Category Archives: London

➤ How one fan came 11,000 miles for those Spandau smiles

Posted on 26 Oct 2018 | Leave a comment

Rebecca Slight, Spandau Ballet, Ross William Wild, Gary Kemp,pop music, tour dates, Fabrique Milano,

Spandau Ballet play Fabrique Milano on Tuesday: Rebecca Slight’s up-close photo of Ross William Wild and Gary Kemp

◼ THE PICTURE ABOVE CAPTURED Spandau Ballet’s return to live performance in Milan this week. It was taken by New Zealander Rebecca Slight who flew 11,000 miles to London to crash with her sister who lives here, then immediately flew off to Milan for the band’s opening gig in its Next Line tour. Talk about super fandom, because she’s also booked in for the big London gig on Monday.

Rebecca tells Shapersofthe80s: “I’m lucky to have the world’s most tolerant husband at home who totally understands. I bought a ticket to Hammersmith while casually chatting to him in the kitchen – he had no idea what I was up to. Lucky he loves me! Milan was not originally in the plan but then my sister suggested the short flight since I had already come so far. And thanks to the beauty of the internet, I had friends in Italy to meet.”

What impressed her most about Spandau’s comeback performance? “The camaraderie, the smiles, the ease with which Ross Wild has fitted into the group. The whole band look so happy, especially Steve who was bouncing around like a little kid! Ross has an amazing stage presence and fabulous vocal range. The sound is a bit rockier and it has a freshness in it that just invigorated the crowd in Milan.”

She adds that she’s a bit gutted she couldn’t get here early enough to see Tony Hadley’s Palladium show but she’s off to Nottingham for the Stepback the 80s concert tomorrow so will see Big Tone singing there. “Totally wish I was seeing more of Spandau’s European gigs but I’ll still be meeting up with my favourite Spandettes at Hammersmith before heading home next week to real life in Glen Eden.”

Real life for Rebecca involves being a seemingly sensible married middle-aged suburban mum and hospital lab technician – “yeah but running away from my responsibility at home to hobnob with the 80s stars of my youth!” She does have previous: last May she hopped over to London to catch Steve Norman and his band, hence the selfie also pictured here. “His shows in May were sublime,” Rebecca says. “Steve is a gent and his girlfriend Sabrina is an angel.”

Steve Norman,Rebecca Slight, selfie, pop music, London

Previous form: New Zealander Rebecca Slight’s selfie taken with Steve Norman last May in London

❏ Odd tickets are still available at £43 and £68 for Spandau Ballet on Monday at London’s Apollo Hammersmith through Spandau’s own store.

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➤ Milan says Ciao to snazzy Ross now fronting the flash dads of Spandau Ballet

Posted on 24 Oct 2018 | 1 comment

Spandau Ballet, Ross William Wild, Martin Kemp, John Keeble, Fabrique Milano, pop music, interviews, tour dates

Last night at Fabrique Milano: singer Ross William Wild fronts the new Spandau line-up, alongside Martin Kemp and John Keeble

◼ LAST NIGHT FIVE STARS WERE REBORN. Spandau Ballet returned to the international tour circuit with a long nostalgic set for an audience of 3,000 in Milan’s vast Fabrique music space. For their rebirth in fashion-conscious Italy, the leaders of the UK’s New Romantics movement during the Swinging 80s pulled out the stops: the dads flaunted floral beach shirts and zhooshy silky jackettis. Up front, their new boy-wonder vocalist Ross William Wild – recruited from Britain’s stage-musical circuit at the appetising age of 30 – dressed both down in Ts with street-cred ripped jeans and up in skimpy black leatherette. All radiated evident joy to be back onstage in this handful of dates titled The Next Line to test the temperature for bigger plans next year.

Tonight they play Rome, then Padua, Utrecht and Tilberg, then home on Monday facing a 3,600 audience at London’s Apollo Hammersmith where tickets at £57 and £155 are still available through Spandau’s own store.

