❚ THE PRESTON-BASEDLaboratory Project is “a utopian vision” as an antidote to the reign of Simon Cowell’s production-line X-Factor performers. The label and studio aims to support artists with integrity, skill and soul to break into the music industry. A new album Taste Masters 3 is being launched tomorrow, Dec 17, at Manchester’s Fac251 venue with seven acts from the north-west promoting the album release on Jan 1.
Shapersofthe80s featured the Lab and its founder Tony Rigg when an earlier album Taste Masters 2 launched last spring, presenting Dresden, The Salford Jets, China White, Jimmy Docherty, Antistar, Super 8 Cynics … Last autumn the original album Taste Masters 1 included Drama King, Evenhand, Fez, Helvelyn 2, Osiris — both albums are still available for download.
Contemporary rock: Pangaea
The Laboratory project is promoting tomorrow’s showcase as a “World Class Live Music Event” featuring these acts:
➢ CLICK PIC TO VIEW BBC NEWS VIDEO of historian Simon Schama introducing his choice of travel paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery, and revealing his own Essex origins which he shares with artist Grayson Perry.
❚ TODAY WE CAN ALL SEE A HOST of paintings seldom available to the British public because they usually hang in our embassies and government buildings around the world. They are owned by the British government and all incoming ministers of state have the pick of this vast and impressive 100-year-old collection from which to decorate their offices. (The Blairs when in Downing Street lined the entrance corridor with lively Scottish colourists and the main public reception room showcased living stars of British art from Allen Jones to David Hockney. The Camerons have chosen endless routine landscapes and city views, several contemporary minimalist images by Susan Collins and David Austin, and among the few human beings, 19th-century prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, twice.)
Travelling Light is a selection made from the Government Art Collection by historian and broadcaster Simon Schama to explore ideas of travel. The show opens today at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. In commenting on his selection he said: “Travelling Light is all about setting off, trying to picture something, never quite catching it but in the process doing something beautiful.”
Highlights of the exhibition include an iconic portrait from 1814 of Romantic poet and intrepid traveller Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips (seen above), brought back specially for the display from the British ambassador’s residence in Athens, Greece. Schama waxes lyrical about the handsome young lord taking his gap year grand tour of Europe as a glamorising prequel to his life of madness and badness. He also loves the urge for adventure seen in Bloomsbury Group painter Vanessa Bell’s portrait of a Byzantine Lady (1912, also above) which is nominally the Byzantine empress Theodora, though Schama notes how it is also a striking self-portrait.
❚ IN EPISODE 3 OF DALSTON SUPERSTARS, Vice online’s “structured reality” mockumentary series about who’s more hip than who in Hackney, this week’s highlight is an exhibition of work @ Wagwan Studios. An infamous art collective called NoiNoiNoi from Dalston E8 describe themselves as “an experiment in cosmic dissonance”, and produce installations collaged from photos and consumer brands which are spookily close to the art stuff in galleries throughout the east London postcodes of E1, 2 and 8. Also this week …
✰ Vee says “Just say no to capitalism: uncapitalise.”
✰ Sam and Anna’s relationship is on the rocks.
✰ Dweeby Stefan becomes Captain Scarlet, psychedelic astronaut, then gets confused about the meaning of reality — “We’re real, right?”
✰ “All the boys want… lipstick paradise.”
✰ Just wait for the punchline when Stefan says “I think I know a little something about art…”
❏ Festive question for the producers — As Top Commenter Struthers notes, some great tracks backing Ep3 of Dalston Superstars but… where’s the free Christmas download of tunes from the show, such as Grant Armour’s theme tune Dalston Riddim, and Mum Dad I’m moving to Dalston, by DJ Platinum ft Decland’n’Karl? … Update Dec 23: By popular demand, here’s a taster of the download 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.
❏ Subcultural analogy:Nathan Barley was a UK television series featuring hipster role models for Dalston Superstars, like, six years ago… Not to mention the Dalston-based absurdist series The Mighty Boosh (2004–7) — its four way crimp-off (below) led by Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, says it all for the coolest of the cool.
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
Le Beat Route recreated for one night only: One of our heroes, MC Sullivan, sharing the best sounds in London last night
2011 and it’s Thursday night Beat Route! The same underground club emanating a spookily familiar spirit of place
❚ WITHOUT DOUBT the party of the year filled the former Beat Route, Soho, last night as photographer Graham Smith and writer Chris Sullivan launched their photobook We Can Be Heroes, which is winging its way from printers to the lucky buyers who invested in the first edition. Smith and Sullivan became crucial to leading and documenting the explosion of Eighties club culture in London. Le Beat Route, founded in November 1980 by crimper Ollie O’Donnell and stylist Steve Mahoney with Fidel Castro fan Steve Lewis as its deejay, became the cool Friday-nighter that served the post-Blitz crowd for the next three years while the scene moved gradually overground.
More exclusive pix are coming on Shapersofthe80s.com once I can wade through the many brilliant soundbites offered by everybody out last night to celebrate the Swinging 80s…
Thursday night Beat Route! Hosts, authors and 80s deejays Graham Smith and Chris Sullivan
Thursday night Beat Route! Seminal club deejays of the 80s Steve Lewis and Jay Strongman
Thursday night Beat Route! Lesley Chilkes, Boy George, David Holah
[ Exclusive party pix courtesy of sandromartini.com ]
TNBR! Last night’s other chief hero hosting the party of the photobook of the 80s — snapper Graham Smith and his lovely wife Lorraine (Northern Soul veterans, both)
➢ 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
➢ MC Tunes — seminal British rap artist performing hits and new material
✰ Vee says “Just say no to capitalism: uncapitalise.”
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 