Category Archives: anniversary

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

FRONT PAGE

2023 ➤ Bowie anniversaries: One fan’s teenage love remains undimmed

David Bowie, 1976, Man Who Fell to Earth, pop music, films, anniversary, birth, death,

Bowie’s new look for 1976 when he became The Man Who Fell to Earth, here in a Haywain shirt. Photographed by Steve Schapiro and published on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine

David Robert Jones
8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016

Every January, two dates stir the souls of Bowie fans: the 8th being his birthday and the 10th the day he died. On the seventh anniversary of his death, Eighties Blitz Kid and pop singer ANDY POLARIS recalls the dramatic influence Bowie had on his early teens in the way that his fan base would also be galvanized by his art to inspire their own creative dreams. This extract comes from a much longer piece at his own website Apolarisview.wordpress.com … Andy writes:

Much has been written about Bowie’s Starman performance in 1972. I had begun a fascination with his image a little earlier after the Melody Maker interview, thanks to an older teenager who also had the album, Hunky Dory.

I began to spend the little pocket money I had on buying all the magazines and music papers that featured him, especially on the cover. Fab 208, PopSwop, Music Star, Music Scene and Jackie thankfully were relatively cheap and I began my scrapbook collection. Ziggy Stardust with his bold make-up and glamorous wardrobe (courtesy of Freddie Burretti and Kansai Yamamoto) was unlike anything seen before and blurred the line between sexes. This beautiful creature offered a world of possibilities to this youth already bored with football and the teenybop fandom that dominated our era. Clothes, style, identity – normal teenage rites of passage – all took on a greater importance over the next few years but now helped define a more alternative journey.

Seeking out Bowie’s references in lyrics opened a new door to imagination. His creative output eased my inner void of loneliness and probably kick-started my interest in science-fiction. Humdrum suburbia was replaced by the magical worlds of Alfred Bester, Philip K Dick, George Orwell and Robert Heinlein to a soundtrack of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs.

Scissors, Pritt Stick or Gloy Gum and a large desk were my 1970s iPad, and all that were needed, as I lovingly read and then pasted articles onto A4 note paper into a hard grey binder. This became a ritual that continued for my teenage life. I never liked to create collages because I hated cutting up articles too much and words were equally important. What Bowie was saying or what people were saying about him seemed as important as the visuals. That shape-shifting style (musically and visually) meant I never got bored and felt that I evolved along with him, my anticipation becoming almost tangible with news of a new release or a TV appearance…

➢ Read Andy’s full article on Bowie: First anniversary of his death and my teenage love is undimmed

Andy Polaris , Billy's club, Derek Ridgers, nightlife

Future singer Andy Polaris and Sue at Billy’s in 1978. (Photograph © by Derek Ridgers)

FRONT PAGE

1982 ➤ When fans first screamed for Spandau and two climbed up to their window

Spandau Ballet, Blitz Kids, New Romantics, Liverpool Empire, 1982, Diamond Tour, fans,

8 May, 1982: Now identified! A teenage fan shins the drainpipe at the Liverpool Empire giving access to Spandau Ballet’s dressing room on their first nationwide tour with the Diamond album. Snapped by © Shapersofthe80s

40
YEARS
ON

■ THE YEAR WAS 1982. Spandau’s seventh single Instinction had put them on Top of the Pops during Easter week and sales were rocketing. The night of May 8, towards the end of Spandau’s first nationwide tour, with stand-up comedian Peter Capaldi in support, has become known as The Return of the Scream. The moment the house lights dimmed, a mighty roar lifted the roof off the Empire, the city’s legendary music venue. It didn’t stop for 75 minutes. The band hadn’t heard anything so intense and were visibly shaken when they came offstage. Guitarist Gary Kemp said in disbelief: “I had to stop playing. I couldn’t hear my own monitor.”
➢ Click through to read all about 8 May 1982 – the return of The Scream to British pop

Yes says Jan: that’s me shinning up
the drainpipe in 1982

■ A 30 YEAR-OLD MYSTERY HAS BEEN SOLVED. At the climax to Spandau Ballet’s first national tour in 1982 fan mania broke out on a level comparable to the 1960s. When their single Instinction crashed into the UK charts with freshly injected energy from producer Trevor Horn, three extra tour dates were added in May. After the show in Liverpool, the creative birthplace of British pop music, a crowd of about 500 fans mobbed the stage door at the fabled Empire theatre. A shadow had only to fall across the band’s dressing room window for screams to erupt in the street. Two girls then decided to shin the drainpipe and beat the window with their handbags until they were let in…

