❚ EX-ST MARTIN’S AND WAG CLUB HOST Chris Sullivan says: “I’ll be deejay at the V&A again for next Friday’s free event. I’ll be doing a typical 80s club set from Kraftwerk to house with hip hop, rockabilly and mutant disco, to seminal electro and rare groove. It’s an evening of all sorts of shenanigans to do with the Club to Catwalk exhibition.”
The monthly Friday Late on October 25 at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum is inspired by the current exhibition Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s, which celebrates the creativity and theatricality of the capital’s dynamic fashion and club scenes. Assistant curator Kate Bethune is running a busy programme of free events, including art and design workshops, art installations, expert talks, performances and deejay sets throughout the gallery.
DIY fashionistas will discover how to make their own Scarlett Dress (named after Scarlett Cannon, 80s Cha-Cha club hostess and now “key identity” for the exhibition, seen at left) by downloading the dress pattern from the V&A’s website. An example of the toile is being displayed in the Sackler Centre on Friday evening.
Kate reports: “Our free Friday Lates tend to attract upwards of 4,000 visitors and our Club to Catwalk exhibition, London Fashion in the 1980s, continues to prove extremely popular and is averaging 5,000 visitors a week.”
Sound of new London: the influential grime collective Roll Deep in 2009. Photograph by Simon Wheatley
❚ HERE’S AN INSPIRATIONAL BOOK that rocks you on your heels by making a mighty claim that in your guts you know is right. With quiet assurance the author Lloyd Bradbury traces a century of black music in his chunky 430-page Sounds Like London to arrive at this conclusion: that UK black music has dramatically reshaped British culture and mainstream pop. He said last week: “It’s astonishing that we’ve come from Lord Kitchener at the gangplank of the Windrush to Dizzee Rascal at Glastonbury in less than three generations. Today’s music-makers do not think of it as anything to do with black musicians. It is basically London pop music. It is an astonishing evolution.”
If the music’s substantially hidden pre-WW2 history is an eye-opener, the postwar lineage is electrifying. Bradbury draws a continuous arc from the Caribbean immigrant Kitchener singing his calypso “London is the place for me” the moment he disembarked from SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948, to embrace the jazz bands, blues and clubs and the many hybrid sounds of reggae, highlife, lovers rock and homegrown funk that have led on through peculiar twists to jungle, drum and bass, garage, dubstep and grime and become the soundtracks for British dancefloors today.
The book pays serious tribute to Guyanan-born Eddy Grant whose north London studio brought on a whole generation of musicians (and whose 1979 hit Living on the Front Line lent its name to the Evening Standard’s column about youth culture). The final chapters set out one of the most efficient roadmaps you’ve read to the truly creative UK music-makers of the past 20 years which otherwise saw our charts being despoiled by Cowell’s vacuous talent show victims and tedious bitch-n-gangsta videos from North America.
Bradley, who grew up in Kentish Town, writes: “British black music has never been so prominent. Indeed it’s at the point now where artists such as Labrinth, Tinie Tempah and Dizzee Rascal are bona fide pop stars, with a young mainstream audience that accepts them. The brilliant thing about the current state of British black music is that … our guys have very often succeeded in spite of the UK music business rather than because of it.”
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Former radio pirate turned author Lloyd Bradley speaking at last month’s Open East Festival in Stratford
In similar vein, Jazzie B of Soul II Soul writes in his foreword to the book: “Sounds Like London is a story that needed to be told by somebody who really cares about it, and the most important thing about this book is Lloyd Bradley. The reason this story of London’s black music hasn’t been told before is because up until now he wasn’t ready to write it.”
Former sound-system owner, pirate radio deejay, classically trained chef and adviser to the British Council, Lloyd Bradley has been writing about black music in Britain, the US and the Caribbean for over thirty years.
