❚ SO NOW YOU KNOW. This revealing graph of the daily cycle of internet use in Britain not only explains why you often face dismal download times when trying to shop online in your lunch-hour, but also the amazing time of day some people leap out of bed and straight onto their computers — almost 40% of us before 7am! This UK Online Measurement data shows maximum daily demand is pretty level between 9am and 5pm, with a minor peak at 3pm. Why then, if demand is as predictable as this graph suggests, can’t ISPs rig a 20Mbps broadband connection so that it doesn’t struggle to deliver a mere 1Meg at say 11am, or perhaps 3pm? [Seems that the inset caption is one hour out of sync with the graph itself, on both counts.]
+++ ❚ “THERE’S A GREAT SURGE OF INTEREST in electronic music. I don’t know why that’s happened, but it’s fortunate for me because I did it a long time ago.” After three low-profile yet prolific decades as a graphic artist, photographer and teacher, the elder statesman of electropop John Foxx is curating Short Circuit, a festival of the best of British electronic music at London’s Roundhouse next week. The day-long event will see Foxx playing his original Moogs, an ARP Odyssey, an Elka String Machine and CR-78 drum machine in a 30th anniversary celebration of his debut solo album, Metamatic.
Foxx’s own verdict on Metamatic: “carcrash music tailored by Burtons”
Foxx’s lyrics and vocal style characterised the original band Ultravox! (1974–79), whose 1978 album Systems of Romance, co-produced by Conny Plank, not only introduced the R-word into the post-punk zeitgeist, but set the mould for British electronica.
After going solo, Foxx’s stark and visionary 1980 album Metamatic, rendered on a range of synths and “rhythm machines”, yielded two futuristic chart hits he summarised as “carcrash music tailored by Burtons”. Two new songs Burning Car and Miles Away charted later the same year. As a pathfinder who imagined himself to be “the Marcel Duchamp of electropop”, he has always enjoyed cult status among the emergent new wave of electronic musicians.
A decade ago Foxx embarked on a new lease of life and Short Circuit will reunite him with former Ultravox guitarist Robin Simon to perform songs from Systems of Romance.
❏ Foxx wants his festival of electronica to capture the spirit of a concert he attended in 1967. “It was like a glimpse of the future,” says Foxx, who hitchhiked down from his native Lancashire to attend the 14-hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace in London. “I watched Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett, Lennon was around, and Brian Jones, and I saw European art movies like Un chien andalou for the first time — so it was really a life-changing event.” With its art displays, video installations and deejay sets, Foxx promises Short Circuit will be “a sort of hallucinogenic musical afternoon”.
❏ Metatronic is a wonderful survey of one man’s post-glam responses to urban dislocation through modernist music that can be as jarring as it is also seductive. Released this month as double CD, plus DVD of relevant promo vids including the early hits Underpass and No-One Driving
Visage Mk 1: Egan, Strange and Ure in 1978 searching for sounds and styles
❚ “I’LL NEVER FORGET FIRST TIME I SAW a synthesiser on Tomorrow’s World. For the first time I saw the possibility to create sounds that had only existed in my head. I’d had no chance of getting my hands on one because they were size of house or at least the cost of one. But then cheaper Japanese synths came on the market, so I bought one. It changed my life because I could make music in a small home studio. The possibilities for young musicians like myself seemed endless.”
This was Midge Ure enthusing during Rocking the Blitz Club (audio at YouTube), another remarkably well-informed BBC Radio 4 documentary on our favourite scene that went out this morning. It was also remarkable for handing over the commentary to Ure, who — despite having earned an OBE for being half the brains behind Band Aid’s smash hit for charity in 1984, and being a founder member of Visage and the voice of Ultravox’s directional chart hit Vienna — is not among the first rank of mythologists programme-makers wheel out to explain the Blitz phenomenon.
This R4 slice of the 80s gave us a refreshingly different take on the familiar fables recycled by the usual suspects, but mediated in this show by Midge’s deeply un-London Lanarkshire lilt. He’s more than qualified to stake his claim to have shaped the music of the Blitz Kids, though he’s reluctant to be described as one of them, being a good four years older, and having had fingers in more pop pies than most on the post-punk scene. Even as the word punk was given the heave-ho in favour of the term “new wave”, Ure was probably the first active player of a synth among any of his clubbing pals, having bought his first, the polyphonic CS-50, at cost direct from Yamaha in the summer of ’78.
His was an obsession shared by fellow Rich Kid, the drummer Rusty Egan, and it led the way to a whole new British dancefloor sound. Ure felt synths “embodied a kind of nostalgia for the future”.
He says: “Rusty and his friend Steve Strange realised our crowd needed somewhere to try out our styles and listen to Euro synth bands like Kraftwerk, Dusseldorf and Telex, whose cutting edge sounds seemed to represent the future.” In almost no time the tribal forces of fashion had granted their wish. Rusty’s deejaying at Billy’s in Soho was augmented by Strange vetting the door to ensure an extreme clubbing attitude, then as 1979 dawned their band of outlandishly dressed clubbing heroes descended on the Blitz.
