Category Archives: Social trends

1980 ➤ As Spandau play in Heaven, all around we can hear the new sounds of 1981

Posted on 29 Dec 2010 | Leave a comment

Spreading the New Romantic message, including clothes by PX: Spandau Ballet play Heaven, Dec 29, 1980. Photographed © by Shapersofthe80s

❚ SIX WEEKS IN THE CHARTS with their debut single, To Cut a Long Story Short, on this day in 1980 Spandau Ballet play at Heaven, the biggest disco in London, and probably in Europe. Their average age is 20. A year after their unveiling at the Blitz club, this is still only the band’s tenth public date, and only their second concert since signing to Chrysalis in October. Their policy is to maintain an air of exclusivity, to thwart the backward rock press by playing admission-by-invitation dates in nightclubs rather than conventional rock venues, and to rely on stylish videos to stress the message that here was a new generation of new sounds and, equally important, new styles. Take it on trust that for the whole of 1980 Spandau Ballet had been the most achingly fashionable pop group on the planet, dressed by the designers of the moment. Significantly, as the first club band to win a record deal, they had been the only New Romantics to appear on Christmas Day’s year-ending edition of Top of The Pops, the BBC’s flagship music show. (Yes, Adam and the Ants also appeared, but he was “glam-punk”, important distinction, as Marco Pirroni confirms.)

On Dec 20, Visage, the Blitz club’s seven-piece studio line-up had entered the singles chart with Fade to Grey. The same week saw Le Kilt’s Christmas party, the new New Romantic club that had opened almost as soon as Steve Strange’s clubnights at the Blitz had ceased. Le Kilt’s co-host Chris Sullivan had murmured something about putting together a band he called Blue Rondo à La Turk. Not to be outdone, i-D’s cub editor Perry Haines had mentioned not only a band he was managing, Alix Sharkey’s Stimulin, but tonight in Heaven he now talks of his involvement with Duran Duran, the Rum Runner house band we’d all run into at Spandau’s November show in Birmingham.

Depeche Mode, Daniel Miller, Dreaming of Me, synthpop

Basildon’s finest: Depeche Mode recorded their first single, Dreaming of Me, in December 1980, after a verbal contract with Daniel Miller’s synth-driven label Mute

Here too is Daniel Miller, an anarchic electronic musician with his own label called Mute and a recording studio in an old church where he had set up all his synthesisers. Only last night he’d been watching Depeche Mode, an unsigned teenage band from Essex, playing the Bridge House pub in east London where they were regulars — he’d heard them play their technopop tune Dreaming of Me, helped them record it and they’d all agreed it would make a great first single.

All round us in UK clubland platoons of amazingly young bands making dance music were lining up to storm the charts in the New Year. By the spring, Spandau Ballet was staging the first Blitz invasion of America with a live concert plus fashion show by a gang of Blitz Kids whose average age was 21. During 1981 the group decided against a tour as being “too rocky”, and played only 10 live dates in the whole year — OK, plus a fortnight at the Ku club in Ibiza that summer, which counted as one booking. While the movement took root, staying cool seemed to suit the style of the times.

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Posted in Clubbing, Fashion, London, Pop music, Social trends, Technology, Youth culture

Tagged Chris Sullivan, Concert, Depeche Mode, New Romantics, Perry Haines, Spandau Ballet, Visage

1980s ➤ So many shapers shaped the decade that people think was all down to Margaret Thatcher

Posted on 27 Dec 2010 | Leave a comment

A handful of key books this year have added to our estimations of that much demonised decade, the 1980s, and to our understanding of its cultural shifts. Shapersofthe80s has of course always drawn a distinction between the youthful creativity of the earlier Swinging 80s, and the ethos that finally took hold in Britain and earned the name of “Thatcherism”

Loadsamoney, Harry Enfield, Thatcherism1980s

Emblem of the 80s: Harry Enfield’s yob character, Loadsamoney. © Rex features

➢ Rejoice, Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s,
by Alwyn W Turner (Aurum Press, 426 pages)

❏ A SHARP AND WITTY ANALYSIS of the 80s came this year from cultural historian, Alwyn Turner. Its savage title Rejoice! Rejoice! echoes the triumphal cry that burst from the lips of prime-minister-turned-warrior-queen Margaret Thatcher in 1982 when victory was declared over Argentina in the Falklands War (910 dead, 1,965 casualties). Reviewing the book in The Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook wrote: “One of the pleasures of Alwyn Turner’s breathless romp through the 1980s is that it overflows with unusual juxtapositions and surprising insights. Who knew, for example, that not only Alan McGee’s Creation Records but the bawdy magazine Viz were set up with money from Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, dismissed at the time as a feeble attempt to disguise the horrors of mass unemployment?

