Duran Duran in 1980: Birmingham’s fluffiest New Romantics
◼ 30 YEARS AGO TODAY the Birmingham club-band Duran Duran released their debut single Planet Earth, less than two months after signing to EMI. It charted in mid-March, peaked at No 12, and bagged the band a spot on Top of the Pops, Britain’s premier music TV show. They were the first New Romantic band from outside London to make good, and this week the writer Steve Jansen claims that “inside of three short years, Duran were officially the biggest band on the planet”.
He celebrated Duran’s birthpangs with a monumental survey of their origins titled Switch It On! – Planet Earth & The Launch of Duran Duran, on the blog gimmeawristband.com. As a shorter alternative, Shapersofthe80s has documented a few key excerpts from his epic account, where Jansen talked to all the key players involved during the run-up to the band’s chart debut. They are published here with his permission…
The New Romantic Jive: Rum Runner regulars Gay John Lupton and Lavinya Jatjm, dressed to the hilt and dancing in the official 1981 video for Planet Earth, co-directed by Blitz Kid Perry Haines and Russell Mulcahy
Motormouths back in action: Strange and Egan interviewed on BBC London news in the club where they once reigned. Such were members’ powers of self-promotion at the Blitz, Egan said, that it was the 80s equivalent of Facebook Live!
❚ NEWLY RELEASED JAN 31, 2011: A remastered version of George Michael’s debut solo album, Faith, from November 1987, is out on Epic/Legacy in the UK and tomorrow the US. There is also a DVD featuring a TV special from 1987, George Michael and Jonathan Ross Have Words, a 25-minute Music Money Love Faith EPK, plus seven remastered promo videos. All available through Michael’s international online retail store.
Faith won a Grammy Award as album of its year, for which Michael wrote and produced every track except one, among them six top-five singles. The first released, I Want Your Sex, went to No 3 in the chart and not unexpectedly caused censorship problems around the world. The daddy of US pop radio hosts, Casey Kasem, refused to say the full song title on air, referring to it only as “the new single from George Michael”. Having gone solo, Michael was after all trying to lay the ghost of his teenybopper image so successully established in Wham! at the age of 20 with his best friend Andrew Ridgeley. Sample their first Top of The Pops appearance as Young Guns, which hit No 3 in 1982, below.
Michael had of course already enjoyed two UK chart-toppers, Careless Whispers in 1984 and A Different Corner in 1986, and in all has achieved eight No 1 singles in the US, his last in 1991. Before all that stuff happened.
Shock’s 1980 12-incher, Angel Face b/w R.E.R.B. — rare vinyl costing £58.21 from Black Rhythm Records in the Netherlands
❚ re:VOX #12 IS A FAT special issue of Rob Kirby’s pocket magazine dedicated to 80s electronica, which celebrates the 30th anniversary earlier in January of the release of Ultravox’s hit single Vienna. This 40-page issue tracks the origins of Vienna as a monster hit that set a benchmark for pop’s new wave, both musically and with its innovative, cinematic video.
There is a lengthy interview with Barbie Wilde of Shock, the mime/dance troupe whose single Angel Face was produced by Rusty Egan of Visage and Richard Burgess of Landscape who also produced Spandau Ballet’s first records (today a director for Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington). The Shock B-side R.E.R.B. is the first re-release by the new label Blitz Club Records — here’s a 30-second clip of the 2011 extended version:
In re:VOX Barbie describes the emergent mime scene inspired by visiting Paris in the late 1970s, and being involved at the age of 19 with Tim Dry in the formation of Shock in 1979, along with Robert Pereno, Lowri-Ann Richards, Karen Sparks and Sean Crawford (later Tok of Tik & Tok) and how all paths crossed at the Blitz, resulting in Shock becoming dance figureheads for the New Romantics. In October 1980 Barbie didn’t have much fun dodging explosions as she ran around Beckton Gas Works with Tok when they added romance to Ultravox’s video for Passing Strangers, one of the first pop promos directed by Russell Mulcahy, in which moustachioed Midge Ure thinks he’s Clark Gable.
Midge, Sean and Barbie: Ultravox’s video for Passing Strangers, 1980, which would later be runner-up for the Best Video award in the British Rock and Pop Awards
Robo-mimes Tik & Tok: Sean Crawford and Tim Dry
Tim Dry, another ex-Shock performer, continues the saga of how in 1980 he span off to form the white-faced robo-mime duo Tik & Tok with Sean Crawford who was already familiar on London’s fashionable streets as a robot character called Plastic Joe. Dry had been completely unaware of the Blitz as a “secret underworld the rest of London was oblivious to” (along with the indolent record industry to whom the scene came as a monumental surprise once it exploded).
He gives full credit to Robert Pereno as the social networker who was key to both acts getting bookings on the clubbing circuit, and persuaded Tik & Tok to ditch disco in favour of cutting edge Euro-synth music. The duo made £30 from their first street performance outside San Lorenzo, the smart Beauchamp Place restaurant. From that pavement debut, television, fame and fortune beckoned…
Steve Strange: reliving his former glory on the door for the Return to the Blitz party, Jan 15. Captured from video by Shapersofthe80s
Kirby has also produced a separate 16-page issue, re:VOX #13, to report the Blitz Club Reunion party itself, held at the site of the original 1980 club on Jan 15 jointly to launch the book Remembering Eden by Jus Forrest and Helen Waterman, as well as Egan & Strange’s website for their label Blitz Club Records. Rob gives his first-person account of the party, confessing that he was too young to be one of the original Blitz Kids and reminds us that he’d fallen in with Rusty quite recently as an obsessive archivist who can trace every track Rusty had ever played as the Blitz club’s deejay. They have already shared their playlists with Graham Smith, the designer of Spandau Ballet’s graphics whose anthology of 80s photographs, We Can be Heroes, is published in September by DJhistory.com
❏ Each issue of re:VOX costs £1.50 from Rob Kirby, 2 Bramshott Close, London Road, Hitchin, Herts SG4 9EP
WHICH TRACKS WOULD YOU LIKE ON
A BLITZ CLUB COMPILATION?
