◼ PRODUCT PLACEMENT DOESN’T COME better than this! On Christmas Day we saw the first of three new episodes of Absolutely Fabulous, the award-winning cult comedy series which ran from 1992 to 2003. It depicted the fashion-addicted lives of PR Edina, played by 80s Comic Stripper Jennifer Saunders, and her best friend, Patsy, the chain-smoking sex-mad magazine editor played by 70s Avengers star, Joanna Lumley. Today, New Year’s Day, we saw a second episode and look whose brand name was being lavishly displayed as Eddie swanned around in those distinctive head-to-foot knits from the Swinging 80s — the hottest label of its day, BodyMap.
Coincidence or design? Only last July David Holah put a load of classic BodyMap outfits into the Cavalcade of the 80s catwalk show at the Vintage Festival organised by Wayne Hemingway at London’s Festival Hall — and they didn’t seem to have aged one jot. One month later, the BBC began filming the Christmas specials. It pays, as they say, to advertise.
Cavalcade of the 80s at London’s Vintage Festival in July: a striking presence on the runway is the very same BodyMap ensemble worn later in Ab Fab on New Year’s Day. Picture courtesy David Holah
BodyMap was the game-changing fashion label launched in 1982 when ex-Blitz Kids David Holah and Stevie Stewart graduated from the trendy fashion course at Middlesex Polytechnic to have their collection instantly bought by Browns, the prescient South Molton Street shop. The pair immediately injected excitement into the fashion scene with daring designs as bizarre as their controversial catwalk shows, given titles such as Querelle Meets Olive Oil, and The Cat in the Hat Takes a Rumble with the Techno Fish. In 1983 they won the Martini award for the most innovative designers of the year and rocketed to international success as the British fashion scene became international news.
Knits, prints and stretch fabrics were restructured in men’s and women’s collections to map every part of the body, itself revealed by holes in unexpected places. Film-maker John Maybury supervised their outrageous videos (here the 1986 Half World collection). Michael Clark’s dance company can also take credit for promoting BodyMap’s overtly sexual appeal. By 1989 Holah & Stewart had opened their own retail outlet but the early 90s credit squeeze forced the company out of the competitive fashion business.
Since then David Holah has continued to design as a freelance and diversify as a printmaker. Stevie Stewart works with leading names in fashion, music, film and advertising as a fashion, costume, set and production designer. Popstar clients who have commissioned her costumes for world tours include Kylie, Britney, Girls Aloud, Westlife, Alexandra Burke, Cheryl Cole and Leona Lewis.
Last week Jennifer Saunders, who writes the Ab Fab TV scripts, revealed that the forthcoming big-screen movie will be set on the French Riviera where Eddie and Patsy go to a party aboard on an oligarch’s yacht. She told New York magazine: “I’m aiming to shoot this in a beautiful part of the Riviera. I fancy the south of France in the spring.”
Stevie Stewart and David Holah: a TV interview during London Fashion Week at the height of BodyMap’s success in 1984. Photographed by Shapersofthe80s
Planets club in Piccadilly, 1981: George O’Dowd before he became Boy, his sidekick and future singer Marilyn, and fashion goddess Kim Bowen. Photographed by Shapersofthe80s
❚ 2011 WAS A BUMPER YEAR for Shapersofthe80s. Visits to this website have doubled year on year, to a total of 174,658 page views during 2011. Also during the past six months, views increased by 40% over the previous six months — driven substantially by our exclusive pictures of Steve Norman’s wedding, and by exploring the heritage which informs We Can Be Heroes, Graham Smith’s definitive new photobook about 80s clubbing.
1 — Spandau Ballet — Total page views include Tony Hadley’s international tour with John Keeble, Steve Norman’s wedding, Martin Kemp’s cinematic triumphs and Gary Kemp as cultural pundit, as each of the band members has been pursuing his own interests since their farewell performance in July 2010.
2 — Boy George whose rise and fall seems Greek in its tragedic possibilities.
3 — Duran Duran who have patiently rebuilt their credibility over the past year. (Of their total page views here, almost half came in one day, yesterday*)
4 — Paradise Point — Britain’s brightest new pop musicians who mysteriously vanished from the stage almost as soon as they had published one of the most seductive videos of the year [see below].
5 — Sade whose long-awaited world tour slaked her fans’ thirst and gave her a No 1 album on both sides of the Atlantic.
6 — George Michael — another 80s survivor whose vulnerability almost renders him indestructible.
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Steady attractions at Shapersofthe80s are the post about John Rutter’s royal wedding anthem, and historically important interviews with the painter David Hockney (1983) and with Beatle John Lennon (1966).
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* It is an astonishing statistical exception that yesterday proved our busiest day of the year thanks entirely to Duran Duran sharing on Facebook the link to our choice of the 10 most creative tribute videos celebrating their comeback. So, despite our having followed Duran’s world tour since their newest album was launched in 2010, almost as many fans visited in a single day as during the entire year to date. ❏ iPAD, TABLET & MOBILE USERS PLEASE NOTE — You may see only a tiny selection of items from this wide-ranging website about the 1980s, not chosen by the author. To access fuller background features and site index either click on “Standard view” or visit Shapersofthe80s.com on a desktop computer. ➢ Click here to visit a different random item every time you click
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.