“Where this book really shines is on the intersections between politics and popular culture… For Turner, the defining characteristic of the 1980s was its obsession with size: big money, big hair, big issues, big politics. But what also emerges from his account is the sheer, unashamed nastiness of public life during the Thatcher years. This was a time, after all, when Thatcher’s cheerleader [disc-jockey] Kenny Everett publicly joked about kicking [the elderly opposition leader] ‘Michael Foot’s stick away’, while thousands chanted ‘Ditch the bitch’ at anti-government demonstrations.

“It is a refreshing surprise, however, to read a book on the 1980s in which Thatcher, while naturally dominant, does not entirely drive out all other voices. As Turner admits, the Iron Lady cast a larger shadow over national life than any other prime minister since Churchill: the style magazine i-D, a quintessential product of the decade, called her ‘almost a fact of nature’. But the results of her revolution were mixed at best, and the irony is that in many ways her policies had the opposite effect from what she hoped.”

Turner is not alone in presenting Harry Enfield’s comic character Loadsamoney as the emblematic figurehead for Thatcherism, a swaggering slob waving a fistful of banknotes while yelling, “Look at my wad!”. In the Financial Times Francis Wheen follows through: “Even if many Britons eventually accepted [Thatcher’s] economic remedies, Turner infers in his history of the 1980s, Rejoice! Rejoice!, ‘culturally the country was unconvinced’. Ideals of enterprise were all very well but winning at all costs, with no thought for the loser and no care for the way one played the game, ‘seemed somehow wrong’. The British still sided with heroic failures and doomed underdogs such as the hopeless ski-jumper Eddie (the Eagle) Edwards.”

30-UP FOR A CLUBBING TREASURE

➢ Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues: The First 30 Years,
by Gaz Mayall (direct from Trolley, 280pp)

Gaz Mayall on 6Music: celebrating his 30th clubbing anniversary talking with Jarvis Cocker on The Sunday Service in October. © BBC

❏ GAZ MAYALL IS one of UK clubbing’s national treasures, and the paperback Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues is a nostalgic first-person collection of great club photos and comic-strip flyers that tell their own tale of London’s oldest continuous club-night, where Tracey Emin was once the cloakroom girl. The lad in the hat, who has kept his tiny nightspot jumping since July 3, 1980, supplies a brief but breathless string of anecdotes about live guests such as Prince Buster, Desmond Dekker and Joe Strummer. Gaz was one of the pathfinders who perfected the then brilliant notion of throwing a party every Thursday and playing his favourite rebel dance-tunes. As the 22-year-old Gaz told Shapersofthe80s that year: “People come here for good music”, which essentially meant his own heritage as a kid raised amid rock royalty and steeped in ska, reggae, rockabilly, rock and R’n’B.

On his club’s 30th anniversary, Kate Hutchinson wrote in Time Out: “It’s still going strong: you’ll find throngs of people swinging to guest live bands and DJs every Thursday night at the Soho basement dive St Moritz. It’s also the kind of hangout that keeps new generations coming, so the crowd always stays fresh. Those who aren’t old enough to go yet can mingle with everyone else at Gaz’s sound-system at Notting Hill Carnival, where he’s been causing a roadblock since 1982, or at his stage at Glastonbury, which he has run for the past three years.”

