WELCOME ➤ TO THE SWINGING EIGHTIES

In 1980 a youth movement began reshaping Britain.
Its stars didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did. This writer was there and these words and pictures tell the tale.

David Bowie

◼︎ As a decade, the 1970s spelt doom. British youth culture had been discredited by punk. A monumental recession followed the Labour government’s “winter of discontent”, threatening the prospect of no jobs for years ahead.

Swinging 80s, London, history, blitz club, blitz kids, theblitzkids, theblitzclub, cult with no name, billy’s, gossip’s, nightclubs, fashion, pop music, steve strange, rusty egan, boy george, stephen jones, kim bowen, stephen linard, chris sullivan, robert elms, perry haines, princess julia, judi frankland, darla-jane gilroy,fiona dealey, jayne chilkes, derek ridgers, perry haines, terry jones, peter ashworth, lee sheldrick, michele clapton, myra, willy brown, helen robinson, stephane raynor, melissa caplan,Dinny Hall, Kate Garner, rachel auburn, richard ostell, Paul Bernstock, Dencil Williams, Darla Jane Gilroy, Simon Withers, Graham Smith, Graham Ball, christos tolera, sade adu, peter marilyn robinson, gaz mayall, midge ure, gary kemp, steve dagger,Denis O’Regan, andy polaris, john maybury, cerith Wyn Evans, iain webb, jeremy healy, david holah, stevie stewart, worried about the boy,Yet from this black hole burst an optimistic movement the press dubbed the New Romantics, based on a London club called the Blitz. Its deejay Rusty Egan promoted the deliberately un-rock sounds of synthesised electro-pop with a beat created for the dancefloor, while drumming in a studio seven-piece called Visage, fronted by the ultimate poser, Steve Strange. He and other fashionista Blitz Kids were picked by Bowie to represent their movement in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes (above). But the live band who broke all the industry rules were five dandies with a preposterous name: Spandau Ballet.

As the last of the Baby Boomers, the Blitz Kids were concerned with much more than music. In 1980 they shook off teenage doubt to express all those talents the later Generation X would have to live up to — leadership, adaptability, negotiating skills, focus. Children of the first era of mass TV, these can-doers excelled especially in visual awareness. They were the vanguard for a self-confident new class who were ready to enjoy the personal liberty and social mobility heralded by their parents in the 60s.

For Britain, the Swinging 80s were a tumultuous period of social change when the young wrested many levers of power away from the over-40s. London became a creative powerhouse and its pop music and street fashion the toast of world capitals. All because a vast dance underground had been gagging for a very sociable revolution.

★++++++★++++++★

“From now on, this will become the official history”
– Verdict of a former Blitz Kid

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Below: View Blitz Club host Steve Strange in all his poser glory in the promo video for Fade to Grey (1982), also starring the club’s cloakroom girl, Julia Fodor, aka Princess

CLICK HERE to run the anthemic 80s video ♫ ♫ from Spandau Ballet and feel the chant:

nightlife, st moritz, club for heroes,le kilt, wag club, beat route,hacienda, cha-cha, holy city zoo, rum runner, camden palace, scala cinema, studio 21,crocs, le palace, white trash, fac51, Dirt Box, mud club, batcave, barbarella's, croc's, electro-pop, synth-pop, Chant No 1, kid creole, blue rondo, animal nightlife, visage, duran, depeche mode, ultravox, human league, gentry, ABC,soft cell, bolan,vince clarke, haysi, wham!, mclaren, heaven 17, yazoo, foxx, omd, bauhaus, phil oakey, jay strongman, Martyn Ware, martin fry ,altered images, 20th-century box, vivienne westwood, PX, axiom, body-map , foundry, sue clowes,demob, seditionaries, acme attractions, i-D, the face, new sounds new styles, Korniloff, andrew logan, kahn & bell, biddie & eve, toyah,

