1983 ➤ A True romance aboard Spandau’s triumphal Thames riverboat

Posted on 29 Apr 2013 | Leave a comment
Spandau Ballet,1983, tour, Gary Kemp

Spandau over Bournemouth, 1 April 1983: Gary Kemp teases the screamers at the Good Friday show in the Pavilion Theatre. © Shapersofthe80s

❚ YES IT’S 30 YEARS SINCE Spandau Ballet scored their only No 1 chart hit single with True, coinciding with their epic “Spandau Over Britain Tour”. By May 3, True the album reached No 1, while the single remained at No 1 as well. The band’s official website is celebrating with a month of recollections from 1983 and asking UK fans to offer their own memories. Naturally Shapersofthe80s was there on the waterfront and has a few inside stories of its own.

The month-long tour ended in triumph at London’s Royal Festival Hall 30 years ago today, on Friday April 29, because True hit the top spot in the UK singles chart and the night before Spandau topped the bill on Top of the Pops – only two weeks after its release. After the London gig there followed a right old knees-up for friends and family aboard a Thames riverboat. As it cast off Shapersofthe80s was onboard and snapped a True romance as Steve “Spiny” Norman took to the dance floor with bass-player Martin Kemp, while Steve’s mum Sheila tried to muscle in. Here are our snaps, never seen before.

CLICK ANY PIC TO LAUNCH CAROUSEL:

Aboard Spandau’s True riverboat: Steve Norman and Martin Kemp take to the dancefloor, while Sheila Norman asks to join in
Steve and Martin are in heaven… See anybody else you know? Of course: future Spandau biographer Paul Simper in dog-tooth suit from Robot with added Wham!
Steve’s mum Sheila joins the chorus line, and backing singer Sam Brown joins Martin
At last, mother and son get to boogey together

The band’s third album True, produced by Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, had preceded the tour and was to yield several chart hits across the world, Gold among them. The tour moved on to Europe in the summer and to North America in the autumn, when Shapersofthe80s will have some wild eye-witness scenes to report – laters…

➢ May 1 update: all five members of Spandau Ballet have agreed to an individual ‘TRUE’ Twitter Q&A session with fans, according to the official Spandau website – Q&A sessions start at 8pm (BST) on the official Spandau Twitter account, not their personal accounts, as follows: Gary May 3, Martin May 6, John May 7, Steve May 9, Tony tbc.

➢ 30th anniversary interview with Gary Kemp
at UK Official Charts website

The Observer OMM Oct 4, 2009

The Observer OMM Oct 4, 2009

HOW IT ALL BEGAN FOR
THE ANGEL BOYS

➢ Read the story of Spandau Ballet,
the Blitz Kids and the birth of the New Romantics
in my feature at The Observer

➢ Photographer Neil Matthews, another friend of Spandau from their earliest days, has been celebrating with an exhibition of his popstar photos titled My 80s Through the Lens, at The Great British Restaurant, 14 North Audley Street, London W1K 6WE. All images can be viewed online and are for sale in limited editions printed on smart archival paper. As well as Spandau, his subjects include Bananarama, Blue Rondo, Bauhaus, Haysi Fantayzee, Malcolm McLaren, The Jam, Nick Heyward, Bow Wow Wow and more.

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➤ Synthpop cabaret from a right romantic pair of poseurs

Posted on 28 Apr 2013 | 1 comment
Terrible Splendour, synthpop,

A Terrible Splendour: the eternal themes of rebellion and shame

➢ If you want to support fresh electropop talent here are A Terrible Splendour – two Londoners called Martin Block and MM Lyle, whose heroes include Duran Duran, Ronny, Japan and Alphaville and they sound a lot like many of them. They say:

“ A Terrible Splendour are a London-based duo who weave tales of blackmail and despair, of cruelty and of heartbreak. Drawing from the Silver Screen, Romanticism and the New Wave, their sound is a darkly luxurious synthesised pop, fractured through the lens of a cursed Berlin.

