DD with their GQ award last night: it was presented by Alex James from Blur at London’s Royal Opera House. Photograph: Rex
The online men’s magazine GQ.com says today:
❏ “After 30 years the perennially stylish supergroup Duran Duran are still producing the goods, with new Mark Ronson-produced album All You Need Is Now joining the likes of Notorious and Rio as essentials in any man’s collection.”
❏ Nick Rhodes says “Our original manifesto has been to collaborate with fashion, art, photography, design and architecture. I guess I’ve always thought of Duran Duran as a kind of ongoing art project.”
❏ GQ.com highlight “The supermodel power summit: bringing together Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova, and Helena Christensen with director Jonas Akerlund for the upcoming video for Girl Panic!”
i-D NOW: a pop-up exhibition at the Red Gallery in Hoxton
❚ THE ORIGINAL FASHION AND STYLE BIBLE, i-D, has decided to celebrate its 31st birthday with i-D NOW. This is a pop-up exhibition of historic covers, plus interactive events featuring industry-leaders, in conjunction with the Taschen anthology, i-D Covers 1980–2010, which was published last year. The event aims to give a behind-the-scenes look at how some of those covers and their hallmark winks were created.
Straight-up from i-D issue 003: Scarlett Cannon and Helen Carey photographed by Thomas Degen
Details are being announced tantalisingly via Twitter but known tasters include past i-D fashion editor and broadcaster Caryn Franklin leading a discussion about fashion.
There’s a musical treat from boilerroom.tv and photographer Billy Ballard is staging a couple of Beauty Now shoots while i-D makeup expert Lucy Bridge does the styling. Other contributions will come from i-D family members including Terry Jones, Richard Buckley, Pat McGrath, Nick Knight, Simon Foxton and Edward Enninful.
i-D issue 008: Scarlett photographed by Thomas Degen
Coincidentally, by way of promoting the pop-up, i-D Online catches up with a couple of style-setters who first appeared together in a straight-up shot for the magazine’s third issue back in 1981. This was the height of the Pose Age when Scarlett Cannon and her startling haircut fronted the ultra-hip Cha-Cha club and she subsequently became the cover girl on i-D’s eighth issue.
Helen Carey with her own unique hairplay worked with designer Martin Degville in Kensington Market, where she was pictured here by Shapersofthe80s. They’re still up for striking a pose 30 years on, during which time Scarlett tells me she been “in full-blown glamorous gardening mode” as a garden tutor and food-growing consultant, among other things. For i-D she talks about her friend Helen’s business Vintage Vacations, which offers holiday retreats in classic silver American trailers.
❚ N F SIMPSON, THE DRAMATIST, died this week aged 92. The Observer critic Kenneth Tynan dubbed Simpson “the most gifted comic writer the English stage has discovered since the war” after seeing the double bill of A Resounding Tinkle and The Hole in 1958. And after One Way Pendulum (1959), he suspected Simpson of possessing “the subtlest mind ever devoted by an Englishman to the writing of farce”…
“ … His focus on the surreal was influenced by The Goon Show and in turn influenced Monty Python and Peter Cook… Simpson was one of the four principal writers to establish the English Stage Company’s influential regime at the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s. The others in that first batch were John Osborne, John Arden and Ann Jellicoe. But in a movement whose central work was Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, Simpson was spiritually an outsider. ”
“ The playwright NF Simpson, was generally identified with the Theatre of the Absurd movement alongside Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. But Simpson was peculiarly and singularly English in his absurdism. He turned suburban characters into weird chatterboxes and language into highly imaginative chop logic, and mixed a comic brew that derived more recognisably from the worlds of Lewis Carroll, W S Gilbert and the Goons, without the puerile edge that came along with Monty Python… ”
“ The plays of N F ‘Wally’ Simpson, were hilariously subversive, yet masked a deeply philosophical mind … He was often compared with Eugène Ionesco. But I always thought he belonged to a deeply English tradition of word-spinning, logic-twisting absurdity. Simpson’s real ancestors were Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and the Goons. His legatees were Peter Cook, the Monty Python gang and the Goodies… ”
❏ This short clip from the 1964 Woodfall film of One Way Pendulum only hints at the Simpson universe. John Cleese saw the film in a cinema in Weston Supermare and called it a true classic of surrealist comedy. It is directed by Peter Yates with Jonathan Miller as the dotty Kirby, the son of a dotty father (Eric Sykes) in a dottily obsessive suburban household. Kirby retunes a choir of Speak-Your-Weight machines and trains them to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. All except one obey his bidding.
