Click on image to treat yourself to this audio track at YouTube, Masked Moods (Long Version)
❚ MOST OF US have fond memories of Blue Rondo a la Turk, the seven-piece jazz/salsa band created by Chris Sullivan in 1981 and their first album Chewing the Fat, which I still consider the most original album of 1982. This yielded two chart singles, Me and Mr Sanchez and Klactoveesedstein. But after the band split and reformed as a trio named Blue Rondo who eventually released a second album in 1984, Bees Knees and Chicken Elbows, not many of us can recall many of its singles apart from Slipping Into Daylight.
Deep breath… Tonight Sullivan throws a party in Soho to celebrate this album’s re-issue by re-release by Cherry Red Records in a two-CD box, the second CD featuring Rondo’s previously unreleased tracks.
❚ WHETHER YOU LIKE ABBA’s SONGS or not, the scale of the West-End musical MAMMA MIA!’s success is staggering. Over 25 years it has been seen by 70 million people in 450 cities across the world, in 16 different languages. At the box office, the show has made £4.5 billion. Yes, billion !!!
So not to have seen this award-winning show is quite a feat, I am ashamed to admit. Yet on the 25th anniversary performance of MAMMA MIA! this weekend at London’s Novello Theatre I was blown away by the sheer energy and quality of this showbiz landmark, with its 34-strong cast of athletic dancers and powerful singers (especially Mazz Murray playing free-love mother Donna) plus an astonishing live orchestra. Here was the essence of full-on theatre.
What was rare for a stage musical was that the audience already knew almost every one of the show’s 22 numbers, written during the decade after ABBA won the Eurovision song contest in 1974 with Waterloo. Yet the lyrics repeatedly proved to be eye-openers during MAMMA MIA!, acting as dialogue to provide a dramatic family plot around a young girl’s marriage on a sunny Greek island.
Crucially many songs were injected with a comic twist, as with Take a Chance on Me and indeed Honey Honey which, the programme tells us, had Björn Ulvaeus – its co-author along with Benny Andersson – falling off his chair laughing and insisting “I didn’t write this as funny!” On an emotional level there were several truly tear-jerking moments as the family saga unfolded, prompted by songs such as Knowing Me, Knowing You and The Winner Takes it All.
Given that today the four members of ABBA are multi-millionaires, it’s ironic that I profiled them as the first entry in an A-to-Z Sunday Times partwork titled 1000 Makers of Music in 1997 by noting that as Swedish journeyman songsmiths in the Seventies their sing-along melodies epitomised Europe’s dreaded folkloric tradition – in contrast to Anglo-American guitar heroes who mouthed youthful dissent. Nevertheless during their breakthrough decade before disbanding ABBA scored eight consecutive No 1 albums in Britain and 25 Top 40 singles, so catchy that everybody could hum one. A decade further along, the quartet had acquired cult status as exponents of what we had grown to appreciate as “pure pop”.
In 2023 ABBA were awarded the BRIT Billion Award which celebrates musicians who have achieved one billion UK streams in their career. Today they stand tall among the best-selling artists in music history. Last month, all four members of ABBA were appointed Commander, First Class, of the Royal Order of Vasa by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. This is the first time in almost 50 years that the Swedish Royal Orders of Knighthood have been bestowed.
Stephen Linard in 2018: A last pint at his local pub before moving away from Canvey Island. (Photo @ Shapersofthe80s)
INCREDIBLE!!!! Update – Shapersofthe80s has received 8,100 hits during the three days since Stephen’s death. Thank you to his fans
❚ HARD TO ACCEPT THAT STEPHEN LINARD has now died from the extensive throat cancer that had caused him so much pain recently. He was one of the craziest of eccentrics who frequently made me laugh out loud. We met at a party at Steve Strange’s flat in 1980 when he was among the sharpest half-dozen Blitz Kids who changed their looks daily and put the Blitz Club on the map. We hit it off immediately and I soon latched onto the star trio of Stephen, Kim Bowen and Lee Sheldrick who went everywhere together.
I photographed his degree show and over the years helped him through various projects in that era when St Martin’s School of Art failed to equip its graduates with any guidance for running their own businesses. Luckily, pop stars from Pet Shop Boys to U2 and even Bowie readily adopted his strong styles and in 1983 the American fashion press included him among the eight most influential London designers [see link below], noted for his strong eye for colour.
From 1983 to ’86 Stephen lived in Tokyo designing for Jun Co, the fashion giant, on a salary which, he liked to boast, exceeded the prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s. From 1989 until recently Stephen was a key player on the design team at Drake’s, the respected men’s haberdasher off Savile Row (pictured below). The main photo (above) marked a last pint at his local pub on Canvey Island where he lived in his late mother’s house until 2020 before joining the Old Romantic Folks who go on retiring to St Leonard’s-on-Sea.
Only six months ago, as if in anticipation of the worst, Stephen staged a striking exhibition of his early illustrations, titled Total Fashion Victim after the club-night he had hosted at Soho’s coolest hang-out, the Wag. I was lucky enough to write the outline catalogue with him.
❚ HOW MANY OF US CAN CLAIM to have read the whole of Marcel Proust’s literary masterwork, originally titled for its English edition Remembrance of Things Past, in seven volumes, containing 1.2million words? Not many of us. What about reading it twice? As a journalist I interviewed painter David Hockney on his 46th birthday when he revealed that he had enthusiastically read the epic twice, drawing parallels between the act of looking around Proust’s world by reading his lengthy descriptions and the time it takes for our eyes to dart around a cubist painting. They are both about duration. And the great device Proust donated to literature was his episode of the madeleine, when a simple cake triggers a moment of involuntary memory.
In 1992, when a new English edition titled In Search of Lost Time was published, novelist A S Byatt admitted, without being boastful, that she too had read Proust twice. This happened at a party thrown by the highly sociable biologist Lewis Wolpert who raised the topic as a Proustian two-timer himself, though a viral buzz through this party could find no others. More impressive still, when our paths crossed a couple of years later, Antonia remarked: “Make that three readings now. But this time in French.”
Proust’s episode of the madeleine: involuntary memory evoked in a French exhibition of 2015
➢ 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
SEARCH our 925 posts or ZOOM DOWN TO THE ARCHIVE INDEX
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
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