SHUFFLING BETWEEN STRAVINSKY AND ARMSTRONG

➢ The Music Instinct : How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It, by Philip Ball (Bodley Head, 464pp)
➢ Listen to This, by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate, 400pp)

❏ TWO IMPRESSIVE BOOKS THIS YEAR have dissected how music works its magic. They are not posited on the 80s at all, though they may well be emergent phenomena of our era of musical diversity. Critics heaped praise on Philip Ball’s The Music Instinct, an engaging survey by a popular science writer. Bee Wilson in The Sunday Times called it a “wonderful account of why music matters, why it wrenches our souls and satisfies our minds and sometimes drives us crazy”. In The Guardian Steven Poole praised Ball’s “deft analyses of the limitations of attributing ‘emotion’ to music, or considering it as a ‘language’ (Lévi-Strauss: if music is a language, it is an ‘untranslatable’ one)”. And the Amazon reviewer Steve Mansfield liked the author’s scope “by drawing his examples from across the spectrum of music, equally comfortable discussing and occasionally comparing music as diverse as J.S. Bach, John Coltrane, Eliza Carthy, gamelan orchestras, ragas, Schoenberg, and the Sex Pistols”.

❏ IN 2008 ALEX ROSS, music critic for The New Yorker, landed an unlikely bestseller with his gripping survey of 20th-century music, The Rest is Noise, plus a torrent of highbrow praise. This year he packages some choice essays under the title Listen To This, which David Smyth in the London Evening Standard said “ranges even more widely, making century-spanning, triple-jumping connections in the same way his shuffling iPod leaps from Stravinsky to Louis Armstrong. Coming from a background of listening to nothing but classical music in his teens and discovering rock’n’roll in adulthood, Ross can explain the brute appeal of, say, Radiohead’s Creep in a way that makes you feel your mind enlarging as you read”.

TWO WHO CHANGED THE CHARTS

➢ I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau,
by Gary Kemp (Fourth Estate, 320pp)
➢ If I Was, by Midge Ure with Robin Eggar
(Virgin Books, 288pp)

❏ FOR A MUSICIAN, the music really tells the life story. It’s rare for many of them to try to flesh out the story in prose, let alone as autobiography. Two who starred centre stage in 1980 were Ultravox’s Midge Ure and Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, and though their accounts of the early transformative years of the decade weren’t actually first published this year, their paperback reprints continue to act as intelligent correctives to the hyperbole that accompanies some of the 30th-anniversary air-punching.

Songwriter Gary Kemp surprised many when last year’s autobiography, I Know This Much, proved so eloquent, encouraging rock writer Paul Du Noyer
to claim that it “sets a new standard for rock memoirs”. One of Amazon’s top reviewers, Mr Steve Jansen, believed that Kemp’s perceptive memories of a London now transformed make a “a touching testament to spiritual growth”. He wrote: “Kemp is able to reflect with great poignancy on a young man’s journey into, and through the shining city of dreams. In Kemp’s case that city, metaphorically, but more often literally — and literary in its evocation — is unmistakably London, and the metropolis is ever present like a ghost, framing his actions and attitude.”

The prominent journalist Robert Sandall of The Sunday Times, who died in July, had made Kemp’s his book of the year: “A sharply observed account by a quintessential London musician. Kemp exudes confidence, candour and a keen appreciation of the capital’s club culture.” This year’s paperback edition brought the story up to date with a postscript on his band’s reunion.

❏ MIDGE URE IS THE OTHER eye-witness to the birth of Blitz culture, and his memoir, If I Was, hasn’t been out of print since published in 2004, and a revised edition is slated for next summer. Here, the musician tells with exceptional vigour a no-holds-barred story of his own journey from impoverished Glasgow childhood to new-wave superstar .

Amazon reviewer Lisby writes: “Ure writes fluidly and conversationally, imparting the kind of tactile detail that takes readers to the place and time of which he speaks. Ure is astonishingly honest, yet never vindictive. He is, in his prose, much as he is in his lyrics, a good person trying to be a better one while hoping the same for us all.” Another Amazon regular called thedouses adds: “Midge’s autobiography is a very well written, frank and honest book, which offers a fascinating insight into his own career and life but also other notable musical figures of the 80s and 90s music scenes in Britain, as well as providing background to the Band Aid and Live Aid events. He doesn’t use the opportunity to settle scores as so many of his contemporaries have done.”

Apart from being a busy wizard stirring the magic cauldron from which emerged many musical innovations in the 80s, Ure here establishes his central role in the production of Band Aid’s charity single, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which led to Live Aid, the globally televised rock concert in 1985 which raised millions for famine relief.

