Nov 13, 1980: chart entry qualifies Spandau for their first Top of the Pops
◼ TODAY’S THE DAY THE HOTTEST NEW BAND OF 1980 released their debut single 30 years ago. Inside a year, Spandau Ballet had clicked with clubland’s coolest fan base, played only eight bookings, refused to make any demo tapes but instead spent that year winding up the media and the music industry with word-of-mouth rumours of a youth movement right behind them.
Kilt-wearing Steve Norman’s lace-ups
On October 10 Spandau signed an unprecedented deal with Chrysalis, on October 27 they released To Cut a Long Story Short driven by a monophonic synthesiser: Daa-didi dada dada di-di dada didi daaa! On November 15 the single entered the chart. Bingo – Top of the Pops.
In 1980, for every new band firing up their ambition in the wings, Spandau acted as a fuel injection system. For electro bands who had been nibbling at success — OMD, Simple Minds, Japan, Ultravox — here was the bandwagon. And they jumped on board.
❚ TODAY’S NEW STARS OF BRITISH ART are quieter and more thoughtful than the YBAs in the Sensation survey of 1997 — this was the progressive critic Waldemar Januszczak’s verdict in June on Part 1 of the millionaire Charles Saatchi’s latest survey when it opened in London. “A rousing exhibition, Saatchi’s best for many a year,” he wrote. Part 2 of Newspeak, British Art Now, opens to the public today and it too proves to be another sprawl of hits and misses, yet the hits do unsettle and send a tingle through your aesthetic nerve. Shapersofthe80s has chosen a dozen of the more hyper-intense images for the gallery below.
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For the sake of balance, let’s give the caustic old traditionalist his turn. Even after he “walked sickened away” from the 1997 Sensation show, Brian Sewell has actually conceded that “Saatchi did more for British contemporary art and the economic blossoming that it engendered than all the Tates, the Arts and British Councils put together.” Yet faced with the 2010 selection, he pronounced Newspeak Part 1 to be “Oldspeak rather than new, and we have seen it all before… The Newspeak group are hardly new kids on the block, for all have substantial exhibition histories, many of them international, yet very few have reached further than the low levels of skill, aptitude and common sense demonstrated every year in exhibitions mounted by students in the benighted art schools up and down the land.”
He concluded: “Newspeak is at best cliché, kitsch and the ironic subversion that is the joke so often played by the post-postmodernist… One might reasonably conclude that British art is dead.”
Shapersofthe80s sides with Januszczak in finding more experiment and curiosity than indifference at Newspeak. Januszczak identifies the Saatchi touch thus:
“What Saatchi has always done, and what Tate Modern can never do, is back hunches with cash. The Tate doesn’t have any FU money. Its investments are our investments. Which is why it remains so chronically and conspicuously image-conscious. When it comes to rewriting agendas, the Tate is a scaredy-cat. Saatchi, on the other hand, is not.”
Of Newspeak, he concludes: “[The] clash of new and old, scientific and irrational, experiment and belief, is typical of the show’s prevailing mood.”
❚ SENSATIONAL! Rudd Studio is behind this refreshing brand update for Channel 4 in the UK and builds on the splintering figure 4, the logo created by Martin Lambie-Nairn for the channel’s launch in 1982. The new look went live on October 22 with a series of channel stings for book-ending commercial breaks and trailing upcoming shows. Here’s Rudd’s own video compilation of the new split-screen animated graphics, with mood music by Oscar Gonzalez. Now all we can pray for is an end to those tiresome scenic station idents, contrived from barbaric housing estates and levitating supermarket trolleys.
❚ “I WAS IN MY STUDIO CUTTING OUT A STENCIL, Friday night about 10 o’clock and the phone rang… It was Anya Hindmarch and she said ‘Samantha Cameron’s a big fan of your work’, and I kind of thought, Yeah right, and she said ‘David is looking for a painting to give to the most important man in the world, I can’t say his name but think America. Would you be interested?’ I was like, Yeah!”
So now we know. Today a new video reveals that the go-between who helped fix the official gift of “hoodie art” from the British prime minister to Potus, leader of the Western world, was handbag designer Anya Hindmarch. We discovered in July during David Cameron’s first trip to Washington as PM that the gift was a painting titled Twenty First Century City, by a graffiti artist whose adopted tag is Eine, and who is regarded in the East End of London as one of the founders of Britain’s street-art movement, alongside Banksy. More important, he was said to be one of the PM’s wife SamCam’s favourite artists.
Yes but, no but … OK, we discovered then that the 39-year-old graffitist’s real name was Benjamin Flynn who’d spent his teens as a hooded tracksuit gang member, had a racy record of convictions for criminal damage and had taken a year to complete 200 hours of community service.
Hindmarch Loot tote bag in canvas, decorated by Eine, aka Ben Flynn, £145. It is claimed that “Eine is doing for letters of the alphabet what Banksy did for rats and smiley policemen”
Even so, what hasn’t really been spelt out is that much earlier Flynn had collaborated with Anya Hindmarch to design a spring collection of trendy tote bags that drew on his street-cred. The bags feature prominently among the luxury accessories illustrated on the Hindmarch website, and as Eine he had even painted the windows of her upper-crust Sloane Street store during March. Just his luck that Anya turned out to work in the same upmarket retail sector as the PM’s wife, who was also a friend.
The nice irony is the clash of classes. Not only is SamCam the daughter of an 8th baronet, raised on a 300-acre Lincolnshire estate, but Hello magazine also reports that she is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Charles II and his mistress Nell Gwyn. The Sunday Times Rich List compiler Philip Beresford has put the “combined family wealth of David and Samantha Cameron at £30m plus”. Ben Flynn on the other hand, was so hard-up two years ago that he had to move home from London to Hastings with his wife Joanne and three children, Spike, 5, Sunny, 2, and Story, 2. On top of which the millionaire Camerons expected him to donate his chosen painting, valued in the marketplace at £2,500.
“Cameron seems quite a positive kind of guy and Obama’s a dude. I would probably have had issues if it had been for Bush” — graffitist Ben Flynn
Still, the compensation for Flynn was overnight global fame, which has brought him a string of commissions, several trips abroad, and enhanced price tags on his work. In the video by Anthony Austin and Charlie Inman, Flynn’s verdict is direct: “My phone didn’t stop ringing for about a month — interviews and television. It changed my life. David Cameron, I love him.”
Alphabet City, Middlesex Street, just up from Petticoat Lane, London’s famed Sunday market: artist Eine spent months persuading shop owners to allow him to spraypaint their shutters. Photograph by Steve Cotton
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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
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A UNIQUE HISTORY
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❏ 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
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