➢ Click through for more about the girls who entered Spandau’s dressing room via the window

Spandau Ballet, Blitz Kids, New Romantics, Liverpool Empire, 1982, Diamond Tour, Martin Kemp, fans, Gary Kemp,Steve Norman, Tony Hadley, Peter Capaldi

Inside the Liverpool Empire, May 8, 1982: fans shocked security staff with the roar that greeted Spandau Ballet. Photograph by © Shapersofthe80s

➢ 1982, How Spandau put Peter Capaldi on the road
to play the new Doctor Who

FRONT PAGE

2001 ➤ Blitz Kids nail the rites for a Tuesday night out

Blitz Kids, New Romantics, Spandau Ballet, pop music, fashion

Before the phrase New Romantics had been invented: Blitz Kids queue for Spandau Ballet’s second pivotal concert at the Scala Cinema in May 1980

20 & 40
YEARS
ON

❚ BBC4 REMINDED UK AUDIENCES this week how entertaining were many of the Blitz Kids who set the New Romantics ball rolling 40 years ago. When the documentary The New Romantics: A Fine Romance was made in 2001, these talking heads were of course 20 years younger than they are today and full of fizz.

However BBC Manchester fell for some faulty memories that had gelled into mythological “truths” to create several laugh-out-loud howlers in the voice-over script as the price of believing odd Blitz Kid fantasies. Another irritation, amid much classic vintage footage, was the repeated montaging of film footage irrelevant to the Blitz club-night run by gender-bending Steve Strange and electro-deejay Rusty Egan, mainly because no more than about 11 minutes of live footage inside the Tuesday-night Blitz exist, and only one of which was used in this doc. That’s history for you. Set in video.

At least we can enjoy the many gnomic quips tossed out by the stars of 1980’s clubworld during the 48-minutes of A Fine Romance…

St Martin’s designer Fiona Dealey on the New Romantic credo: “Dressing for the Blitz was REAL THEATRE. It wasn’t just another uniform.”

Blitz Kid Stephen Linard’s trade secret: “Make-up was the big thing: make-up and Elnett. We used to get our make-up DONE FOR NOTHING down at Selfridges at half-past five and the girls there would do a makeover on you.”

Steve Strange on the term New Romantics: “I’d rather call it THE CULT WITH NO NAME, because the papers can never put one finger on it.”

Rusty Egan on gender confusion at the Blitz: “By the end of the night you’d hope to go home with someone – same sex, opposite sex, NO SEX AT ALL, you were never quite sure.”

Spandau manager Steve Dagger on their music: “Over the period 78-79 in the rehearsal studio the band gradually changed from a rock-pop sound to a modern SYNTHESISED TYPE DANCE SOUND.”

Duran’s Nick Rhodes on first seeing Spandau Ballet live in Birmingham in 1980: “We saw them play at the Botanical Gardens and when we left we were smiling. We just said: WHAT’S THAT ABOUT?”

New Romantics, Duran Duran, pop music, frilly shirts, Top of the Pops

Happy even to work “New Romantic” into their lyrics: frilly Duran Duran’s debut on Top of the Pops in March 1981

“Boy” George O’Dowd: “Duran Duran brought the FRILLY SHIRT through to the masses.”

Gary Kemp on shooting Spandau Ballet’s video for Chant No 1 at the Beat Route club in 1981: “That was our LAST HOORAH – Spandau being part of this movement.”

Spandau manager Steve Dagger on the early 80s: “There was this COLOURFUL BANG which revitalised pop culture and fashion and London as a swinging city.”

Robert Elms on the clubbing revolution initiated by the Blitz Kids: “It introduced one-off nightclubs, warehouse parties, the deejay as the centre of attention, clubs where they tell you you can’t come in UNLESS YOU LOOK RIGHT. None of that had existed before.”

George O’Dowd speaking as an old Boy: “Strange and Egan were the gruesome twosome of the time – the HINGE AND BRACKET of New Romanticism.”