NOT FORGETTING…

➢ Any Day Now: David Bowie The London Years (1947-1974), by Kevin Cann (Adelita, 336 pages) was reviewed here on Dec 11. “Being a Bowie fan for almost 40 years I am flabbergasted. Many, many never before seen pictures” — Amazon reviewer Peter Gooren

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Posted in Clubbing, Economics, London, Media, Politics, Pop music, Social trends, Youth culture

Tagged 20th-century music, Blitz Kids, Books, Gary Kemp, Gaz Mayall, I Know This Much, Margaret Thatcher, Midge Ure, Reviews

What larks! Festive fun and games and British ways to make merry

Posted on 25 Dec 2010 | Leave a comment

Bobbin’ about to the Fiddle ,Charles Williams, 1817,Thos Tegg,caricature, Almack’s,quadrille,dancing,Lady Jersey,

Bobbin’ about to the Fiddle — a Familly Rehersal of Quadrille Dancing, by Charles Williams, May 1817: published by Thos. Tegg No 111 Cheapside

❚ UNLIKE 21st-CENTURY DANCING, when the quadrille was introduced at Almack’s Assembly Rooms in 1815, its steps were notoriously difficult to perform correctly. This luxurious salon in King Street, St James’s — where the ballroom was partitioned off by crimson ropes — was governed by a committee of despotic lady patronesses who ruled over a “magic list” of those who may or may not be admitted to their weekly balls. Studio 54 had nothing on the power of these women: they effectively decided who belonged to “society”… “All on that magic list depends/ Fame, fortune, fashion, lovers, friends…/ Banished thence on Wednesday night/ By Jove you can do nothing right.”

Yet even at Almack’s after Lady Jersey, wife of the 5th earl, brought the quadrille over from Paris as an energetic French precursor to traditional square dancing, wallflowers would sit sniggering as they watched the beau monde’s finest stumbling through the intricacies of its steps and twirls and changes of partner. The quadrille nevertheless soon became all the rage, so required determined practice.

Breeding counted for more than money at Almack’s and the prime role of the magic list was to exclude “cits”, precisely the kind of nouveau riche city-dwellers depicted above by caricaturist Charles Williams, in May 1817. This bourgeois family are preparing for their seaside vacation in Margate by practising their dancesteps at home.

The father is saying to the French dancing master: “I say, Mounseer Caper! Don’t I come it prime? Ecod, I shall cut a Figor!!” [ie, figure], and one of the daughters says “Law, Pa, that’s just as when you was drilling for the Whitechaple Volunteers — only look how Ma and I & sister Clementina does it!!” while the dancing master says “Vere vell, Sar, ver vell, you vil danse a merveille vere soon!” Nobody was spared from the satirist’s pen.

Tom Jerry and Logic, Making the Most of an Evening in Vauxhall,Vauxhall Gardens,George Cruikshank, Jonathan Tyers,Roger de Coverley ,Pierce Egan, Life in London,1821

Tom, Jerry, and Logic Making the Most of an Evening in Vauxhall: by Robert and George Cruikshank, from Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821)

❚ FOR 200 YEARS THE VAUXHALL GARDENS were the most notorious and important of London’s many pleasure gardens, immortalised in Fielding’s novel Tom Jones by the description “where people come to undo others, and others come to be undone”. Vauxhall lay on the south bank of the Thames, up-river in a rural setting beyond London’s city limits, where the gardens opened before the Restoration of 1660 and closed finally with a fireworks display in 1859. Today all that remains is a small park bearing the name of the original Spring Gardens, while nearby streets do likewise for the enterprising proprietor, Jonathan Tyers, who from 1728 invested in enhancing the grounds so that in their heyday he could charge a guinea admission. (That would be £173 or $267 in today’s money!) He commissioned Roubiliac to make the great statue of the composer Handel for the gardens and added an orchestra pavilion, fountains and temples. Frederick Prince of Wales was his most prestigious patron.

Over several acres Tyers introduced formal plantings which offered attractive paved walks lit by thousands of glass lanterns in the arbours by night, and shrubberies for the making of mischief. Fireworks, hot-air balloon rides and circus performers provided entertainment along with music such as Handel’s from the bandstand.