“ Sounds Like London is a riveting read. It’s one to wolf down in a few sessions, and then savour slowly at a more considered pace… He avoids trotting out the usual suspects who pop up perennially as talking heads as part of the dumbing-down documentary epidemic, so the stories and angles seem fresher than might be anticipated. Quite correctly, Eddy Grant is right at the heart of Lloyd’s history lesson, and it is wonderful to read a book that recognises his role in changing pop music for ever. But some of the other choices of, well, witnesses are also inspired. People like Wookie, Root Jackson, Hazel Miller of Ogun Records, Teddy Osei of Osibisa, and Soul II Soul’s designer Derek Yates come across particularly well and have some great tales to tell… ” / Continued online
“ Traditionally, black music in this country has been described by historians, as well as its champions in the rock press, as rebel music… Sounds Like London certainly has its darker moments – Trevor Nelson talks about being asked to DJ at clubs to which, as a punter, he was repeatedly refused entry; producers bristle at the memory of clueless major-label representatives craving their demographics but demanding they make stylistic compromises that damaged their reputations… This is an invaluably materialist book that is often at its most enlightening when it recounts the dramas of distribution – label bosses circulating their records via an alternative network of barbers, grocers, hairdressers and travel agents, for example. The much-missed Stern’s record store began life as an electrical supplies shop on Tottenham Court Road that was popular with African students who paid for repairs with new vinyl from their home countries. For Bradley, black music in London is often creative expression and sometimes art, but almost without exception it is work… ” / Continued at Guardian Online
Electronic Beach Club in Ibiza: Rusty Egan and Steve Norman poised to start last Friday’s session. Photograph courtesy El Brasero
❚ THEY WERE DANCING IN THE STREETS OF IBIZA last Friday night to the toe-tapping toons of Steve Norman (saxophonist, guitarist and percussionist with Spandau Ballet) and Rusty Egan (former Visage drummer and deejay at London’s legendary Blitz Club in the 80s). Regular readers of Shapersofthe80s know that Norman-Egan’s storming double act, billed as Electronic Beach Club, have been entertaining sunseekers at the Nassau Beach Club on Playa D’en Bossa, fortnightly since May and they’re in residence until September.
Steve of course made his home on what he calls “this fair, white isle of Ibiza” in the 90s when he introduced the idea of live musical improvisation with the deejay at a club residency in San Antonio. What’s new today is the idea of beach clubs, and he and Rusty are finding themselves in demand across the island. Last Friday saw a huge gay pride street party in Ibiza town when the open-air El Brasero restaurant invited them to entertain the crowds from a first-floor terrace. Their playlist featured a lot of 80s pop and even Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. Naturally, we asked Steve for an update…
❏ Steve Norman writes: “Friday’s street party was fantastic, very emotional. My first proper street gig since The Roots Silver Jubilee set back in 1977. El Brasero is one of a collection of fab little eateries in the Gypsy quarter of Ibiza town. We set up on the terrace overlooking the street with a washing line complete with the family’s Sunday best hung out to dry serving as a backdrop.
Photographs by El Brasero, Carrer Passadis 4, Ibiza
The week’s washing aloft, Egan-Norman to the fore
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“Rusty surpassed himself with his choice of tunes and I sweated like a trooper on what was a very, very hot August night. But the main protagonists were the crowd, all the people drinking, eating or passers-by who stopped to watch. They all entered into the spirit of the event and the connection was made. For me it was one of my fave gigs ever. And the woman whose washing line it was never did throw water over me as she had threatened to do, should I not live up to her expectations, when what I could’ve done with was a nice cold shower!
“All great with Rusty, he’s a pal. Not driving me nuts anything like he normally does. I am doing gigs without him as he is doing without me but we have something unique together. What go down well are songs that people half recognise. Melody is the key, that’s why I believe the sax resonates so much with audiences. I always try to be singalongy with what I play – as Deuce Barter says, ‘simple phrases that the postman can whistle’. Oh and a deep version of True by Deep Mind normally finishes it off quite nicely.
“I’ll be taking my sax to Sa Trincha at Salinas Beach Friday for a brief session with deejay Franco Moiraghi and again with Franco at Downtown Cipriani when the restaurant turns into a nightclub on Saturday night/Sunday morning… that’s a very decent gig indeed. Rusty’s coming to watch and take the piss!”
HERE THEY ARE IN THE LOCAL PROMO
❏ Una actualización del comerciantes del Barrio / Update: Newly published video by the retailers of the Marina district to capture the Ibiza Orgullosa and the inimitable Norman-Egan double act… “Exito espectacular de la primera edicion de Ibiza Orgullosa, organizada por la asociacion del barrio de la Marina de Ibiza ciudad. Gracias a todos por asistir y disfrutar del evento.”
“Possibly one of the best shows yet,” he says, this time featuring Giorgio Moroder, Pet Shop Boys, MGMT, Vivien Glass, Vile Electrodes, Margaret Berger, Kid Moxie, Perfume, Marsheaux, BEF, Sin Cos Tan, Mason, Isaac Junkie feat Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory, Kurt Baggaley, OMD, Tenek and more.
“ It was 27 April 1985 and the opening party for the second floor of the Wag Club – the nightspot I founded and ran in Soho – was in full, unrestrained swing. Fuelled by the unlimited free bar, the place was totally off the hook, the crowd dressed to the nines in their own inimitable fashion – pirates, preachers, punks and picture-postcard peaches – throwing themselves about with Bacchanalian abandon to a soundtrack as arcane and varied as they were.