Monday’s event Backstage Live presented by Pips Taylor will be streamed online from 19:45 to 20:30 GMT via YouTube and Facebook. Fans are invited to suggest funny and creative questions to put to the band by emailing in advance to nick [at] moonlightmile.co.uk

Spandau Ballet, Fabrique Milano, pop music, interviews, tour dates, Steve Norman , Gary Kemp

Looking sharp at Fabrique Milano: Steve Norman and Gary Kemp

Spandau Ballet, Fabrique Milano, pop music, interviews, tour dates, Steve Dagger

Milan last night: Manager Steve Dagger adds to the smiles all round after the Spandau Ballet tour launch. Front right is keyboardist Toby Chapman

Spandau Ballet,pop music, interviews, tour dates, Ross Wild, John Keeble

Wherrrrre’s Johnny? Missing from available Milan photos, Spandau drummer John Keeble – pictured instead in rehearsals with his new bro Ross. Plus the playlist

ROSS TELLS ALL IN RECENT INTERVIEWS

❏ In a frisky chat with Graham Norton on Radio2 [from 2h04], Ross told listeners that singer Tony Hadley’s exit leaves “an awesome legacy” but it wasn’t just a matter of him playing a role as Hadley: “As a kid, all I wanted to be was lead singer of a band. It’s liberating now to just be myself and sing as me.”

❏ Pre-show buzz included this lively and reflective interview with Ross and Steve Norman [above] for FaceCulture in Holland, plus a massive picture splurge on Spandau in The Sun last Friday:

“ Guitarist Gary Kemp insists the band are stronger after surviving Tony Hadley quitting as lead singer. Brother Martin adds: “We should be so lucky to play together and have that opportunity. In the end, we’re a family. We might be a dysfunctional family, but whose isn’t?”

Tony may no longer be part of Spandau’s plans but they insist they are all back on good terms, with Tony also recently making contact after a bereavement within Steve’s family. Steve says: “He was straight on the phone and that cut through everything. None of the grievances came into it. We’re old mates. . .” / Continued at Sun online

Bang Bang Romeo, Spandau Ballet, pop music, interviews, tour dates,

Bang Bang Romeo who are supporting Spandau’s gigs: vocal powerhouse Anastasia Walker, Ross Cameron (guitars) and Richard Gartland (drums)

❏ “An absolute honour” – so say Yorkshire’s female-fronted soul rockers Bang Bang Romeo who will be supporting Spandau in Holland, as well as in London on the 29th. The trio represent a strong voice for the LGBT community.

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
2018, At Ross’s showcase debut, dad band Spandau preen with pride for their newly adopted son

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
2018, Shock claims about the secret role of Shapers of the 80s in the rise and rise of Spandau Ballet

➢ Elsewhere at Shapers of the 80s:
1980, Who was really who in Spandau’s break-out year, penned by the Invisible Hand of Shapers of the 80s

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Posted in Britain, Europe, interviews, London, New Romantics, Pop music, Swinging 80s, tours, videos

Tagged Apollo Hammersmith, Bang Bang Romeo, comeback, debut, Fabrique Milano, Gary Kemp, Graham Norton, John Keeble, Martin Kemp, Radio2, Ross William Wild, Spandau Ballet, Steve Norman, streaming, Tony Hadley

➤ 45 years of soothing egos and arresting our attention by portraitist Ridgers

Posted on 6 Oct 2018 | Leave a comment

Derek Ridgers Photographs, book, launch, party, pop-up exhibition,Sherrone,

“My favourite mid-80s muse”: Derek Ridgers signs his book for singer Sherrone from the 1988 band Savajazz

❚ DEREK RIDGERS BLAMES PUNK for turning him from a self-confessed pop fan who photographed performers into a considered photographer in 1976. “Almost overnight,” he writes, “the audience became more photogenic than the bands.” He didn’t stop shooting Jagger, Clapton, Richards, Ringo, Diana Ross, James Brown, the Pet Shops, Johnny Depp and their showbiz pals who are of necessity brazen exhibitionists. But this softly spoken London-born art-school graduate did then develop the knack of persuading life’s everyday misfits, clubland weirdos and sexual eccentrics to pose for uninhibited and seductive portraits that came to sum up the essence of their individuality.

Ridgers says his latest book, with its understated one-word title Photographs, is “my masterwork – my best photographs from the last 45 years”. In large-format hardback, exquisitely printed so that the ink provides the sheen on otherwise matte paper, its 240 pages capture an astonishing spectrum of moods and lifestyles.

