Steve Spears Credit: Courtesy

“I have something very revealing to admit. I’ve been in Terri Nunn’s bed this week.”

Steve Spears has just uttered these words into a live mic in front of a few hundred people, including the aforementioned Berlin vocalist and her partner. It’s not the steamy scandal you might think — it’s a simple matter of getting the wrong room key — but it’s emblematic of surreal happenings in the life of Spears, the ultimate ’80s kid all grown up.

Spears has just returned from a new-wave-tacular stint on the high seas where he served as official trivia master for the ’80s Cruise. Besides his quizmaster duties, Spears spent seven days surrounded by fans and heroes of the Decade of Excess, interviewing and crossing paths with the likes of Gary Numan, Rob Bass and Downtown Julie Brown “in line … at the buffet” — still surreal to the podcaster and, latterly, author.

The Central Floridian who 20 years ago helped launch the  “Stuck in the ’80s” podcast (when he and his cohorts “didn’t even know what a podcast was”) has come a long way since interviewing Andy Wickett, the pre-Simon LeBon Duran Duran vocalist, and thinking he had peaked with that first episode.

And yet, here we are, nearly 800 episodes and 200 interviews into “Stuck in the ’80s,” and he’s notched interviews with the likes of Steve Perry (a “gold medal” conversation for Spears), Martha Quinn, Molly Ringwald, Martha Quinn and Sebastian Bach. Spears casts a wide net, interviewing musicians, actors and personalities from the era’s rock radio and still-youthful MTV. Conversations are freewheeling, unhurried and often get very personal.

“The secret to the podcast, why it’s going on for so long and why people seem to enjoy it, is we wanted to be kind of a place where you’re willing to share things that you wouldn’t normally share,” says Spears. “I always wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I have an open-book policy as far as sharing those stories. That’s what helps you connect with your audience, because we’ve all had break-ups, they’re just devastating. And, wouldn’t it be great to get advice from the star of Valley Girl as to what she felt when she broke up with Nic Cage?”

You’d think he’d be running out of subject matter by now, but for Spears there are seemingly infinite possibilities in approaching this very singular decade, the last hurrah of a pre-internet world.

“So the ’80s was really the last time pop culture was personal and it permeated every part of your life. What you watched on TV, how you dressed, what you said, how you voted,” says Spears. “The ’80s were an all-encompassing pop culture phenomenon, and the fact that I’ve been able to write and podcast about it for 20 years still kind of blows my mind. Because normally when you have a nostalgia revolution it doesn’t last this long.”

And as long as we’re talking about new ways to approach familiar subjects, just a few days ago, Spears released Stuck in the ’80s, the book (Benjamin House Press, 298 pp., $19.80), a print companion to the podcast, anthologizing some of the highlights of the series’ run. The book is an intriguing document of the faces that made that decade, and leans in on the pop fizz. 

“The thing is, podcasts are wonderful. I love podcasts. I mean, obviously, the day I die, my obituary is probably going to include the word ‘podcast.’ But they’re also fleeting. An episode comes out and then it disappears down the feed after 20 years, and at that time when I started the book, I think we had about 700 episodes. I thought that these conversations and these stories deserved a permanent home,” explains Spears.

The podcast and the book both take a holistic view of ’80s pop culture. While an oral history would have been the obvious choice of format, Spears instead creates a personal narrative that connects the faces, places and conversations with what was going on in his life in short-story style chapters, along the lines of NME-style journalism. That’s a tougher one to pull off, but is a more rewarding, or in Spears’ estimation “durable,” read. 

“When I first thought of doing the book, I thought of it being a collection of transcripts, and as I was looking at them, it occurred to me that I can’t just run these transcripts. It doesn’t make any sense without the behind-the-scenes. … So I started slowly adding in context to the interviews,” says Spears. “Some of them are very, very personal [like] Deborah Foreman talking me through a break-up. I’ve seen and read so many oral biographies lately, where it’s just nonstop droning on and on from these people without any sort of … I wanted to humanize it more.”

A new narrative structure settled on, the problem became how to narrow down hundreds of interviews to a shortlist of 60 or thereabouts.

“There’s almost 800 episodes of the podcast, but not every episode has interviews. Maybe 300 or 400 people. So choosing them, some jumped out … and then others, as I went back and read the transcripts, something popped out that I just didn’t remember,” says Spears. “You have some people like Martha Davis from The Motels and we’re talking about how it’s easier to write when you’re depressed or when you’re sad … that interview is still wonderful.”

But it seems that with Stuck in the ’80s, all roads lead to Steve Perry, the singular frontman for Journey who voiced all their biggest hits. Even though Spears cops to more alternative musical tastes — his sentimental favorite is talking lyrical inspiration with Midge Ure of Ultravox — he feels Perry is at the very heart of this book.

“I asked him about Sherrie Swafford, the subject of ‘Oh Sherrie.’ He told me about how hard it was to be a rock star and to be in a relationship at the same time that they’re just not compatible. And it was like a session of therapy between he and I, and that’s why I ended the book with that conversation. The book begins at my first concert, which was Journey,” says Spears. “For some reason, Journey has that role in ‘Stuck in the ’80s’ lore as being like this symbol of what the ’80s were. Just the way he spoke and the way he shared, it was just so what I love about the decade.”

Stuck in the ’80s, the book, can be ordered online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble or directly from the author. “Stuck in the ’80s,” the podcast, can be listened to on all the usual streaming platforms.

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This article appears in April 1-7, 2026.