July 2, 1981: Shooting the video for Chant No 1 at Le Beat Route club in Soho, “down, down, pass the Talk of the Town”. Photograph © by Shapersofthe80s

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2023➤ Kemp Bros keep tongues firmly in their cheeks

Gary Kemp, Martin Kemp, comedy, documentary, pop music, television, biopic, Spandau Ballet,

Who Do They Think They Are? Their spoof TV doc traces the Kemp Brothers’ origins back to the inventor of the clothes peg

❚ THREE YEARS AGO the critics divided over a TV “mockumentary” about Spandau Ballet’s Kemp brothers, which Martin summed up as “French and Saunders do Gary and Martin Kemp”. Gary added: “Our traits, but highlighted”. The unexpectedly oddball hour is being repeated on BBC2 tonight.

Their contemporary, Eighties musician Andy Polaris, declared himself a bit of a fan in his own review:

The Kemps All True is a surprisingly deft spoof documentary based on the Spandau Ballet stars’ ill-fated revamp revolving solely around the two charismatic brothers. Chock-full of well-known British cameos (Christopher Eccleston, Daniel Mays, Anna Maxwell Martin), it follows their attempted relaunch including a guest star covers album where ‘Sia’ and the gruff-voiced ‘Rag and Bone Guy’ both murder True, a song they had reserved for a popular girl band.

Gary Kemp, Martin Kemp, comedy, documentary, pop music, television, biopic,Spandau Ballet,

Exclusive preview of new album cover (BBC)

Interwoven are real clips from the band’s history leading up to the current 40th anniversary where they are rudderless and searching for new streams of income including an unappealing-sounding meat replacement vegan product called Wonge and a charitable retirement project. The hour whizzes by due to a cavalcade of witty observations about vintage pop stars (ie, playing private parties for oligarchs for considerable financial rewards and celebrity endorsements for dodgy products), piercing their Photoshop vanity and pretentious public images…   ➢ Continued at Apolarisview.com

Shapersofthe80s published another candid appreciation of the Kemps’ venture into comic territory, which was conceived by its director and writer Rhys Thomas, here:
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: Knife-edge TV doc shows Kemp tongues firmly in their cheeks

Followed up almost inevitably by Spandau’s former vocalist Tony Hadley telling The Sun: “I wasn’t approached and would not have anything to do with it. I’m done. They want me back for good but it ain’t going to happen. I’d rather be happy on my own than be in that band again.”
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: Vocalist Hadley hammers final nail into the coffin of Spandau Ballet

Martin Kemp, Gary Kemp, Rhys Thomas, BBC2, documentary,

Preview of Gary Kemp’s latest work as a portrait painter (BBC)


➢ Click for the quite funny Kemp Bros trailer

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2023 ➤ 80,000 items of Bowie baggage find final resting place in the Olympic Park

Bowie, David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts, V&A East Storehouse, , archive, David Bowie

Into the archive: 1978 self-portrait sketched and signed by Bowie (detail)


❚ AT THE DAVID BOWIE CENTRE for the Study of Performing Arts fans will soon be able to get up-close to Bowie’s creative genius like never before. From 2025 the Victoria & Albert Museum’s East Storehouse in London’s Olympic Park will house more than 80,000 items amassed during the six decades of the performer’s pioneering career. His archive will be made available to the public, from fans to school children and researchers, thanks to the David Bowie Estate and a donation of £10m from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group.

The archive features handwritten lyrics, letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments, album artwork and awards. It also includes more intimate writings, thought processes and unrealised projects, the majority of which have never been seen in public before.

V&A East Storehouse will be a new type of museum experience taking visitors behind the scenes of the stored collections. The new Centre will also support the ongoing conservation, research and study of the archive.

