A different country, but we have a passport to it

So much for New Year’s resolutions; my attempts to give up the gym, take up smoking and stop wasting money on nostalgia have failed dismally.

At Christmas I joined my fellow Northern, economic migrants on motorway-hell when I found myself on the M6 Toll Road, seemingly transported back to 1963. There were no lorries, no motorbikes, no caravans, no coaches and only a few cars at long distances in front. I switched on the wireless to see whether the Department of Transport had arranged for us to receive Radio Caroline and The Goon Show to enhance the nostalgic experience, but no.

A week after my Heartbeat experience the motorway took me back to 2004 with a bang: after just five weeks two lanes of the road were closed for essential repairs on a 100m stretch near Sutton Coldfield. So much for nostalgia.

This week I turned 38 and experienced a bizarre metabolic change. I’ve developed a sudden taste for “guest” bitter and have started listening to Radio 4’s Home Truths to discover the unusual things you can do with socks, the real recipe for onion jam and what a “kreng” is. I have also begun to collect sales promotion tokens and, worst of all, my longing for the past has intensified.

I had a Proustian moment when it was announced that the Raleigh Chopper is to make a comeback. It didn’t stimulate me to write a six-volume novel in which absolutely fuck all happens, but it did resurrect the nostalgia cloud.

Serving as Proust’s Madeleine, the sight of the Chopper took me back to the Seventies. I was wearing monkey boots and Brummie bags and singing “D’ya wanna be in my gang?” by coal-strike candlelight. I was transferred back to Blackpool (Combray with a log-flume) and was holding a pair of clackers – a piece of rope with a wooden ball on each end that you… well, clacked together.

Such nostalgia is unavoidable. Our nation is obsessed with the past. It has become so embedded that you can’t change television channels without stumbling across some programme reminiscing about the Eighties, or seeing Top Of The Pops 2, or finding channels dedicated to dreadful Seventies’ sitcoms. There are nostalgia shows recreating the conditions in a World War One trench and a Fifties’ grammar school. More recently there’s been a trend for “100 Best'” shows: 100 best sitcoms, 100 best sex scenes and the 100 best TV ads, the 100 best musicals, and so it goes on and on and on.

Meanwhile, strategic marketing gurus claim that artificial is “out” and authentic is the new noir. However, the demand for authenticity is not a recent phenomenon. It is a feature of the technological revolution that began with the PC 30 years ago. The clearest exposition of this came in the Eighties’ ad for Gaymer’s Olde English Cider, which had the slogan, “Give me something old”.

Nostalgia is older than the hills. Every generation looks on the past with a sense of nostalgia. My parents fondly reminisced about Uncle Joe’s Mint balls, condensed milk sandwiches, powdered eggs, teddy boys and polio. Nostalgia was also a facet of the industrial age, when ad campaigns were designed to reflect a bygone age of Haywains and milk maids. But in the past 30 years an enormous industry has grown up around nostalgia and “authenticity”.

Yet nostalgia becomes more commonplace when there is rapid change. We are in the midst of a communications revolution, which is transforming our lives on a similar scale to the industrial revolution.

A feature of this is that we can’t keep up with the next technological fad or fashion. We have a feeling of dislocation and inadequacy in the face of rapid change. To remedy this, we seek solace in the past, nostalgia a replacement for those things we are perceived to have lost.

Because the past was actually pretty rubbish, you find that you yearn for things you never actually had, or even liked. My nostalgia pangs have led me to buy CDs for bands that I used to hate in the Eighties – Echo & The Bunnymen, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, China Crisis, Teardrop Explodes and The Mighty Wah.

The past was extremely dull, so we have replaced nostalgia with retro. While nostalgia is about recreating exact replicas of the past, retro is about bringing back the images of the past but modernising them. Retro is the semi-skimmed version of the past. We want things like the past, but not the bad side as well.

Retro is an answer to the emptiness of nostalgia and the inability to gain any meaning from the past. And retro will be a permanent feature of future marketing.

One major retro fad of the future will be sea monkeys. These are tiny shrimp that look like minute whale carcasses (a kreng). You add some powder and some toxic chemicals to water and within days these freakish skeletal creatures start to shag, lay eggs and pitch ad campaigns in front of your very eyes. In 20 years sea monkeys will be a retro product, like the Atari tennis game and space invaders. People will be putting aside their human-cloning games and buying retro sea-monkey games for their children instead.

By then, retro may become the new retro. Bike shops might start selling remakes of 2004 remakes of Seventies’ Choppers for the generation of children whose fathers forced their nostalgia on their sons. Whatever happens, one thing is for certain, retro will never be “so last year”. The past is here to stay.

Sean Brierley is a former deputy editor of Marketing Week and author of the Advertising Handbook