Terrible Splendour, synthpop,PoseursTheir live shows are a theatre of love and death, with performances drawing on Weimar-era cabaret. The recent self-made video for their track Victimless Crime displays an aesthetic that references German Impressionist cinema and gothic storytelling.

The band’s debut album Poseurs, is released on the French electronic label Desire, to include a limited edition of 300 copies on white vinyl. It features 11 tracks ranging in style from dissolute disco to sombre cabaret musings. Resolutely modern synth sounds, in turn lush and vicious, combine with lyrics addressing the eternal themes of rebellion, shame and the vagaries of outrage. Plus sparkling new mixes by producer James Aparicio (These New Puritans, Spiritualized). ”

Er, thassabout it.

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➤ Playlists to keep us foot-tapping into May

Posted on 27 Apr 2013 | Leave a comment
Basement Jaxx ,video,Back 2 The Wild

Back 2 The Wild: Click on pic to run video in a new window

➢ Bedazzling music video for the new Basement Jaxx single Back 2 The Wild is directed by Mat Maitland at Big Active & Natalia Stuyk. Salient points at Popjustice:

  1. Basement Jaxx are Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe and they hail from London, England.
  2. They’ve collaborated with “everyone” from Kele Le Roc to JC Chasez to Dizzee Rascal to Robyn.
  3. If a song of theirs came on in a club it would not be inappropriate to have a bit of a dance.

➢ Double whammy: view the Wild video in super-high quality and visit their own online playlist at jaxxplayer

Dazed Digital ,May,Playlist ,Jessie Ware
➢ Dazed Digital has a vibey May playlist alongside its main feature post-punk stars, Savages. It says:
“ We’ve got a whole lot of Jeremih from his Cassie mixape collab to Shlohmo, new Gold Panda, Co La’s experimental single on Software, the first release from legendary London establishment Fabric’s Houndstooth label as well as an exclusive stream from Pedestrian’s new EP and more from our recently featured avant-garde electronic duo Diamond Version. ” Not to mention Jessie Ware.

Electricity Club,Kraftwerk, Mi-Soul, radio, Rusty Egan

Electricity Club Showman Rusty Egan: any kind of music so long as it’s electro

➢ Rusty Egan presents The Electricity Club Show every Friday 00:00 till 02:00 BST … Either take this picturesque catch-up route via the Electricity Club which champions the current electropop scene:

“ Eins-zwei-drei-vier… the fourth programme in the series Egan Presents The Electricity Club on Mi-Soul Radio can now be heard on catchup. The show starts with Kraftwerk and the other featured artists are fine examples of the Düsseldorf foursome’s legacy. These acts include Felix Da Housecat, Tiga & Zyntherius, Afrika Bambaataa, The Knife, Omd, Junkie Xl Featuring Dave Gahan, Mgmt, Simple Minds, Sin Cos Tan, Daft Punk, Inertia And The Presets. ”

➢ Or tune in live to Egan playing the best in electronic music at Mi-Soul on Fridays 00:00 till 02:00 BST

“ Mi-Soul is a soul music broadcast platform, providing everything soul everywhere – online, on mobile app and in due course on FM and digital, and any other future platform yet to be invented. Launched by the team responsible for creating Kiss FM in the 1990s, Mi-Soul continues to be supported by many of the original DJ team, augmented by high-profile presenters in every genre. Mi-Soul occupies a self-contained wing in the in the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust’s iconic building in Deptford, which was designed by the award-winning architect David Adjaye, and opened in 2008. ”

RUSTY’S SUMMER IN THE MED

❏ Rusty Egan says: “If you are in Cannes for the film festival I will be there on the Croisette at “Canvas” on the beach opposite Carlton Cannes hotel May 17–19 … then in Ibiza at Nassau Beach Bar with Steve Norman from Spandau Ballet on sax and percussion, from May to Sept every other Friday … I have been very busy writing and recording new music under the title Welcome To The Dancefloor and will be ready to release some stuff very soon. Visit Soundcloud to sample some.”

