Be amazed: Jamie Allan exploiting high-tech illusions
❚ IN AUGUST WAS BOWLED OVER by an evening of 16 (I think!) fresh and original magical illusions under the title of Jamie Allan’s Amaze at London’s Marylebone theatre. This month it rightly transfers to the West End’s Criterion Theatre for a 47-show season. Declared “a master class in magic” by the Chicago Tribune, this superb live event thrills adults and kids alike as Allan blends state-of-the-art technology with timeless conjuring techniques, often involving members of the audience. In August he staged a baffling finale where he produced so many cards from nowhere to cover the stage’s floor, having removed his jacket so we could blatantly see there was nothing up anybody’s sleeves! I’ll be going again. ➢ Jamie Allan’s Amaze runs 18 Oct-23 Nov
at the Criterion Theatre, London
Click on image to treat yourself to this audio track at YouTube, Masked Moods (Long Version)
❚ MOST OF US have fond memories of Blue Rondo a la Turk, the seven-piece jazz/salsa band created by Chris Sullivan in 1981 and their first album Chewing the Fat, which I still consider the most original album of 1982. This yielded two chart singles, Me and Mr Sanchez and Klactoveesedstein. But after the band split and reformed as a trio named Blue Rondo who eventually released a second album in 1984, Bees Knees and Chicken Elbows, not many of us can recall many of its singles apart from Slipping Into Daylight.
Deep breath… Tonight Sullivan throws a party in Soho to celebrate this album’s re-issue by re-release by Cherry Red Records in a two-CD box, the second CD featuring Rondo’s previously unreleased tracks.
❚ ANY FAN OF DURAN DURAN remembers the very first photographs of the band in 1980 as they finalised their line-up which was to win a recording contract by year’s end and secure their first chart hit with Planet Earth. The five musicians were young and handsome and while they emerged as lucky leaders of the New Romantic music and fashion movement based on Birmingham’s Rum Runner nightclub, so local teenager Paul Edmond learned the skills of photography by capturing their frilly shirts. These Pose Age outfits took inspiration from Jane Kahn and Patti Bell’s futurist boutique, but in those DIY days before stylists had been invented, it fell to Paul to inject a sense of cool nonchalance into his images of the budding pop stars as they too practised how best to look a camera in the eye.
Four decades later, after selling 100 million records, winning umpteen music awards, and being welcomed into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Duran themselves revel in releasing new material and reworking the old, their latest album being Danse Macabre. How appropriate then that the photographic archive of Paul Edmond – which embraces a wider world of youth culture than only that of Duran – is being published this spring. A trio of books filling 200 A4 pages has been initiated by his sister Maggie K de Monde, herself an all-round song-writer and performer. Nick Rhodes makes a contribution. Advance orders for the £90 package are being invited by APS Books of Yorkshire, with delivery expected in June.
Tragically, Paul himself cannot share this poignant moment because he was killed in a road accident in 2015. He and I became great friends working on the monthly magazine New Sounds New Styles in 1981, for which he took an arresting cover picture of Jane Farrimond and the flamboyant Martin Degville, a pair of Brummie style leaders who both ended up in the band Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
❚ WHETHER YOU LIKE ABBA’s SONGS or not, the scale of the West-End musical MAMMA MIA!’s success is staggering. Over 25 years it has been seen by 70 million people in 450 cities across the world, in 16 different languages. At the box office, the show has made £4.5 billion. Yes, billion !!!
So not to have seen this award-winning show is quite a feat, I am ashamed to admit. Yet on the 25th anniversary performance of MAMMA MIA! this weekend at London’s Novello Theatre I was blown away by the sheer energy and quality of this showbiz landmark, with its 34-strong cast of athletic dancers and powerful singers (especially Mazz Murray playing free-love mother Donna) plus an astonishing live orchestra. Here was the essence of full-on theatre.
What was rare for a stage musical was that the audience already knew almost every one of the show’s 22 numbers, written during the decade after ABBA won the Eurovision song contest in 1974 with Waterloo. Yet the lyrics repeatedly proved to be eye-openers during MAMMA MIA!, acting as dialogue to provide a dramatic family plot around a young girl’s marriage on a sunny Greek island.
Crucially many songs were injected with a comic twist, as with Take a Chance on Me and indeed Honey Honey which, the programme tells us, had Björn Ulvaeus – its co-author along with Benny Andersson – falling off his chair laughing and insisting “I didn’t write this as funny!” On an emotional level there were several truly tear-jerking moments as the family saga unfolded, prompted by songs such as Knowing Me, Knowing You and The Winner Takes it All.
Given that today the four members of ABBA are multi-millionaires, it’s ironic that I profiled them as the first entry in an A-to-Z Sunday Times partwork titled 1000 Makers of Music in 1997 by noting that as Swedish journeyman songsmiths in the Seventies their sing-along melodies epitomised Europe’s dreaded folkloric tradition – in contrast to Anglo-American guitar heroes who mouthed youthful dissent. Nevertheless during their breakthrough decade before disbanding ABBA scored eight consecutive No 1 albums in Britain and 25 Top 40 singles, so catchy that everybody could hum one. A decade further along, the quartet had acquired cult status as exponents of what we had grown to appreciate as “pure pop”.
In 2023 ABBA were awarded the BRIT Billion Award which celebrates musicians who have achieved one billion UK streams in their career. Today they stand tall among the best-selling artists in music history. Last month, all four members of ABBA were appointed Commander, First Class, of the Royal Order of Vasa by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. This is the first time in almost 50 years that the Swedish Royal Orders of Knighthood have been bestowed.
➢ 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 2024
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch 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 800 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
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