Following last Saturday's soundtrack into Hill Street Blues here's another 80s TV cop show with a very memorable theme tune and possibly the diametric opposite of Hill Street's gritty realism- the glitz and glamour of the waterfront world of Crockett and Tubbs and Miami Vice.
Miami Vice ran from 1984 to 1989. Jan Hammer's theme tune is a ridiculously over the top collision of synth pop and 80s rock guitar by Jan Hammer, a piece of music that says 1987 to me as much as anything else released that year- Strangeways Here We Come, It's A Sin, La Isla Bonita, Respectable, Pump Up The Volume, The One I Love and April Skies all included. It's also impossible to hear the tune without the opening titles flashing through my mind...
80s Miami was as alien a world as any for someone living in the north west of England in 1987, palm trees, flamingos, wind surfing, women in bikinis... none of these things featured much (if at all) in my seventeen year old life. Like the Balearic beauty of the Hill Street Blues theme tune, the theme tune to Miami Vice provides an instant Proustian rush.
Miami Vice was visually a riot of rich colours, buildings, cars, boats and clothing, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas providing fashion inspiration (even in rain lashed northern England, rolled up suit jackets and loafers with no socks, pastel tees and white cotton trousers became sought after for a while but wasn't a look I ever dabbled with). I enjoyed Miami Vice in a sort of anti- indie kind of way. It's rollcall of guest stars from the music world was long and varied too- Miles Davis, James Brown, Leonard Cohen, Frankie Valli, Eartha Kitt and Sheena Easton all appeared, as did Phil Collins who I loathed then and still do.