♫ Rusty Egan’s Playlist at the Blitz

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➤ 14,000 words on Bowie’s album – responding to Bowie’s own 42 words telling what it’s all about

Posted on 26 Apr 2013 | Leave a comment

❚ AND YOU WON’T STOP READING THEM! A novelist asked David Bowie to explain his comeback album. In his own way, Bowie uttered his first public words on the subject: 42 of them.

Rick Moody,reviews,David Bowie, The Next Day,pop music,Britishness

Rick Moody photographed by Seamus Kearney … and a salute from Bowie at 66

“Never has an album been quite as resistant to interpretation as The Next Day,” writes Rick Moody, the 51-year-old American author, tipped by New Yorker magazine as one of its “20 writers for the 21st century”. So he asked Bowie for some clues! We offer a few teasers here to entice you in, but no spoilers. The original piece is so rewarding, you won’t regret setting aside half an hour of your time to devour it… Moody talks of cocktail napkins, albatrosses, a sequence of ghosts and the pressure to be à la mode … of chanson, of papal indulgences, of hatred of rhyme, the ancient temple in Rome, quintessential Britishness, rethinking certainties and the world at war…

SHAPERS OF THE 80S OFFERS AN EXTRACT
FROM HIS MONUMENTAL ANALYSIS

➢ Rick Moody dissects Bowie’s new album with the help of its creator in 14,000 words published yesterday. Read the full essay at the pop-cultural web platform, The Rumpus

BY RICK MOODY: “ I am writing these lines because The Next Day, the album by David Bowie, is the unlikeliest masterpiece of the recent popular song, the best album by an otherwise retired classic rock artist in many, many years. It kicks the shit out of that recent spate of albums by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, it is better than anything the Stones did since Tattoo You … [etc etc etc]

“ It’s a remarkable and completely unpredictable masterpiece by a guy in his later sixties, an album that doesn’t sound like anything else happening in 2013, except that it sounds, in some ways, like a lot of the very best work David Bowie has done … [etc etc etc]

“ In the environment of Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and One Direction, David Bowie sounds like a titan, like a behemoth of song, but it’s not only because of his context, it’s because he made a great album, which has more passion in each composition than most people manage in entire albums … [etc etc etc]

“ I wanted to understand the lexicon of The Next Day, and so I simply asked if he would provide this list of words about his album… and yet astonishingly the list appeared, and it appeared without further comment, which is really excellent, and exactly in the spirit of this album, and the list is far better than I could ever have hoped. ”

David Bowie, The Next Day, Where Are We Now?,video

Having asked Where Are We Now? in his first comeback single this year, Bowie’s second posed other enticing questions in a sexually ambiguous video for The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (ISO Records)

BOWIE’S LIST

Effigies

Indulgences

Anarchist

Violence

Chthonic

Intimidation

Vampyric

Pantheon

Succubus

Hostage

Transference

Identity

Mauer

Interface

Flitting

Isolation

Revenge

Osmosis

Crusade

Tyrant

Domination

Indifference

Miasma

Pressgang

Displaced

Flight

Resettlement

Funereal

Glide

Trace

Balkan

Burial

Reverse

Manipulate

Origin

Text

Traitor

Urban

Comeuppance

Tragic

Nerve

Mystification

“ It’s a great list, and it has the word chthonic on it, and this is one of my very favorite words, and you have to admit, additionally, chthonic is a great word, and all art that is chthonic is excellent art, and art that has nothing chthonic about it, like, let’s say, ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, that is art that’s hard to withstand ” …
➢ Rick Moody continues at The Rumpus

