Love Squeeze as well.
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Also, I’m a Boston(ish) girl, born and raised, so the New Kids thing was born from that. I went to a church overnight in Dorchester when I was 13, right as the New Kid’s were making their debut and we were hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the church when a couple of the New Kids and some other guys walked by. It was the most exciting thing to ever happen to me up to that point in my life.
Bon Jovi is another thing entirely. Always loved him, always will.
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All of these. And Ministry and The Smiths.
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Oh how could I forget to mention the Smiths! Their first album is still one of my all-time favorites. (I mean… there were many bands I could have mentioned but the list is long and you’d all get bored.) But I really should have mentioned the waterboys too, whose 2nd and 3rd albums I still love intensely, and the Clash, and the Jam, and the Mission, and sisters of mercy, and simple minds, and the teardrop explodes, and Dexys, and Siouxsie, and… well you get the picture.
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You guys are forgetting New Order!
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I didn’t love them, other than Blue Monday. Their predecessor Joy Division on the other hand could definitely have been added into my long list! It nearly broke me when I heard “Love will tear us apart” being played in my suburban Safeway… the antithesis of what indie music was about! I have said to my kids, because some of the songs of that era have become so well-known since, people tend to forget how groundbreaking they were at the time.
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I was a proud Gen X parent when last year, D24 put New Order’s True Faith song in her Spotify playlist. 
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Ha! Fun thread direction. Well, I was an actual punk rocker with a band and all that. And my friends were all in bands and we had a thriving local scene.
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Awesome! I love music but cannot sing and don’t really play anything. But when i was in collge, some friends were in a band and we spent a lot of time trawling them around the local music scene. And one of my exes (long relationship) was (is) a bass player (I actually met him when he joined a band with one of my roommates at the time). And one of my good friends here is a bass player in a local band, so we go see them a lot, but it’s kind of dad-band stuff (but they are good). So I’ve been doing it vicariously!
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I am loving this thread…I’m familiar with all these bands, but I was so NOT an alternative or new wave kid, lol. Along with Duran Duran, it was Glass Tiger, The Police, Wham!, Debbie Gibson, Madonna. I saw The Bangles open for George Michael’s Faith Tour at the Orange Bowl in 1987. 
And then I dated a guy long-term who was into hair bands and some harder metal. So I once shopped at Scribbles for an outfit to wear to a Whitesnake concert.
It was not my finest moment, and I have grown as a person.
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Oh, I got into some of the harder stuff later in the decade, but more hard rock than metal. Got totally into guns’n’roses, Metallica etc. and then fully into grunge as the decade turned. And then stuff like arctic monkeys, franz ferdinand, 30 seconds to mars. I used to keep up with what was newer back when I was driving D19 around, because she’d take control of the car radio, but I don’t anymore so I’ll occasionally come across something new now but I mostly just listen to older stuff now.
PS the Police are great, always enjoyed them.
@tamagotchi , what did you play, or were you on vocals?
Drums and glockenspiel. 
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I 100% feel like the members of this thread need to make a spotify list to share with the group…
@SpreadsheetMom - I will see your Whitesnake outfit story and raise you one Worst Outfit At A Concert Ever story… in HS I was a pretty solid Billy Joel, Madonna + Indigo Girls and Tori Amos type music listener, which in college added more U2, Dave Matthews, 80’s hair metal, and good dance music. What I was NOT was anything that sounded “scary.” So there was a lot of metal that I just didn’t listen to. So one summer, while I was working on the Hill, my then boyfriend invited me to a concert after work. It was outside of town and there was no time to change, so I had to go in my work outfit - an adorable mint green skirt suit with white silk tank, heels.
The concert? Dio, singing his songs + some from his time in Black Sabbath.
The locale? The kind of bar / club where chicken wire would not be amiss.
The attendees? lots of motorcycles out front, lots of ripped off sleeve shirts and ripped up jeans.
