The Eighties+ Party returns to Zappa Baza in Belgrade on 9 October from 10pm. The format started in Valjevo in May 2022 and now fills clubs; the organisers billed one of the previous Belgrade editions as sold out, in front of around six hundred people.

What makes this format work is not nostalgia, which is the cheapest possible reason to put on a night. The playlist stitches together synth-pop, ex-Yu rock, hard rock, glam, funk, disco and pop, and the names that come round regularly include Laki Pingvini, Prljavo Kazaliste, Whitesnake, Madonna, ABBA, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Michael Jackson and Kiss. Zagreb and Los Angeles in the same night, in other words - exactly what the cassettes taped off the radio in those years looked like.

Zappa Baza at Bulevar vojvode Bojovica 30a is named after Frank Zappa and has spent years being one of the places Belgrade goes when it wants guitars rather than a guest list. The party marked its fourth birthday in May, and the October edition lands just as Belgrade's club season starts moving back indoors after the summer river rafts.

The price is what explains the popularity: tickets through tickets.rs start at 400 dinars, about 210 denars. That is less than two coffees in central Skopje, for entry to a party that runs until morning.

The question a format like this leaves behind is not the usual one asked about nostalgia nights. The crowd at Eighties+ is not only the people who lived through the eighties, but twenty-somethings who know the songs from playlists. What does it mean when one decade is more present in clubs than the music being recorded right now?