British artist David Hockney posing yesterday at the Royal Academy of Arts in London with his painting The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011. Photograph by Luke MacGregor, Reuters
“ The Royal Academy of Arts in London has never been host to an exhibition quite like David Hockney’s A Bigger Picture. The academy has a history dating to 1768. The one-man show, which runs from Jan 21 to April 9, is a tour de force. It consists almost entirely of new work, using both low-tech media such as painting and the latest high-tech tools. Hockney approaches the time-honored subject of nature in a fresh, contemporary way. The result is spectacular.
Hockney has also come up with a more hi-tech kind of picture created by multiple, high-definition cameras set at slightly different angles. The result is a moving photo-collage: a bigger picture because it sees more, from varying points of view. Most of the films on show are landscapes, though the most recent is a dance spectacular, shot on 18 cameras in Hockney’s studio. It gives a wonderful festive finale to the exhibition, in which Hockney paints the stage in sumptuous color, and shoots the action like a combination of Pablo Picasso and Busby Berkeley ” … / continued online
“ [Hockney] is commanding new technologies in a countercultural quest to prove that painting, in an age dominated by conceptualism and installation, can be as theatrical and monumental as any 21st-century spectacle. ”
“ Hockney is best known as the raunchy Californian sensualist who painted sun-kissed boys gliding through the azure swimming pools of Los Angeles in the Sixties. And yet here he presents himself as a modest pastoralist, content to hymn the bounty of nature with quiet exultation – dancing, like Wordsworth, among the daffodils. Once inspired by distant destinations such as Egypt, China and America’s West Coast, he now seems happy pottering about a neglected nook of England. The prodigal son has returned to within 65 miles of Bradford, where he was born in 1937, and settled down. The internationalist has turned parochial. The radical has come over all conservative … Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I don’t understand paintings like these. Fresh, bright and perfectly delightful, they are much too polite and unthinkingly happy for my taste: if they offer a vision of arcadia, it is a mindless one… ” / continued online
HOCKNEY REVEALS A ‘new vision of the world’ IN OUR OWN INTERVIEW 30 YEARS AGO
❚ WHILE IN LONDON FOR A FORTNIGHT in 1983 David Hockney says that he has resumed painting after a two-year break pursuing photography. The freshly primed canvases in his London studio testify to the urgency with which he wants “to deal with the ideas that are bubbling away”. He lobs in a shocker: “I’ve looked at some cubist paintings for 25 years without understanding them. Suddenly I see cubism differently, more clearly. And my experiments have led me to a couple of theories of my own . . .”
Take me to the moon: Marr with his new Signature Jaguar
❚ YES, THIS IS ONE MASSIVE product plug but, wow, Johnny makes it also sound like a mighty love affair. From his fame with The Smiths, Johnny Marr is indisputably the maestro of the UK rock guitar sound of the 80s. Today on his blog he introduces his own bespoke guitar, the Johnny Marr Signature Jaguar, which he has spent years developing with Fender, the Arizona instrument maker.
This 14-minute video amounts to a low-key masterclass by one of the all-time greats in his field. In a play-through of all the Jag’s functions and switches, Johnny details what goes into customising a guitar to meet the individual musician’s needs. He has dealt with each little niggle that has irritated him over the years, the biggest being the jazz switch, he says, which was prone to being thrown at the wrong moment.
Johnny concludes: “For someone who’s grown up from being a little boy thinking that guitars are the greatest object in the world bar none, to have designed your own is a little bit like designing the spaceship that went to the moon.”
His verdict: “It sounds like I’m supposed to sound, I think.”
➢ In issue 351 of Guitarist magazine — “We sit down with Johnny, his tech Bill Puplett and designer John Moore to discuss what makes the Johnny Marr Signature Jaguar so different”
Robbie Vincent at BBC Radio London in the mid-70s: from sparring phone-in host to soul master. (Photographed by Roger G Clark)
♫ Before you read on, click herefor the perfect soundtrack from Robbie’s Radio London shows three decades ago: Friends & Strangers, recorded by saxophonist Ronnie Laws for the album Mountain Dance on Blue Note, 1977
◼ TUNE IN ONLINE AT 10AM TODAY and “If it moves, funk it”. Wherever you are in the world, your internet connection will deliver one of Britain’s great musical tastemakers who 35 years ago had teenagers expressing their musical allegiances in fanatical yet playful rival groups known as soul tribes who adopted saucy names such as the Dartford Tunnel Moles, Medway Maggots, Sherwood Softshoe Shufflers, Welwyn Wobblers and scores more. More important, in an age of casual racism, this white radio and club deejay opened their ears and hearts to the rhythms of black music which they couldn’t hear anywhere else — certainly not in the pop charts and precious few places on the radio dial.
