+++ ❚ 90s BRITPOP BAND BLUR picked up the Outstanding Contribution To Music honour at the 2012 Brit Awards in London tonight. Before they stepped up to collect their award, this is the video that played, from Brixton-based Blindeye Films. Blur, who have been together for more than 21 years, performed at the Brits in 1995, where they won four gongs: Best Band, Best Album, Best Single and Best British Video for their album Parklife.
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Sensationally rasping Phil Daniels duets with Damon (above) as Blur perform the title track from their 1994 album Parklife live at tonight’s awards.
➢ More video in STV’s report tonight — “As the band returned to the Brits stage to end tonight’s show with a medley of their hits, Damon Albarn delivered a heartfelt speech: “The last time we were here was 17 years ago and what happened that night seemed to have a really profound effect on our lives so it’s very nice to come back and say thank you very much for this honour … ” / continued online
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Snapper and Stone: Derek Ridgers seen at last night's Sunday Times party at the Saatchi Gallery beside his photo of Keith Richards, published by the Magazine in 1986. (Nokia mobile snap by yours truly)
❚ WHAT ARE THE ODDS on any photographer having an iconic photograph included in the exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Sunday Times Magazine, the UK’s first newspaper colour supplement? Launched in the dull days of 1962 when papers appeared only in black-and-white, as did TV, the mag proclaimed itself the paper’s Colour Section to point up its USP. Since then it must have published at least 250,000 pages, so the odds of being shown in the powerful new exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery are stacked against most of its contributing photographers. Only 60 were chosen for the show.
This elegantly mounted selection of 100 historic pix, plus various supporting mementoes, packs a surprising punch. The vitality of the huge images is an object lesson in what makes photographic magic.
Grit and glamour on ST Magazine covers: Don McCullin’s exhausted mother and weeping child in Bangladesh, 1972 ... Marilyn Monroe on a 1973 cover, photographed in a famous series of naked pictures by Bert Stern, a month before her death in August 1962
Right from the off, the Mag established its benchmark: “photographer first”. In Feb 1962 the 24-year-old David Bailey’s launch issue cover shots at Chelsea Reach showed the model Jean Shrimpton wearing a Mary Quant outfit and announced the dawn of Swinging London. Inside pages featured pop artist Peter Blake five years before he designed the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album sleeve, and a short story titled The Living Daylights by 007 author Ian Fleming.
In the words of Michael Rand, the Mag’s art director for 30 years, its credo was “grit plus glamour — fashion juxtaposed with war photography and pop art”. This meant serious investment in photo-reportage from the world’s troublespots. He went on to champion the work of Eve Arnold, Snowdon, Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy, Richard Avedon, Eugene Richards, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark. Rand says he felt a great responsibility to project the honesty of their pictures. Risking his life in the warzones of the late 20th century, Don McCullin survived sniper bullets to return with some of the century’s most haunting pictures, and to write movingly of the impact on his own soul from having witnessed at first hand the pain and the pity of shell-shocked soldiers and starving children in Biafra, Vietnam and Northern Ireland. In 1989, Stuart Franklin, onetime president of the Magnum agency, leant out of a hotel window to give the world the unforgettable image of a young man single-handedly halting a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square.
First group pic of key Blitz Kids, April 1980: George O’Dowd, Vivienne Lynn, Chris Sullivan, Kim Bowen, Pinkietessa and Steve Strange immmortalised by Derek Ridgers for The Sunday Times Magazine
All the more reason to be extra-impressed at last night’s party launching the exhibition to meet my old ally on London’s clubbing scene in the 80s, Derek Ridgers. You know his pictures of everyone within a mile of Steve Strange, king of the posers, because they’re all over this website, and as half a dozen key Blitz Kids well remember, he snapped their first published group shot at the Blitz for the ST Magazine in April 1980. Last night Derek had been chatting on and off for at least half an hour while we sidestepped the namedroppy media luvvies and posey models to mingle with the veterans Mike Rand and Beatle biographer Hunter Davies, ST picture editor Ray Wells and snapper Uli Weber (standing in front of his demonic pic of Boy George sprouting a pair of satanic horns, while his pic of Kylie Minogue in the bath is on the poster for this show).
Eventually Derek, who is modest to a fault, asked if I was carrying a camera and I had to say no, thinking it a bit uncool at a swanky champagne bash for 700 media A-listers (which was obviously his view too since his own holster was empty). We did then discover that we were both toting the same unsmart workhorse Nokia 6300 mobile with 2Mp cams onboard. OK, they’ll do, so would I mind taking a pic of him beside his own exhibit at the end of the gallery? Excuse me, Derek? Nice old mild-mannered Derek with his long hair tied in a tail, and knapsack over his shoulder? Renowned for his book full of skinhead and punk portraits, not to mention the dodgy habitués of sexclubs like Skin Two, of David Claridge vintage? Derek’s IN this show? Yes he is. Even with the odds stacked at 250,000 to one against, it’s true. “I was amazed when they sent me an email asking if they could show this photograph,” he said. “So I said, yes, I didn’t mind.” How cool is that?