Vauxhall Gardens, 1732,James Boswell, Dr Samuel Johnson,Rowlandson

Vauxhall, 1732, engraving after a watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson, published by Richard Powell: In the lower box is a supper party of James Boswell, Dr Samuel Johnson, Mrs Thrale and Oliver Goldsmith. Mrs Weichsel sings from the front balcony while Mr Barthelemon leads the orchestra (Princeton University Library)

Elegant painted booths afforded privacy while dining and the ornate Rotunda and other rococo pavilions became famous London attractions. An audience of 12,000 attended Handel’s Fireworks music at Vauxhall which brought together “persons of all ranks and conditions”. The 19th-century history of London Old and New observes “the English assert that such entertainments as these can never subsist in France, on account of the levity of the people”.

By 1712 Sir Roger de Coverley is supposed to have said that he’d have been a better customer to the gardens “if there were more Nightingales and fewer Strumpets.” So it was inevitable a century later that the rakish Tom and Jerry would pay their guinea for admission to Vauxhall. Their rip-roaring “sprees through the Metropolis” would one day give their names to Hollywood cinema’s cartoon cat and mouse, and in their own day they were no less famous.

“Jerry Hawthorn Esq, and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian” were young London clubmen created in 1821 by the sports-writer Pierce Egan in his monthly journal, Life in London, which became a runaway success. It was illustrated by the leading satirist of urban life George Cruikshank and its trio of hellraisers became contemporary pinups much copied by other engravers.

The topmost Cruikshank print is not among the best to record the showy splendour of Vauxhall Gardens but it is one of the few to locate Tom and Jerry, their journalist creator and the graphic satirist at London’s hedonist destination — five Regency legends in one image.

Twelfth Night,Isaac Cruikshank, Thomas Tegg,etching,parlour games

Twelfth Night by Isaac Cruikshank: published Jan 10 1807, by Thomas Tegg, Cheapside

❚ BEFORE TV RULED OUR LIVES, playing parlour games was how families amused themselves at the annual Christmastide gathering and Twelfth Night was the traditional day for games, merriment and feasting. The punch called wassail was the drink of choice, and in the Regency era a grand masqued ball often heralded an end to the solemnity of religious observance. Twelfth Night concludes the 12 days of Christmas and precedes the feast of the Epiphany on January 6 (though these dates vary under different sects of Christianity). It was not until the Victorians, influenced by the monarch’s Germanic roots, that we shifted celebrations to Christmas Day itself, which had previously been only a religious holiday.

Cruikshank’s hand-coloured etching from 1807 (above) shows three couples playing the traditional Twelfth Night game of acting out the character depicted on the tickets they have drawn from a bag held by a fat squire seated at left who sings the praises of “good old English customs”. Each ticket is inscribed with a portrait and description. Only two players are happy with their choice: on the left The Queen of Love has been drawn by a self-satisfied lady with a long nose, and on the right The Lovely Hostess by a jolly lady who smiles. The others have drawn unflattering or sarcastic tickets and regard them with expressions of dismay: the dandy in green is affronted by being perceived as a “man of fashion” while the fat woman in yellow has drawn “Miss Higginbottom” and remarks “Put in the bag on purpos to affront me I dare say”. We see a decorated Twelfth Night cake and candle on the side table.

Isaac Cruikshank is one of the four celebrated British illustrators (along with his son George, Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray) who established satirical caricature as a powerful medium of social comment at the dawn of the 19th century. The Private Eyes of yesteryear.

The Plumb-pudding in danger, James Gillray, Humphrey, Library of Congress

The Plumb-pudding in danger: by James Gillray, published London H. Humphrey, 1805 Feby 26 (Library of Congress)

❚ PLUM PUDDING IS THE ESSENTIAL CONCLUSION to a traditional Christmas feast. It is made not from plums but dried fruit and for good luck every member of the family should have a hand in stirring the mix before it is steamed or boiled. Since medieval times, the pud has become as symbolic of Britishness as Britannia and John Bull. This political cartoon was drawn by James Gillray in 1805 as a response to one of the most traumatic periods in Britain’s history.

