Iconic figures in the 1980s new wave movement with hits like Standing in the Dark, Doesn't Really Matter and Crying over You, Toronto's Platinum Blonde are back after 12 years with a new single Beautiful. Joe Leary spent 24 Seconds with lead singer Mark Holmes.

24: You first got the band back together some years ago. How did it feel the second time around?

MH: Basically, that was just a tour to promote the greatest hits record, which went number one for a few weeks, so it felt good and the tour went really well. It wasn't all of us at that time though.

24: Did it take some time to gel again or was the magic still there right away?

MH: If you're trying to recreate the magic then the magic's not there. It's only gone if the people themselves have changed and I don't really think we have. It was just like putting on a comfortable pair of jeans that you had just taken off the day before. It felt like no time had passed really.

24: Platinum Blonde hit the charts at the time of the explosion in music videos. How crazy did it get for you?

MH: I couldn't really go out in public at that particular point. Everybody knew my face; not just the kids but the parents as well. If you weren't a fan of the band you still knew the image, just like you knew Duran Duran or Howard Jones, you knew what the artists looked like. A lot of people take the mickey out of the 80s. I do it all the time because there's lots of ridiculous things. But as crazy and weird as it was, one thing that has never really been duplicated is that the music was happening for the first time, just like the 50s with Elvis and the 60s and 70s. That was all happening for the first time. The 90s was just a reproduction of the 50s and 70s and now in the 2000s, there's not a lot happening for the first time.

24: Did you feel at the time like it was a new wave during the 80s, or in your mind, were you just playing rock and roll?

MH: I felt like it was a new wave. My view of rock and roll was that it was a 12 bar blues progression done a little quicker. That was rock and roll to me, the stuff that Elvis was doing and Jerry Lee Lewis and maybe the Stones. That to me was my definition of what that was and I felt that what we were doing didn't really have much to do with that at all. It was orchestral in nature the way it was put together; the bass had no movement and the guitar was doing a riff over and over again and then singing on top of that . We wanted to keep the music simple and something that people could still sing along to.