Fast Times 80's Music

Depending on when you were a teenager, the spectacle taking place in an upstairs room at the Black Rose Irish Pub on Saturday night is either a dream done up in ''Miami Vice" pastels or a shudder-inducing ''Nightmare on Elm Street." It's just after 9 p.m. and already a generously imbibing corporate crowd, packed into the bar for a holiday office party, is whooping it up, blurting out requests for something, anything, from the Flock of Seagulls catalog.
When Fast Times, a Malden-based '80s cover band, opts for Duran Duran's ''Hungry Like the Wolf," nailing the song's slick hairspray-and-Eurotrash vibe, a gang of mortgage company employees hits the dance floor like a herd of promgoers. Even the guys in business suits clutching their Scotches start to surreptitiously twitch their hips.

''The '80s rocked -- it was [expletive] awesome!" recalls Mike Couture, 40, an account executive. ''I did it all and saw everybody, from Loverboy to Molly Hatchet to Rush to Cyndi Lauper, Queen -- I saw 'em all!" For a moment, the buffet table loaded with Swedish meatballs and littered with cocktail napkins fades as Couture's Reagan-era college memories come flooding back. Fast Times, named after the seminal 1982 flick ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High," specializes in eliciting precisely this kind of reaction when it performs. And perform it does, all over New England, racking up 45 gigs in the last year alone, and roughly 70 shows since it began playing in public nearly two years ago. And the band is likely to get even busier.

If the recent boom of entertainment programming milking '80s nostalgia such as VH1's ''I Love the '80s" is any indication, pop culture's fixation on the decade of ''Dynasty" and acid-washed jeans is at its zenith. Even onetime fashion nightmares like those off-the-shoulder ''Flashdance"-style sweatshirts are making a comeback. The zeal with which Fast Times is received by audiences is an unsettling reminder that somebody bought all those Bryan Adams records. Its performances have been as varied as the color combinations on a Rubik's Cube: weddings and birthdays, cruise ships and ski resorts, graduation parties and rock clubs willing to take a chance that a cover band specializing in Joan Jett and Journey can fill the room and, more important, the bar coffers. ''All I want to do is get my hair bigger, and I can't!" says singer Sofia Trapotsis, who, with Israeli-born drummer Yotam Rosenbaum, is the youngest member of the band at 28. ''You don't know how many hairspray bottles I've gone through." Nevertheless, when the light hits her teased hair, fishnet gloves, and torn pink T-shirt just right, Trapotsis looks like a less toothy Pat Benatar, or a shorter Sheena Easton.

For the Manchester, N.H., native, Fast Times is a girl's dream come true. ''I used to sit in my room listening to Madonna songs and imagined one day singing them," she says. ''And now I am."
But wardrobe worries aren't merely the concerns of a dance-floor diva. Assembling the right combination of cringe-worthy attire is everybody's priority. ''My suit's pretty bad," keyboardist John Polischuk readily acknowledges, referring to the sky-blue, shoulder-padded ensemble he ensconces himself in for gigs. ''If I walk out in public with that, my girlfriend won't be seen with me." Band members take in stride the occasional online taunts they find themselves subjected to because they don't write original material. ''Everybody's entitled to their opinion, but we're doing the music because we enjoy it. We're not doing it to sell out," says Polischuk, who graduated from Malden High in 1988. ''Our focus is to get the crowd out on the floor and get the party hoppin'. Yeah, it's tongue in cheek, but we do take the music seriously."
These priorities, plus the band's ability to poke fun at the tackiest aspects of the era without condescending to it or its audience, appear to have put Fast Times on a fast track.
Polischuk and Hingham-born guitarist Greg Elsden (Hingham High class of '87) knew they were on to a good thing when, as field reps for a life sciences company, they began jamming together after hours. The two quickly realized that what they had in common was an adolescence spent in the much-maligned '80s --

Elsden still recoils at the thought of the stirrup pants girls used to wear -- and an abiding fondness for the pop and rock music of the era. They never even considered writing their own material. What was the point with so many '80s classics waiting to be resuscitated? ''We don't have an original thought in our collective mind," Elsden says with a broad grin. He's got more important things to worry about, like choosing the right outfit. ''You can't dress heavy with all the lights on you." says Elsden, who, on this Saturday night favored a look reminiscent of Loverboy's Mike Reno: headband, black leather pants, and aqua T-shirt (sleeveless, of course). Although there are other cover bands around New England (and at least two oth - The Boston Globe-Jonathan Perry