In a new interview with Dennis Wood of WOKW 102.9 FM‘s “Back To The 80s”, RATT singer Stephen Pearcy was asked what he thinks it was about the 1980s that made that era so magical. Pearcy said: “Forty-plus years later, I call it the ‘Sunset Strip Experience’. It was so new, refreshing and it was open to anybody — DURAN DURAN, VAN HALEN, MÖTLEYs (CRÜE), RATTs — and anything went. And there was no discrimination, there was nothing. It was just pure color. Everything was new. Everybody got a shot at it. But it wasn’t even just the decade of decadence. It was a decade of color, excitement, danger. That decade is — it was just so colorful and new. And that’s what I think people are discovering now, the new generations, the new, whatever you wanna call it. It’s not just this angst and this bummer stuff that everybody had to deal with in the ’90s. Granted, there were great bands that came out of that whole, what they call the Seattle scene. Well, let me tell you, the Sunset Strip Experience scene will never go down. It’s more alive than ever before.”

He added later in the chat: “It’s a decade that’ll never be repeated. The ’80s were a very special, special thing. A time, a place — it was just an era that it’ll never be duplicated. So, of course, everybody wants to relive it. It was a great thing. It was a good feeling. So everybody’s embracing it. And it’s good to see. For me, seeing my peers who were starting to fall victim to, like, ‘Ah, we can’t do this.’ ‘Ah, we don’t wanna do that.’ Now they’re embracing it. Of course, you should embrace it. It happened once. If you can keep it going and have fun with it, do it. Why not?”

Pearcy was also once again asked for his opinion of the label “hair metal,” the pejorative term which was coined in the late 1990s as a way to disparage acts thought to have been all flash and no substance. He said: “You had to be labeled, and now it’s ‘hair metal’. It doesn’t bother me in the least. Some guys are bothered by it. To me, it’s, like, hey, look, come on. They’ve gotta label you. What do you wanna be? So, it doesn’t bother me personally, as long as they keep sending in the checks, you know what I mean? And I’ve gotta tell you, some of these bands, they’re being played on radio and stuff more now than they ever were then. So there is a plus side to this whole hair metal, whatever you wanna call it. If they wanna pigeonhole you in that, great.”