1832 Reform Act, The People’s Charter 1838, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women 1861, women’s suffrage 1865, women’s rights, Millicent Fawcett, The Cat and Mouse Act 1913, hunger strikes, death of Emily Davison, Emmeline Pankhurst, Representation of the People Act 1918, Franchise Act of 1928
Punk power: Judith Frankland models her own design Dare To Wear Fur from her collection for The Woman Who Likes to Say Hello. Photography by Denise Grayson. Above left, Pink Power, for the woman who holds her own in a man’s world. Illustration by Manny More
+++ ❚ THE GLOVES ARE OFF. Onetime Blitz Kid Judith Frankland aims to return to the couture fashion scene at London Fashion Week in September. During two decades spent abroad, she mixed bespoke design with nightclub promotion which in Italy won her membership of i guerrieri della notte — the warriors of the night.
Today in her fashion blog at The Swelle Life, she declares that ultimately “my passion is for fashion” as she unveils yet another outfit in her new collection designed for “The Woman Who Likes to Say Hello”.
She writes: “The seven outfits are part of a work in progress to be finished very soon in anticipation of presenting a small collection next Fashion Week in London. It is the first I have undertaken in eight years.”
Alongside Judith’s latest chapter in her progress back into fashion, Denise Grayson shoots her in the bold jacket (above) that eyeballs the woman who dares to wear fur (or at least, who dares to fake it).
Regular readers know Judith as one of the faces in the masthead atop Shapersofthe80s — grabbed from Bowie’s 1980 Ashes to Ashes video when she was dressing like a singing nun. So it’s no surprise that the new fur-woman silhouette evokes a more subversively punk spirit in contrast to previous separates in the new collection which combine power motifs with hints of romantic vulnerability. Manny More’s delicious illustration (above left) affirms the feminine bows and understated lace dress of a powerbroker’s outfit for the woman in a man’s boardroom — while the tightly knotted kipper tie provides a slap in the eye for the male chauvinist who is deceived by the notes of pink prettiness.
Judith’s designs demand high standards of tailoring and her ambition is to collaborate with an experienced cutter. She says: “I want to explore the possibilities this can create. I would love to work with a professional pattern cutter and, frankly, I feel they do not get the applause they deserve. We can all play with and drape fabric, but boy, it takes talent to bring that to life.”
In the short-term, Judith’s mini collection is likely to turn a few heads during Newcastle’s first Fashion Week (May 14–21), a citywide initiative to champion the Tyneside Business Improvement District. Then it’s London’s turn.
❚ A NEAT OUTCOME RESULTED from last week’s Radio 4 interview with Morrissey, former singer with The Smiths, the UK’s leading indie band of the 80s, who broke up in 1987. After the reluctant interviewee said that he was “very very surprised to be making music today” he added that, had his music career failed, “I would have become a novelist”. He then revealed that he had written his memoirs and was in the progess of redrafting his 660-page manuscript. He dared to suggest: “I’d like it to go to Penguin, but only if they published it as a classic. I can’t see why not — a contemporary Penguin Classic — within the next year or so.”
By Good Friday Penguin Books, creators of the modern paperback, were trying to head off a bidding war between rival publishers by announcing that it is indeed willing to publish his autobiography. A spokeswoman told The Independent: “There is a natural fit between Morrissey’s sensibility, his artistic achievements and Penguin Classics. A book could be published as a Penguin Classic because it is a classic in the making. It’s something we would like to discuss with Morrissey.”
There is no minimum time limit before a book can be considered a Penguin Classic, but the list embraces people or works that have “caused scandal and political change, broken down barriers, social and sexual”. However, a leading article in the same day’s paper pours cold water on the mighty ego of the singer they call Bigmouth: “Sadly for Morrissey, it’s the accumulated judgement of posterity, rather than authors, which determines what literature survives and what gets pulped.”
Nevertheless, according to The Independent report: “Morrissey is not short of suitors. The publishing director of Faber and Faber sent the singer an open letter begging him to join the ‘house of Eliot’, a reference to T S Eliot, the giant of 20th-century poetry. Lee Brackstone wrote: ‘We feel very strongly that you belong in this company. You deserve Faber and the love we can give you. History demands it; destiny commands it’.”
These events coincide with today’s UK release of a new album, Very Best of Morrissey, a 20-track download and CD of remastered solo classics (also as 18 tracks on vinyl, EMI/Major Minor). A bonus DVD, which includes eleven remastered videos (three of which are previously unavailable on DVD) including Boxers, Sunny, and The More You Ignore Me The Closer I Get, plus I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty taken from the Jonathan Ross TV show in December 1990.
As from tomorrow the 12-minute interview with R4’s Front Row is available on iPlayer. Morrissey deals briskly with pressing issues such as ageing (“many of the early songs were like mating calls and I have to think seriously about singing them now”), the problem of having the prime minister as a fan (“no I’ve never met him”) and, inevitably, a Smiths reunion (this is not the place for spoilers). And yes, Johnny Marr gets a mention.