I left my blazer in the car, but to say my attire was out of place would be the understatement of the century. (Plus I really didn’t enjoy the music.)
Clearly though, it must’ve been love. I’ve been married to that guy who took me to the concert for 24 years now.
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Ha, my 80s playlist, which I limit myself to one song per artist (with the exception of the Clash where I have 2) is already over 5 hours long and I still think of new songs to add every so often!
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I saw Depeche Mode in the 1980’s at Astroworld. They were okay, but OMD opened and they were great!
My musical tastes ran the gamut back in the day. 80’s country, 70’s rock, New Wave, pop, Broadway- you name it, I listened to it. But then, one Sunday night, I was flipping channels and I stumbled upon Metal Mania on MTV. The video for “Eyes of a Stranger” by Queensryche was on and that was it, my passion for hair metal was born. Queensryche is still my favorite band (although only the old stuff- it’s not the same since Geoff Tate left).
Nowadays, I have a separate Spotify playlist for pop/hair metal/country and one for Broadway/vocalists, just dependIng on my mood. I like a few current artists, like Olivia Rodrigo and Five Seconds of Summer, but not too many.
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I am making myself an honorary member of this group because of the recent music discussion. Reaching with a college 26 grad 
Report in! I see them July 21. I watched the Bon Jovi’s documentary on Hulu, he has been working hard on his voice for a few years, let’s hope it holds. Then I see guns and roses the same week. Axl’s voice is shot in the upper register (saw them two summers ago at Wrigley Field), I just go to see and hear Slash!
Like many of you I love Depeche Mode. I saw them twice on the last tour, D19 went to one of them with me and now loves them too. She was mesmerized by Dave Gahan’s voice (and style.) I told her to get in line! I hope they tour again.
Fun story…one day long ago sitting around the rink with hockey parents, a Whitesnake song came on. One of the moms said ‘I dated David Coverdale back in the day.’ Before the Tawny Kitaen days. All eyes turned to her (of course!), and for the rest of the season we peppered her for more information. Her poor husband had to listen to that all season too. He did not look like David Coverdale
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D26 spent a long day yesterday hanging out w/her best buddy from 2nd grade. Despite us moving away halfway through D26’s 4th grade year, the 2 kids kept in touch all that time. We’re very grateful for that. D26 got home tired from all of the driving. She just escaped a massive monsoon storm that was going to hit her friend’s part of town when she was hitting the road to come back home.
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Tangentially on the subject of dating someone famous. Waaay back my mother went to high school with Bill Cosby and he apparently invited her out on a quasi date to see him perform. Given what we have learned about him since, I’m so glad she chose not to go!
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Honorary members always welcome!
On bon jovi. I think I mentioned earlier my old crowd had a thing for Young Guns II, and that included the music video of Jon Bon Jovi’s theme song for it. I remember my one friend pulling the foldout poster from the CD insert (remember those days?) and saying “I could turn gay for this guy”, much to his rather conservative wife’s horror
Slash is just magnificent. The first time I saw him was on a tour “back home” with Kings of Chaos, kind of a guitarist supergroup I guess, which at that stage also had Duff, Matt Sorum (I think this was around the velvet revolver era so they did some of that too), Sebastian Bach etc. it was a small venue and I was standing maybe 5 people from the front. Had an amazing time seeing slash so close, haha. I saw GnR here I think maybe 2018 or so? Didn’t notice an issue with Axl’s voice. Was going to see them again but then covid canceled that show.
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I dated…how to say this without too much info. The son of someone famous (probably not famous in the US, but definitely in Europe). We happened to be in Europe at the same time as he was there to deliver a talk at a banquet held by the monarch of that country, and he got us invites! So we met the monarch + spouse in a private audience with his dad and his dads wife, and then attended the banquet in the royal palace. All while we were backpacking around staying in pensions and hostels that was kind of surreal. This ex was the bassist I mentioned earlier, btw.
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