It is titled The Plumb-pudding in Danger and shows William Pitt, Britain’s youngest prime minister, wearing a regimental uniform and sharing a table with the French emperor, Napoleon. A plum pudding represents the world as a globe and each leader is carving himself a slice. Pitt takes possession of the seas with a slice considerably larger than Napoleon’s, who carves off Europe where the French are the dominant military power. The previous year war had been renewed between Britain and the First French Empire that had followed the Revolution of 1789 and a period of continual warfare. With Napoleon intent on invading Britain, Gillray produced many prints in which he imagined the horrors of a successful invasion. By 1805 a British naval blockade on France was successfully frustrating French sea-trade and naval retaliation, so that January the emperor sought a reconciliation with England. Presciently this cartoon was published only months before the decisive British naval victory in the Battle of Trafalgar.

W Belch,January,engraving, ice-skating,1810,Henry Raeburn,Coleridge,Georgian England

January, one of a series of prints depicting the months, c1810: printed, published & sold by W. Belch, Staverton Row, Newington Butts, London

❚ THESE YOUNG BUCKS ARE FLOUTING THE RULES of ice-skating in the Regency period. Among outdoors activities in Georgian England, skating was so hugely popular that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge waxed exceeding florid in a prose essay about the pastime for The Friend magazine, where he noted “the melancholy undulating sound from the skate”. Inevitably society proposed “a proper attitude for genteel rolling”, the posture illustrated most famously in Sir Henry Raeburn’s painting of the Reverend Robert Walker, who as a member of the Edinburgh Skating Society is seen serenely gliding with arms crossed over his chest. Evidently, the two January bucks above were only too keen to flaunt their own style to catch the attention of their female admirers on the riverbank.

➢ The Republic of Pemberley and all things Austen
➢ 500 articles in an online magazine dedicated to Jane Austen’s Regency world

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Posted in Culture, Europe, London, Politics, Social trends

Tagged caricature, Christmas, dancing, nightlife, parlour games, pleasure gardens, plum pudding, quadrille, satire, Tom & Jerry, Twelfth Night, Vauxhall Gardens

2010 ➤ A feast of Bowie-ana served in waffeur-thin slices

Posted on 11 Dec 2010 | Leave a comment

David Bowie, review,Curious magazine, Any Day Now,Brian Ward,Arnold Corns,Man Who Sold The World,Mr Fish,Freddi Burretti, Ziggy Stardust,Yours or Mine,Malcolm Thomson

Candid cover for Curious magazine from 1971: Bowie spotted the dress designer Fred Burrett (aka Rudi Valentino) at the Kensington disco Yours or Mine wearing white spandex hot pants. He became a close friend Bowie determined would be “the next Mick Jagger” in a specially created band called The Arnold Corns. In the event, as Freddi Burretti he made Ziggy Stardust’s outfits from the first quilted jumpsuit onward… Bowie here drags up in the Mr Fish “man-dress” that appears on the sleeve for The Man Who Sold The World — one of many mementoes in Any Day Now, Kevin Cann’s new book about Bowie. Photographed © by Brian Ward

❚ DAVID BOWIE HAS BEEN THE SINGLE MOST INFLUENTIAL FORCE IN POPULAR MUSIC SINCE [Fill in the benchmark of your choice, eg:] Mozart/ Schubert/ Marie Lloyd/ Gershwin/ Little Richard/ Sondheim/ Spinal Tap. In which case, this Christmas there can be no better present for anybody with the slightest interest in the godlike creator of Ziggy Stardust than Kevin Cann’s new photobook Any Day Now, The London Years 1947-1974 (Adelita, £25).

It is impossible adequately to acknowledge the trainspotterish, yet deeply rewarding scope of this sheer labour of love that has amassed 850 pictures — friends, lovers, costumes, contracts, doodles, laundry bills, performances, candid snaps — on 336 pages. Why, it even has a backstage photo I’ve never seen of the day I met Bowie at the London Palladium when he sang Space Oddity for charity (and met the cult ukulele player Tiny Tim, going on to record one of his B-sides, Fill Your Heart, on Hunky Dory).