In his straight-from-the-hip autobiography, If I Was, Midge Ure makes the bold claim: “I had this idea to make music to play in the club. We had to invent our own musical style because our points of reference were very limited — after Kraftwerk, Yello and early Bowie we ran out of influences.” His own taste was for the very textured sounds of the synth built round classic songs, which intuitively caught a mood, unarticulated at that time, for a return to melody. And yet …
“A synth is just a software program and it has a very specific sound — a cold European soulless sound that drummers couldn’t emulate. Only a machine could do this,” he says with eagerness appropriate to a new-wave innovator. “Everybody aspired to be a robot — we didn’t want any human element in there at all, so people sang in a very robotic way. It was not going to sound like Jimi Hendrix. It was going to sound like a watered down version of Kraftwerk.”
❚ MIDGE IS THE ONLY PERSON AMONG THE NEW ROMANTICS to go on record and acknowledge the role of Gary Numan, an otherwise dread name who was perceived as an aloof and unclubbable loner. He definitely never signed in at the Blitz. Yet as 1979 unfolded Numan’s dystopian sci-fi synth sound sidestepped the Blitz Kids to reach No 1 in the UK charts, twice: in May with Are Friends Electric? and in September with Cars. They were blatantly commercial records and that wasn’t how Blitz Kids defined cool.
But Ure recognised Numan had broken down barriers of disapproval within the old guard of the music biz. He was being a great spur. Ure dreamed up the name Visage for his new band who knocked out a demo covering the classic In The Year 2525, with Egan on drums and the eye-catching Strange posing away as vocalist after a few lessons from Ure. Despite music industry scepticism, it won them a deal with Radar Records, the attention of producer Martin Rushent who had an office above the Blitz, and helped rope in Magazine members Dave Formula, John McGeoch and Barry Adamson, and Ultravox keyboardist Billy Currie. A single called Tar was released that September. It didn’t chart, but did clinch them a bigger deal with Polydor in 1980.
Ure says: “Visage was never really a proper band, just a group of our favourite musicians who we brought together to make experimental music for the Blitz club. Because they were all signed to other labels we chose Steve Strange as our frontman because he looked the part.” This worked well enough. Even while Ure and Currie part-timed with the seven-man studio-only Visage line-up, while steering Ultravox along similar synth-pop lines, Visage put out two successful albums, and a handful of chart singles (the most enduring being Fade to Grey in November 1980). What laid the pathfinding flares for the movement were some uber-stylish art-videos — the first starred Blitz coat-check girl Julia Fodor before she became the fabulous princess and deejay — which disseminated the OTT New Romantic ethos for fans to emulate.
Ure scored the significant double of taking Ultravox’s majestic Vienna to No 2 a month later and for four weeks, then seeing it win Single of the Year at the 1981 Brit Awards. It was produced by the German Conny Plank with an evocatively romantic landmark video stunningly directed by Russell Mulcahy who was creating a whole visual vocabulary for the then novel music video. Ure can take full credit as lead singer and guitarist for breathing a subtle blend of Roxy Music’s style and krautrock clarity into Ultravox and building them into a credible vanguard for the electronic New Wave.
Reflecting back in the R4 doc, Ure says: “There’s no doubt the early 80s was a golden age of music made by real popstars who created themselves. It was more than just padded shoulders and asymmetrical haircuts. It was a pivotal moment in our cultural history when new tech mixed with new ideas to create something really good. All in the pressure cooker environment that was the Blitz club.”
Sony Stowaway: the pioneering stereo cassette-player was launched in London at Regine’s nightclub. Headphones replaced speaker to make model TCS-300 light enough not only for jogging but also the burgeoning fad of roller-skating
“ ‘Whaddaya mean, you’ve never been hang-gliding in headphones?’ To the Californian who recently delivered that crushing putdown while visiting London, the true Brit can now reply in the affirmative. This week, the Stowaway arrived in Britain, having already started crazes in Japan and America. Made by Sony and selling for around £99, it comprises lightweight headphones and a cassette machine the size of a small tranny which, as roller-skaters and parachutists have found, leaves the hands completely free. Consider the possibilities. ”[Source: On The Line, Evening Standard, April 24, 1980]
Update The no-frills Stowaway lacked a Dolby noise reduction system so in one bound it turned portable music into the pre-web equivalent of a rubbish P2P download direct to your ears. It has blessed public transport ever since. That summer, 1980, one of London’s rare Stowaways announced itself in the next seat to mine on a flight to St Tropez where for two weeks a then unknown British band called Spandau Ballet had brought the look and sound of Swinging London to the Papagayo nightclub. “Tss-tss-tss-tss” went the soundtrack to my trip from the next seat (with odd moments mercifully punctuated by the divine Chaka Khan’s “I wanna be naughty with you-oo-ooooo”).
In opposition to the Japanese-made name “Walkman”, invented for Sony’s home market, it was launched as the Soundabout in the US and as the Freestyle in Australia. Yet within three months, in the UK the Stowaway (cool, sexy name) had been rebranded the Walkman (dumb, dorky name). Somehow, the marketer’s S-curve inexplicably took sales to a million. By 1984 the price had plummeted to £30 and by 1986 the word Walkman was accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary
➢ 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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