Simpson’s vision directly inspired a whole generation of comedy in the UK from Dick Lester’s Beatles movies (1964-5) to the Monty Python TV series (1969-74) and beyond. It was One Way Pendulum that took Simpson from the Royal Court theatre into the West End and in 1988 Jonathan Miller revived it at the Old Vic. Simpson’s final play, If So, Then Yes, was staged only last year.
❏ David Quantick appraised playwright N F ‘Wally’ Simpson as one of the foremost absurdists of the 20th century. The documentary featured material recorded at a workshop for a new play, If So, Then Yes, his first full-length piece in 30 years. It charts a day in the life of octogenarian writer Geoffrey Wythenshaw, who sits down to dictate his autobiography from the comfort of a retirement home for the upper crust. After its Royal Court reading it then played at the Jermyn Street theatre during September 2010.
The Hadley band in Las Vegas last week: John Keeble (drums), Phil Williams (bass guitar), Big Tone, Richie Barrett (guitar), Phil Taylor (keyboards)
❚ EXACTLY WHAT SPANDAU BALLET FANS don’t want to hear! Yesterday as the 80s supergroup’s vocalist Tony Hadley was taking a well-earned rest following his American solo tour, he delivered the bombshell. Fans who want to see him singing again with his onetime schoolmates in Spandau “could be waiting 20 years”!
The shocking prospect came yesterday in an interview with TNT, the Australian backpacker magazine, anticipating his imminent tour down under. Before his US dates earlier this month he’d been much more circumspect about another Spandau reunion, using the phrase “maybe one day in the future” to American music magazine ConcertLivewire. Tony’s new forecast for a rendezvous with Spandau means the already portly singer would have passed his 71st birthday — along with many of Spandau’s original fans, ear trumpets at the ready.
Remember, an argument over royalties split Spandau asunder in 1990 and Tony didn’t speak to songwriter Gary Kemp for 19 years until their sudden reunion tour in 2009. Even so, the singer tells TNT: “It was only ever meant to be a one-off. After 20 years of squabbling we buried our differences. But after our last show in 2010, you know, I had a band waiting around for me on a retainer for six months. I’ve had no time off and I’m trying to finish the new album so at the moment there aren’t plans to do Spandau again. You could be waiting 20 years.”
Tony has pursued an active solo career ever since the split and his current band has backed him for 13 years, with John Keeble of Spandau playing drums. This month’s American tour was an investment, and Tony told Windy City Times they “want to come back next year and do 20 or 30 shows”.
His big news is about his solo album, due next year. He tells TNT: “I’m doing some writing with Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees. I went round his house and had a little cup of tea and said, let’s get together and do some songs. For me, that is a major wow.
“2012 will be busy with the Olympics. My manager has been talking to various people about an orchestral version of Gold [the Spandau Ballet hit] for the games — doing it with an 80-piece orchestra would be amazing.”
➢ Sept 11 in New York, 13h30 — Tony sings at the memorial concert for 9/11 in The British Garden, Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan, NYC, created with the endorsement of the British Consulate-General to honour the 67 British subjects lost in the 2001 attacks
➢ Tony’s Australia dates 2011 — Oct 26, Hindmarsh, South Australia; Oct 27, South Morang, Victoria; Oct 28, Doncaster, Victoria; Oct 29, Chelsea Heights, Victoria; Oct 30, Rewind Australia, Wollongong, NSW; Nov 3, Coolangatta, Queensland; Nov 4, Penrith NSW.
❚ SINCE HE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHED Ziggy Stardust at the Rainbow Theatre in London, 1972, Masayoshi Sukita has remained one of David Bowie’s favourite photographers. Bowie and Sukita’s collaboration has spanned 40 years resulting in thousands of previously unseen photographs and iconic portraits, the most recent of which were taken in 2009. Speed of Life is a new prestige book containing never before seen photographs from Sukita’s archive, presented along with David Bowie’s commentary. It is to be published in a limited edition of 2,000 copies worldwide, each signed by the authors, Bowie and Sukita.
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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
❏ David Quantick appraised playwright N F ‘Wally’ Simpson as one of the foremost absurdists of the 20th century. The documentary featured material recorded at a workshop for a new play, If So, Then Yes, his first full-length piece in 30 years. It charts a day in the life of octogenarian writer Geoffrey Wythenshaw, who sits down to dictate his autobiography from the comfort of a retirement home for the upper crust. After its Royal Court reading it then played at the Jermyn Street theatre during September 2010.