➢ View A Fine Romance (BBC Manchester 2001,
last shown 2015, on iPlayer now for another month)

➢ Says one observer: “If you stepped out and didn’t get
abuse, you hadn’t done it right” – Daily Mail review, 2001

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
How real did 1980 feel? Ex-Blitz Kids give verdicts on the TV play about Boy George, Worried About the Boy in 2010

FRONT PAGE

2020 ➤ Yes, Midge Ure has Fleetwood Mac to thank for his landmark hit Vienna

40
YEARS
ON

❚ ON THIS DAY in 1980 Ultravox released one of the three most significant albums of the year that exemplified Britain’s new wave of synthesised electronic music – the others coming from Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (in February) and Japan (in October). None of them acknowledged any association with the New Romantics movement. Ultravox’s 12-track album Vienna made an immediate impact, though its title track was only its third to be released, hitting No 2 in the charts in January 1981, later winning Single of the Year at the Brit Awards and an age later voted “the UK’s favourite No2 of all time” in a BBC poll.

It was produced by the German Conny Plank with an evocatively romantic landmark video directed by Russell Mulcahy who was creating a stunning visual vocabulary for the then novel music video. Midge Ure can take full credit as lead singer and guitarist for breathing a subtle blend of Roxy Music’s style and krautrock clarity into Ultravox and building them into a credible vanguard for electronica. Even as the word punk was given the heave-ho in favour of the term “new wave”, Ure was probably the first active player of a synth among any of his clubbing pals, having bought his first, the polyphonic Yamaha CS-50, in the summer of ’78.

As one of the most innovative musicians of the new decade, having had fingers in more pop pies than most, Ure is well qualified to stake his claim to have shaped the music of the Blitz Kids (among whom he was very much an honorary member), and here he describes the inspiration for Vienna, in an extract from his eloquent and candid 2004 autobiography If I Was (Virgin Books):

The first time I plugged in and made a noise with Ultravox was in April 1979 at a rehearsal room in the Elephant and Castle. Right from the first minute I knew I had come home. This noise was what I had been searching for, not only could these people make that noise, but they also could teach me how to make it. [These people being Chris Cross, Billy Currie, Warren Cann.]

What we were doing was radical and new: synthesisers, drum machines and electric guitar mixed together, synth bass with regular drums playing on top of it, the electronic and the organic. It had never been done before. Our sound was massive, this weird crossover between Kraftwerk and the guitars, bass and drums that belonged to every rock band in the world…

I might have been a one-time teeny-bop guitarist but once I was behind the technology, the music that made me famous was the darkest, most serious stuff I’d ever done. Those early days in Ultravox were the best time of my life. The result was a complete crossover, maybe that’s why it worked. The music came from all of us: everyone contributed and we split all the songwriting credits four ways. The classic example of all of us working together was Vienna.

Midge Ure, Ultravox, pop music, Swinging 80s,

The day job: in 1979 Midge Ure (moustachioed) resurrected the name of Ultravox along with Billy Currie, Chris Cross and Warren Cann. © Getty

One night I was sitting having a conversation with my old manager, Gerry Hempstead, who had co-managed the Rich Kids, when his wife Brenda said to me: ‘Midge, what you need to write is a song like that Vienna.’ I looked blank and she went, ‘You know, the Fleetwood Mac song.’ I looked blanker. ‘No, it wasn’t Vienna,’ said Gerry, ‘it was Rhiannon.’ That was the night I went home with Vienna lodged in my brain.

The next morning it was still there. I walked into the kitchen in my little flat and said to Billy, who was staying over, ‘I’ve got a line running around in my head I can’t get rid of, “this means nothing to me, this means nothing to me, Vienna”.’ We built the song from that one lyric. Every component element came from all four of us. It wouldn’t have been Vienna without Warren’s heartbeat drum sound, and it wouldn’t have been Vienna without the bass synth notes and Billy’s eerie viola… / Continued in Chapter 10 of If I Was

➢ Buy Midge Ure’s If I Was: The Autobiography

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
1978, Midge stakes his claim as the weathervane of synth-pop who helped shape the British New Wave

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
110+ acts who set the style for the new music of the 1980s

FRONT PAGE