❚ ONE LONDONER’S LIFEnewly topped up in paperback today. . . Spandau Ballet songwriter Gary Kemp surprised many when last year’s autobiography, I Know This Much, proved exceedingly well written and frank, what’s more. Many of his contemporaries – such as top Amazon reviewer Steve Jansen — believe that his perceptive memories of a London now transformed make a “a touching testament to spiritual growth”. Jansen writes:
“The real value of I Know This Much, aside from its glistening prose, is in witnessing someone discovering themselves. Always something of an odd penny, the Spandau songwriter and arguably its spiritual leader was always wiser than his pop position called for, and his working class soulboy roots never really sat comfortably with his angular New Romantic entrance. This rendered him somewhat pretentious to many, and his flaunting of left-wing politics often grated when framed by his band’s timely, aspirational image.
“However, with the benefit of distance and maturity (and following his time in the wilderness, as Joe Strummer would say, when discussing that inevitable period between an artist’s fall and his redemption), 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 . . .
“From the sheer and challenging poverty of his childhood, through to the sensitively handled, near tear-jerking account of his parents’ death within days of each other in 2009, money and success is always comes second to recollections of his brother, mother and father. Kemp is evidently, despite his aloof lone wolf image, a highly sensitive and lovingly loyal chap, but this is an identity that he has to arrive at; and time and the ravages of age are the consequential pain of his slow lesson.”
The new paperback edition from Fourth Estate brings us up to date with a postscript on the band’s reunion.Rock journalist Robert Sandall of The Sunday Times 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” … “Sets a new standard for rock memoirs,” says rock writer Paul Du Noyer … “Deeply cool,” says the deeply cool actor Bill Nighy.
❚ ONLY THREE MUSICIANS FROM THE 1980s are included in the annual Rich List of Britain’s top 50 music millionaires, published today by The Sunday Times. The richest musician of the decade who holds his own amid the older gods of rock is singer-songwriter George Michael who is worth £90m ($138m) today. He sits at No 25 in the ST’s top 50. George is pictured above in Wham!’s Club Tropicana video (where “the drinks are free”). His group’s “pure pop” epitomised the sybaritic style which by 1983 was signalling the divide in British music between electronic earnestness and full-on hedonism.
The other two richest stars from the 80s are each estimated to be worth a relatively puny £35m ($54m). They are Lancastrian Mick Hucknall of Simply Red (their summer tour climaxes with a farewell concert on Dec 19 and is booking now), and pop diva Kylie Minogue who found fame in the UK through the Australian TV soap, Neighbours. The Sunday Times justifies Kylie’s presence in this UK list, as someone who often seems “more British than the British”. She herself has regarded the UK as “my adopted home” almost since 1988 when her debut single, I Should Be So Lucky, went to No 1 and set her on the path to becoming the most successful female artist in the UK charts. She was honoured by the Queen with an OBE in 2008.
Simply Red’s Hucknall: a December farewell
Since the 2009 Rich List, three 80s stars have dropped out from the top 50 musicians: Annie Lennox, Simple Minds vocalist Jim Kerr and Sade – though her sensational album comeback this year is likely to be reflected in next year’s list. Astonishingly the creative genius behind Kylie and the huge stable of Stock Aitken and Waterman acts – Pete Waterman – last appeared in the Rich List in 2007.
Should we assume creativity does not equate to profitability? From a musician’s perspective the 80s have been the least lucrative decade in pop history, apart from the Noughties from which only TV impresario Simon Cowell emerges as a multi-millionaire (£165m). Inevitably, older musicians have had longer in which to sell records and accrue proceeds, so the 1960s yield 20 musicians in the Rich List who are still millionaires today, led by Sir Paul (£475m, $731m), Sir Mick (£190m) and Sir Elton (£185m). From the 1970s there are ten in the top 50, with Sting way out in front (£180m).
Among the richest artists from the 90s is Victoria (“Posh Spice”) Beckham (£145m whose fortune the ST oddly entwines with her footballing husband’s). Robbie Williams is now worth £85m and Gary Barlow £35m – both started out in boyband Take That. The Gallagher brothers of Oasis are worth £55m, and Jay Kay of Jamiroquai £35m.
The Rich List names 13 moguls ruling the UK biz, led by former songwriter and Warner Music Group chairman, the American Edgar Bronfman who has made his home in London, and is worth £1,640m ($2,522m). The ST reports him as being “well placed to snap up the beleagured EMI”, effectively Britain’s last homegrown record company, founded in 1931.
Leaders among the younger British businessmen are Simon Fuller (£350m, $540m), the former Spice Girls manager who struck gold as creator of TV’s Idol franchise which has been sold worldwide during the past decade, and Jamie Palumbo (£150m, $231m) who founded the Ministry of Sound clubbing empire.
LISTEN TO MCLAREN’S REQUIEM
EXCLUSIVELY AT SHAPERS OF THE 80S
Romance and anguish: James Stewart and Kim Novak in the psycho-drama Vertigo (top), and the post-punk Mekons
◼︎ TWO UNEXPECTED RECENT VIDEOS have acquired poignant new life in the wake of Malcolm McLaren’s death, Svengali of punk that he was. Few people could have guessed that the soundtrack to one of last month’s Paris ready-to-wear fashion shows [in the video above] would be McLaren’s final creative achievement.
It was completed after his diagnosis of cancer and possibly in acceptance of his own mortality.
What seduces the listener is the overwhelming melancholy McLaren evokes, in what suddenly amounts to a Requiem to Myself. It was commissioned by Dries Van Noten – to set a deliberately discomfiting mood for his runway show amid the gilded opulence of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on March 3.
After McLaren’s funeral, his partner Young Kim described the piece to Shapers of the 80s as “quintessential Malcolm McLaren – an entirely original and powerful, elegant but punk collage”. She gave us permission to run the full 13-minute mash-up in clean mp3 format, featuring the Vertigo theme, Mekons, Roxy, Raincoats and Burundi Beat.
McLaren on how to fail brilliantly
in this ‘karaoke world’
◼︎ “THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN TODAYis no more than a karaoke world, an ersatz society, which provides us with only the opportunity to revel in our stupidity… A karaoke world is one in which life is lived by proxy.” So said Malcolm McLaren last October, only days before he discovered he was unwell. He was presenting a keynote speech to 1,000 delegates in London at the Handheld Learning Conference 2009 about the future of learning and education.
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.”
➢ 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
The other two richest stars from the 80s are each estimated to be worth a relatively puny £35m ($54m). They are Lancastrian Mick Hucknall of 
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 