❚ BRITISH POP’S NEXT JUSTIN TIMBALIKE, according to PopJustice, is Tyler James, the slick-suited Mr Fit who amazingly did NOT win The Voice TV talent show last year, despite a brilliant soulful voice and emotive falsetto. This week he swaggers through the video [below] for his new single Worry About You, featuring British rapper Kano to underline hard-man East London cred. It’s the second heartfelt tune to be released from his recent album A Place I Go, some songs on which reflect his turbulent past as a best buddy of the tragic Amy Winehouse who died last summer.
In the softly porny video for his last release Single Tear we see Tyler as a ho-master. In the new video for Worry About You he moves up to scarfaced power player in gangland. What is it with casting white boys as gangstas? It doesn’t wash. Nor does it square with the songwriter’s yearning in lyrics such as “I haven’t cried a single tear whole year” and “Worry about you baby, I worry about you”. This dude cares about people.
OK, his album is a ballad-led tearjerker but among 14 tracks it contains only two upbeat numbers: we hear none of the mischief we can see in those bright blue eyes. The reviews have been mixed and a consensus feels his handlers have yet to grasp how to project Tyler’s simmering matinee-idol charisma. What is it with today’s pop-biz shapers that they no longer know how to assess a talent and play to his strengths?
❚ SOME F***BOOKERS might think shedding a load of virtual “friends” a very good New Year’s resolution. “Crack open an ice-cold PBR, stretch out in your skinny jeans, and take the quiz,” says the invitation to discover How hipster are you? Sadly, this irresistible ploy is a Facebook app so will involve compromising all your privacy settings and will of course reset to their defaults “How people bring your info to apps they use”. That means welcoming Facebook’s “one billion active users” to your quiz results. The quizmakers themselves claim that “only 2.5% of all people are true hipsters”. Do you really want one seventh of the world’s population knowing how uncool you might just be? Bit of an own-goal there, Zuckerberg Mi.
On the other hand, Katherine P from Birmingham posts: “Somehow I don’t think I need to do the quiz to know the answer.”
Before-and-after designs: left, coloured Plasticine model … right, real food on the plate by El Bulli chefs
❚ EATING CAN BE THEATRE, just as food can be art. The Catalan chef Ferran Adriá is Houdini and Picasso in one, commonly lauded as the best in the world. His three-Michelin starred restaurant El Bulli, two hours north of Barcelona, was an academy repeatedly garlanded by scholars who take dining seriously. Since 1987 it grew to serve 1,500 plates daily, prepared by 50 cooks and served by 30 staff typically to only 50 companions at table. Its culinary revolution is known as “molecular gastronomy” famed for scented gels and foams and for using every part of every animal and plant.
Adrià’s manifesto: No 10 of his 23 principles that summarise El Bulli’s cuisine
Now after 25 years of experiments, Adriá is replacing the restaurant with an inspirational foundation, while his career is being celebrated in Spain’s first major exhibition about cooking. In a series of galleries at Barcelona’s Palau Robert, we are blown away by a fearsomely complete collection of photos, letters, utensils, mementoes, and a vast poster of the 1,846 dishes catalogued by the restaurant. Best of all are the videos in which we see his edible creations being conjured. Another simple but charming glimpse behind the magician’s hand is a table-top displaying before-and-after designs of individual dishes: ingredients modelled from coloured Plasticine are composed as templates for his chefs to translate – abracadabra! – into the resulting plates of food shown alongside.
“ Tonight’s dinner involves all the senses, it engages the mind, and is also, at times, a strangely emotional experience. The dishes can be confrontational as well as exquisite… The constant stream of surprises continues for more than four hours – the green leaf that tasted exactly of oysters; the grilled strawberry with ginger on the outside and an injection of gin on the inside; the polenta gnocchi with coffee and saffron yuba; the perfect razor clam with its gelatin twin in the other half of the opened shell. Playful, arresting, occasionally alarming, the meal is almost like a story… ” / Continued at Guardian Online
❚ THE “WORLD’S MOST USELESS MACHINE” is not new news but it did raise a smile during a trip to the year-old Museum of Ideas and Inventions – essentially a hands-on diversion for restless children – while Christmassing in Barcelona. The co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s laboratory of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, came up with the idea in 1952. Electronics engineer and the “father of information theory” Claude Shannon, who worked with Minsky at IBM, liked the idea so he built the machine. It is a battery powered box, the sole purpose of which is to turn itself off after some human hand has turned it on.
