➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣

2010 ➤ Spandau Ballet turn east for their final furlong

Posted on 26 Jun 2010 | 2 comments

Spandau Ballet, farewell performance, end of tour, Newmarket, racecourse,

Spandau onstage last night at Newmarket’s July racecourse. Photographs © by Shapersofthe80s

❚ 19,000 FANS OF POP MUSIC AND HORSERACING from across the rural region of East Anglia roared a big welcome at 9.25 last night for Spandau Ballet’s final concert before they sign off from touring. Insiders were once again wondering out loud whether the five former schoolmates who reformed last year after a separation of almost 20 years will ever play together again, so busy are their individual careers.

Balmy midsummer weather blessed the gathering, as the band followed a programme of seven races at Newmarket’s July Course with 14 hit numbers that most people in the throng spookily seemed to know by heart.

Not knowing what to expect from this curious hybrid audience, Spandau manager Steve Dagger had initially been hesitant about playing the venue. By about 6pm the car-parks were packed and the crowd had swollen, dress-coded in smart-casual summer finery. “Look at them! Those people are definitely here for the music. The fact is there isn’t another venue big enough for 19,000 people in the east of England.” There was only a brief pause before we witnessed a conversion on the Road to Damascus, against all expectations. As he surveyed the sheer numbers of revellers game for a big day out, grinning the Dagger grin, he murmured what would have been heresy during Spandau’s early anti-rock era: “Now that we’ve broken our festival duck, we might be up for doing Glastonbury next year. Who knows . . . ?” You read it here first.

Otherwise, thassit for Spandau’s touring until further notice. Tough luck, America, but the numbers simply don’t stack up. And any talk of the 2012 Olympics is pure fanclub speculation. So start campaigning now.

❏ An established event in the cultural calendar, Newmarket Nights host gigs by Simply Red and Razorlight on July 16 and 23.

➢ Update Aug 28 — “We’ve got about a year-and-a-half off now”

➢ Nov 15, 2010 — Read “The best year of our lives” — Paul Simper’s summary of the Reformation tour published on Spandau’s official website. Take a hint from drummer John Keeble’s verdict: “You miss everything at the end of a tour. You miss the piss-taking, you even miss the getting up early. Everyone wants to be a rock star and it doesn’t get much better than a tour like that. But now people are looking to the future. Are we going to do this again? Of course we will. There’s no agenda to sort out any more. File Spandau under ‘to be continued’…”

Spandau Ballet, Newmarket Nights, final performance,Olympics,American tour

Smart girls enjoying a last glimpse of the Ballet boys at Newmarket

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Posted in London, Media, Pop music, Social trends, Youth culture

Tagged Concert, Spandau Ballet, Video

2010 ➤ Is it goodbye or merely au revoir? Spandau’s questions, questions give us no answers

Posted on 25 Jun 2010 | 1 comment

Spandau Ballet, Heaven club, London, New Romantics

London’s Heaven club, Dec 29, 1980: the tenth of Spandau Ballet’s selected dates, as they were known in those days to avoid the rockist words “gig” and “tour”. Note Gary Kemp, far left, on synth. Photograph © by Shapersofthe80s

❚ TONIGHT AT A SWANK EVENING BASH Spandau Ballet bow out from the Reformation Tour which reunited the five former schoolmates from the Angel, Islington, for one year, one album, one single, one tour, one DVD and umpteen vintage remixes. They headline the second of this year’s Newmarket Nights at the summer racecourse near the Suffolk market town renowned as the birthplace of thoroughbred horse racing.

Tomorrow the mobile knives climb back in the drawer and who knows whether they will ever be sharpened again as a team? Tony Hadley in particular hits the road on July 3 with his own band alongside ABC and Rick Astley. It’s the first of a series of Heart Radio picnic concerts, starting at Borde Hill Garden in Sussex.

Reasons reasons were there from the start, so each member of Spandau returns to his own art. Shapersofthe80s, too, was there from the start, corralling the 22 Blitz Kids who put the show on the road in 1980 for a now-nostalgic team photo at the Waldorf Hotel. Robert Elms even smuggled a copy of my Evening Standard column into the picture in his right hand, sentimentalists as we were at the outset of the big adventure. Blue sing la lune, sing lagoon.