In Britain, your skin colour wasn’t necessarily reflected in your musical tastes but if you danced with your hips, your feet and your soul, black music definitely became the rallying point for frustrated dancers unable to find release in dancehalls of the Saturday-night meat market tradition. The soul tribes of Britain saw white and black kids gathering together in underground clubs discovered only through the grapevine, and often unlicensed for alcohol. Then came marathon all-day soul festivals — the first Purley all-dayer in 1978 springs to mind, with music amplified through the UK’s first serious sound system designed by soul disc jockey Froggy, and a mixing console to provide seamless cross-fades. On dancefloors across the land, the acrobatic tribes competed to improvise the wildest dance moves and to build the highest human pyramids. None of this could have been imagined in America, with its strict apartheid between black and white music, and limited chances even for Motown artists to cross over into mainstream charts and playlists.
1978: Chris Hill entertains dancers from across the south-east during the first all-day soul event at Tiffany’s in Purley, the London suburb
From 1976 the BBC Radio London deejay Robbie Vincent commanded a high-profile lunchtime show on Saturdays which featured imported albums and the novel vinyl format of 12-inch singles to introduce dance fans to a galaxy of consummate musicians pushing the frontiers of hard soul, up-front jazz and raw funk … Ronnie Laws, Eddie Henderson, Weather Report, The Crusaders, Lonnie Liston Smith, Johnny Guitar Watson, Bootsy Collins, George Benson, Wilton Felder, Maze, Roy Ayres, Al Jarreau, Hi Tension, The Fatback Band, Brass Construction, Funkadelic.
Vincent was one of three deejays who soon headed what became known as the Soul Mafia working in London and the south-east and bringing real pressure to bear on record companies to release quality US acts in the UK. His counterpart at the commercial Capital Radio station was black deejay Greg Edwards, Grenada-born and New York-raised. He won his own cult following with his Saturday evening Soul Spectrum and its romantic “Bathroom call”.
Essex’s Gold Mine in 1975: GI uniforms and swing (courtesy Brian Longman, CanveyIsland.org.uk)
At about the same time that Vincent had a residency at the spanking new Flick’s disco in Dartford, Kent (south of the Thames), Chris Hill was already a legend as resident deejay at the Gold Mine on Canvey Island (north of the Thames). If anywhere in the mid-70s, this was where novelty dressing up began, influenced by several MGM compilation musicals in the cinema (That’s Entertainment!, 1974) and blockbusters such as The Great Gatsby (1974) rekindling nostalgia for vintage Hollywood fashion. For a while, and encouraged by Hill, the Gold Mine had the monopoly on GI uniforms and scarlet-lipped jive-dolls during its Glenn Miller and swing revival.
As a club deejay Vincent was the least theatrical in his presentation. Yet, as an ex-Evening Standard journalist and “devil’s advocate” phone-in veteran, his consummate broadcast interviews with American soul giants (James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Bobby Womack, Chaka Khan, Luther Vandross, Teddy Pendergrass, Herbie Hancock, Roy Ayers) not only educated a generation of teen clubbers but reinforced the credibility of the music at the very moment when a hitherto cathartic disco scene turned to dross. The destructive effect of the dire film Saturday Night Fever and its musically inane Bee Gee soundtrack cannot be overstated as its infection swept the globe in 1978.
Dressing up for the dancefloor: toga parties were popular on the soul circuit, here in 1979 at Papillon club, Brighton. (Photograph by Paul Clark)
One consequence for the UK was that the emergent soul scene dived back underground and partially reemerged only in 1980 with the New Romantics, disguised in a sharp new wardrobe. There were mutations within the family, but most danced to music with soul and many new young bands had funky beats and jazz pretensions. Mainstream jazz itself came back into favour with young clubbers in the early 80s when the black Brits Courtney Pine and Sade Adu were among the first to make good. All the emergent subcults lived to dance, and dressed up to do so as the 80s matured, while the whole flavour of UK music shifted away from rock guitar to the more upfront dance beats led by the bass guitar and bass drum.
