Adam Ant: intensely serious. (Photograph newly posted at Facebook)
➢ Adam Ant, Dandy in the Underworld is a retrospective photographic exhibition at Proud Galleries in London, being launched with a charity performance by Adam and band on March 6, 2012. Hence a superbly considered interview with Decca Aitkenhead in today’s Guardian about surviving stardom, dealing with bipolar disorder and stuff…
“ Ant still gets annoyed when anyone muddles him up with the early 80s New Romantic scene: “Cos New Romantic was nothing to do with Adam and the Ants. The Ants was a punk band, or a post-punk band if anything, and so historically it’s inaccurate. New Romantic was basically, in my mind, clubbers with too much makeup on with stupid clothes. I never set foot in any of their clubs, so I find it quite distressing to be nobbled into New Romantic, cos it was just a load of guys who looked like they’d had a row with their girlfriends’ makeup. There was nothing tough about it, nothing dangerous about it, it was soft electro stuff and it just looked a bit wet. And I didn’t like being associated with it.”
A man of 58 who still cares this much should probably come across as faintly ridiculous, but the intense seriousness with which Ant deconstructs these arcane distinctions conveys an impression of almost heartbreaking vulnerability… ” / continued online
“ I never set foot in the f***ing Blitz [club]
– I WOULD HAVE BOMBED IT ” Adam Ant drawing his line in the sand with
the New Romantics
(Clink magazine, 23 March 2011)
Instinctive punks, 1977: Adam and Jordan at the premiere for Jubilee
“ Shapersofthe80s has always drawn a clear distinction between Adam Ant and the New Romantics. As does Marco Pirroni, the Ants guitarist and co-writer of many of their hits. “Adam is glam-punk,” he told me emphatically at the bar of the Wag when Ant’s first solo single Puss ’n Boots was storming the chart in Oct 1983. “Americans don’t understand he was never a New Romantic.”
As if proof were needed, just gawp at the way Adam goes hoppity-skippiting through the video to Antmusic. The rent-a-crowd extras must have been the least stylish Londoners within earshot of the Blitz club. Gawp again at how these kids can’t dance either!
Yes of course Kings of the Wild Frontier went on to become one of the great slapstick albums of its time. No dispute. And with characters like Prince Charming and Puss ’n Boots, Adam treated us to year-round pantomime. ”
Posing for the press: Sue Tilley, whom Lucian Freud painted in Benefits Supervisor Sleeping 1995 (left), seen at the Lucian Freud Portraits exhibition this week at the NPG. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images Europe)
❚ YESTERDAY SHE WAS QUIETLY CHUFFED on her Facebook page. This morning she’s a hot topic in the national papers. And for the next four months Sue Tilley is all over the National Portrait Gallery in a retrospective exhibition of the British painter Lucian Freud, who died last year. The 80s nightclub doorgirl known as Big Sue is famously the subject of Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, the most valuable painting ever to be sold by a living artist. Freud’s nude portrait of Sue — since promoted from benefits supervisor to manager of a Jobcentre Plus in central London — acquired its unique status after it went under the hammer for $33.6m (£17.2m) to Roman Abramovich, the ninth richest person in Russia, at Christie’s New York in May 2008.
She said at the time: “My life’s changed overnight. I’m beside myself, but then lovely things are always happening to me. Still, I’m not surprised — in a way, I always thought this might happen. I love that painting.” There are four paintings of Sue in the new exhibition. She said: “I like two of them, I don’t mind one of them and I hate one of them.”
London clubland knew Sue from vetting the door at Taboo, Leigh Bowery’s now-fabled one-nighter, on Leicester Square from 1985 to 87, as well as the Abba night off Hanover Square. After Bowery — a performance artist and “an icon of outrage” — had become a model for the painter Freud, he introduced them and Sue also posed for a series of portraits in the mid-90s. After Bowery died of Aids in 1994, she was invited to write his obituary for The Guardian, which directly inspired his biography, Life and Times of an Icon, which was published by Hodder in 1997.