Shapersofthe80s at the party – click any pic to enlarge all in a slideshow:

books, Derek Ridgers Photographs, launch, party, pop-up exhibition,Sheronne,

Cover girl Michelle Carr, discovered in a Californian art gallery in 1992

Derek Ridgers Photographs, book, launch, party, pop-up exhibition,

The Old Truman Brewery, London

Davide Meneghello with Abdula Jama, Borough Market’s Gentleman Barista, here in front of a photo of Troublefunk in Washington 1987

Ridgers’ first photos of the agenda-setting Blitz Kids, published in the Sunday Times Magazine in April 1980

Model Scarlett Cannon (cradling Maude), Native Boy Andy Polaris and artist Jo Moise

Lisa recreates her bare-breasted pose captured at Islington’s Torture Garden in 2015

As an outsider looking in, his photographer’s eye sets out to find people whose appearance is uniquely striking or simply different, yet his instinct is to bring about “a moment of stillness and quiet contemplation” before his camera. By contrast, his book’s printed pages set unfamous showoffs (starting with cover-girl Michelle Carr) in competition with international celebrity egotists. This can create witty juxtapositions of subject yet there’s not an ounce of banality or cynicism. The most powerful images nail the internalised apprehension of the homeless and of some Quite Important People too: study the faces of Peter Cook, Don McCullin and Dennis Hopper; and unknowns such as the Deadhead, the Skin women, Sofia Staks and assorted skinheads.

As Ridgers tactfully navigates all extremes of id and ego, you’re likely to be surprised by how so many individual portraits, such as those of NWA and Snoop Dogg and even Kylie, arrest your attention, as the tragic Tuinol Barry’s has done in earlier books, and likewise Babs, the skinhead girl spotted in Soho in 1987. Ridgers says now of Babs, who had been through a children’s home: “We hardly spoke. Somehow I think we had a connection – even if it was only for 1/125th of a second. We were probably both outsiders.”

Across these varied social camps, note how few people smile at the Ridgers camera: across all these camps, the next page can reveal a real tear-jerker.

Shapersofthe80s at the party – click any pic to enlarge all in a slideshow:

Three towering shapers of London’s 80s music and style scenes, former Wag Club director Chris Sullivan, with renowned clubland deejays Jeffrey Hinton and Princess Julia

The Ridgers subjects: from pop stars, to skinheads, to uninhibited eccentrics

Former musical Blitz Kids Christos Tolera of Blue Rondo, and Andy Polaris, frontman for Animal Nightlife

Co-founder of the 80s Blitz Club, deejay Rusty Egan with Rosie Luther

Ridgers giving an interview to London Live TV this week

Our hero: he says his latest book is “my masterwork”

A FOUR-DAY POP-UP EXHIBITION

The Old Truman Brewery, London E1 6QR, is displaying selected images from the Ridgers book, curated by Faye Dowling to include an archive of original magazines such as i-D and The Face. It is open from 5 to 7 October, and our slideshows record an amazingly retro book launch party when faces from Derek’s past caught up with him. Derek Ridgers Photographs is published at £34.95 by Carpet Bombing Culture

➢ In one of Ridgers’ best interviews yet, this week’s Huckmag asks: What’s changed? – “About the only thing that’s changed during my lifetime is that there are different platforms now, mainly the internet. Once upon a time, when you bought a new outfit, you couldn’t wait to get out and show yourself off in it. Nowadays you never have to leave the house; you have Instagram.”

➢ This week’s London Live TV interview

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s: Ridgers casts an honest spotlight on the birth of punk

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2018 ➤ Revealed: The secret role of Shapersofthe80s in the rise and rise of Spandau Ballet

Posted on 5 Jun 2018 | Leave a comment

Spandau Ballet, 1980,Scala Cinema, performance,

A photograph never before published: sharply styled Spandau Ballet in 1980 playing the dramatically lit Scala Cinema gig that eventually brought the record companies scrambling to sign them. Photograph by Steve Brown

◼ FIRST COMES THIS UNAUTHORISED BOOK that tells the world there were two bands called Spandau Ballet back in 1979 and turns over the whole myth about where their name came from. There are a least two huge marmalade-dropper revelations, plus several dozen eye-openers about the birth of Blitz culture, however well you think you knew the early 80s. The author David Barrat even knows John Keeble’s middle name. In fact he gives us everybody’s middle name, just to prove his overdue diligence. Barrat is also very revealing about the band’s legal falling-out that ended in the high court before an apparently congenial judge who quite liked their music.

Then out of the blue I find there are about 100 shockingly well-informed pages not exactly about me, long before this website existed, but following my every footstep through every month of 1980 as the second SB with the stolen name takes its first tentative steps toward a record deal and the UK charts all within a single year – which was indeed good going for a new band by any standards. Very flatteringly Barrat suggests that I am waving some Invisible Hand behind the scenes to make the Spandau magic happen and actually writes that “their success can be pinned on one Evening Standard journalist”. Talk about blush!