This lineage does get overlooked these days: a substantial generation of 70s music lovers acquired taste, style and feet that knew how to move. This was precisely the audience-in-waiting who demanded and created vibrant world-beating pop and fashion as Swinging London was reinvented in the 80s. Only with the so-called Second Summer of Love in 1988 and the ecstasy-fuelled hurricane of aceed house that swept in from Ibiza did UK youth almost overnight abandon a long history of dancing with its feet. The trance-inducing techno beats of rave music proved so alien to the soul heritage that kids chose instead to wave their hands in the air as if to commune mystically with the lazer light.
Ever since, only their elders can remember how to cut a dash on a sprung-maple dancefloor. Those include the cool soulboys and girls of the early 80s who favoured the funky post-Blitz London clubs such as Le Beat Route, the Wag and Dirtbox. And they express fond gratitude to Vincent, Edwards and Hill as their musical mentors.
New technology: Chris Hill and Robbie Vincent in front of Froggy’s Matamp console
◼ REFLECTING THIS WEEK on the heady rise of the soul movement in Britain, Robbie Vincent identified some of the reasons: “The whole thing grew because as the years went by we had more and more access to a core group of really important American black artists. In the UK, Loose Ends and Soul II Soul are fine examples of bringing not just great home-grown R&B to our ears but style and fashion too.
“Popular black music writing royalty like Kenny Gamble, co-founder of the mighty Philadelphia International Records label, says his favourite cover version of one of his tracks is Now That We Found Love by Third World. It is real credit to UK dancefloors that the track was adopted almost as an anthem. But it needed that pool of musicians like The O’Jays and jazz crossover men like Donald Byrd and Grover Washington to influence and excite those new young kids on the block.”
Robbie Vincent himself deserves credit as an enthusiast with missionary zeal. From the 1978 launch of the then Labour-leaning tabloid, the Daily Star, he wrote an influential weekly column recognising the inventive camaraderie of Britain’s soul tribes, long before other media woke up to the phenomenon. For most of the 80s Vincent’s career saw him curating soul in regular strands at Radio 1, the BBC’s nationwide flagship, then at key music stations ever since. In 1995 he was voted Independent Radio personality of the year at the annual Variety Club awards. In 1997 he contributed profiles to The Sunday Times’s partwork the 1,000 Makers of Music. Of Berry Gordy’s Motown label during the 60s he wrote: “The Sound of Young America became a way of life, especially for Britain’s Mods: if it wasn’t Motown, it wasn’t hip.”
Philly’s Kenny Gamble interviewed by Robbie Vincent today and next Sunday
These days, following a spell of ill-health, Vincent is ensconced at JazzFM airing his jazz-funk credentials every Sunday from 10am in a three-hour masterclass. And Christmas Day’s coup is an extensive interview with Kenny Gamble, who founded the Philly label as one half of the independent producing and writing team Gamble and Huff with 170 gold and platinum records to their credit. On air Gamble talks of its stars such as The O’Jays [view vid], Billy Paul, Michael Jackson and Teddy Pendergrass. In the late 60s Atlantic offered G&H one massive act after another — Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield, Archie Bell & the Drells. Gamble says: “We did the background singing on I Can’t Stop Dancing. There were no Drells. There was me, Huff and Karl Chambers. I’ve been a Drell, I’ve been a Stylistic, I’ve been a Blue Note and a few other things.”
As a man of taste he declares The Temptations [view vid] the best group ever and Motown the greatest record company ever. When G&H formed Philly Int in 1971, they set up MFSB as the in-house band, a pool of 30 musicians exactly as the Funk Brothers were for Berry Gordy. “Motown was the blueprint for what we did. The Motown sound was so powerful, everybody wanted it. But we wanted our own sound [view vid]”. Here in MFSB’s The Sound of Philadelphia we hear the driving bass, hi-hat rhythms and lush orchestration that defined what came to be called disco in the eternal battle between rock guitars and dancing feet. The JazzFM interview continues on New Year’s Day.
