❚ THE US SHUTTLE ATLANTIS today undocked from the International Space Station and is heading home to Earth for the last time. This, the 37th shuttle mission to the ISS over 13 years, brings to a close Nasa’s 30-year reusable spaceplane programme.
US space shuttle Atlantis: last view from the International Space Station (Nasa)
➢ Reuters reports: An American flag that flew aboard Columbia on the first US shuttle mission in 1981 will remain affixed to the International Space Station’s air lock until the air lock swings open to admit astronauts in future years who ride to the station aboard a capsule built by US commercial companies. NASA is supporting efforts by four firms — Boeing, Space Exploration Technologies, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Blue Origin, a space travel start-up backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — with technology development contracts worth $269m. NASA hopes the new vehicles will be ready to fly in about 2015.
The space shuttle Atlantis is the bookend of 134 previous shuttle missions that have deployed satellites and observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope. The shuttle’s crowning accomplishment, NASA says, was carrying to orbit and constructing the space station — a $100 billion project of 16 countries.
“Woodstein” the investigating double act: Robert Redford cast as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in the colour-coded Washington Post newsroom built in Hollywood for the 1976 movie All the President’s Men
Fingertap. Clap hands. — Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee expressing his elation in All the President’s Men, after finally approving Woodward and Bernstein’s story of the century: “Run that baby!” [Exactly the same gesture that Charles Wintour would give at the London Evening Standard when elated]
◼ ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN should be compulsive viewing for everybody in public life in the UK right now. This, Robert Redford’s greatest achievement as producer, is also the greatest movie about how good journalism works. It examined the greatest crime in the history of American politics: the Watergate conspiracy that disgraced the White House in 1973. The scandal gave to our language the all-purpose suffix “-gate” for any corrupt activity in public life.
The film showed American journalism at the height of its power, and gave the language the team nickname “Woodstein”, derived from the two 30-year-old reporters who scooped the world, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Their investigations would lead in 1975 to the takedown of the highest office in the land: the presidency of Richard Nixon.
In 2006 a thorough and thrilling half-hour TV doc appeared titled Telling the Truth About Lies, reporting on the making of the 1976 feature film, All the President’s Men, directed by Alan J. Pakula and written by William Goldman. The doc directed by Gary Leva is as steeped in the integrity of the screenwriters and film-makers as much as the feature movie itself faithfully tries to honour the diligence and persistence and courage of everybody at the Washington Post, under the editorship of Ben Bradlee and the enlightened direction of its publisher Katharine Graham. Leva was of course finally able to report the identity of Deep Throat, Woodstein’s anonymous senior source in the FBI, which had remained a mystery for three decades.
Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post for three decades: here with reporters Carl Bernstein, left, and Bob Woodward in 1972. She put Ben Bradlee in charge and gave him “remarkable freedom in the newsroom”. (Copyright Mark Godfrey. Estate of Katharine Graham)
It was ATPM that inspired Nick Davies, the Guardian’s key reporter who has dug deep into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, to become an investigative journalist. Given the current climate of ineffectuality and guilt spreading through Britain’s parliament, police and press — as documented in this week’s Spectator under the claim that “The omertà of Britain’s press and politicians on phone-hacking amounts to complicity in crime” — All the President’s Men should be a reminder to everybody in the British press today of the campaigning John Pilger’s famous charge that the first duty of journalists is to be “tribunes of the people”.
Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men: click on image to run video clip
❏ Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee: “You guys are about to write a story that says the former attorney general, the highest ranking law enforcement officer in this country, is a crook. Just be sure you’re right.”
❏ ATPM on video — “We haven’t had any luck yet” — “Get some.”
❏ Producer and star Robert Redford who played reporter Bob Woodward: “I had to be extra diligent on being authentic. I spent so much time focussing on detail — the tiniest, tiniest details were important.”