Bowie, David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts, V&A East Storehouse, archive,

Into the archive: notes for Bowie lyrics created by the Burroughs “cut-up” technique

Highlights include stage costumes such as Bowie’s breakthrough Ziggy Stardust ensembles designed by Freddie Burretti (1972), Kansai Yamamoto’s flamboyant creations for the Aladdin Sane tour (1973) and the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen for the Earthling album cover (1997). The archive also includes handwritten lyrics for songs including Fame (1975), “Heroes” (1977) and Ashes to Ashes (1980), as well as examples of the “cut-up” method of generating lyrics introduced to Bowie by the writer William Burroughs. Additionally, the archive holds a series of intimate notebooks from every era of Bowie’s life up to his death in 2016.

Tilda Swinton, one of David Bowie’s friends and collaborators, said: “In 2013, the V&A’s David Bowie Is… exhibition gave us unquestionable evidence that Bowie is a spectacular example of an artist who not only made unique and phenomenal work, but who has an influence and inspiration far beyond that work itself. Ten years later, the regenerative nature of his spirit grows ever further in popular resonance down through younger generations.”

Bowie, David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts, V&A East Storehouse, costumes, archive,

Into the archive: stage costumes from every decade of Bowie’s career

➢ Read further detail at the official David Bowie website

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2023 ➤ Spitting Image puppeteers steal the live stage show in Birmingham

Idiots Assemble, Spitting Image, Birmingham Rep, puppets, theatre,

Spitting Image Saves The World at Birmingham Rep:
Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak given life by puppeteers wearing grey. (Photo PA)

❚ THE MAJOR MIRACLE about Birmingham Rep’s new show Spitting Image Saves The World is that the move from satirical television to live theatre stage succeeds brilliantly. And hilariously. Not only are the puppeteers visible (though clad in grey from head to foot) while animating their giant plastic caricature heads and arms and indeed lending them “legs” – from superstars to cabinet ministers to royalty. They also execute physical illusions and perform exacting song-and-dance routines that fill the stage. And for the hundred or so celebs depicted, most are voiced by equally superb impressionists. Seldom before have we witnessed a stage show as ambitious as this involving complex scene changes.

As with the Central TV series that created Spitting Image in the Eighties, satire fuels the comedy, while two hours on-stage require a storyline. The mission improbable is quickly identified as rescuing the dicey state of the nation – or more whimsically, “the fabric of society”, epitomised by King Charles III waving a pair of soiled underpants aloft.

The puppet heroes recruited to meet the challenge run from a tiny Tom Cruise to Ru Paul, Stormzy, Idris Elba, Greta Thunberg, Angela Rayner and a robotic Elon Musk. An adversarial establishment is led by Rishi Sunak in school uniform, Rees-Mogg as a very tall stick insect, a dancing Gove, Javid, Truss, Raab, Patel, Carrie and Boris Johnson and Suella Braverman as a haunted child from The Exorcist. All are mercilessly sent up along with Harry and Meghan, Wills and Kate, Edward, Ant & Dec, Kier Starmer, Nicola Sturgeon, Presidents Xi Jinping, Zelenskiy and Putin. Sir Ian McKellen opens the show as Narrator, while HM QE2 closes it on electric guitar, riffing on Queen’s We Will Rock You.

Click any pic to launch slideshow

Just before the late Queen’s finale, the storyline had run out of steam. The previous three scenes had nothing to add, yet each closed with a red-curtain flourish as if each was the last. They could be cut completely. So too could the many four-letter expletives used frequently throughout the script. These were not laugh-lines, but mainly casual exclamations. Birmingham Rep is proving as foul-mouthed as London’s National Theatre, where its production of Phaedra is lubricated by unnecessary hard-core expletives. Do these theatres really believe swearing somehow ticks the trendy “diversity” box?

One further source of irritation was that of the dozen voices providing vocals during Spitting Image, half of their microphones sounded so fuzzy as to be useless. Words and lyrics were seriously less audible than the other half dozen. Ruinous when wordplay is key. (Coincidentally, the same went for last August’s musical Counting & Cracking which suggests a technical fault might lie with Birmingham Rep as the House, not the individual company performing.)