◼ AMONG VINCENT’S FANS TODAY is the young black British mixer-producer Fitzroy Facey, who describes himself as a religious listener to Robbie Vincent’s radio shows through the late 1970s and early 80s. It was 1979 when Robbie helped instigate the National Soul Weekenders at Caister holiday camp, which are still going strong (see video below). In a recent interview for his magazine The Soul Survivors (edited extract at JazzFM), Fitzroy acknowledged that Vincent has been as important as some of the artists he has interviewed because he touched so many people’s lives, to create the “one nation under a groove” [view vid].
Robbie: My phone-in show helped here as I suffered a lot of abuse and would not tolerate racism or bigots. I’m very proud to have stood up to those views and the great uniter is music, which is a universal language.
Fitzroy: I was one of those coming from an Afro-Caribbean background who remember the racist door policies in the 70s and early 80s.
Robbie: Tell me about it; don’t forget I grew up in an era where Tamla Motown didn’t put their artist photographs on the cover sleeves because they were black and they worried they might alienate a white audience. This is an often missed point and an utter disgrace… We should hang our heads in shame.
“The Robbie Vincent Edition” 1994: his Classic Jazz-Funk selection for Mastercuts ranges from Grover Washington, Roy Ayers and Gabor Szabo to Blue Feather and OPA
Fitzroy: There are huge testaments on the net to both you and Greg Edwards for opening doors to pirate stations and presenters of black music. The younger generation have no concept that back in the 70s access to black music was totalling less than 10 hours a week. Today it’s 24/7 and you couldn’t possibly imagine 30-plus years later that Kiss, Jazz, Choice FM would grow out of that.
Robbie: That’s what made the scene so exciting — it was pioneering. The people who danced and were enthusiastic about the music made me very proud to be part of it. Because people were so passionate… Remember, the young black musicians were inspired by their brothers in America. You didn’t have to become a boxer — you learned an instrument. It was so infectious, it was inevitable that the music back then would be integral to popular music today.
❚ HOT NEWS OF A CHRISTMAS TREAT for Bowie fans. They have waited for almost 40 years to see his only Top of the Pops performance of The Jean Genie with The Spiders from Mars in January 1973 — shirtless, though clad in an open satin jacket. The tape was long thought to have been wiped or lost.
However a former BBC cameraman recently discovered that he possessed the only broadcast-quality copy in pristine condition, and today Bowie Wonderworld announced that entertainment boss Mark Cooper has arranged to have it included in this Wednesday’s 90-minute collection of classic Christmas hits (TOTP2, 7.30pm). The intention had been to unveil the clip in the BBC4 documentary Tales of Television Centre in the New Year, but enthusiastic fans persuaded him to bring forward its screening, even though you won’t see the track listed in the online billings.
As executive producer of Top Of The Pops 2, Cooper said: “I can’t imagine what other piece of TOTP from the early 70s would be as extraordinary a find.”
Bowie’s performance of The Jean Genie was recorded on Jan 3, 1973 and transmitted the following day for the first and only time. The “lost” recording — copy on 2-inch broadcast videotape — was screened last week at the NFT’s Missing Believed Wiped event. BowieNet’s news editor enthused: “A shirtless David looks amazing as he shakes maracas and blows on the harmonica. It’s clear David and the Spiders were at their peak when this video footage was shot, just a few days before David’s 26th birthday.”
Andy Barding, another privileged witness, added: “The first screening of the newly rediscovered clip of Bowie, Ronson, Woodmansey and Bolder performing The Jean Genie on Top of the Pops saw a packed National Film Theatre struck agog at the majesty of Ziggy in action: in pristine, full-colour TV quality. David, with deep-red hair, shaved brows and bafflingly wide trousers, looked every inch the epitome of what we recall as glam.”
The Jean Genie single had been released in November 1972, and the January 4 transmission on the BBC’s flagship pop show boosted it to peak at Number 2 in the UK singles chart. The track was remixed for Bowie’s sixth album Aladdin Sane in April 1973 which divided critics over his genius. The Jean Genie surfed in on the inspirational wave caused by the arrival of Ziggy Stardust and the Starman in July 1972, when Bowie’s Top of the Pops appearance years later passed into legend as the glam-rock moment that shaped the imaginations of a teen generation who were to become the popstars of the 80s.