“ High jinks indeed, yet looking around I realised that we as a group had come of age, were taken seriously and that this moment was ours. George Michael danced next to Siobhan of Bananarama overlooking Sade who nodded to the music in front of Suggs and Martin Kemp. Over the way, John Galliano camped it up alongside Leigh Bowery, Judy Blame, Boy George and one of the scene’s most innovative dressers and designers, Stephen Linard, while behind them stood Steve Strange and Princess Julia chatting to Vivienne Westwood… ” / Continued at High Life
➢ Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s runs at the Victoria & Albert Museum, July 10–Feb 16, 2014. Featuring more than 85 outfits, it showcases new looks from the decade’s most experimental designers and some remarkable photography from back in the day
Monica Curtin’s 1985 pic of Scarlett Cannon as “key identity” for the V&A Club to Catwalk show… Outfit by BodyMap’s AW 1984 collection, Cat in the hat takes a rumble with a techno fish. Stylist John Derry-Bunce. Background painting Simon Josebury. Hair and makeup Jalle Bakke
❚ “FASHION???” SCOFFED THE FASHION EDITOR of a leading women’s magazine who shared my flat in 1980, after meeting one of the more ornamental Blitz Kids over our breakfast table. “Those aren’t even clothes!” Yet within five years she was as keen as every other editor to be featuring BodyMap, Galliano, Jones, Auburn, Hogg, Hamnett, Bernstock Speirs et al. Scroll forward 30 years and London’s world-beating decorative arts museum, the V&A, weighs in with a necessary exhibition reappraising the UK’s style revolution of the 80s. What’s coming under scrutiny in its dedicated fashion galleries are the unique silhouettes of that extravagant shape-shifting decade and the clubland forces that moulded them. Only two weeks to go before Club to Catwalk, London Fashion in the 1980s, and there’s one crucial tipping point at its heart: the moment fashion became style.
Let’s hand over to fashion guru Iain R Webb, one of the central figures who defined his generation and whose impressive book As Seen in Blitz was published last month. Here’s a taste of the mighty personal essay he has written for the summer issue of the V&A Magazine…
V&A Magazine summer issue: the 80s deconstructed by Iain R Webb
Webb writes: “ The 1980s were all about being photographed. We dressed as if every day were a photo shoot and every night a party (it usually was). But there was another revolution happening.
The advent of the stylist who approached fashion as an artistic construct was something new. Alongside the contributors to BLITZ, The Face and i-D (Ray Petri, Judy Blame, Caroline Baker, Helen Roberts, Beth Summers, Simon Foxton, Mitzi Lorenz, Maxine Siwan and Caryn Franklin among them) were two thought-provoking arbiters whose importance is often overlooked. Michael Roberts at Tatler and Amanda Grieve at Harper’s and Queen added a subversive edge to their respective glossy titles. Roberts poking fun at old-school mores while Grieve (later Harlech) befriended St Martin’s graduate John Galliano and helped create the romantic whirlwind that shaped fashion for decades to follow.
The images produced by all these stylists merged fashion and art, questioned the accepted ideals of beauty and social status and enjoyed a sense of experimentation. Their vanguard imagery often highlighted specific issues such as the superficiality of fashion and consumerism with humour.
“At that time there was a group of stylists who were as creative as the designers, if not more so,” remembers PR Lynne Franks, who represented BodyMap, Katharine Hamnett and Wendy Dagworthy. “It prompted the question: What came first, the styling or the clothes? It was very spontaneous, like playing dress-up.”
Stefano Tonchi, editor of W magazine, then editor of Westuff, an alternative style periodical published in Florence, says: “Fashion was no longer fashionable. Style was used to describe many areas of the creative arts that came together. It made for a new category. Music dictated a lot of the emerging trends and there was experimentation in both photography and graphic design, but fashion was where these exciting changes were most evident. Think of the BodyMap fashion shows, they weren’t just about the clothes but involved music, graphic design and theatre… ”
➢ Choose “View full site” – then in the blue bar atop your mobile page, click the three horizontal lines linking to many blue themed pages with background article
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. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapers of the 80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
“The (velvet) goldmine that is Shapers of the 80s” – Verdict of Chris O’Leary, respected author and blogger who analyses Bowie song by song at Pushing Ahead of the Dame
“The rather brilliant Shapers of the 80s website” – Dylan Jones in his Sweet Dreams paperback, 2021
A UNIQUE HISTORY
➢ WELCOME to the Swinging 80s ➢ THE BLOG POSTS on this front page report topical updates ➢ ROLL OVER THE MENU at page top to go deeper into the past ➢ FOR NEWS & MONTH BY MONTH SEARCH scroll down this sidebar
❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
VINCENT ON AIR 2026
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch up on Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
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UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
LANDMARK FAREWELLS. . . HIT THE INDEX TAB UP TOP FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
DIY fashionistas will discover how to make their own Scarlett Dress (named after Scarlett Cannon, 80s Cha-Cha club hostess and now “key identity” for the exhibition, seen at left) by downloading the dress pattern from the V&A’s website. An example of the toile is being displayed in the Sackler Centre on Friday evening.