SUDDENLY ON FACEBOOK
The first most of us knew of this new round of fame was an uncharacteristic namedrop on Facebook about 9pm on Weds… Sue Tilley I just met Kate Middleton and she was completely lovely. Michael D Herbage She just texted the Queen with excitement at meeting you! Claire Lawrie Was she signing on? David J Deaves She didn’t pose naked for Lucian, did she? Alison Atkinson Maybe you could ask her to hook you up with her brother-in-law! Amanda Foxley Wow — just saw u on tv here in Australia, fantastic! Tami Longhurst Hi Sue, Just saw you on the evening news at the National Portrait — they said that Kate met Sue Tilley Lucian’s “most famous sitter”. Fantastic.
Crying out for speech bubbles: Sue Tilley meets Kate aka Duchess of Cambridge, with NPG director Sandy Nairne. (Photo by Jorge Herrera/WireImage)
Finally Sue couldn’t resist posting the photo of herself talking to the Duchess of Cambridge, aka Kate Middleton, wife of Wills, our future king.
Facebook Thurs 4pm… Sue Tilley Right… now I’m really showing off. [Posts the above pic, wow!] Charlie Condou Kate’s saying, “Didn’t we meet once in the loos at Kinky Gerlinky?” Sue Tilley Charlie, you’ve hit the nail on the head… Then she said, “Do you wanna come up Trannyshack afterwards?” I asked her where she got all the jokes she puts on Twitter! Dean Bright I saw you on News at 10. Emma Peake Thrilled to see your Christmas necklace making its royal debut — a vicarious delight! Sam McKnight She’s eyeing your do. Mark my words the “Big Sue” will be the new Pob! Gary Irwin Is that Sven Goran Eriksson? David Power Sue, are you inviting her to Taboo?
Laters… Sue Tilley After all yesterday’s excitement I’ve now got to spend today finishing packing… It is a bit weird that tonight will be my last night in this flat I have lived in for 30 years… a lot of ghosts are going to be rattling about… Just paid maybe my last visit to Camden Town as a resident… Saw Rob the handsome contestant from the last British Bake Off, then a fabulous tranny and then a gorgeous lorry driver shouted “I saw you on the telly yesterday” … I’m going to miss the funny old place.
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was bought by Roman Abramovitch, the Russian tycoon and Chelsea FC owner, for a record £17.2 million. Freud died last summer, aged 88, and Miss Tilley described him as “a marvel, really, a complete one-off”. She said: “Do you know, there wasn’t one bad moment sitting for Lucian, excepting the painting when I was lying on the floor — that wasn’t overly comfortable. But it was such an interesting experience. He’s a person you’ll never meet again. Really, he did what he wanted and that was that. I think that’s a trait to be admired. I wish more of us were crazy enough to do that. ”
➢ Duchess of Cambridge carries out first public engagement
without Wills “ The 30-year-old duchess is taking advantage of the prince’s controversial six-week deployment to the Falkland Islands in order to make her mark as a working member of the Royal Family. [Kate] studied history of art at St Andrew’s University, where she met Prince William, coming away with an eminently respectable 2:1. ” (The paper noted she was wearing Jimmy Choo “Cosmic” heels.)
➢ Lucian Freud Portraits runs at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Feb 9–May 27 — 130 paintings and works on paper loaned from collections throughout the world, from the 1940s right through to his last, unfinished work. Born in Berlin, he was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis, and moved to London to escape Nazi oppression in 1933, though Sigmund did not flee until 1938. Lucian was known for his intense portraits, especially of nudes, and Time magazine critic Robert Hughes proclaimed him “the greatest living realist painter”.
Derek Ridgers meets the fugitive Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in Rio, about 1985: “I played pool with Ronnie a few times and he was a lot better at it than I was. I suppose he had plenty of time to practise.” (Picture courtesy of Derek)
❚ WITH 35 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE,Derek Ridgers is one of the UK’s leading documentary photographers, notably of youth culture, its rock stars and its street tribes. “Derek Ridgers’ compulsion to photograph London clubs over two decades was an extraordinary one,” curator Val Williams wrote in his 2004 book, When We Were Young: Club and Street Portraits 1978–1987. Here were “transient beings moving across an urban landscape, flamboyant souls who cared more than anything about how they looked and whose greatest fear was of being ordinary. But it was the ordinariness that Derek Ridgers glimpsed in these costumed characters that makes his photographs so powerful.
