“ It’s lovely being asked to talk about Steve now, because I couldn’t right after he died. I’d start, but then I’d just burst into tears. He was one of my best friends and he created a big part of my personality. He showed me how exciting life could be, but how you could be a decent person with it. I also genuinely believe that everything that the 80s was, he started it. What people wore, how they did their hair, the decade of excess – that was all him. . .
Steve Strange’s gravestone erected 18 December in Porthcawl, South Wales
We were both working-class boys who had always wanted to do something else and here he was, doing it brilliantly. I looked up to him. He’d set up punk gigs back home in Wales, came up to London to work for Malcolm McLaren, and now he was carving out his own path away from punk. . . He succeeded because he was smothered in charisma. It drew everyone to him – the working class and the middle class loved him, but even the most upper-class people were immediately in the palm of his hand.
London made Steve, but it wasn’t good for him. He was a very intelligent man, but he got scrambled and crossed the line with drugs. . . The saddest thing is that I could see the end of Steve’s story long before it had been told. I’d waited for the phone call for years, so it wasn’t a shock. But to go to his funeral in Wales… it was incredibly sad. . . ” / Read the full tribute at the Observer online
Spandau Ballet singer Tony Hadley talking to Lorraine today. (Picture: Rex Shutterstock/ITV)
◼ METRO REPORTS TONY HADLEY talking to Lorraine Kelly today on ITV: “Spandau’s on hold, that’s kind of one of the reasons I did the jungle [TV show],” Tony said of the 80s chart-toppers. With the 2015 world tour ending only recently, he admitted that a future reunion shouldn’t be ruled out. “We’re really great friends and we’ll get back together every three or four years – which is how it should be.”
“ For his 27th studio album, has Bowie gone jazz? On first listens to Blackstar, released on 8 January, Bowie’s 69th birthday, it certainly sounds like rock’s oldest futurist has dusted down his saxophone. They are tooting, parping, wailing and gusting all over the place, occupying rhythmic, atmospheric and lead parts, with guitars and keyboards intermingling in a weave of supporting roles.
Donny McCaslin: Bowie’s new-found friend
The saxophone was Bowie’s first instrument, which he started learning in his pre-teens inspired by a bohemian, jazz-loving elder half-brother, Terry Burns. Bowie once said that, aged 14, he couldn’t decide if he wanted “to be a rock’n’roll singer or John Coltrane”. Even in his rise to rock fame, Bowie remained a creature of the jazz age, at least in the sense of the boundary-crashing freedom that characterises his work.
A new single, Lazarus, released today, may kick off in the vague realm of contemporary music, with spectral guitar and stuttering rhythms calling to mind the young British trio the xx, but it is not long before those saxophones are sighing and the beat is fragmenting. Just about holding it together are the familiar tones of Bowie’s teeth-gritted, tight-chested whisper of a vocal, proclaiming it is This way or no way / You know I’ll be free / Just like that bluebird / Now ain’t that just like me? Sure sounds like jazz to me. . .
What Bowie has created with this hardcore jazz crew, though, is not something any jazz fan would recognise and is all the better for it. At its best, free jazz is amongst the most technically advanced and audacious music ever heard but it can be uncompromisingly difficult to listen to for the non-aficionado. The improvisational elements that make it so gladiatorial and hypnotic live can make it over complex and inaccessible on record. Bowie’s intriguing experiment has been to take this wild, abstract form and try to turn it into songs. Blackstar is an album on which words and melody gradually rise from a sonic swamp to sink their hooks in. It is probably as close as free jazz has ever got to pop. . . ” / Read the full review at Telegraph online
◼ IN AN UNNERVING SIMULATION OF BOWIE’S VOICE, the star of Bowie’s new musical Lazarus, Michael C. Hall, sings its title track for the CBS Late Show (below) the day it is released as a single. The maestro himself is watching the show at home in his armchair. How meta-modern is that?!