That said, this Spitting Image show is highly original and is directed by Sean Foley with great imagination (congratulations to Alice Power for those costumes it would be a spoiler to describe). Along with plenty of other show-stopping highlights, Putin’s tap-dance routine deserves a rollicking long future. As do the 12 grey-clad puppeteers. When they stepped down-stage together to take their curtain call – their names arguably unknown to most of the audience – it came as a sudden epiphany to accept that their skills had created every one of the characters and driven the entire performance.

THE PUPPETEERS were Kate Bradley, Paula Brett, Kaidan Dawkins, Bertie Harris, Jojo Lin, Pena Iiyambo, Chand Martinez, Will Palmer, Helen Parke, Rayo Patel, Tom Quinn, Faye Weerasinghe.

Idiots Assemble, Spitting Image, Birmingham Rep, puppets, theatre,

Spitting Image Saves The World at Birmingham Rep: Stormzy and Tom Cruise given life by puppeteers. (Photo: PA)

➢ Idiots Assemble – Spitting Image Saves The World
is live on stage at the Birmingham Rep until Saturday
11 March. Later it is likely to tour.

Idiots Assemble, Spitting Image, Birmingham Rep, puppets, theatre,

Spitting Image Saves The World at Birmingham Rep: celebrity cast headed by Tom Cruise, as puppets

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2023 ➤ Don’t let zeros dazzle you in front of Doig’s broody paintings

Courtauld Gallery, Peter Doig, collecting, exhibitions , fine art , London,

Canal 2023, by Peter Doig at The Courtauld. Photo Fergus Carmichael

❚ EXACTLY 40 YEARS AGO as he was graduating from St Martin’s art school Peter Doig told me: “You’ve got to be an entrepreneur these days”. I was writing a powerful critique of the rot that had set into the UK art-school teaching system as prime minister Thatcher’s education cuts torpedoed creativity. For his generation – just before the YBAs devised their own solution – it was becoming ever more difficult for young artists to make their mark and there was plenty of unrest to report in my 1983 survey for The Face magazine.

So, hasn’t he done well since then?! During the past 15 years key paintings by Doig have sold for record prices in the international market – $11m, $5m, $11m, $12m, $17m, $39m and $29m. Averaging those seven sums, and grossing up to estimate the worth of the 12 paintings in his exhibition opening this week in London, yields their possible total value as $212million.

So when I walked into the Courtauld Gallery this morning to view his 12 newest paintings hung in two modest rooms, all I could think of were the zeros. Was I standing amidst 212,000,000 dollars-worth of art? And how do we square those zeros with Doig’s own expressionist take on magical realism, eerily mesmerising landscapes and striking figurative images in which he, his family and friends appear with smudged features as if in dreamworlds, described by one critic as “a troubled Arcadia”? Even his two self-portraits are unsettling. Multiple perspectives also tease. Half the pictures are enormous, some have taken him years to complete, others look as if they’re unfinished.

Their idiosyncratic visual chemistry reflects the itinerant life of this 63-year-old Scottish-born Canadian who has also lived in Trinidad and London. Painterly is the one word that unites the leading critics in their reviews of Doig, yet he achieves this largely without thick gestural brushmarks, and often with washes that let pigments emerge subtly through others in sea, sky and land, suggesting remembrance of lost times. Many touches refer to the impressionist masters displayed in an adjacent space at the Courtauld.

Courtauld Gallery, Peter Doig, Trinidad, collecting, exhibitions , fine art ,

House of Music (Soca Boat) 2019-23, by Peter Doig at The Courtauld. Photo Fergus Carmichael

His colours can be strong, as in Alice at Boscoe’s, where a vivid jungle of red and green foliage dominates and his daughter slowly emerges as the faintest female form slung in a hammock. Similar contrasts make Music (2 Trees) a haunting rumination featuring his wife and other friends. In contrast, House of Music (Soca Boat) relies on whole swathes of hues to intrigue.

