➤ … except of course
I was actually the first …
Life as a photo call: Dick, Clare-with-the-hair and George on the town 1981. © Shapersofthe80s
✧ Danilo Monzillo’s exhaustive Blitz Kids compendium
Les incroyables: Greg Davis, Stephen Linard, Clare Thom, Lee Sheldrick and Fiona Dealey on the town 1981. © Shapersofthe80s
✧ 21 albums later, Depeche Mode stake their own claim to the Universe
✧ Stephane Raynor’s photos of PX at Facebook
✧ Blitz Kids pages at Facebook
✧ Updates on the godlike Bowie
✱ Agyness Deyn, the lovely British supermodel, debuts as film actor and wears Balenciaga on one of the May cover options for i-D No 319, the Lights, Camera, Action issue. Others feature the British actor Andrew Garfield becoming Spiderman, hot designer Raf Simons, French art director Julia Restoin Roitfeld proving that pregnant can be sexy, while Judy Blame and Mark Lebon style London’s hottest boys and girls for SS12
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✱ Catch up on The Hawking Excitation when Britain’s most famous 70-year-old cosmologist stars in The Big Bang Theory, the US’s highest rated comedy show
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✱ Read here how Tony Hadley dropped another bombshell on ITV’s Loose Women on May 16... And the Big Man’s finally on Twitter as TheTonyHadley
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✱ The restless Derek Ridgers presents The Endless Night at the Museum of Club Culture in Hull HU1 1TG, a whole free gallery show of his nightclub photographs 1977–2011 running weekends 11am–5pm from April 12–May 31 ... Derek’s London show Unseen runs daily at Soho’s Society Club until May 31
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✱ Kraftwerk promise new album ‘soon’ — Ralf Hütter in the New York Times. “We didn’t fall asleep,” he said. “The 168-hour week is still going on”
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✱ Whatever happened to Mika? He’s popping up at Jodie Harsh’s Circus event on June 17 at Lovebox, the 12-stage carnival in Victoria Park, E9 7DE, where Hot Chip, Friendly Fires and Grace Jones are headliners over the three days
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♫ i-D Online’s May Mixtape features Jaymo & Andy George, Behling & Simpson, Javeon McCarthy, Hot since 82 and Pardon My French while the next Mixtape will be premiered at a monthly live music event, at XO Bar just above Xoyo, EC2A 4AP
♫ Dazed Digital’s April playlist has 30 tracks celebrating creativity in East London ... Listen to the latest Dazed & Confused radio show hosted by Tim Noakes ... Dazed’s April issue introduces 21st-century girl Grimes, photographed by Hedi Slimane, newly crowned creative director of Yves Saint Laurent, and styled by Dazed senior fashion editor Robbie Spencer
♫ Martina from Dragonette has had to explain what’s going on in their video Let It Go: “I get kidnapped along with all these young kids and they’re sapping our happiness and making it into pills. It’s like Clockwork Orange except they’re positively stimulating us instead of all that crazy war and rape and stuff.”
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✱ Global webcast weekly — Robbie Vincent’s Essential Rhythms from the pioneering 70s & 80s deejay goes out every Sunday 10am–1pm BST (GMT+1). Retune digital radios in the UK to find National Jazzfm on radio & on TV or listen live online and later on demand at Jazzfm.com ... May 27: funkathon special, Clinton, Players, much more, plus a classic long one not to be missed ... Shapersofthe80s tells how Robbie influenced the shape of British musical taste in his 35 years as master of hot cuts under his shout “If it moves, funk it”
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✱ Uh-oh! Vice lifts the lid in Dalston Superstars #Exposed
... Download the bleeps behind Dalston Superstars, the Vicedotcom “structured reality” video series about hipness in Hackney. And there’s a mixtape of its achingly hip soundtracks. Here’s a taster .................................................................................
✱ London’s massive new exhibition of vibrantly coloured landscapes by David Hockney concludes with an eye-popping series of “cubistic” multi-screen cine films of exactly the kind he was proposing to Shapersofthe80s in his 1983 landmark interview when he revealed “Suddenly I see cubism differently, more clearly”. Read it inside, along with his latest adventures on an iPad
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✱ Rusty Egan will deejaying in the Big Top at MFest, a new family festival supporting all things British, and curated by Spandau Ballet sax-player Steve Norman. It’s at Harewood House near Leeds, July 7–8, with food, comedy, sport, Human League, Inspiral Carpets, Heaven 17, Soul II Soul, Glen Matlock and more
◆ Two photo reports on Shelley & Steve Norman’s wedding day exclusive to Shapersofthe80s ... First the ceremony, then gossip from the hog-roast reception where the newly-weds took to the stage as Cloudfish ... Plus a video guide to Steve’s wedding-day playlist, ten truly weepy soundtracks to married bliss
➢ 1980, Three key men in Boy George’s life
➢ 2010, Ex-Blitz Kids give their verdicts on the TV drama Worried About the Boy (pictured)
➢ 1979 — Unbelievable! The voice of sweet reason in George’s TV debut
➢ 2010, Ex-jailbird George takes his first trancey steps on the path to sainthood
➢ June 14, 2011, Boy George celebrates the big Five-0 and tells the world, yes, finally he has “lots of regrets” ...