Update: Listen to favourably selected highlights from a frankly tiresome interview between a cranky Morrissey and a very patient Dermot O’Leary (BBC R2 on April 30, 2011) as the evasive singer winds him up while discussing their Irish roots and musical idols, a UK and Scandinavian tour, an album of new material and the “mutants” of Coronation Street. We hear two clips from his Very Best Of CD, Girl Least Likely To, and Interlude: The next day Moz told True To You why he had been so cantankerous: “I’m sorry I made the O’Leary radio interview so difficult but I was in a foul mood, having spent a full week surrounded by the royal dreading. England may very well be a Windsor dictatorship, but, PR weddings aside, it is usually quite bearable.” He also complains about his familiar views on the British monarchy being cut from the earlier R4 interview.
SUMMER TOUR DATES
➢ Listed at True-to-you.net — Morrissey’s nine-date UK summer tour runs from Perth June 15–Plymouth June 30, plus Glastonbury Festival on June 24, and Hop Farm Music Festival July 2.
The real deal: troubled actor Charlie Sheen in one of his many recent TV appearances, here opening up to Andrea Canning on ABC
ONLINE TODAY THE URBAN DICTIONARY boasts that it has clocked up 5,762,970 definitions since 1999, a space of 12 years. Its contributors are mostly aged under 25. In contrast, the Oxford Engish Dictionary, bedrock of the language since 1928, boasts only 600,000 entries plus probably as many more variations on headwords, drawn from all of literature.
Sam Johnson: no time for cant
Have we all stopped talking proper? Has slang become the ephemeral new lingua franca of digital social media?
While the great and good-humoured Dr Johnson, creator of our first enduring English dictionary in 1755, enjoyed robust slang he would exclude low social neologisms as “cant”. The writing is on the wall in today’s Guardian. One linguistic historian declares that the internet is now the future for lexicography, but what he really means is tweeting and texting. Here’s the gist of Johnny Davis’s feature…
❚ THE OTHER WEEK the two dudes who created South Park were on TV recalling how they had attended the Academy Awards in drag, hairy-chested on the red carpet in knock-off gowns inspired by Ralph Lauren and Versace. They’d found the courage to overcome earlier cold feet.
Parker and Stone: sheening at the Oscars
“We did some Charlie Sheening and we were fine,” Trey Parker explained. “We were just sheening our heads off,” agreed Matt Stone.
The social media went to work. “Apparently sheening is a new verb,” tweeted one viewer. “The new name for wasted,” wrote another. In fact the new name for wasted had already been recorded three months earlier by Urban Dictionary, the online open source directory of slang phrases and neologisms. Sheening, it says, is “an alcohol and blow extravaganza, sometimes ending in a hospital stay and/or death. Referencing the amazing behaviour of the actor Charlie Sheen.”
Sheening was not the only example of slang to make the news recently. Days after the South Park pair appeared on TV, The Oxford English Dictionary published its latest online update. Included for the first time were the internet-era initialisms OMG, BFF and LOL. Sexting was in there; as were Wags and muffin top (“referring to a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers, cf, spare tyre, love handle”).
“Someone wrote that the OED finally thinking muffin top worthy of including was a bit disturbing,” says Urban Dictionary’s founder, Aaron Peckham, from his home in California. “Like your dad suddenly deciding that Whassup! was worthy of repeated, loud public use.”
GOOGLEHEIMER’S
The condition where you think of something you want to Google, but by the time you get to your computer, you have forgotten what it was. Very prevalent in the 420 community.
(eg — I’ve got Googleheimer’s so bad that between the garage and the office, I forgot what I was going to look up)
❚ POWER DRESSING FOR THE WOMAN determined to make her mark seemed to be the theme of Judith Frankland’s comeback collection unveiled in Newcastle upon Tyne this weekend. With seven outfits put together from separates all juxtaposed in an immaculately tailored riot of colour and texture, this was Frankland at full throttle. Former Blitz Kid Judith herself claimed her new look was for “The Woman Who Likes to Say Hello”. Here were corporate pinstripes, nipped waists, military chains, tight collars with kipper ties, and figure-hugging contours, softened with feminine ruffles, twisted sleeves, puffball shoulders, festooned skirts and gipsy prints. The mix of fabrics included wool suiting, lace, lamé, taffeta, cotton and duchess satin. One visitor at the preview summarised the contrast between a daring sense of the contemporary and elements of period drama as “woman in the boardroom aching to be romantic heroine”. Judith wants you to “interpret these pieces as you wish — take a skirt or a top and pair it with something you love in your wardrobe. I applaud experimentation and individuality”. Her collection is showing until Friday in a mixed show of women artists.
Boardroom bosses in kipper ties — The Woman Who Likes to Say Hello collection, by Judith Frankland
The governess and the hostess — The Woman Who Likes to Say Hello collection, by Judith Frankland
Top brass and Downton flapper — The Woman Who Likes to Say Hello collection, by Judith Frankland
Top brass detail: bowtie and waistcoat in blazer suiting, by Judith Frankland
Downton flapper detail: puffball sleeve in gold brocade, by Judith Frankland
➢ 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
By Good Friday Penguin Books, creators of the modern paperback, were trying to head off a bidding war between rival publishers by announcing that it is indeed willing to publish his autobiography. A spokeswoman told 