The larger paintings include works that were created in the artist’s studio since returning to London in 2021. One such titled Canal has shady characters loitering on the Regent’s Canal tow-path where his son is having breakfast before an unlikely crimson bridge. Another titled Alpinist casts a skier as a harlequin against a brittle snowy landscape, inviting us to consider why.

So there’s plenty of food for thought before those zeros re-enter the mind’s eye, ker-ching… Coincidentally yesterday morning, Peter Doig was telling Radio4’s Today programme how the artist has little or no say in what millionaire collectors such as Charles Saatchi are prepared to charge or spend as paintings pass from one to another in the secondary market. Recalling that in 2021 his picture titled Swamped sold for $40m (!), he said: “I sold Swamped for £800 and of all the paintings of mine that have sold for £250million, the amount of money I got was less than £64,000… There are a lot of people out there who want to profit off you somehow.”

Only last month Doig was awarded £2.5m by a judge in a United States court following a decade-long dispute with a gallerist alongside a collector who claimed to own a painting made by him as a teenager. Doig denies this and is donating the windfall to a not-for-profit organisation.

Concluding his Today interview, Doig said: “The money’s not what it’s about. It has given me a life I would never have imagined – travel and making connections – but who could have imagined showing [here at the Courtauld Gallery] in the room next to Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère?”

➢ Peter Doig is the first living artist to exhibit
at the Courtauld Gallery since its £57m revamp in 2021.
His exhibition runs until 29 May 2023

Courtauld Gallery, Peter Doig, Trinidad, collecting, exhibitions , fine art

Music (2 Trees) 2019, by Peter Doig: Photo Mark Woods. Copyright Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved. DACS 2023

➢ Peter Doig speaks to Channel4 News
about his London show

Courtauld Gallery, Peter Doig, collecting, exhibitions , fine art , London, Channel4 News,

Peter Doig with his painting of Alice at Boscoe’s on Channel4 News

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2023 ➤ Fond farewells to the glorious Queen of the Telegraph fashion pages

Hilary Alexander, tributes, Daily Telegraph, fashion,

Farewell to Hilary Alexander on her retirement in 2011: here’s the spoof front page every good hack deserves to cap their career. Read my own account linked below

“The dizzy industry doyenne”
Obituary at Vogue
https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/hilary-alexander-obituary

Fashion editors, tributes, obituary, Hilary Alexander, Suzy Menkes, Anna Wintour

The British fashion triumvirate in their heyday: Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune, Hilary Alexander of the Daily Telegraph and Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of US Vogue

❚ ONE OF BRITISH JOURNALISM’S greatest characters has died and you won’t hear a harsh word spoken about her – apart from on the hilarious spoof tribute page produced for Hilary Alexander’s leaving party in 2011 after donkeys years as fashion director of the Daily Telegraph, when it enjoyed the highest daily sales among UK quality newspapers. During the 1980s-90s I worked regularly alongside Hilary and also dared go out on the town with her to witness her beaming smile and unique dress sense turn heads in all directions. As British fashion grew in credibility on the world stage, Hilary became one of a triumvirate of British fashion editors the international circuit took very seriously, the others being Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune and Anna Wintour of US Vogue, who were to clock up two OBEs and a DBE. Hilary was twice named British Fashion Journalist of the Year. Two obituaries remark that she pursued work like “a Stakhanovite” implying exceptional efficiency.

Early yesterday, Hilary’s 77th birthday, she died from a heart attack while in hospital. Our mutual colleague Penelope McDonald recalls the laughs they had enjoyed over the years – especially at the annual Fenwick Christmas shopping evenings to which Hils attracted leading designers. She devoted much time to inspiring and mentoring young fashionistas. In 2002, the artist Georg Meyer-Wiel remembers his graduation show in menswear at the RCA because he met big names such as Mary Quant and Issey Miyake in the company of Hils at the gala.

