1980s

In April, the Pet Shop Boys, pop music’s most influential and beloved synth-pop duo, returned with a new album, Nonetheless. The British pair could hardly be described as wildly prolific, having released a comparatively meager fifteen albums since their debut Please in 1986. (Their one-word titles usually contain some oblique joke or other; the act’s singer Neil Tennant once remarked that the idea for the first LP was that it amused him that a record buyer would ask for the “Pet Shop Boys, please.”) Yet one reason for this relatively sparse output is that they take a painstaking amount of time to ensure not only that each of their albums is polished to perfection, but that it is existentially different from their previous release.

Duncan Hannah, wild child of Andy Warhol’s 1970s, matured to the art world of Eighties New York. The following is an exclusive excerpt from his as-yet-unpublished diaries that chronicle a decade of growing up and getting down — of painting, writing, reading, heroin, AIDS, infatuations, sobriety, Reagan and more. February 15, 1984: Semaphore Gallery sold the painting “Christmas” that I painted on Christmas. Hooray! I was in a cab coming down Broadway with Greg Crane and Simon Lane. We stopped for a red light at Houston Street. Crane said “Oh my God, LOOK!” and pointed to the south side of the street. Above the New-Wave fruit-stand, illuminated in the darkness, was a giant billboard advertising my upcoming show at Semaphore.