What we see is a charismatic mugshot of wrecked old Scary Stone, Keith Richards, snapped back in late 1985 when the face of the “10th greatest guitarist of all time” was engraved with a tiny fraction of the million lines it boasts now. He was settling into his marriage to the model Patti Hansen, and Derek persuaded the rock star to pose for him after a chance encounter at the Savoy hotel in London. He says: “There was no KR entourage whatsoever. He couldn’t possibly have been any more helpful. I guess that’s what makes him the guy he is.”
Full marks for initiative, Derek. In 2012 The Sunday Times remains the UK’s best-selling quality newspaper. In the season of Oscars and artsy prizegivings, to be included among the 60 top photographers in the life of its mighty Magazine is pretty well the best gong a lensman can win.
Grit and glamour at the Saatchi Gallery: Tim Hetherington’s photographs observe American soldiers asleep in 2009 in Afghanistan. He said they are about “the intimacy of war. We’re not talking about friendship. We’re talking about brotherhood.” He was killed in Libya in 2011 ... Minutes before a tense Amy Winehouse went onstage at a Mandela tribute concert in 2008, Terry O’Neill persuaded the singer to pose for a pic dedicated to the great man. O’Neill said: “She steeled herself for it.” All published in the ST Magazine. Gallery views by Shapersofthe80s
Beijing 1989: Stuart Franklin photographed pro-democracy student protesters in Tiananmen Square which made a cover shot for the ST Mag. Two days after the massacre of hundreds of civilians, he caught “Tank Man” defying Chinese T-59 tanks armed only with his shopping bags
Glamour and grit: Faye Dunaway in Beverly Hills at 6am the day after winning her 1977 Oscar for Network, photographed by her future husband Terry O’Neill... Right, in 1976 Don McCullin catches six Christian Phalangist militia playing music over a girl’s corpse after they went into East Beirut to “clean up the rats”. One had a Kalashnikov and another a lute stolen from the home of the people they’d just killed. McCullin says: “It haunts me to this day.”
Grit or glamour, the eyes have it: Nigel Parry nails the steely ambition of Tony Blair in 1994, weeks before becoming the Labour Party leader and going on to win three general elections ... Uli Weber nails the demons of pop singer Boy George on tour in 1993, after emerging from one of his early descents into drug-fuelled despair
❚ WHICH UK STYLE MAGAZINE is edited to the coolest beats in town? Art director Terry Jones’s mould-breaking “manual of style” i-D which pioneered the straight-up mode of street photography back in 1980? Or fashion photographer Rankin’s playpen Dazed & Confused, which clocks up its 20th birthday this year?
Google Maps place them 2,000ft apart: Dazed in Islington EC1 and i-D in Shoreditch EC2
Only 2,000ft separate the offices of these two fulcrums of hipsterdom. i-D’s HQ is safely coralled by its London postcode EC2 into Shoreditch’s much-aped paradise of cool, where the sounds on its monthly mixtape are as bleepy and chilled as you’d hear in the spoof online soap Dalston Superstars. A ten-minute walk westwards, Dazed & Confused’s address in EC1 brings associations with the intelligentsia of Islington, though you might not guess that from February’s cover boy, Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky, whose swag spells strength and sex. Judge each mag’s soundscape for yourself.
