Rainy Portsmouth night brought back memories of Paradise City '“Â Simon Carter

It is an image seared into my subconscious. One from a different era - culturally, without a doubt; musically, indisputably; and in terms of male hairstyles - hell, one thousand per cent yes!

The poodle-permed Joey Tempest, lead singer of Swedish pretty boys Europe, bounds onto the stage as the opening keyboard riff of The Final CountdownÂ reverberates around the concert venue.

You know the song, of course you do. You'll pretend you don't like it, because it's not cool in 2018 to admit things like that, but if you were a teenager 30 or so years ago you probably did like it.

Guilty pleasures, air guitars and all that. Plus keyboards galore and a huge chorus that's virtually impossible to forget, even if you want to.

It hit number one in the charts, back in an age when the charts still mattered.Â Early December 1986, top of the pops for two weeks. So very close to being the ChrimboÂ No 1.

This was the mid-1980s in terms of melodic hard rock '“Â Bon Jovi, Guns N Roses, Motley Crue, Heart, Whitesnake, Cinderella, Def Leppard, Poison, Ratt, Faster Pussycat.

Lots of power ballads, ubiquitous guitar solos. Lots of make-up too, and that's just the blokes I'm talking about. Oh yeah, and a blizzard of hair. Lots and lots of it, and much of it permed and kept in place with enough hairspray to have opened up a hole in the ozone layer larger than Portsea Island.

I'm still talking about the blokes, by the way.