Instead of a traditional retirement clock, here’s a bespoke souvenir of their heyday for the Angel Boys, courtesy of the E4 TV series Skins. It’s a slideshow of Spandau’s biggest No 1 hit True, rendered very poignantly with ukulele backing . . .

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Posted in Clubbing, London, Media, Pop music, Social trends, Youth culture

Tagged Evening Standard, New Romantics, Spandau Ballet

2010 ➤ Step up Martin Kemp – movie mogul

Posted on 24 Jun 2010 | Leave a comment

Martin Kemp,Jonathan Sothcott, Black and Blue Films,Expose

Kemp and Sothcott: director and producer with Hammer Horror in mind

❚ ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLAR. Who’s this relaxed and expansive dude sitting in smart restaurant with his business partner talking about their upcoming horror movie? Yes, in the week that his band of 80s popsters Spandau Ballet wind up their year-long reunion tour with a posh send-off concert at Newmarket racecourse, bass player Martin Kemp presses the button marked Publicity for his next project.

Kemp at 15: scene-stealing in The Glittering Prizes

At the ripe old age of 48 he’s now a writer and director of films, which might seem a logical next step after a lifetime of watching how it’s done. His long list of acting credits stretches back to that first child-star cameo in the coolest TV serial of 1976, The Glittering Prizes, which made an international star of Tom Conti, after which Kemp made his mark as those folk villains Reggie Kray in The Krays and Steve Owen in EastEnders.

Even while his pop career was being reanimated with Spandau, Kemp had formed a British company called Black and Blue Films in partnership with 30-year-old producer Jonathan Sothcott and actor Billy Murray, a familiar face from TV soaps. In a video interview with Kemp he says his directorial debut is a remake of a notorious 1976 video nasty called Exposé, given the new title of Stalker (click through for trailer). It’s an old dark house psycho-drama, with plenty of blood, if clips from the new version are any indication. “People start dying,” says Sothcott and Kemp adds: “All in one house. That’s a good premise for low-budget film.”

Expose, Black and Blue Films, Anna Brecon, Martin Kemp

Anna Brecon in Exposé: says it all

That was the cleverest lesson Kemp learned about screenplays, Sothcott maintains: “He wrote it low-budget! So we could shoot it fast and cheap, which so many writers in this country don’t do.”

For Kemp, the hardest challenge as a director was to keep the story rolling. “That’s what I learned on Exposé, pacing the story. That’s where I’ve seen lots of my friends fall down on their first feature, never on the acting or photography – it is telling the story.

“This is my 40th year in entertainment, so it’s nice to mark it with a something new. Every project throws up different problems that you have to solve – directing means you have to solve everybody else’s as well.”

Sothcott lays his own cards on the table: “The model I’m trying to rip off with Black and Blue is Hammer [the much-loved tongue-in-cheek horror studio of the 50s and 60s, which churned out gothic potboilers calculated to make audiences laugh as much as scream]. Next year I hope we’ll be making six crime-horror-comedy movies that will sell all round the world – stuff that isn’t just Brit-centric. Stuff that’s fun.”

Despite the chaotic economic climate, Kemp maintains that their company is thriving. “We’ve had a funny couple of years. All around us are production companies closing down, not able to get money, and we’ve had possibly the best two years ever. We’ve got Just For the Record [see trailer below, a Spinal Tap-type spoof, but of the film industry: “This wouldn’t have happened on Grange Hill”] and we’re in talks about another couple of films. Exposé was so much fun, I can’t wait to do my next.”

Watch out also for Dead Cert, a fast-moving vampire frightener starring cockney Craig Fairbrass: “Kill ’em, that’s the only thing we can do.”

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1966 ➤ When John Lennon became US public enemy number one

Posted on 23 Jun 2010 | Leave a comment

Beatles, burnings, Alabama,more popular than Jesus

Birmingham, Alabama in 1966: a warm welcome awaits The Beatles

Beatles, tour, USA 1966, burnings, Shea Stadium,more popular than Jesus

From the extreme right to another: God-fearing fans burn Beatles records in the Bible Belt in 1966 . . . while 45,000 more pack Shea Stadium in New York City. (Picture by AP)

❚ FAME FASCINATES NOW NO LESS THAN IT DID THEN. Interest in John Lennon intensifies this year because it brings the 70th anniversary of his birth and the 30th of his murder in New York. There, a prestigious 70th birthday celebration is being held at Radio City Music Hall on September 25 starring The Fab Faux, a premier-league tribute band. Soon after, Liverpool goes into overdrive for two whole months of Lennon worship.