You too can assemble your own useless machine in beginner-level electronics kit form (from US$35 + shipping), or in a ready-soldered version (from US$55 + shipping). Both include printed circuit board.
“ Gerry Anderson, who has died aged 83 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, was the main mover behind a number of puppet series commissioned by Lew Grade’s Independent Television Corporation. They made the company a fortune from the space age: perhaps the best known was Thunderbirds (1965-66), and among the others were Fireball XL5 (1962-63), Stingray (1964) and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68).
Factoid: Thunderbirds hero Jeff Tracy and
his sons John, Scott, Virgil, Alan and Gordon were all
named after early American astronauts
Captain Scarlet as Royal Mail postage stamp last year
“ The pre-ITV world of the early 50s had been one of puppets such as Muffin the Mule and the Flowerpot Men, a mirror for a Britain on extremely visible strings. Rocket men, on BBC radio, Radio Luxembourg and in the Eagle comic, meant Dan Dare and Jet Morgan – recycled Biggles and Battle of Britain pilots. After Anderson, they were destined for the galactic dole queue, just as Eagle’s demise was hastened by the arrival of Anderson spin-offs such as TV Century 21 (1965-71). “Everything we did,” Anderson told his biographers Simon Archer and Marcus Hearn, in What Made Thunderbirds Go! (2002), “was in an endeavour to sell to America”, and Grade spectacularly achieved that with Fireball XL5, a US network sale to NBC. Thunderbirds, shown across the world and more than a dozen times on British TV, is the show that defines the Anderson achievement, yet never attracted a US network… ” / Continued at Guardian Online
Thunderbirds’ secret base at Tracy Island: model kit comes with miniature versions of the Thunderbird 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. “Some assembly required.” From Dragon Models USA, $115
Stingray’s Troy Tempest and “Aqua” Marina (Photo: ITV)
“ Anderson’s third series in Supermarionation brought a new level of emotional literacy to the genre, albeit one difficult to define. Gradually the move had been made and puppetry was continuing to move toward greater realism, but let’s not get this out of proportion; it was not the end of innocence. Puppetry of the Gerry Anderson variety, despite being set in an imaginary future began to appear more relevant at a deeper level for the audience of the day. The transaction in any learning process depends upon emotional involvement and increasingly the puppet series got you involved… ”/ Continued at Cult Britannia
Pop artist Peter Blake’s Band Aid sleeve… The original vinyl can be yours today for £6.99, US$11.25, €8.60 at eil.com
◼ 1.1 BILLION VIEWS FOR GANGNAM STYLE at YouTube!!! Merry Christmas, pop pickers. Now spare a few minutes to listen to the original demo of the tune that in its day became the biggest selling UK single of all time. In 1984 was at No 1 in the pop charts.
It was recorded under the artist name of Band Aid by a megagroup recruited from 47 of the biggest hitters in British rock and pop. It raised huge funds for famine relief in Africa and a year later led to Live Aid, the biggest global rock concert ever, viewed by two billion people in 60 countries, who coughed up still more dollars. Live Aid is said to have raised £150m (about £400m or US$650m at today’s prices).
The idea for Band Aid was proposed by one down-on-his-luck musician, Irishman Bob Geldof, who had been moved by a horrifying BBC TV news report on the famine in Ethiopia. The project sprang out of a telephone call with Midge Ure of Ultravox when he was appearing on The Tube, the weekly pop TV show broadcast from Newcastle. The song was written and produced in a flash by Scotsman Midge, who has emerged as one of the most genuinely multi-talented shapers of the 80s.
WALKING OUT OF THE SHOPS
❏ The Band Aid single became the fastest seller of all time in its first week of release, ironically keeping one of its participants, George Michael and his band Wham! off the coveted No 1 spot in the Christmas singles chart, which would have been their third No 1 in a row. Bob Geldof, mover and shaker behind the charity project, told Record Mirror in the December 1984 page shown here: “It’s NOT a Geldof plot to get back in the limelight as some people are claiming. It allowed people who understandably felt a sense of impotence about Ethiopia to express their support.” DTKIC endured as the biggest-selling single of all time in the UK for 13 years, until it was overtaken in 1997 by Elton John’s Candle in the Wind, released following the death of Princess Diana.
➢ 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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