Together in Electric Dreams

A Guardian article this week caused a nostalgia rush. Georgio Moroder has launched his first album for 30 years.

Memories, memories. Thirty years ago this month, Moroder’s 1984 hit with Phil Oakey, Together in Electric Dreams, was top of my college cassette playlist. Along with The Cars’ Who’s Going to Drive You Home Tonight. Band Aid and the Frog Chorus were mercifully a few weeks away.

Back in November 1984, I was living in a student terraced house on Ullswater Street in Leicester. I was preparing for a law tutorial about the Sunday trading laws. We had been tipped off that the chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson might sit in on the session. I wasn’t a fan of local Blaby MP Nigel – he seemed far too confident, a view that was reinforced by his too-clever-by-half 1988 budget – but I prepared more carefully than normal, including prepping a few jokes walking along the Grand Union Canal in Leicester on a mild November evening…

Needless to say, Lawson didn’t show up but we did get an MEP (Tom Spencer) and, if I remember correctly, Peter Bruinvels, a one term right wing Tory MP. I never thought he would last in multi-cultural Leicester.