Lennon Naked, an unflattering new drama-doc: Christopher Eccleston stars as John Lennon with Naoko Mori as Yoko Ono. © BBC

Tonight and tomorrow BBC4 steals a march with Lennon Naked, a robust drama-documentary charting the musician’s activities from 1967 to 1971, a turbulent period which included the dissolution of The Beatles as the most popular group in pop history, huge enough to have pioneered the stadium concert. The sudden death in 1967 of gifted Beatles manager Brian Epstein was devastating for each of the Fab Four – Lennon most of all. He leaned ever more heavily on the bewitching catalyst for change in his own fortunes, the artist Yoko Ono, whom he had met the previous November in London.

With Beatlemania at its height, and the Fabs the coolest ambassadors for Swinging London, 1966 had precipitated its own trauma. Not only was Lennon taking his first steps exploring the not-yet fashionable halucinatory drug LSD, but in July a bombshell exploded in his lap, as The Beatles’ world tour was about to descend on 14 cities in North America.

An interview was published in an American teen magazine in which he boldly asserted of The Beatles’ fame: “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” Across the American Bible-belt and beyond, God-fearing Christians were outraged. Anti-Beatle demonstrations and public burnings of their records ensued, the Ku Klux Klan – a right-wing hate group – vowed vengeance and death threats were reported. Such was the pressure on the whole entourage that when a fan threw a lit firecracker onstage in Memphis and it went off, the Beatles’ press agent Tony Barrow recalls: “All of us at the side of the stage, including three Beatles on stage, all looked immediately at John Lennon. We would not at that moment have been surprised to see that guy go down.”

Though repeated apologies were issued at press conferences across the States, after the San Francisco concert on August 29, 1966, the whole furore persuaded the band to stop touring ever again.

The now notorious “Jesus” quote had arisen in conversation with the British journalist Maureen Cleave, a clear-sighted interviewer on the London Evening Standard where it had been first published without raising an eyebrow in the increasingly secular UK. Today, Shapersofthe80s republishes her riveting account of her tour of Lennon’s Weybridge home, which set out to explore the then novel phenomenon of four popstars who were so famous they couldn’t set foot in public without being mobbed. Thanks to the trust the Fab Four placed in her, Cleave sought to put Beatlemania under the microscope by interviewing John, George, Paul and Ringo separately and successively, under the series title How Does a Beatle Live? Lennon, for one, would ask when you rang, “What day is it?” – with genuine interest.

➢➢ Click to read the original article on Lennon,
How Does a Beatle Live?

Maureen Cleave, The Beatles, Evening Standard,more popular than Jesus

Maureen Cleave recalls: “Ringo used to say the only place he felt safe was in the lavatory; so the Standard once took a photograph of them all there, with Paul sitting on the washbasin.” She never mentions that she was sitting in the middle.

➢➢ Beatles pics from 1966 – Daily Mirror slideshows

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1984 ➤ 2010, RIP Big Frank and Little Frank. You’ll be missed. You know you will, you really will

Posted on 22 Jun 2010 | Leave a comment

❚ TIMPERLEY COMEDY LEGEND FRANK SIDEBOTTOM IS NO MORE. The man in the papier-mâché head like a Max Fleischer cartoon has been revealed only in death to have been aka Chris Sievey. Almost entirely unknown to the effete south of England, Lancastrian icon Frank was unleashed on the world through a record given away with the video game The Biz, presciently created by Sievey for the pioneering ZX Spectrum computer in 1984.

Only last week, he launched a comedy song for the World Cup, titled Three Shirts on My Line. Campaigns to Make Frank No 1 in the pop charts have begun at twitter.com/MakeFrank1 and at the Facebook group Let’s get Frank Sidebottom in the charts, which is bursting with tribute images. The Manchester Evening News reports that Frank is facing a pauper’s funeral after dying virtually penniless, so visitors to this impromptu Facebook page have already established a fund, being helped by Guardian writer and former bandmate Jon Ronson who asks for donations to go via this Paypal account: jonelle1929@gmail.com. [Appeal now closed, see update below]