❏ Bob Woodward on writing the book on which the film was based: “Carl Bernstein and I were going to do a standard narrative about Watergate from the perspective of the Nixon White House” . . . Redford: “I said my interest is different, my interest is you guys and how you worked” . . . Bernstein: “Woodward came up to me one day and said he’d gotten a call from Robert Redford, and I said what the hell about? And he said, well, he thinks the story is really us. At the time we were still reporting the story and we sure didn’t think the story was really us.”
❏ Redford on the Woodstein team: “One guy was a Wasp, the other guy was a Jew. One was a Republican, the other guy was a radical liberal. They didn’t really care for each other but they had to work together. Now, that dynamic is character driven.” It is also so often the truth about working relationships in a newspaper office. You don’t have to like each other to produce first-class journalism.
❏ The Washington Post was sceptical about cooperating, Redford said, because the film could turn out to be “Hollywood crap”. Screenwriter William Goldman: “I was terrified because you knew that everybody who was going to talk about this film had at one time or another been in a newsroom. We knew if we Hollywooded it up we would be in terrible trouble.” The film nevertheless won four Oscars in 1976.
EPIC FINAL SCENE: 9 AUG 1974, NIXON RESIGNS
❏ ATPM on video — Ben Bradlee: “Nothing’s riding on this except the first amendment of the constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.”
BEN BRADLEE INTERVIEWED IN 1996
Allan Gregg In Conversation (above):Did you see a change in behaviour of politicians post-Watergate?
Ben Bradlee: “I thought I did for a few years afterwards. 1974 brought in a whole new young idealistic breed of congressman. For a while their ethics cast a shadow on the American political scene. It’s taken some years for them to work their way out of the system.
“But I don’t think I saw a fundamental change. I saw an increase in the fear of getting caught. I saw an increase in the quality of journalists joining the business – it attracted a lot of good young energetic people who were bright and dedicated. But, in long haul, I’m quite discouraged about the ethical content of American political life… Lying has become second nature to people; to fib first, and then lie.”
The Guardian’s Nick Davies: giving evidence to the Commons media committee in 2009. Photograph by PA
◼ BRITAIN’S BIGGEST-SELLING NEWSPAPER, the tabloid News of the World, closes tomorrow, a victim of its own phone-hacking scandal. First published 168 years ago, this hugely powerful title became the most toxic media brand in the land, all within the week. And much of the cause was down to the work of one investigative journalist, Nick Davies of The Guardian newspaper.
“ I have no doubt at all that Nick Davies is the greatest living British journalist ” — Peter Oborne, chief political commentator on the rival newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, speaking on Radio 4 tonight
Nick Davies is considered one of Britain’s leading investigative journalists. He has broken numerous stories, mostly for The Guardian. His scoops include the story about the nurse turned serial child murderer, Beverley Allitt, and the recent WikiLeaks revelations in classified US military and diplomatic documents. He it was who tracked down Julian Assange and persuaded him not to post his latest secrets on the WikiLeaks website but to hand them over to The Guardian. Among his published books, Flat Earth News accuses British newspapers of what he calls “churnalism”, churning out stories based entirely on PR, press releases or wire copy, without further fact-checking.
One irony is that in this year’s Society of Editors awards, Davies lost the award for News Reporter of the Year to Mazher Mahmood (the “Fake sheikh”) of the News of the World, whose winning submissions included exposing the Pakistan cricket match-fixing ring, and the claim that Fergie “sells” Andy for £500k. [Update July 10: In the NoW’s final issue, “crimebuster” Mahmood reminds us of the 250 successful prosecutions his investigations have achieved over 20 years, from paedophiles, arms dealers, drug peddlers and people traffickers to bent doctors and lawyers.]
Among the awards listed in his Debrett’s People of Today profile, Davies is cited as Feature Writer of the Year 1997, Journalist of the Year 1998, Reporter of the Year 1999, Martha Gellhorn Award 1999, European Journalism Prize 2003.