POSTSCRIPT VIA IAN HUNTER

+++
❏ Rick Moody: “ They have no idea how easy it would be to stop. Still, this neglects the loss you would feel about retirement… Ian Hunter, the British singer-songwriter and Bowie’s acquaintance for whom he once wrote All the Young Dudes, had a song on this subject, on his comeback album called Rant (2001), the song being Dead Man Walking (What am I supposed to do now?/ Crawl down the hole of monotony?/ The silence is deafening/ The phone never rings) ”

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2013 ➤ A ‘blistering’ picture hoard from punk’s formative years

Posted on 25 Apr 2013 | Leave a comment
The Clash,book, exhibition,Photography, Sheila Rock

The Clash in 1976. Photographed by Sheila Rock

❚ FOR THOSE WHO SURVIVED the mid-70s, punk was the anti-fashion UK phenomenon that transformed contemporary culture. Now “a blistering 1976-80 photo-hoard” of mostly unseen pictures has been published as a 272-page photobook. Punk+ by Sheila Rock – an American in London – chronicles both designer and street styles that impacted on fashion, society and politics, including Vivienne Westwood’s shop SEX as well as BOY, Robot and Acme Attractions. The collection, which had been stored in a box in Rock’s garden shed, includes formative images of The Clash, Chrissie Hynde, Paul Weller, The Jam, Generation X, Siouxsie & the Banshees and The Sex Pistols.

Paul Simonon of The Clash says: “This book is a great photographic record of a major shift in British street fashion.”

Sheila Rock arrived in London in 1970 to join the David Bowie circle, and it was her friend and Patti Smith guitarist, Lenny Kaye, who took her to a gig by the then-unknown Clash. “That was the first time I was introduced to the punk scene,” she says. “I decided to take my Nikon camera with me and my photography career began.” Her photographs of showbiz performers and musicians have been published in titles from Vogue to The Sunday Times and can also be found in London’s National Portrait Gallery. This month her pix will also be showing in the Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Mick Jones,,book, exhibition,Photography, Sheila Rock

At the Brown’s party tonight: Sheila Rock with Clash guitarist and vocalist Mick Jones. Photograph © by Beki Cowey

Rock’s career took off in 1980 in The Face, the 80s style bible published by Nick Logan, who describes Rock as “self-effacing but sweetly persuasive” in the preface to PUNK+. He notes how she refined her images to capture a style that portrayed what her subjects wanted to personify. She often achieved this better than they understood themselves.

Tonight the book was launched with a two-week exhibition of Rock’s photographs at Brown’s high fashion store in London, and a further show runs for a month from May 28 at Rough Trade East, where there’s also a book signing.

Mojo Magazine reports: “Sheila Rock’s PUNK+ book presents a blistering 1976-80 photo-hoard. The striking and fascinating photo-book collects almost 200 images of groups including The Subway Sect, Eater, Buzzcocks, The Clash and the Sex Pistols, plus documentation of the rapidly changing fashions of the late 70s. She estimates 90 per cent of the shots have never been seen, and that 85 per cent were self-motivated experiments rather than work commissions. Those enthralled by shifts in vintage youth styles will also delight in the images of unselfconscious punks, such as the young Jam fans who mixed the Weller look with the safety-pin aesthetic.”

➢ PUNK+ is published by First Third Books Ltd (London and Paris): 272 pages, size 20 x 27cm, limited edition of 300 copies signed and numbered, £99; standard edition of 1,700 copies, £49. The book includes illuminating conversations with Chrissie Hynde, Tony James, Don Letts, Jeanette Lee, Glen Matlock, Chris Salewicz, Jon Savage, Steven Severin, Paul Simonon, Jah Wobble and more.

➢ Sheila Rock celebrates punk at Brown’s Men’s dept,
London W1K 5QG, April 25–May 7, Vogue preview

➢ Another exhibition of photos by Sheila Rock runs May 28–June 30 at Rough Trade East, 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL. On May 29 at 7pm Sheila will be joined by Don Letts and Jeanette Lee plus special guests for a Q&A event and afterwards a signing session for her book Punk+.

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