So what we’re doing here today is offering a modest extract from Barrat’s book for you to read how he theorises about my ducking and diving as a regular young journalist about town who suddenly fell into five years of rollicking night-clubbing. Then on an inside page you can read my own parallel account of falling under the spell of the real Svengali, Steve Dagger, Spandau’s manager. I blow the gaff on his game called Squeeze the Lemon.

David Barrat says he became “just an ordinary fan of the band” at the age of 16, who two decades later created a cult SB-related MSN group online called Deformation. It focussed on three subjects: 1, origins of the band’s name; 2, whether SB were real “New Romantics” or not, as a friend’s mum claimed; 3, the legal battle that tore the band apart in the late 1990s. He tackles other questions such as “When was Gary Kemp visited at home by a bishop? What was the real story behind Bob Geldof’s idea for the Band Aid Christmas single?” All the while he unnervingly debunks myths put about by celebrities with faulty memories.

He has also dug up a mass of colourful detail about London clubland in the past when the police were as dodgy as the club-owners, the notorious Roxy in particular, which adds quite a bit to the sum of human knowledge.

So tuck into Barrat’s own book in the extract embedded here as a PDF which will open in a new window. Then contrast it with my own account at the link below.

Click on this image to read the David Barrat book extract

WHEN YOU’RE READY FOR MY OWN STORY…

➢ 1980 was one frantic year – Follow my version of Spandau Ballet’s unprecedented rise, penned by the Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
Spooky or what? When two bands went by the name of Spandau Ballet – the most amazing revelation made in Barrat’s book

Waldorf Hotel 1980: seated at centre, Spandau Ballet, house band of Covent Garden’s Blitz Club, home of the New Romantics movement, plus support team of Blitz Kids who helped put their first single To Cut a Long Story Short into the UK singles chart at No 5, on 6 December. Average age 20, everyone had a specific role to play in staging and promoting the band: seven musicians, six designers, three media and management, three club-hosts, two DJs, one crimper and 22 egos.
Commissioned by Yours Truly and photographed on 16 December for the Evening Standard © by Herbie Knott

➢ Click to buy New Romantics Who Never Were: The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet, by David Barrat, from Orsam Books, 330pp, £16.99

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2018 ➤ The Spandau show must go on and Oh, the Wild voice! Oh, the Wild biceps!

Posted on 31 May 2018 | 1 comment

TABLOIDS GET THEIR MAN: ROSS WILLIAM WILD
HERE SINGING The Show Must Go On, 2012

➢ A talented Elvis impersonator has been brought in to sing Spandau Ballet’s hits like True and Gold – Daily Mirror

Spandau Ballet, vocalist, Ross William Wild, Martin Kemp,

Spandau’s new boy Ross William Wild met Martin Kemp when they both appeared in Million Dollar Quartet

✭ The identity of the new Spandau vocalist has been cracked: He is a 30-year-old former Aberdeen Grammar School pupil, born in February 1988, whose original name is Ross William Davidson. He has a sister Lucy Indiana Wild living in Canada (and it’s sheer coincidence that today he has a friend called Will Davidson). Ross trained for the stage at Aberdeen Youth Music Theatre from the age of 10, and then studied Musical Theatre at Glasgow Academy of Music Theatre Arts.

➢ “We first noticed he had such a fantastic singing voice when his voice was starting to develop” – Evening Express

Ross William Wild , Spandau Ballet, vocalist,

Spandau’s new boy Ross William Wild with Nile Rogers at Abbey Road Studios this year – at Instagram

✭ His first instrument was guitar when he was 8 and the first chords that he struck were the blues chords.

✭ Describes himself as musician, singer, actor, writer and adventurer. Tweeted that he enjoyed the Charles II: Art and Power exhibition at The Queen’s Gallery.

Spandau Ballet, vocalist, Ross William Wild

Spandau’s new boy Ross William Wild – at Twitter

✭ In 2016 he released his debut solo album Wild Tracks which includes songs written with Trisha Ward.

✭ In 2016 Ross played Elvis Presley in the hit West End musical Million Dollar Quartet and shared the stage with Martin Kemp when he took over the role of record producer Sam Phillips who discovered Presley.

✭ Above, Ross featured as the popular and handsome Daniel in the raunchy 2011 film Downing, where he has sex scenes with a woman and a man. He speaks with a clear Scottish accent.

➢ Hunky Ross regularly shows off “his honed physique in saucy social media selfies” – according to The Mail