◆ Tony Hadley at Facebook: “My wife and I are pleased to announce the safe arrival of our beautiful baby daughter born on February 6, 2012” ... Tony also says: “There are no plans for a UK tour this year. I am working to get the new album finished, and we start rehearsing some of the new songs at the end of this month for the recording at Metropolis on the 14th April” (tickets on sale now)
◆ Shapersofthe80s tells the story of Spandau Ballet’s comeback tour after two decades apart — Videos, interviews, free downloads, links and background articles from the 2009-10 Reformation tour ... That’s all folks, possibly for ever
◆ Story behind the making of Spandau’s Olympic Gold, remixed by deejay Paul Oakenfold and turned into a slick vid
✱ 30 years ago the 80s supergroup’s debut single Planet Earth peaked at No 12 in the UK chart . . . Shapersofthe80s tells how Duran’s road to stardom began in the Studio 54 of Birmingham, UK, in 1980
✱ Catch up on 2011: Highlights of Duran’s round-the-world adventure ... and DD’s delayed return to the UK ... Plus ten killer videos other people made as tributes
to Duran’s return to creativity
✱ After 2010’s Grammy Award winning Soldier Of Love LP, Sade went on to release The Ultimate Collection. The 29 tracks on two CDs included three new numbers, plus a version of Moon & The Sky featuring Jay-Z . . . In 2011 the band won a Grammy award for Best R&B Performance By A Group for the track Soldier Of Love
✱ 2010 — Shapersofthe80s finds comeback Shard comfy as ‘Auntie Sade’
✱ 1981 — Pix of Sade’s Demob designs during the first Blitz invasion of the US
✱ 1982 — Pix of Sade helping backstage during Steve Strange’s fashion show in Paris
Picture by © Alan Davidson
❏ The Blitz Kids outflanked most of the 80s copyists who followed their Bowie-inspired passion for changing their look as often as possible. You’d find the follow-on generation of posers at Studio 21 on Oxford Street or the Batcave, or in a back barrel at Birmingham’s Rum Runner. After the Blitz caravanserai had moved on into the world of work, fashion designer Fiona Dealey said: “You look at these little Bat people with make-up dribbling down their necks and you feel like saying, ‘Sorry darling, not enough loose powder’. The difference was that our make-up was stage slap, Leichner not Factor. The clothes came from a costumier, Charles Fox not Flip. Dressing for the Blitz was real theatre. It wasn’t just another uniform. You felt glamorous.”
➢ How three wizards met at the same crossroad in time — a brief scene-setter on the forces shaping the Swinging Eighties
➢ 1980 — Strange days, strange nights, strange people: at The Blitz a decade dawns
➢ 1980 — One week in the private worlds of the new young: London blazes with creativity
➢ 1980 — Shapersofthe80s tells how Duran Duran’s road to stardom began in the Studio 54 of Birmingham, UK
➢ 1981 — Birth of Duran’s Planet Earth ... when other people’s faith put the Brummies into the charts
➢ 1976–1984, How creative clubbing started and ended with the 80s
➢ 2010 — Comeback Shard comfy as ‘Auntie Sade’
➢ 2009 — Onstage, Spandau’s Hadley and Kemp finally get huggy: a mighty Reformation
✧ ... except of course I *was* the first
✧ Steve Strange has become the Lost Boy of pop after forlornly going solo without Rusty — follow his news at Facebook: Steve “Visage” Strange
✧ Blitz Club co-host and deejay Rusty Egan still going strong
✧ Follow the adventures of an international deejay at The fabulous World of Princess Julia
✧ Judith “frankly” Frankland blogging at The Swelle Life
✧ Boy George dates and official news
✧ The World of Animal Nightlife
✧ Gary Kemp blogs on his own website
✧ Danilo Monzillo’s exhaustive Blitz Kids compendium
✧ The official line on Duran Duran
✧ New Romantics on video
✧ Landmark pop videos from the 80s and all crucial points before — on the Shapersofthe80s channel at YouTube 
❖ Welcome to our latest visitors from 173 countries and dependencies — not forgetting our southernmost visitors at Río Grande in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina (53°47′S, 67°42′W), only a smidgeon further south than our reader in Punta Arenas... Our northernmost visitor lives at Hammerfest in Norway (70°39′N, 23°40′E), a nudge nearer the Pole than others at Tromsø in Norway (69°41′N, 18°56′E) and Murmansk in Russia (68°58′N, 33°05′E)