Graham Smith: signing advance copies of We Can Be Heroes between coffee and cake today at Soho’s Society Club. Photographed by Shapersofthe80s
❚ THE BOOK OF THE DECADE has arrived and early buyers of the 2,000-copy first edition had it in their hands today. The photo-story of 80s clubland, We Can Be Heroes, felt reassuringly hefty to the touch and we finally discovered the page size to be generous at 235 x 280mm. The five-colour printing gives intensity especially to the black-and-white photography on the high-gloss paper and author Graham Smith’s verdict on the quality was simple: “Stunning.” Collaborator and 80s club-host Chris Sullivan breathed a sigh: “We got there in the end.”
The 320 pages of story-telling and voxpops from perhaps 100 contributors will raise plenty of smiles when the postman delivers the book during the next week. Even if you’ve read Shapersofthe80s from top to bottom, you’ll find as many more quotes and insights from the original Blitz Kids themselves. Deejay Jeffrey Hinton reminds us in the book: “People think this was a premeditated scene but it was not. It was childlike, thrown together. We didn’t do it for the money, we were innocent. It’s all so marketed today.”
Ringleaders who shaped the style of the 80s celebrated in We Can Be Heroes: Chris Sullivan, Fiona Dealey, Lee Sheldrick, Stephen Linard and Kim Bowen — the rebels within St Martin’s School of Art, all photographed by Graham Smith
Bournemouth was the destination on bank holidays: good-natured hijinks brought London clubbers to the south-coast resort, and Smith has included many of their snaps in We Can Be Heroes
While the main images reveal just how small in number was the coterie who initiated the sounds and styles of the 80s, Smith has supplemented his own portfolio of pictures with many snaps from clubland wags themselves whose ambitions were liberated by the spirit of collaboration inspired in 1980. Nevertheless, designer Fiona Dealey makes a valid point in the book: “When anyone has written about the Blitz it has been by the same few blokes giving the same old soundbites with never a mention of what the women were up to. The Blitz was our youth club and I feel they hijacked it.”
Today John Mitchinson, the book’s publisher, said he was reasonably confident that a commercial edition of Heroes might follow in the autumn of 2012. In the meantime a limited number of copies of the first edition are still available only from Unbound Publishing.
➢ View Shapersofthe80s video — Chris Sullivan telling his “ribald tales of excess” from the Blitz era at a launch party for We Can Be Heroes… with Graham Smith and Robert Elms on video too
Chris Sullivan signing today: “Now people can see the book itself we might shift a few more copies.” Photographed by Shapersofthe80s
❚ EPISODE 4 OF DALSTON SUPERSTARS, Vice online’s “structured reality” series about hipness in Hackney, is a Christmas special, which means sex, drugs and sausage rolls. Will the wildest Christmas party Dalston’s ever seen solve the gang’s problems, or just add to their hangovers?
✰ Stefan: “Dad found my Tumblr and freaked out and he cut me off”
✰ Sam considers whether it’s right to throw a recession party
✰ Maeve becomes a working girl and discovers what “the Occupy Wall Street thing” is all about
✰ Anna thinks she wants to do fashion styling
✰ Stefan and Maeve transition to the working class
✰ Vital vocab: get gaddafied, satanic Mean Girls, ghetto-fabulous snacks
❏ Vasilisa Forbes, Photography and Multimedia “This was a really emotional one.”
❏ Charlie Mass, European Institute of Design “I’m from australiaN.”
❏ Laura O’Reardon, Senior College “Maeve, get a job you user.”
❏ Daniel Heronneau, Wallington County Grammar School for Boys “Vee looks like Kreayshawns dj Lil Debbie.”
❏ Jimmy Dallas, Preston, Lancashire “thisiswanknow”
❏ Jack Van Cooten, CEO at Banana Hill “Awesome”
❏ Huw Williams, Central Lancashire “I just envisage a coked up editor screaming at staff: It IS funny! They’ll get it eventually, you’ll see!”
❏ Robsta Hendricks, London “Brilliant. From living West travelling East to living East working West Gastro part time, I get it. Well done.”
❏ Thibaud Guerin-Williams “In Richmond VA this is real.”
❏ Pierre Chambaud, London “how can I be a part of dis gang?”
❏ Grant Armour, Sarfend High School for Dudes, Uni. Sussex, da blud behind da wkd #christmasmixtape “these outta town muthafuckas in efes think they run the game, they going to get it in the knees. we about to blow the roof off alibi in 2012 mane. smokin big damn dank.”
❏ Sean Otley, Manchester “dalston s.s = toss.”
❏ Rich ‘Catface’ Brooks, UCLAN “Chris Morris did this seven years ago, but much better, and aimed at Vice.”
AND NOW THE #christmasmixtape
❏ Update Dec 24 By popular demand, here’s a mere taster of the download featuring largely Grant Armour [see comments] available at, like, #christmasmixtape
❏ Subcultural decryption: Dalston is the area of east London that UK hipsters regard as, like, paradise. Unless they live a mile away in Shoreditch, then it’s Shoreditch. (Hoxton is SO yesterday.)
❏ Subcultural analogy:Nathan Barley was a UK television series featuring hipster role models for Dalston Superstars, like, six years ago… Not to mention the even holier Mighty Boosh (2004–7).
➢ 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
LANDMARK FAREWELLS. . . HIT THE INDEX TAB UP TOP FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
✰ Stefan: “Dad found my Tumblr and freaked out and he cut me off”
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 