“ The Milly Dowler story changed the politics of the whole saga and made it impossible for anybody to defend the News of the World and that included the prime minister and the Tory leadership… And so they’ve switched sides, specifically on the question of whether there should be a public inquiry. ” ➢ Davies on pursuing the phone hacking investigation — on video at Guardian online
Davies decided to become an investigative journalist after seeing the brilliant film All the President’s Men, about the US journalists who cracked the Watergate conspiracy that brought down president Richard Nixon in 1973 and helped indict and jail numerous Nixon aides…
All the President’s Men, 1976: Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford playing the Woodstein investigative team in a film studio
◼ OF ALL THE MOVIES ABOUT JOURNALISM the best by far is All the President’s Men. It tells the real-life story of how two young reporters on the Washington Post saw the corrupt American president Richard Nixon out of office. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play the “Woodstein” team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, both hitting 30 when they pulled off their scoops about conspiracy in the White House. The Oscar-winning film is a gripping thriller that also gives the most authentic view of newspaper life yet, shot in an exact replica of the colour-coded Washington Post newsroom, built by knocking together two Warner soundstages in Burbank and ensuring all the coffee-cups and paperwork came from the real office 2,000 miles away.
Jason Robards won the 1976 Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his charismatic depiction of the executive editor Ben Bradlee. “WOODSTEIN!!! Get in here!” At the press screening this writer attended, he raised repeated cheers for his oh-so-true-to-life rigour as he harried the young reporters again and again when they failed to convince him they had the scoop of the century. Our hearts sank, along with theirs, as Bradlee took his pen to their report and deleted line after line after line. We’ve all had bosses like him. “Get some harder information.” – “We haven’t had any luck yet.” – “Get some.” This film excels for showing how good newspapers work.
The real thing: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post offices at the height of the Watergate investigation. (Associated Press)
◼ TODAY ON NEWSWEEK’S WEBSITE Pulitzer Prize-winning Carl Bernstein draws a comparison between Nixon’s downfall and the anything-goes approach of News of the World owner Rupert Murdoch and how it threatens to undermine the influence he so covets…
“ The hacking scandal currently shaking Rupert Murdoch’s empire will surprise only those who have wilfully blinded themselves to that empire’s pernicious influence on journalism in the English-speaking world. Too many of us have winked in amusement at the salaciousness without considering the larger corruption of journalism and politics promulgated by Murdoch Culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
“ The facts of the case are astonishing in their scope. Thousands of private phone messages hacked, presumably by people affiliated with the Murdoch-owned News of the World newspaper, with the violated parties ranging from Prince William and actor Hugh Grant to murder victims and families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. ”
48-page freebie: today’s News Of The World includes a souvenir of famous pages since the paper was first published on Sunday October 1, 1843, including “Crippen’s life at sea” as the killer doctor fled abroad in 1910 and “Prince Harry’s racist video shame” in 2009. During the 1950s — under its slogan Henry James’s phrase “All human life is there” — sales averaged 8.4m copies weekly. Its latest average sale was 2.6m copies
❚ 30 YEARS AGO TODAY, a report in The New York Times brought first confirmation to the public of the sudden and puzzling appearance of a fatal form of cancer which one year later would be termed AIDS (for acquired immune deficiency syndrome).
In May 1981, two Los Angeles doctors submitted a brief account of five of their patients to the US Centers for Disease Control’s newsletter, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Dated June 4, this was the first clinical description of the disorder. The Los Angeles Times reported under the headline, Outbreaks of Pneumonia Among Gay Males Studied: “Researchers are investigating mysterious outbreaks of pneumonia that have occurred among male homosexuals in Los Angeles and several other cities.”
A month later, the CDC ran another bulletin [linked below]. Doctors from New York and California were seeing another rare disease in gay men. “During the past 30 months, Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS), an uncommonly reported malignancy in the United States, has been diagnosed in 26 homosexual men.”
The New York Times received an advance copy of the report and ran its first article on the syndrome on July 3. It mixed together deaths from Pneumocystis pneumonia and KS and was headlined: Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals…
By Lawrence K. Altman Published: July 3, 1981
“ Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.
The cause of the outbreak is unknown, and there is as yet no evidence of contagion. But the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area, are alerting other physicians who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to help identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment.
Friedman-Kien: “rather devastating”
The sudden appearance of the cancer, called Kaposi’s Sarcoma, has prompted a medical investigation that experts say could have as much scientific as public health importance because of what it may teach about determining the causes of more common types of cancer.
In a letter alerting other physicians to the problem, Dr Alvin E. Friedman-Kien of New York University Medical Center, one of the investigators, described the appearance of the outbreak as ‘rather devastating’. ”
BLAST! Hackney-born William Roberts was an apprentice poster designer, who at the age of 14 attended evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art in London. Within four years he was taken up by Wyndham Lewis, who was forming a British version of the avant-garde Futurist movement. Ezra Pound suggested the name Vorticism, and 19-year-old Roberts’s work was featured in the radical Vorticist magazine BLAST in 1914, a seminal text of 20th-century modernism. A lifetime later, Roberts painted the group (he is seated third from left) in one of the defining images in European art — The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 (detail) — currently showing in The Vorticists: Manifesto for the Modern World at Tate Britain until September. (Courtesy of the Estate of William Roberts/Tate)
London’s grooviest art school is leaving the bright lights for the wide open spaces two miles north of their historic manor, where the impoverished Marx wrote Das Kapital and Hazlitt the finest essays in English, and the painter Francis Bacon was a founding member of the Colony Room, a notorious watering hole for misfits. Can our savviest creative spirits really thrive once uprooted from Soho’s 300-year heritage, its dissenters, eccentrics, streetlife and dens of inquity?
King’s Cross Central: the University of the Arts at Granary Square will form the hub of a new cultural quarter, a 67-acre development that is the largest in London for 150 years. (Courtesy of Anderson-Terzic)
❚ AT MIDNIGHT LAST NIGHT, before an artsy audience spanning many generations, Jarvis Cocker and Pulp were bashing out their hit song Common People in the heart of his ramshackle old college, St Martin’s School of Art, as it was still called in 1988 when he met that girl made famous by its lyrics. While he studied film-making, she seemingly “studied sculpture”. The song says she came from Greece and her Dad was loaded, yet she wanted to slum it by going to live in down-at-heel Hackney. Jarvis explained years later: “It stuck in my mind what she was saying — that she wanted to sleep with common people like me.”
Common People has become much more than an anthem for Jarvis’s generation. Everybody knows the words and the 800 former St Martin’s graduates — gathered to bid farewell to their alma mater as it leaves Soho for King’s Cross — erupted into a riotous sing-along, because those lyrics are stiff with truths that aren’t entirely universal, but they are, or were, peculiarly British. What we now know is that, in real life, Jarvis hardly knew the girl and in the end they didn’t get it together, but what the encounter had triggered in him was an awareness about class differences in our society that, as a lad from Oop North, even at age 25, he’d been oblivious to: that she would always have Daddy to help her “never fail”.
The definitive song of the Britpop era begins as satire but ends in anger. In deeply felt rage. As with the socially mobile 60s, this was the edginess in the 80s that divided British society and in our art schools sparked tangible creative tension, when talented working-class lads came up against genteel gals from the moneyed middle-classes, especially those on the smartest degree course for fashion in the land. Many posh parents saw this as an alternative kind of finishing school, yet the sloganeering designer Katharine Hamnett tells fashion historian Judith Watt in a forthcoming film documentary about St Martin’s, directed by Oleg Mitrofanov: “I actually had to change the way I spoke because I’d come from public school and nobody would take me seriously.”
Radical sculptors of the 60s: Richard Long outside St Martin’s in 1967 (Alammy) . . . One of Barry Flanagan’s giant bronze hares in O’Connell Street, Dublin, in 2006
Why the Blitz Club became the potent subcultural melting pot that it did in 1979 was down to its geography — located midway between St Martin’s on Charing Cross Road, and Central School of Art & Design in Holborn, in the no-man’s land between the then trendily refurbished market area of Covent Garden and the sleazy, yet always cool red-light district of Soho. As one early 80s fashion graduate reminds us: “Essentially, the Blitz was an art students’ club.” Then into their midst, lured by new music, came the working-class soulboys and girls who were themselves several sharp steps ahead of their own class for style. Naked one-up-manship inflamed ambitions all round.
Graduation 1993: for his collection, The Tangent Flows, Hussein Chalayan buried silk garments in his back garden, then exhumed them. Joan Burstein of Browns put the entire collection on show in her windows
The pole position of St Martin’s has been reconfirmed with each generation of graduates who become household names: from Frank Auerbach and Joe Tilson, Lucian Freud and James Dyson, Terence Conran and his son Sebastian, Isaac Julien and Belinda Eaton, Bruce Oldfield and John Galliano, to Stella McCartney and Sarah Burton who stepped into Alexander McQueen’s shoes following his sudden death.
Through the 60s and 70s, both under Anthony Caro’s tutorship then in revolt against it, abstract sculpture had been St Martin’s strength, but with the 80s the fashion department responded to the force of Britain’s subversive street style which was exciting the international media. The impact of alumni such as Jacques Azagury with his New Romantics collection made London Fashion Week an essential stop-over for the fashion world’s globetrotting commentariat.
30 years on: Pistols bassist and St Martin’s painter Glen Matlock unveiled this plaque at his old college. It was designed and made by potter Douglas Fitch and graphic designer Mike Endicott
Is the old Soho alchemy about to lose its magic? Last night’s party for alumni was organised by one of them, Birmingham-reared Katie Grand, stylist and editor of Love magazine and coincidentally partner of Pulp’s bass player, Steve Mackey. It was a generous and fitting farewell to the shabby seven-storey building on Charing Cross Road that has blazed as the beacon among London’s half-dozen undergrad art schools for the past 50 years. Though technically St Martin’s School of Art (founded 1854) merged with Central School of Art and Design (founded 1896) two decades ago, only now does the resultant Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design have a purpose-built new home to house its 3,800 staff and students — two miles away from the life of spice that energises Soho.
President Obama by photographer and St Martin’s alumnus Platon Antoniou: he succeeded to Richard Avedon’s job at the New Yorker magazine
Not for nothing did the anarchic Sex Pistols choose to play their first gig at St Martin’s in November 1975. GQ editor Dylan Jones, who graduated in 1980, told The Independent a while back: “We were 400 yards from the 100 Club, 200 yards from the Marquee, and a mere spit from the Cambridge, which is the pub everyone used to congregate in before they went onstage — the Pistols, the Clash, Adam and the Ants… St Martin’s at the time felt like the most exciting place on earth, not just because of all the wonderful painters, designers and boulevardiers who had studied there, but also because it was central to the whole punk explosion.”
So will the renegade artistic heritage that evolved with the growth of Soho over 300 years become somehow dissipated? Britain’s most visible sculptor Antony Gormley, another St Martin’s graduate, made a case more detached from bricks and mortar in Wednesday’s Guardian: “The place stands for a certain anarchic idea of permanent revolution – of every generation overturning the orthodoxies of the previous one.” Indeed, from the stage in the old St Martin’s studio last night, Jarvis Cocker capped his anthemic song by criticising the government’s introduction of £9,000 annual student fees that are bound to deter new generations of common people from even considering art school. He then indicated the walls of the buliding, and said, “It’s not about THIS … It’s about THAT”, pointing at the heaving dance-floor.
Which seems to suggest that the spirit of the age will ultimately trump any spirit of place. Aha! Germanic Zeitgeist versus the classical genius loci. Discuss.
McQueen lives on: The 2011 Costume Institute Met Gala, held in New York on May 2, honoured the life of the British fashion designer Alexander McQueen who died in February 2010 at the age of 40. His Savage Beauty exhibition is running at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until July 31
❏ SOME OF US WHO were later required to recruit new talent in our workplaces learnt a novel lesson in 1970 by watching a compelling BBC documentary shot at St Martin’s. How do you assess somebody for a creative job which has few boundaries and rests heavily on self-reliance? Invite them to an interview, don’t say a word and see how they react! Such was the inspiration yielded by Christopher Burstall’s documentary A Question of Feeling, which observed a dozen first-year sculpture students including Richard Deacon who were locked in an empty studio and not allowed to speak. Each was given one particular material — a block of polystyrene, say, or a bag of plaster. They were left to deduce for themselves that these were raw materials with which to work, without critical feedback, despite their tutors’ constant surveillance.
The experiment known as “The Locked Room” came in response to the prevailing trend towards non-objective art, itself a reaction to Anthony Caro’s giant abstract works in steel, all of which posed the problem of how you set about teaching conceptual art. This was a bold attempt to erase tradition. Tutor Peter Kardia said: “I wanted to put them in an experiential situation where they couldn’t grasp what they were doing. What I wanted was ‘existence before essence’.”
❏ JUDITH WATT, fashion historian who has taught the history of fashion and writing to Fashion Communication and Promotion BAs since 1998, reports:
“Most current students were not invited to the party; so it was helpers — many my lovely students — and those who graduated this June. It was a shame, as students are so much of what makes up St Martin’s unique character (with the added magic dust of some staff). There was a mix in terms of the alumni, but so many of the youngsters have no idea about those important days of the late 70s to the mid-1980s, when St Martin’s was the beating heart of British fashion and style; who the people were, or the magic uniqueness of it. Stephen Linard was there, and I thought of how many of my students have xeroxed pictures of him and his work from The Face, i-D and Blitz but didn’t know he was in their midst. Which spoke volumes about them, and the hideous metamorphosis of fashion, not him.
“John Galliano (obviously) was not there but homages of all kinds to him were graffiteed on the walls. I saw Dean Bright, Jacques Azagury, Ninevah Khomo, Claire Angel, Paddy Whitaker and Keir Malem, Christopher Brown, Andrew Groves, David Kappo, Tristan Webber, the lovely Christopher Kane. Sadly not there were Fiona Dealey, Rifat Ozbek, John McKitterick, Ike Rust, John Maybury, Simon Ungless, and, of course, Amanda Lear. Great line up really … Most asked-about former tutor was Bobby Hillson, who set up the MA Fashion course and was the person who arranged for Lee McQueen to enroll as a student and who supported him in those early days. She was sadly not there … and was sorely missed.
“Jarvis Cocker hit just the right note … it’s a long time since St Martin’s has felt like an art college to me — and last night it did again. Pulp playing Common People was particularly apt, as of course it’s the thread that binds so many of the people who make up the subversive British music and style underground. With the fees now at around £9,000 a year, that may be a lot more difficult to find.”
Two alumni, two gatecrashers, four ex-Blitz Kids: At St Martin’s farewell to CXR party, Corinne Drewery (fashion, Swing-Out Sister), Christos Tolera (ex-college cafe customer), Stephen Linard (fashion, own silk suit), Robert Leach (ex-Kingston — photo from his Facebook album, Goodbye Charing Cross Road, June 24, 2011)
❏ HOW TO DRESS FOR A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME PARTY — Fashion note by Stephen Linard (class of ’81, pictured above):
“That suit is a one off from 1990, silk rep candy stripes, to my own design. I was the belle of the ball. Etro print shirt, Drake’s linen madras check scarf, printed pastel paisley hank, lime-green suede Paul Smith Hush Puppies.”
Partying with her stars: Willie Walters, BA fashion course director, in a shirt by Lucie Sutton. Photographed by Alexandra Gordienko
❏ Kay Barron, FCP/CSM graduate, reports at Grazia Daily:
“Everyone regressed to their student selves. In fact some (sorry) became even younger when Pulp took to the stage. I would like to apologise for pushing, screaming and bouncing on people’s feet like a 16-year-old as Jarvis (an ex-student himself) wiggled his way through Disco 2000, Sorted for Es and Whizz, Misfits and Common People (natch). They have never sounded better.
“This party was as legendary as the college. Beyond any fashion party, as no-one was putting on airs and graces, everyone was relaxed and felt bloody lucky to be there.
“St Martin’s is bigger than a building. Give it a year or two and the spanking new building in King’s Cross will be as rough around the edges as CXR, and another 72 years of creative genius will be shaped there. And there will be 800 new alumni enjoying Absolut cocktails, and drawing obscenities on the wall — really, all that talent, and penises are still the illustration of choice!”
Iain R Webb Absolutly aglow. Photographed by Robert Leach
❏ Iain R Webb, CSM professor of fashion, reveals all about his 1970s soulmates at the Harper’s Bazaar blog, and puts Friday’s bash in perspective:
“The Farewell to Fashion at Charing Cross Road party was a strange cocktail (fuelled by lashings of Absolut vodka) of nostalgic sad tidings and glittering ecstasies. Past generations of graduates, from Swing Out Sister’s Corinne Drewery (who DJ’d in the Illustration studio) to Katie’s ex-classmate Giles Deacon, rubbed shoulder pads with the current cohort and a Sex Pistol — Glen Matlock, who along with the original Pistols line-up played their first gig at St Martin’s. Dressed up to the nines (and tens in some cases — the boy in the gold knitted dress that unravelled as the evening wore on), the colourful crowd (who says fashion folk only wear black?) displayed a flagrantly flamboyant individuality that is the very lifeblood of the college and has played no mean part in the success of its alumni who have over the decades become big players on both sides of the catwalk.
“The St Martin’s media mafia still fills the international front rows, Twitter on about trends and play dress-up with popstars and supermodels. The party on Friday night was an appropriately loud, glittering and bumptious, sexy and downright messy affair. Confirmation of the enduring talent born out of St Martin’s School of Art.”
Farewell CXR<3 thanks for the amazing memories: fashion print-maker Chi He from Shanghai (second right) and friends at the St Martin’s party. From her Facebook album
❏ CHRISTOS TOLERA, painter, musician and not a former student, who nevertheless idled many away teenage hours in the St Martin’s cafe, reports:
“Pulp started with Misfit and ended with Common People which I listened to in the rain from Charing X Rd as I left. If I was 22 I think I would have thought it was one of the best gigs ever. Jarvis was charming in between songs and had presence but was drowned out during the enthusiastic performance.
“However the energy in the room was palpable and reminded me of the olden days, of gigs in warehouse spaces and a certain abandon rarely seen in these overly organised and calculated times. I left because I wasn’t drunk and had seen enough. It made me feel old. I didn’t really have anyone with me who was looking through the same eyes, seeing what I was seeing. There was something quite romantic about listening to the last song from under an umbrella on the street, with no one really aware that the very audible racket coming from the first-floor window was actually Pulp and not a dodgy covers band.
“All in all I found it sad. Not the band but the memory of me as a 17-year-old hanging out in the cafe at St Martin’s thinking I’d arrived only to find out I was just passing through like the rest of us. My night was summed up when the girls in the cloakroom asked why I was there and I told them I’d modelled in a seminal show (Stephen Linard’s) there in 1980. ‘Oh, that was nine years before I was born’…”
HELLO TO THE SPECTACULAR NEW UNIVERSITY CAMPUS BESIDE THE CANAL AT KING’S CROSS
King’s Cross Central: The focus for CSM’s new home will be the Grade II listed Granary Building of 1851, built to a design by Lewis Cubitt
❏ THIS WEEK marks the end of an era, as CSM leaves its two buildings in central London and moves to a new premises in King’s Cross, just across the road from The Guardian. The move won’t be welcomed by Professor Louise Wilson, legendary course director of MA fashion, who believes that the very grottiness of the Charing Cross Road building has helped drive her students – from McQueen to Christopher Kane – to succeed. “You feel that you’re better than this corridor,” she says. “In the new building you want to hide…”
➢ 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
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➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 