Frank Sidebottom, Three Shirts On My Line, World Cup, Nick Hilditch, tributes

Official unofficial World Cup song launch: Frank at The Salutation pub in Manchester last month. Right, Nick Hilditch’s concept for a statue in Albert Square, pointing to Timperley

Frank Sidebottom zoomed to cult status through comedy records on the Regal Zonophone label and his broadcasts on Radio Timperley for Manchester Radio Online. Within minutes his stand-up routine rocketed him to 80s superstardom, accompanied by Little Frank, a puppet who was his deadringer. From 1986 he had his own comic strip in an anarchic children’s comic called Oink! which was top-shelved by many newsagents. He regularly reported for the regional TV news programme, Granada Reports, graduating to his own ITV showcase, Frank Sidebottom’s Fantastic Shed Show.

Sidebottom, whose fame was greatest during the late 1980s, can truly claim to have put on the map such names as Timperley, St Helen’s, Altrincham FC, Mrs Merton, Mark Radcliffe and most notoriously Chris Evans. Among the final appearances of Big Frank and Little Frank was the living test card shown on late-night television in Greater Manchester on Channel M.

Sievey left a daughter, Asher, 31 and two sons, Stirling, 31, and Harry, 18, who still lives with Sievey’s ex-wife Paula. Frank’s catchphrase was “The Robins aren’t Bobbins”. Another one was “You know it is, it really is”.

Frank Sidebottom, Edwina Currie, Cheshire FM

Sidebottom the broadcaster: Frank meets Vicky at Cheshire FM . . . and interviews MP Edwina Currie for Granada TV

➢➢ Genuinely a genius – Manchester’s showbusiness stars lead the tributes
➢➢ Longtime friend Mick Middles recalls Frank’s creator, first encountered as frontman of The Freshies, an off-kilter power pop band
➢➢ “A curious line in daft Bontempi songs” – The Guardian obit, June 22
➢➢ VIEW ♫ ♫ Frank Sidebottom explaining Three Shirts on my Line, his unofficial World Cup 2010 song, at the Monarch in Camden Town last December

Find the complete Sidebottom discography at Frank’s interweb site

➢➢ Frank’s World, the official official site
➢➢ Complete Sidebottom discography at Frank’s interweb fan site run by Russ
➢➢ Frank Sidebottom at MySpace
➢➢ VIEW ♫ ♫ Chris Sievey and the Freshies in the studio recording Bouncing Babies – a poptastic treasure from 1981
➢➢ VIEW The Magical Timperley Tour – Frank Sidebottom takes a load of people on an amazing bus tour through his home village of Timperley . . .

➤ Update: fan fund totals £21,240
for Frank’s send-off

Chris, aka Frank

❚ FRIDAY JULY 2 IS THE DATE for Chris Sievey’s funeral. A private service for family and friends will be held at Altrincham Crematorium to celebrate the life of the man who created the cult hero Frank Sidebottom. It is being funded by donations from an internet campaign. Within six days of his death from cancer, donations to the funeral fund saved Sidebottom’s creator from a pauper’s funeral. More than 2,500 supporters signed up to the Facebook group Frank’s Fantastic Funeral, with Twitter claiming 3,400 followers. The appeal fund closed on Sunday June 27 at £21,240.

His son Stirling, 31, said the private funeral would give those who knew his dad the chance to mourn the man behind the mask. “The funeral is for friends and family of Chris. We want to hold a celebration of Frank within the next couple of weeks. We are looking at venues, including Manchester town hall.” [More at the Manchester Evening News]

➢➢ UPDATE: A fresh assessment of Chris Sievey, the little-known creator of Frank Sidebottom

❚ IGNORED BY THE MAINSTREAM ALL HIS LIFE, the cult comedian cum cod pop star finally made headline news in death. Plenty of people didn’t get Sidebottom. The first time he appeared at Liverpool University, he bombed. “Did Sievey like being Frank? Yes. Would he prefer to have been a Beatle? Yes.” – Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, June 26, 2010

➢➢ Radio Presenter Mark Radcliffe describes the “real affection” evident at the funeral of his close friend Chris Sievey

❚ THE END OF THE SERVICE for Sievey at Altrincham Crematorium, July 2, was marked by the Beach Boys hit God Only Knows. A celebration of his life, titled Frank’s Fantastic Farewell, is being held in Castlefield Arena on July 8, 7-10pm, admission free.