➢ Bowie fulfills his jazz dream – Listen to an NPR Music interview with the two main characters who accompany Bowie on this new adventure in music – his longtime friend and producer Tony Visconti and his new-found friend/saxophonist and band leader Donny McCaslin.
LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner taking your calls: Click on this pic to open the live stream at touchmysoul.net in a new window
◼ SHIA LABEOUF INVITES YOU TO RING HIM AND TO#TOUCHMYSOUL – the art collective LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner are standing by, waiting for your calls as part of a new project at Liverpool’s FACT gallery, 11am–6pm GMT from Dec 10–13. Telephone +44 (0)151 808 0771. Or view the live stream. Or visit the gallery in person.
“ Luke Turner and Nastja Säde Rönkkö, it’s safe to say, don’t quite have the same growly charisma as Shia LaBeouf, a world-famous Hollywood actor turned performance artist. Indeed, they look as if they’ve won a competition to hang out with him. But the unlikely trio are adamant that they are an artistic collective, each on an equal footing. Turner wags a metaphorical finger at journalists who have failed to understand this.
“If it’s a positive article, it’s a work by the art collective,” he says. “If it’s negative, it’s by ‘actor Shia LaBeouf’.” He frowns. “It’s very peculiar to write about a work without saying who it’s by.”
But aren’t they like a band, where people are only interested in the singer? “Well,” says Turner, “you don’t say, ‘John Lennon has released his album.’ It’s the Beatles. I’m not comparing us to the Beatles, by the way.”
Since the beginning of 2014 – when LaBeouf heralded his new career by attending the premiere of Nymphomaniac with a paper bag over his head, scrawled with the words “I am not famous any more” – the three have dreamed up projects that have involved LaBeouf interacting directly with the public. “Why does a goat jump?” asks LaBeouf. “There’s an animalistic urge to express love that I can’t express in film”. . . ” / Continued at Guardian Online
Read transcripts of the live stream:
❏ Luke Turner tells uswhat we’re seeing beneath the live video stream: “It’s the three of us typing the fragments of conversation together as there’s only one phone line, so we’re all on it together. Colours just separate the ideas/threads of thought or conversation.”
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➢ For four days from 10 Dec 2015 #TOUCHMYSOUL is being streamed live from FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), 88 Wood Street, Liverpool L1 4DQ, as part of the group exhibition Follow, open 11 Dec 2015–21 Feb 2016 (admission free)
❏ Except that the performers didn’t revealany such thing. It was an impossible and ambiguous invitation – “Can you touch my soul?” – since some people insist there’s no such thing as the soul, and whatever it is, a soul is intangible or immaterial and cannot be touched anyway. The OED offers three definitions: “1, The spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal. 2, A person’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity. 3, Emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance.”
So what counts as a soul being touched? The TMS artists did not specify, neither before the four-day performance, nor after. The trio gave a post-event interview to Dazed Digital in which they still did not answer these questions. They talked about phoning and listening. The words meaningful and connection and rewarding experience recurred. All are intensely subjective, so how can we or they evaluate the outcome?
Luke Turner said that they wanted to “be receptive to whatever feelings might travel down the phone lines to us over those four days”. Do feelings touch a soul?
Nastja Säde Rönkkö said: “Some people moved us with their sweet energy, laughter, singing, silence, life stories, emotions.” Does all this mean touching a soul?
Shia LaBeouf spoke mostly in blank verse, very little of which made sense: “Connection is to be lived / And the internet is not any less alive.” Hm.
A curator said: “It’s about the framework of the show: what do you think is a real experience?” Ah, good old reality. There you go.
The event seemed to conclude with LaBeouf being tattooed with the words: “You. Now. Wow.” We were shown him being touched by the tattooist’s needle.
A project that doesn’t set out its brief beforehand risks missing its mark. It’s hard for callers to know what they’re expected to do or to evaluate any subsequent touching. The result was yards of telephone transcripts which are available to read online at touchmysoul – mainly touchy-feely, hippy-dippy psycho-babble and precious little enlightenment.