When I was editing the student edition of the Telegraph in 1988 Hils was keen to shoot a winter fashion feature with students in the coldest place in the UK. Amazingly this apparently proved not to be Scotland but the Tyneside estuary which receives freezing oceanic winds from the east. Consequently there we were in December fitting out some model students at Newcastle’s Uni and Poly with warm winter wear for our pages. In about 2002 my colourful Blitz Kid friend Judith Frankland recalls meeting Hils in Paris at a party for John Malkovich. She says: “I was dressed up as you can well imagine and she came straight over to me and said ‘I have to know who you are’ and smiled and told me to contact her if I was in London. Of course I didn’t have to ask who she was! It’s a good job she hadn’t seen me mere minutes later as my platform departed from the rest of my shoe, grrr!”

Fashion editors, tributes, obituary, OBE, Hilary Alexander, photos,

As captured by Google: The umpteen faces of fashion queen Hilary Alexander

Paul Hill, foreign desk manager at the Daily Telegraph, also recalls: “She used to organise the Christmas shows in Canada Square, taking over the canteen for the day and putting catwalks in and often filming them for DVD circulation to staff. I was in one (as one of five Elvis impersonators singing appallingly badly All Shook Up) and Hils was everywhere with what started as a full bottle of scotch, but by the end of the show was almost empty and she was a very happy and relaxed director! She would inveigle all sorts of seriously-minded staffers into these annual events, famously Lord Bill Deedes to dress up – make-up and all – as Mick Jagger to mime along to Brown Sugar.”

In today’s Vogue obituary Anna Wintour says: “Hilary was irrepressible in everything she did. She lived life to the fullest and her reporting on fashion was just as committed. I threw a party for her in Paris when she retired – except she never retired! Hilary could never quite leave an industry that she loved so much.”

In the Telegraph obituary Lisa Armstrong writes: “To sit next to Hilary at the shows to be treated to an experience that was a unique blend of massage and wrestling match. Bobbing to the music – whatever it was – she was always the first to bounce out of her seat as the models were still filing off the catwalks, the ears of Uncle Bulgaria’s hat flopping away as she stormed the catwalk to get backstage before everyone else. She would do anything to get a story.”

Our set of photos here from a Google search for Hils sums up her eternal exuberance (“I will not stop flying. I will not stop smoking.”). Her home life in Dulwich was surprisingly private. Born in New Zealand, Hils was educated in Hong Kong and, having ended an unfortunate early marriage, she leaves no partner. Her funeral could be a starry event, though my own 2011 tribute in the link below is probably unbeatable!

➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
2011, The incomparable Hilary Alexander makes her own front-page news as she leaves the Telegraph

Fashion editors, tributes, obituary, Vivienne Westwood, Hilary Alexander,

Hilary’s last profile photo posted at Twitter 2022… Hils celebrates her retirement with Andreas Kronthaler and Vivienne Westwood in 2011

➢ “More stamina than teenagers. To sit next to her at the shows was truly an experience” – Daily Telegraph obituary

➢ “A discerning eye for detail and relentless pursuit of a story made her name” – The Times obituary… She was on first-name terms with many designers but never forgot the readers for whom she was writing. “It’s hard for the average person to decide what to wear,” she said. “Our role is to take the threads that come through from the catwalk shows and say ‘This is the way to wear things’.” She saw fashion as more than mere style and was instrumental in making it newsworthy. “It’s not frivolous – any industry that employs half a million people and generates billions a year is a serious news subject.

Fashion editors, tributes, obituary, OBE, HM Elizabeth II, Hilary Alexander,

Fashion royalty: Hilary Alexander was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by the Queen in 2013… Hils sports a black silk dress with a jazzy poppy print to coordinate with the OBE ribbon

THE BRITISH FASHION COUNCIL’S
VIDEO TRIBUTE TO OUR HILS

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