One day during school holidays in 1981, the year I turned sixteen, I ate spaghetti bolognese in a new brick house in Noble Park. My hosts were two delightful girls around my age, dressed in checked mohair jumpers and straight black trousers. Sonia and Letitia ran the Models fan club. Our subjects included whether I should grow a ‘floppy fringe’, like Models’ keyboard player Andrew Duffield (I did), and James Freud’s recent appearance, alongside the Models’ Sean Kelly, on the television show Sounds. This was an event which many in the pro-Models camp found meaningful: Sean and James were friends again! Freud and Kelly had started their music careers in the late 1970s, in the Teenage Radio Stars. When Freud re-joined Kelly in the Models in 1983, his pop sensibility helped to take them to the top of the charts with the hit singles ‘Barbados’ - a line from that song gives this book its title - and ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight’.