18 FEB UPDATE: A SELECTION OF THE 1,089 CALLS
Jerry Springer’s Final Thought:
“I play a crazy talk-show host, but that’s not me. It’s like an actor playing a role.”
David Bowie at rehearsals for Lazarus: wearing a feather embroidered wool-silk V-neck sweater by Alexander McQueen, plus the latest self-winding Louis Vuitton Tambour eVolution Chrono GMT watch in stainless steel. Facebook fans comment: “Back to blond!”. . . “Is that his John Shuttleworth impression?” … “Almost unbelievable that a man approaching 70 can cause such media interest”. . . “The watch is the Vuitton one he got for free when shooting in Venice [wink]” [Wrong!]. . . “Still not wearing his wedding ring though – it disappeared from his finger when he returned with The Next Day”. . . And a female: “Really the spit of his Dad there!”
◼ SOMETHING IS IN THE AIR.Bowie as you’ve never seen him before. Nothing new about that. But here he is with black spectacles and short-back-and-sides (plus a hint of moustache or mere cool stubble?) coming and going while his new show Lazarus is in rehearsals in New York, modestly and without fuss, sitting in the auditorium for previews alongside its director Ivo van Hove. “No one saw him sat there! ‘I can behave very well so nobody sees I’m there,’ he would say.” And before an enthusiastic first-night audience on Monday, Bowie appeared unshowily on stage to take a bow along with the cast. In fact, he looked inwardly chuffed.
The multimedia production is co-written with Enda Walsh and presented off-Broadway at the 200-seat New York Theatre Workshop. It is Bowie’s surreal live stage re-imagining of The Man Who Fell To Earth, according to the entertainment site ShockTillYouDrop. “This is a Bowie show. Lazarus takes pieces from Bowie’s music, album covers, music videos, and more, to belie a virtual scrapbook of the artist’s career and ideas new, used and unused.”
The New York Times decides it’s a “great-looking and mind-numbing new musical built around songs by David Bowie”, four of them new (Lazarus, No Plan, Killing a Little Time and When I Met You). Some songs “are rhapsodies of alienation; cries of solitary pain turn into our collective pleasure”.
Click any pic below to view bigger:
Bowie and director Ivo van Hove at Lazarus rehearsals
Hall as Newton and Caruso as an angelic muse
Hall as Newton and Milioti as Elly his romantic interest
A hint of moustache? Bowie arrives for the premiere
Bowie takes a bow: Stylish men in T-shirts protect their jacket collars from sweat with an Alexander McQueen navy and silver skull polka dot evening scarf… Proper lapels too on this McQueen single button shoulder jacket in worn-away cotton and wool
Applause for Sophia Anne Caruso, Michael C. Hall, Ivo van Hove, David Bowie and Cristin Milioti
Under the headline “Bowie’s weirdly brilliant off-Broadway masterpiece”, The Daily Beast says: “Lazarus contains its own surreal logic, but at its heart seems to be about love and connection, and the forces that can make or violently break such connections.”
Rolling Stone declares it a “Surrealistic tour de force: Impromptu kabuki actors invade the stage. And through it all, the humanoid Thomas Newton [The Man Who Fell to Earth] — played by golden-throated Michael C. Hall, who is best known for his roles on Dexter and Six Feet Under but whose theatrical credits include big roles in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Cabaret and Chicago — mostly remains stoic, lonely, yearning. At its core, Lazarus is a two-hour meditation on grief and lost hope (with no intermission), but it takes so many wild, fantastical, eye-popping turns that it never drags.”
In a nutshell, The Wrap media website raves: “It’s the best jukebox musical ever. That may not sound like much of a compliment, but when you put David Bowie’s musical catalogue at the service of book writers Bowie and Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove, the result is more than unique. It’s terrific must-see theater.”
Meanwhile in little ole London, look what has appeared on a billboard at Olympia – a stylish poster counting down to the January launch of Bowie’s new album, ★. And a Bowie New Year to us all!
Ta-daaa! Jonathan Barnbrook’s ★ billboard at Olympia
➢ 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
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