Eddy Grant’s I Don’t Wanna Dance — UK number one single in 1982
✧ A treasure trove of pop videos has been brought out of the attic at the YouTube channel memorylane1980s from tapes that were recorded live. Currently the hoard goes only up to the end of 1984, everyone from the Smiths, New Order, Simple Minds, OMD, Bob Marley, Womacks, Nick Heyward, Matt Bianco, Jimmy the Hoover, Eddy Grant and all the pop supergroups
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
◆ Shapersofthe80s is declared an “invaluable website” by historian Dominic Sandbrook, author of the rich new cultural analysis, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979. We report how Sandbrook gives generous credit to key influencers on youth culture. His unstuffy combination of high and low life is behind the BBC2 series The Seventies currently viewable live and on iPlayer
✱ 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 ...
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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, 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
◆ 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)
❏ 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.”
◆ 350,000 views since we launched in autumn 2009. During 2011 visitor numbers doubled. See what were the hottest topics at Shapersofthe80s — best for Blitz Kid photos and eye-witness memories
Archive — Many publication dates are arbitrary, so click and take pot luck!
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❖ 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)
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:
