❚ FRANCIS WHATELY’S DOCUMENTARY FILM David Bowie, Five Years: The Making Of An Icon has a transmission date – next Saturday on BBC2 at 9.20pm and next week’s Radio Times is publishing a cover feature. Beautifully edited, in both sound and vision, the 90-minute film explores five pivotal years in the singer’s career – 1971, 1975, 1977, 1980, 1983 – and features interviews with Bowie’s collaborators. Here’s the trailer: +++
➢ Update May 26: Catch up on iPlayer with David Bowie, Five Years – A consummate TV documentary with unseen footage in pristine quality adds lustre to the current golden age for music docs … Watch Bowie’s musical collaborators on camera showing how they created their classic riffs… Wakeman on piano! Carlos on everything! Nile saying “I was as nervous as hell” Deeply satisfying.
Canvas-Club on the beach opposite Carlton Cannes hotel
❚ IN CANNES FOR THE FILM FESTIVAL TONIGHT? So are former 80s Blitz Kids, club deejay Rusty Egan and Spandau Ballet’s sax-percussionist Steve Norman, and you can catch their storming double act at the pop-up Canvas-Club on the beach opposite Carlton Cannes hotel, on the Croisette May 17–19… Then the pair move off to Ibiza where they perform fortnightly at the Nassau Beach Club on Playa D’en Bossa from May to Sept.
STEVE NORMAN RINGS IN TO REPORT:
“ Our first night was pretty relaxed. Cannes during the film festival feels fantastic. There are full-on business meetings day and night in the Canvas-Club where we’re jamming. The last time I was here was 2009 when Spandau announced we were going to make a film (and that is due out next year). But there was a completely different vibe at the Midem music festival where people do deals all day then let themselves go at night. For the film business it’s all deals. They’re not a club crowd, so we adapt accordingly.
“ Rusty is brilliant at gauging the audience’s mood, making a seamless transition from dinner table to dancefloor. He warmed up the dinner session lifting the pace gradually, then I rocked up about 10pm vibing on top of his music to kick things off into a Latin fury. We play a soulful mix of house music, quite funky but definitely not retro. Next we’re off to Ibiza – my second home, where I left a little piece of me – and we’re appearing fortnightly on Mondays at Nassau Beach Club from May 27 through till September. These places are springing up all over. It used to be a beach bar and has mushroomed into a nightclub on the sand. People will be chilling by day, then going for it by night. ”
Rusty and Steve: discs, drums, percussion and sax!
Rusty adds: “I have been very busy writing and recording new music under the title Welcome to the Dancefloor and will be ready to release some stuff very soon. Visit Soundcloud to sample some.”
❚ SEE HOW PLANET EARTH IS BLUE! Wow how the stars look very different today, rising in the black void! Thrill to the International Space Station whizzing over clouds in a most spectacular way! Here’s a video made by a station commander, sitting in his tin can singing the defining Bowie hit from 1969, the year man went to the Moon. What a way to inspire new generations of would-be space explorers, sung 230 miles above the earth by one of the latest successors to Major Tom.
Last night, this wondrous HD video cover version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity was posted on YouTube by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the space station, which is the largest artificial body in orbit. Viewed at full-screen, its pin-sharp photography combines poetry and awe and speed and perspective and human scale more honestly than any special-effects movie. Seeing stars rise over a black horizon fixed in their constellations itself fixes the vehicle firmly in the firmament of space, while beneath the Great Big World Keeps On Turning. This alone is a magical moment of unparalleled apprehension.
“With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here is Space Oddity, recorded on Station,” he tweeted. “A last glimpse of the World.” Overnight his personal post has clocked a million views, quite apart from scores of other media postings. It was Hadfield’s parting act for the digital media on the eve of his return to Earth today after nearly five months in zero-gravity. And Bowie replied with the tweet “Hallo spaceboy”.
Commander Chris, a former Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot, was the first Canadian astronaut to walk in space. On December 19, he took off for a long-duration stay on board the ISS as part of Expedition 35. He is the first Canadian to command the space station and its six staff. And now, as the song goes, it’s time to leave the capsule …
CLICK ANY PIC TO LAUNCH CAROUSEL:
Video stills courtesy of Canadian Space Agency/Chris Hadfield/EMI/Mercury Records
No longer “a cheap date”: Robert Elms with Alison Moyet today
❚ ALISON MOYET HAS COMPLETED her eighth solo album, The Minutes, with Guy Sigsworth on production creating a whole new synthesised sound. It is released on May 6 on the Cooking Vinyl label. Today she talked to Robert Elms on his BBC London show about slipping into “electro-jazz” and being able to say No to merely doing more cover versions. “I wanted to play a bit.”
She surprises Robert by saying, yes she is a mainstream artist, but regards herself as an instrumentalist, that her first instrument is “a voice – I love chanson, like Brel or Michel Legrand. But as well as being a voice, I’m an artist where voice is not the main thing, it can be about the lyric or the melody. I don’t always want the voice to be the focus!”
Alison Moyet, the Basildon punk, high priestess of electronic pop and peerless soul singer, set out as Genevieve Alison Jane. An Essex girl born to a French father and English mother, she left school at 16, became famous at 21 as singer in Yazoo, and released her triple-platinum solo debut, Alf, at 23. She found fame hard to handle at such a young age, but hindsight has helped her appreciate those experiences. “For a while in the mid-80s, it was amusing to be a pop bitch, but that changed, and it stopped being enough. Now I am able to put my early work into context and find pleasure in the innocence of it.” Between 1984 and 1987, Moyet was Britain’s biggest female solo star.
➢ 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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➢ David Bowie, Five Years – previews at Uncut’s blog