This book is a feast of Bowie-ana served up like La Grande Bouffe, in ever more tempting waffeur-thin slices. Cann is a veteran chronicler of the pop star’s work and here neither attempts a long-form biography, nor detracts from Nicholas Pegg’s much more musically appreciative survey, The Complete David Bowie, last updated in 2006. Any Day Now is more a chronology that feels as if it has an entry for every day in the star’s first three decades, running to 140,000 words (original interviews, press reports, eye-witness accounts), all diced and dispersed through the calendar. Contributions include a foreword by Kenneth Pitt, Bowie’s gifted manager 1967-1970.

Early cover designs for Any Day Now, publicised during the past year. At centre, the Palladium performance of Space Oddity

A typical spread [see below] might contain six images and as many short items, some of which are set in a font so small as to demand a magnifying glass for reading. An efficient index helps you to pick your topic and start panning for gold.

So for example, the “seminal” filmed version of Space Oddity, Bowie’s biggest hit, that has been exhumed then forgotten four times in the past 40 years, is finally accounted for in all its charmingly improvised glory. Since 2005, we have been able nonchalantly to click on YouTube to view this paradigm of all pop videos dating from before the word was invented. Yet originally it was a mere segment in a half-hour TV film about Bowie titled Love You Till Tuesday (LYTT) and directed by Malcolm Thomson.

While America was testing its first unmanned Apollo Lunar Module in 1968, the Space Oddity segment was of course inspired by that year’s visionary 70mm movie release, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. Cann’s chronology documents Thomson filming what Bowie evidently intended as a tongue-in-cheek spoof from its conception in Oct ’68 to wrap in Feb ’69. Bowie wrote the song itself, a forelorn meditation on love and fame, as his own love-life was falling apart and after viewing the Kubrick film “while stoned” (allegedly) that January, six months before the first Moon landing.

Ultimately in a studio in Greenwich, Bowie dons a barely-plausible zip-up silver space suit, blue visored helmet and Major Tom breast-plate while Samantha Bond and Suzanne Mercer as Barbarella-esque astro angels (more ’68 iconography), flaunting ludicrous blonde wigs and diaphanous gowns, simulate weightlessness among inflatable plastic furniture. It’s a modest little dig at Swinging 60s ephemera to set beside Barbarella, Blow-up and the incomparable Modesty Blaise.

Despite the single spending 14 weeks in the charts in 1969 and reaching No 5, Cann reports, TV networks showed “no interest” in the film, LYTT, containing this musical jewel, so it did not have its first public airing until 1972, on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test. It then vanished until 1975 and the re-issue of Space Oddity when the clip was supplied as a promo to broadcasters, which doubtless helped the song’s progress to No 1 in the charts. Even then, the film clip did not receive a release until an album of same name, LYTT, came along in 1984. We then had an even longer wait until a DVD release in 2005 delivered the remastered version we enjoy today.

❏ Not many people know this, 1 – In the same month, Feb 1969, Bowie auditioned for the hippy stage musical Hair! Twice! [Any Day Now, page 146]

❏ Not many people know this, 2 – The book’s timeline ends in 1974 because Bowie left the UK on March 29 that year, aged 27, and has never resumed residency here since. Sob! Onboard the SS France bound for New York, the harmonica legend and Gershwin protege Larry Adler gives a recital. When the crew hear that Bowie is not going to do likewise while aboard and express their disappointment, Bowie gives them an impromptu performance in the canteen: 10 songs including Space Oddity. A few crew members took instruments and they played with him. What a jam session that must have been!

Any Day Now, Bowie, Kevin Cann,Kon-rads,Bowie

Spread from Any Day Now, the new book about Bowie’s formative years: here seen in his David Jones era when he formed his first band the Kon-rads at the age of 15

Melissa Alaverdy,Lindsay Kemp,Bowie , Any Day Now, Kevin Cann, Adelita

Another spread from Any Day Now, designed by Melissa Alaverdy: Bowie learning white-faced mime under Lindsay Kemp

Melissa Alaverdy , Any Day Now, Kevin Cann, Adelita,Bowie,Beatles

Another spread from Any Day Now, designed by Melissa Alaverdy: Bowie is seen here with Yellow Submarine-era Beatles

➢ Why there will never be another David Bowie — Caspar Llewellyn-Smith says Lady Gaga has got it wrong if she thinks the Thin White Duke’s brilliance comes down merely to striking a decent pose (from The Observer, Oct 10, 2010)

