It's the funny thing about decades. I'm sure it works the same way for everyone, that you're constantly chasing your tail, reevaluating what you thought was set in stone. I was born in 1971, so the 80s was the decade in which I found a voice, found music, met girls, read books. The 70s were just the bit you had to go through to get there, so by the time you were looking back at the flares, the glitter, the platforms, it seemed incomprehensible that this could ever have been cool or fashionable. Even the Sex Pistols seemed like a joke band, and the idea of being into Elvis was something for a Hi-De-Hi fancy dress party.

Now, with the benefit of further hindsight, the perspective has changed, and I can see the 70s for Marquee Moon, punk, Neil Young, Pynchon, and so on. That doesn't mean that anyone has learned their lesson though. Now it's the "noughties," that unnameable wasteland, which seems to have inherited the "decade that taste forgot" line that we used to knowingly recite about the 70s. Having lived through 2000 to 2010, and, to be frank, having had a fucking great time, I know that's not true, but I can completely understand how someone who was born in 2001 might wince at the idea of MySpace, websites with cheesy flash animations, Britney Spears, the Kings of Leon, Don't Believe the Truth. If I'm honest, even Franz Ferdinand sound a bit dated these days.

That gap between the 70s and 80s seemed like a razor at the time. We had entered a new age, a better age, the yuppies on the telly were drinking champagne and had crazy hair like the lady off the programme I wasn't allowed to stay up to watch. Everything was going to be better. It was a Tomorrow's World fantasy of new technology, computers, mobile phones and colour TV. At my primary school, a local big shot who ran a scrap metal business decided to throw some shade by donating *gasp* a computer to be used by the pupils. It was dutifully installed by technicians who no doubt wore lab coats and white gloves. Once the crappy thing had been set up, destined for endless "10 ANDREW IS COOL 20 GOTO 10" japes, we gazed at it in awe. As part of the deal, the big shot had demanded that a plaque be inscribed and screwed into the desk where the computer was placed - "This BBC Micro Computer was donated by blah blah blah on this the 4th day of May in the year of our Lord..." and so on. It wasn't a joke. He was deadly serious.

It must have been around 1982 that I received a digital watch as a Christmas present. I can honestly say that I had never been more excited. I was no stranger to the digital age, however. My father, as a lecturer at the local college (then Poly, now Uni), sweet-talked the lads in the computer department into letting him take a Commodore PET home in the summer holidays. This was like nothing we had ever experienced. It dwarfed the desk it was placed on, and came with scratched up tapes some of which contained games and others random programs showing Fibonacci sequences or primitive fractal displays. There was a complicated print out explaining how, with a soldering iron, you might be able to hook it up to stereo (not mono!) speakers, but we were happy with the black and white. We would play a convoluted lemonade game, where you had to choose how many lemons to buy, how much to charge for your lemonade, and then there was a randomised weather generator which determined how much you sold. We were in touching distance of Matthew Broderick in WarGames.

With the technology came new music. Howard Jones was featured on an episode of Blue Peter, explaining that he didn't use backing tracks - he was sequencing the music from a computer. There were baffled stares all round. It had never occurred to me that he was using backing tracks. I had assumed the band were simply off stage somewhere, to make room for the man doing the dancing.

Looking back now I find it easier to see the 70s, 80s, 90s as a flow rather than discrete chunks of time. It's a useful shorthand, though. And, like Camera Obscura, I suppose I remain an 80s fan.