Egan plans to produce a Blitz Club album, not of the usual suspects who are wheeled out on 80s compilations, but artists as cutting-edge as those Rusty was so eagle-eared at finding on his travels through Europe in the late 70s. “Not 12-inch disco remixes,” he says. “Our clubs played great weird music like Can, Neu and Magazine.”
He is inviting lovers of Billy’s, Blitz and Club for Heroes music from 1978 to 1981 to propose the key tracks they think made London’s clubbing scene so inspirational. He names as examples the German version of Bowie’s “Helden” (1977) that he played relentlessly at Billy’s, RAF by Snatch featuring Brian Eno (1983) and Eno’s own King’s Lead Hat (1978), Television’s Little Johnny Jewel (1975) which he says has “great drums” from Billy Ficca, Klactoveesedstein by Blue Rondo a la Turk (1982), and the French model Ronny’s If You Want Me To Stay (1981).
❏ Send your track suggestions to Rusty Egan through the contact page at
Posh pop totty: Florence Welch and Lily Allen. Photos by Dave Hogan/Getty, and Icon/Rex
❚ HALF OF ALL PEOPLE WHO know who Pete Waterman is regard him as a genius. Or they did, until today’s outburst on BBC radio when he wrote off two decades of pop music. “It’s never been worse,” he harrumphed over breakfast on R4’s Today show, hinting at some insidious infection. His detractors have always condemned him as the schlock-meister who bulldozed the freshness of early 80s pop into oblivion by churning out some of the crassest tunes of the decade.
Waterman’s personal claim is to have created 22 UK number one singles, but the former apprentice electrician and club deejay is best-known as the founder of SAW, the Stock Aitken Waterman songwriting and production hit factory that put 100 singles into the UK top 40 chart and sold 40m records in a formulaic mix of Hi-NRG and Eurobeat (think Rick Astley, Jason Donovan, Hazell Dean, Mel & Kim, not forgetting Kylie). Immediately before impresario Simon Cowell stepped fully formed from the egg, Waterman left no less of an imprint on the British music scene through a strategy that skilfully avoided overestimating public taste.
What detonated 64-year-old, father-of-four Waterman this morning was the Today show. For no obvious reason it exhumed a survey from last month’s issue of The Word music magazine which had generated newspaper headlines in December by calculating that 60 per cent of current chart pop and rock acts must be middle class because they went to what we Brits paradoxically term “public” schools (meaning posh fee-paying private schools), compared with 20 per cent ten years ago. On average, fewer than a tenth of Brits attend fee-paying schools.
Examples cited were Lily Allen who boarded at Bedales, Grammy nominee Florence Welch from Alleyn’s School, the Nu-Folkies Mumford & Sons from King’s College School, and the not exactly current Coldplay’s Chris Martin from Sherborne, and Radiohead all ex-Abingdon.
Bah humbug. Light blue touchpaper and off Pete goes, whizz-bang. “This has been a gripe I’ve had for over 20 years, and particularly right now. It’s never been worse,” he blasted.
“The major companies dominate and they see a CV and if you haven’t got 96 O-levels you ain’t getting a job. When all the A&R people wear Jack Wills clothes [slogan: “Fabulously British clothes for the university crowd”] it tells you where they’re going. It’s become snobbish. It’s become a snobbish culture.”
Click through to the iPlayer to hear Pete in full spate on Today today. What he’s lamenting really is an end to John Lennon’s Working Class Hero who made British pop great in the swinging 60s — because he’d known what it was to live a hard life. “You’ve got to have lived the life to have sung the life.” Despite his honorary doctorate in music from University College Chester, Dr Waterman OBE concludes: “There’s no university in the world, ever, that has given you a degree in a hit record.”
➢ How pop went posh — Will Hodgkinson front-paged the topic on the arts section of The Times, August 13, 2010 … Adds the ex-Rugby Horrors to the list of public-school suspects, along with Foals (Abingdon). “One of the reasons all these bands are emerging is because public schools have such great facilities,” says old Etonian Tom Bridgewater, MD at Loose Music. The Times tenuously lists the “Top schools of rock” as Abingdon (Radiohead), Bedales (Patrick Wolf), Eton (James Blunt), Marlborough (Chris de Burgh — Is he the latest Marlborough can offer?), Westminster (Mika), plus the free state-funded city college, The Brit School in Croydon (Amy Winehouse).
FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY
❚ Pete Waterman made one of the most inspirational guests on Desert Island Discs in 1995 by expressing real erudition about his industry and popular culture. In a model lesson that was worthy of the Open University, he explained how pop music worked. And he identified the three best groups in music history who defined the essence of pop: The Beatles, The Beach Boys and, unexpectedly but rightly, Abba.
➢ 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
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❏ 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
◼ 30 YEARS AGO TODAY the Birmingham club-band Duran Duran released their debut single Planet Earth, less than two months after signing to EMI. It charted in mid-March, peaked at No 12, and bagged the band a spot on Top of the Pops, Britain’s premier music TV show. They were the first New Romantic band from outside London to make good, and this week the writer Steve Jansen claims that “inside of three short years, Duran were officially the biggest band on the planet”.
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