Kahn & Bell in their heyday, photographed by Paul Edmond
❚ IT’S GOOD TO SEE how trendsetters in Birmingham have been reminding the world of the city’s reputation for creativity. Only last December people with long memories succeeded at finally getting a blue plaque erected on the site of the legendary nightspot, the Rum Runner, birthplace of the international supergroup Duran Duran during the Swinging 80s, and a vital platform for Annie Lennox, Fine Young Cannibals, Dexys, Fashion and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
No less famous than the Rum Runner were Jane Kahn and Patti Bell, the fashion duo with their boutique at 72 Hurst Street from 1976 to 1986, which became an epicentre for the alternative music and fashion scene. Their penchant for fantasy and theatricality found them designing hand-made clothing for Duran Duran, the dance group Shock and even Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz. One of their models who worked in the shop as a teenager was the local drag legend Twiggy.
K&B have been described as Birmingham’s equivalent to Vivienne Westwood and the New Romantic magazine New Sounds New Styles observed in 1981: “When similarities to London designers were seen in their collections it was considered that Birmingham had copied London.” This was by no means the case. Duran’s photographer Paul Edmond preferred to describe Patti and Jane as “the queen and princess of the Birmingham New Romantic scene… Patti was the Vivienne Westwood, with Jane as Zandra Rhodes. Jane was perhaps slightly more refined in her fashion design and Patti was the more outrageous one, the most outgoing”.
Even so, in 2006, Duran’s Nick Rhodes created the compilation album Only After Dark to celebrate the music played at the Rum Runner, and lamented with hindsight: “Allegedly this was the UK’s second city, but you couldn’t help but wonder at the gaping disparity with the capital. If this was the second city, what might life be like in the thirteenth?”
Click any pic to enlarge as a slideshow:
In tribute to the iconic designers, an exhibition titled “It’s Not Unusual: a photographic homage to Kahn & Bell” has being curated by the National Trust with input from local photographer Gary Lindsay-Moore, at a quaint terrace of restored shops known as the Back to Backs Museum in Hurst Street. It opens on 9 June though visiting hours are very confusing on the B2B’s complex website so better ring for specific information, as booking seems necessary.
Today no less than in the Eighties, Brum remains Britain’s “second city”, as a focus for a population of more 4 million people in the wider West Midlands, the largest metropolitan county outside the capital. Its fashionable Digbeth scene has been compared to London’s Shoreditch. Likewise Brindleyplace, the Hurst Street village and Broad Street, where a Brummie version of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame once saw large brass stars set into the pavements on both sides honouring local showbiz heroes and institutions. Sadly, this year I counted only a handful remaining. The whole of Broad Street was resurfaced in the recent extension of the metro tram route westwards and most of the brass plates in the Walk of Stars were ripped out.
If we feel rightly sentimental about our past so that a gilded statue of those industrial pioneers Boulton, Murdoch and Watt stands prominently on Broad Street only yards away from the Black Sabbath Bridge – recently renamed after the local rock band – why are David Bintley, Jeff Lynne, the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Aston Villa Team of ’82 among the only star names to remain embedded in the pavements? To have lost the Walk of Stars as mementoes of the city’s history is a crying shame.
One of the few surviving brass stars still visible in Broad Street’s Walk of Stars, this one a tribute to Aston Villa FC
The blue plaque finally awarded to the site of the Rum Runner nightclub in Birmingham
❏ Updated 23 July 2023… NEW SOUNDS, NEW STYLES is a live panel discussion just announced for Friday 25 August at 6.30pm in the Birmingham Back to Backs at £5 per ticket. Linking with the museum’s exhibition on Kahn and Bell, this event will explore the culture of the punk and New Romantic scenes in Birmingham in the late 1970s and 80s. The discussion will be chaired by Jez Collins of Birmingham Music Archive and panel guests will include Carl Phillips, Dylan Gibbons and Carol Maye.
➢ Buy NSNS tickets from Birmingham Back to Backs
Hurst Street’s terrace of vintage shops now home to the National Trust’s Back to Backs Museum in Birmingham
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 