➢ Fresh today, i-D online’s January mixtape features 31 tracks
— “ Opening with a Roska remixed track, Mama Grizzlies, this fully wonky and warped 4 minutes and 26 seconds of bouncy beats should get you thinking weekend… Moving swiftly on, Hoquest, Sacha Robotti, Azari & III, H.O.S.H, Laura Jones and The 2 Bears wrestle out strong sequences of muscly mixes and the stop/start pace slows down to the sound of Odd Future duo Matt Martian and Syd Tha Kyd, aka The Internet, lowering tempo levels, alongside Amateur Best, Gang Colours and Enchante… ” / continued at i-D / Listen here to Mama Grizzlies
+++ ➢ This week also saw the first Dazed Digital playlist of 2012
— “ These 30 tracks have been on constant repeat on the Dazed office stereo over the last few weeks, from this month’s cover star A$AP Rocky’s trill new jam Pretty Flacko to British electronic whizz kids Gang Colours, Alby Daniels, Vesel, Beatoven and Ifan Dafydd. We’ve also been loving Common’s hot comeback track Ghetto Dreams… Oh yeah, if you haven’t seen the video for Forgiven by 18+ yet, make sure you check that out too, but maybe not at work… ” / continued at Dazed / Listen here to Pretty Flacko (baaad language warning) +++
Derek Ridgers meets the fugitive Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in Rio, about 1985: “I played pool with Ronnie a few times and he was a lot better at it than I was. I suppose he had plenty of time to practise.” (Picture courtesy of Derek)
❚ WITH 35 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE,Derek Ridgers is one of the UK’s leading documentary photographers, notably of youth culture, its rock stars and its street tribes. “Derek Ridgers’ compulsion to photograph London clubs over two decades was an extraordinary one,” curator Val Williams wrote in his 2004 book, When We Were Young: Club and Street Portraits 1978–1987. Here were “transient beings moving across an urban landscape, flamboyant souls who cared more than anything about how they looked and whose greatest fear was of being ordinary. But it was the ordinariness that Derek Ridgers glimpsed in these costumed characters that makes his photographs so powerful.
An era of conspicuous sexuality: clubber at Witchity, a David Claridge dive in 1979, photographed by Derek Ridgers
“Ridgers’ photographs are an undeliberate chapter in a decade of English social and cultural history which changed the way we thought about music, fashion and consumption. It was the decade of the handmade and the customised, of Oxfam shopping, conspicuous sexuality, of excess, wide success and dismal failure.” Well, that’s a point of view.
His earliest exhibitions in the 70s and 80s featured punk portraits and skinheads, and many seminal images of London’s clubland New Romantics. He has mainly worked for UK magazines and newspapers such as NME, The Face, The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph, Time Out and Loaded. He now runs the Derek Ridgers Archive where limited edition prints are for sale, and he blogs occasionally though thoughtfully at Ponytail Pontifications. Derek has always been the “quiet observer”. He collaborated only once with Shapersofthe80s and his fine shots can be seen on our inside page about the 1983 Face cover story, The making of UK club culture. He also brilliantly articulated what remains today the definitive description of Billy’s, the font of all 80s clubbing. You’ll read it in the feature.
Oomska, a new UK-based online arts and pop culture magazine, today asked Derek to share his views about photography. Here are some highlights:
❏ “ Other than a camera, my favourite piece of equipment, if one could characterise it as such, is the sun.
❏ The digital age has probably added several years to my life expectancy — when I think about all the wasted time and expense of having clip tests made prior to getting the bulk of my colour film processed, I think I must have been mad.
❏ I love Garry Winogrand but some of his photographs (for instance the ones taken in the Ivar Theatre) suggest that he wasn’t necessarily always thinking about the art.
❏ It’s becoming harder and harder these days to earn a living as a professional photographer … I don’t particularly care.
❏ The most popular camera used on Flickr is now the iPhone 4. The rise of the hybrid consumer appliance will probably continue.
❏ For me it’s whatever works… Photoshop has brought all those darkroom techniques that took years to learn within the reach of everyone.
❏ A static image can still have more power than a moving one because you can live with it and study it and let its whole being seep into you and fix itself into your brain. ”
The snapper snapped: Derek Ridgers at last December’s party at the Beat Route reincarnation to launch somebody else’s photobook We Can Be Heroes. Snapped by Sandro Martini
❚ THERE’S A BREATHLESS FOUR-PARAGRAPH teaser online at Rolling Stone magazine’s website in an attempt to sell the February 2 issue. It’s headlined How David Bowie Changed The World. Yet it promises nothing we haven’t read a million times before. Instead, try our own tribute on Bowie’s 65th birthday, linked further down this post.
“ He phoned Angela in London, asking for her help: witches intended for him to impregnate one during Walpurgis Night. He later said Satan was living in his indoor swimming pool. David needed an exorcism (“I really walked into other worlds,” he later said), and Angela got him one – though it was by way of a long-distance phone call. “David was never insane,” Angela wrote. “The really crazy stuff coincided precisely with his ingestion of enormous amounts of cocaine, alcohol and whatever other drugs.” In any event, the rite may have helped break Bowie’s fear of a fiend possessing him. “It was time to get out of this terrible lifestyle I’d put myself into, and get healthy,” he later said. “It was time to pull myself together ” … / Continued online at Rolling Stone
❏ Update Feb 8: Now this Bowie issue has reached the UK, Mikal Gilmore’s account of the Ziggy phenomenon proves a workmanlike retelling of the familiar, but is oh-so relentlessly downbeat. He even cites an alleged quotation from 1998: Bowie is supposed to have said that, “Without Iman, I’d have put my head in the oven by now”. It’s a cheap shot because the quote has never been attributed, so counts for nothing more than hearsay. Rolling Stone claims a circulation of 1.45m.