➢ Review in the Guardian: Two Bowie biographies shed new light on the career of pop’s greatest chameleon, but the man himself remains elusive

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Posted in Fashion, Film, London, Media, Pop music, Social trends, Youth culture

Tagged 1960s, 1970s, 2010, Adelita, Any Day Now, Books, David Bowie, Kenneth Pitt, Kevin Cann, Love You Till Tuesday, man-dress, Michael Fish, Reviews, Space Oddity, Video

➤ Whatta they like? Essex reality stars shake their vajazzles in the face of Hollywood

Posted on 10 Dec 2010 | Leave a comment

❚ IN THE SPACE OF TWO MONTHS The Only Way Is Essex has become “totally must-watch TV”, an addiction and an education for anybody who does not live in Essex. The huge county lies along the north bank of the Thames estuary, stretching from the east of London to the coast, and socially it might as well be another nation. “I compare Essex to LA — we live the same lifestyle, we’ve got as much money and got the same tans,” says hunky reality-star and club promoter Mark Wright, 23.

“The boobs may be fake” say the opening titles but the cast of 20-somethings are “real people” thrust into to this enhanced reality show that is the jaw-dropping hit of the season. They’ve given the English language new buzzwords spoken in their unique variant on Estuary English: “jel”, “vajazzle”, “shu’ up”, and “whatta we like?” Get up to speed with YouTube’s clips ahead of series two, plus the fight-back from authentic East-End Londoners.

The 10-episode series was filmed mainly in the towns of Brentwood where the The Sugar Hut bar is located, Gants Hill, Chigwell, Buckhurst Hill, and The Manor House nightclub in Woodford Bridge. It was shot only days before being broadcast, presumably so cast members had little chance to object to the odd scene where they might have felt like prize twerps. Unsurprisingly, ITV2 has received plenty of complaints for the show’s “negative representation of Essex”. Surprisingly, the first series was such minority cult viewing on ITV2 between Oct 10 and Nov 10 that its biggest single audience was only 1.2m viewers.

The Only Way Is Essex, Jessica Wright, Lydia Bright,Essexmas,nativity, New magazine

The tabloid press was unusually slow in conceding that the show made compelling viewing. Series two faces one mighty hurdle that may well stymie the innocent charm of the original format — key members of the cast are being snapped up by pushy big-hitting agents who will no doubt insist on contracts that guarantee more respec’ for the talent.

A Christmas special called The Only Way Is Essexmas to due air at 9pm on Christmas Eve.

❏ XMAS UPDATE — The paradox of such a calculated TV format is how quickly it backfires. The Christmas special was as joyless as the format is heartless. In the end, these non-professional, often tongue-tied actors are simply pushed from one pedestrian stunt to another daft costume party set-up, where they are humiliated on camera and in front of their friends as their relationships crumble and their social ineptitude is laid bare. The two or three fun boys and girls in the cast have been reduced to polyfilla between the slimebags whose mums and dads really ought to tell them what prats they are making of themselves. The pet “micro-pig” as Christmas present proved to be a cringemaking booby-trap, just like Arg’s party singalong, while the two-timing antics of lothario Mark and his female sidekicks were blatantly egged on by the TV professionals. The crude splicing to turn shots into scenes indicates how desperately short of plausible footage the producers are. The Essexmas special stank of shameless exploitation by all at Lime Pictures.

Sociological footnote

❏ ESSEX IS OF COURSE the county which has created almost every British subculture since World War 2, from Mods to Soulboys-and-girls to Vajazzlers ! Essex Man and Essex Girl are pejorative terms that have been colloquial currency for 30 years. Essex Man was rated as a serious political force in the 1979, 1983 and 1987 elections which put Margaret Thatcher in power and kept the Conservative Party there. The stereotypical Essex Girl can be heard before you see her coming, she wears white stiletto heels, peroxide blonde hair, an orange tan, and is famed for being free with her sexual favours. Essex Girl jokes reached mania levels in the 90s when the classic of its kind went like this. Q — What’s the difference between an Essex Girl and a supermarket trolley? A — A supermarket trolley has a mind of its own.