❏ The retired cameramanJohn Henshall, now 69, has been speaking of how he came to own the footage of David Bowie’s Jean Genie which was thought to be lost. In the early 70s, long before the days of digital effects, Henshall ran a company called Telefex which made star filters, multi-image prisms, fish-eye lens attachments, kaleidotubes and picture rotators. Encouraged by TOTP producer Johnnie Stewart, he used the fish-eye to create the optical effects seen in the Bowie recording.
Afterwards he asked Stewart for a personal copy on 2-inch tape to include in his company’s showreel.
Today he is an expert in digital imaging, who pioneered the now ubiquitous lightweight television camera mounted on a long boom arm that we see sweeping above artist and audience at concerts. He also directed photography on hundreds of early music videos for artists including Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, Blondie and Elton John.
Henshall only discovered how “rarer than rare” the clip was when he mentioned it in a radio interview. He said: “I couldn’t believe that I was the only one with it. I thought you wouldn’t be mad enough to wipe a tape like that. They’d been looking for it for years.”
Cultural clairvoyant Douglas Coupland: photographed in Shanghai for Time Out by Yang Xiaozhe
❚ DOUGLAS COUPLAND CAPTURED THE ZEITGEIST of a generation with his 1991 debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, and he kept his finger on the pulse of our times with such books as Microserfs, jPod and Generation A. However, Coupland’s first great artistic passion was not writing, but visual art. The Canadian cultural clairvoyant is in Shanghai this week for a group show at Art Labor. He talked to Sam Gaskin for Time Out Shanghai about the rise of smartphones for decoding and recoding the post-everything milieu…
“ If a UFO landed on Earth,” Coupland said, “and it had one of these on its roof you wouldn’t know what it meant, but you’d know it meant something. We could even go into some sort of Mad Max future where all the scanners are dead but you’d still wonder what it said. That’s what I like about them. There’s wonder in these things.”
These things are the Quick Response codes (a 2-D version of barcodes), upon which Coupland has mapped his Memento Mori series of paintings. On one level, the works are colourful abstracts reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and TV test screen patterns. Using a smartphone app, the paintings can also be scanned to reveal encoded messages. This fusion of image and text brings together two Couplands: the conceptual artist who got his start at a Tokyo art school and the novelist and aphorist who wrote Generation X and jPod… ” / Continued online
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❏ Scan this Coupland painting with your smartphone to reveal its hidden message about the future … or right-click to download the image, then upload it into the online QR reader at onlinebarcode reader.com
“ Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago. ” — Kurt Vonnegut, 1994
ANOTHER SHOW OPENED IN CANADA LAST WEEK
❏ Coupland graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1984 with a focus on sculpture. The 49-year-old artist was in Calgary this month for the opening of his newest exhibition, Douglas Coupland: Twenty-first Century at TrepanierBaer Gallery, which features thought-provoking sculpture, paintings and a collection of Marshall McLuhanesque “slogans for the 21st century” formatted into his paintings as QR codes.
“ Q: Regarding your Memento Mori QR paintings — which can be scanned with a cellphone QR app to reveal the title of the paintings — what inspired this approach and what do you hope it awakens in people?
❏ Scan the above installation, photographed by The Calgary Herald, to reveal the message about truth in the Memento Mori painting … or right-click to download the image, then upload it into the online QR reader at Inlite Research
HOW TO READ QR CODES
❏ QR codes are similar to the barcodes used in supermarkets, but store much more complex data arranged in a square pattern on a white background. They are familiar in Japan and Europe on home-printed tickets for flights, trains and entertainment events, and on the walls of art galleries for providing detailed information about the exhibits. The QR code in the right-hand column of Shapersothe80s will take you to a different random page within this website each time you scan it.
QR codes are usually scanned with a smartphone after you have downloaded the relevant app — or by taking a photo of the code on your phonecam. The alternative is to visit the website of a QR reader and upload the QR image for it to be decoded. You can do this with each of the Coupland paintings here, though many online readers do seem to have difficulty scanning his multicoloured images and only two readers succeeded.
❏ Scan another Coupland canvas showing at the TrépanierBaer Gallery to reveal its hidden message about the dead … or right-click to download the image, then upload it into the online QR reader at Inlite Research
NEW THIS WEEK: FIRST INTERACTIVE MUSIC VIDEO TO INCLUDE SCANNABLE QR CODES
➢ 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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