“ As a cultural lightning rod Bowie has bequeathed insights into the realm of the imagination. As a performer he has delivered a repertoire of life-skills through a cast of mythical personalities invented for himself as a popstar, from the self-destructive Ziggy Stardust and the amoral Thin White Duke, to his romanticised “Heroes” (his own quote marks added to emphasise self-awareness). Through their formative years, Bowie invited his acolytes to do A…. and B…. and C…. ” / Read on to discover what
MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
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➢ THE BLOG POSTS on this front page report topical updates ➢ ROLL OVER THE MENU AT TOP to go deeper into the past ➢ FOR NEWS & MONTH BY MONTH SEARCH, see the sidebar below ➢ WELCOME to the Swinging 80s ➢ iPAD USERS see only a tiny part of this website. View on a desktop computer for the full content
❏ 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.”
✱ Hot news! Blur reunite live at the Brit Awards ...
✱ Also, Madonna must be mad to charge £5,000 for standing tickets for her London tour date. Standing!
✱ And how to apply by March 2 for 10,000 tickets to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert...
✱ Click the hotlink to read many other updates in a regular News Splurge, now published as a front-page post. Shapersofthe80s is changing the role of this side column to point to deeper coverage of topics on inside pages
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✱ Verdicts on 2011: Picky people’s year-ending Best Ofs in fashion, TV, web and film ... Also, Best Ofs across the 2011 music scene✱ Top moments from the past year of trial and error at i-D online
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✱ Hot news, Feb 20: Pulp reissue their weird and groundbreaking first three albums. Then Jarvis and pals head for the States. We have the tour dates for Pulp in the US — plus Spain again in May
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✱ As the moody psycho-thriller Martin Kemp’s Stalker goes to DVD, catch up at Shapersofthe80s with a video interview with Martin as the Spandau Ballet bass-player talks about becoming a movie mogul ... and read how he got blood on his hands during his his directorial debut
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✱ 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
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✱ An exhibition of portraits by artists and photographers honouring Richard Hamilton, the father of pop art in the UK, runs until May 14 at the National Portrait Gallery in London ... Shapersofthe80s discussed his second thoughts about his definition of pop art when he died in September
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✱ The bleeps behind Dalston Superstars are free to download! By popular demand the Vice dotcom “structured reality” video series about hipness in Hackney has had to issue a mixtape of its achingly hip soundtracks. Here’s a taster ...
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✱ “If it moves, funk it” — Robbie Vincent’s Essential Rhythms from the pioneering 70s & 80s deejay goes out as a global webcast Sundays 10am–1pm GMT. Listen online live or on demand at Jazzfm.com and retune DAB sets in the UK to find National Jazzfm on radio & TV ... See online for latest playlist: Randy Crawford, Chaka Khan, The Blackbyrds, Robert Glasper... RV also currently standing in on Jazz Travels, Tuesdays at 6pm ... Here at Shapersofthe80s read how Robbie influenced the shape of British music in his 35 years as master of hot cuts
◆ The reviewers say: “A gorgeous history of 80s London clubland” — Alex Petredis, The Guardian ... “To anyone who dismisses Eighties nightlife with the words ‘Peter Stringfellow’, a thorough reading of this fascinating and definitive account should be a priority” — Robert Spellman, Sunday Express
◆ Thud! The first edition of this coffee-table photobook We Can Be Heroes proves to be monumental tombstone of a hardback measuring 28.5x24cm ... It chronicles six whirlwind years from punk to the New Romantics — through Graham Smith’s eye-witness photography, and racy commentary from writer Chris Sullivan, one of the core shapers of British youth culture ... Meet Smith & Sullivan on Feb 22 and buy signed copies downstairs at the The Sun & Thirteen Cantons, 21 Great Pulteney Street, W1F 9NG, from 7pm until late
Archive — Many publication dates are arbitrary, so click and take pot luck!
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❖ Welcome to our latest visitors from 171 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)
KEY PHOTOGRAPHERS ON THE SCENE
My gratitude to the photographers who have generously permitted use of their images at Shapersofthe80s, because who would believe the preposterous story of the Blitz scene without the supporting pictorial evidence? These are the people whose lenses first caught the magic, and more subcultural images from the 1980s can be found at their own online galleries ❂ Neil Matthews ❂ Denis O’Regan ❂ Andy Rosen ❂ Homer Sykes ❂ Virginia Turbett ❂ Special thanks to:
