The eighties can't touch us now: is egg punk the new New Pop?

In Natasha Stagg's book Sleeveless, her cool appraisal of 2010s media and fashion as seen by a sort of New York fashionista spy in the camp, she has a typically ironic (or semi-ironic, or quarter-ironic, it's hard to tell) remark in her piece looking back at the 1980s. This decade was a reactive decade, she says. A swing away from earlier prevailing norms. A new age of pop and corporate art. Under this ethos, she says, "it was unrealistic to go on rejecting all things synthetic, including New Romantic music". Ah! Those early-80s types might have had lumpy rock or punk ideals (or whatever) swirling around in their befuddled heads, but they were going to have to make their peace with the likes of Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and ABC. The 80s would win out. Or not. I think Stagg here is part-satirising both the decade (the 1980s) and herself as a cultural commentator. At least I don't think she's totally sincere about all this. It's a funny comment though. And it recalls that great line in the Undertones' My Perfect Cousin: "His mother bought him a synthesiser / Got the Human League in to advise her". More hilarity! Except, did the punk-pop kids (like me) who bought Undertones records at this time even know who the Human League were? Almost certainly not. HL's pop mega-fame was still more than a year away - The Sound Of The Crowd, Love Action and - drum roll, flashing lights - Don't You Want Me. Anyway, Stagg was probably only having fun with her look back at the benighted 80s and of course plenty of people managed perfectly easily to resist the allure of Simon Le Bon, Dave Gahan and co. It's true that synths weren't very punk - nor even keyboards, really - but bands like New Order helped convert people to a form of pop music that definitely wasn't just about cinematic/fashion-shoot videos, (supposed) sex-symbol singers and forgettably vapid tunes. No, punk and new wave may not have exactly embraced the synth sound but it was, I reckon, beginning to course through the bloodstream at some level  - not to mention the busy ongoing retrieval of synth-tastic sounds from early Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Suicide, Simple Minds, Magazine and others. These days synth-punk (aka egg punk) is everywhere. It's the curse of Devo! Bands like Powerplant, Gee Tee, Big Break, Delivery, BEEF, Cabo Boing, Macula Dog and no doubt tons of others I don't know. The other day I came across an egg punk band who'd got a demo tape out with one track called Are We Not Demo? Are you calling us egg punk? The yolk's on you, man. The people in these bands are almost certainly far too young to have been around when the New Romantics (nearly all former punks of one kind or another) burst onto the scene. If today's egg-punkers had been alive back then maybe they'd have immediately succumbed to the latest chart sounds. I doubt it though. Long live all things synthetic, long live egg punk. The eighties can't touch us now ...