An era of conspicuous sexuality: clubber at Witchity, a David Claridge dive in 1979, photographed by Derek Ridgers
“Ridgers’ photographs are an undeliberate chapter in a decade of English social and cultural history which changed the way we thought about music, fashion and consumption. It was the decade of the handmade and the customised, of Oxfam shopping, conspicuous sexuality, of excess, wide success and dismal failure.” Well, that’s a point of view.
His earliest exhibitions in the 70s and 80s featured punk portraits and skinheads, and many seminal images of London’s clubland New Romantics. He has mainly worked for UK magazines and newspapers such as NME, The Face, The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph, Time Out and Loaded. He now runs the Derek Ridgers Archive where limited edition prints are for sale, and he blogs occasionally though thoughtfully at Ponytail Pontifications. Derek has always been the “quiet observer”. He collaborated only once with Shapersofthe80s and his fine shots can be seen on our inside page about the 1983 Face cover story, The making of UK club culture. He also brilliantly articulated what remains today the definitive description of Billy’s, the font of all 80s clubbing. You’ll read it in the feature.
Oomska, a new UK-based online arts and pop culture magazine, today asked Derek to share his views about photography. Here are some highlights:
❏ “ Other than a camera, my favourite piece of equipment, if one could characterise it as such, is the sun.
❏ The digital age has probably added several years to my life expectancy — when I think about all the wasted time and expense of having clip tests made prior to getting the bulk of my colour film processed, I think I must have been mad.
❏ I love Garry Winogrand but some of his photographs (for instance the ones taken in the Ivar Theatre) suggest that he wasn’t necessarily always thinking about the art.
❏ It’s becoming harder and harder these days to earn a living as a professional photographer … I don’t particularly care.
❏ The most popular camera used on Flickr is now the iPhone 4. The rise of the hybrid consumer appliance will probably continue.
❏ For me it’s whatever works… Photoshop has brought all those darkroom techniques that took years to learn within the reach of everyone.
❏ A static image can still have more power than a moving one because you can live with it and study it and let its whole being seep into you and fix itself into your brain. ”
The snapper snapped: Derek Ridgers at last December’s party at the Beat Route reincarnation to launch somebody else’s photobook We Can Be Heroes. Snapped by Sandro Martini
National treasure: Jarvis Cocker on the road again this year with the original members of Pulp. Photographed by Shannon McClean
❚ ARE THEY MAD? They’re letting Jarvis Cocker into the States in April, with his Britpopping band who reunited last year! Following those hugely popular festival dates in Europe, and several in the UK which re-established Jarvis as the single most credible face of indie pop, Pulp in the US kicks off April 11 at Radio City Music Hall, storms into two Coachellas, sidles over to San Francisco, and that’s not all… parachutes into Spain again in May, so get booking!
On top of which, the retro-obsessive site The Second Disc reports the historic background to remastered reissues on Feb 20 of Pulp’s first three albums on the Fire Records label, on which the band spent a tempestuous and frustrating decade into the 90s. The awesome and undeniably strange albums It (1983) and Freaks (1987) and Separations (1991-2) have been expanded to include a host of non-LP singles and B-sides. Fire claims: “They cover a staggering sonic range from the pastoral, acoustic sounds of It, to the darkly romantic Freaks and the disco-tinged Separations. They point to Jarvis Cocker’s varied sources of musical inspiration and show a band in the process of finding their own unique voice.”
Cocker’s exceptional and seeringly honest song-writing skills were finally endorsed when the distinguished literary house of Faber published his lyrics last year under the title Mother, Brother, Lover. Read more about his creative coming of age and view Jarvis in a video interview where he protests: “If I’m a national treasure, dust me off.”
Y SUS CONCIERTOS INCLUYEN ESPAÑA
➢ Pulp, confirmados para el festival murciano SOS 4.8 — Pulp estarán en el SOS 4.8 de Murcia. Sí señor. Finalmente era verdad. Tras semanas de rumores, un misterioso anuncio en su twitter en el que dejaban caer que habría más conciertos de Jarvis Cocker & co en 2012 tras su exitosa reunión el año pasado (actuación en el Primavera Sound incluida), y la confirmación de su presencia en Coachella, el festival murciano se ha llevado el gato al agua en cuanto a fechas en España… / El informe siguió en crazyminds
Together last July at Berlin’s Melt festival: the original Pulp line-up fronted by Jarvis Cocker
Take me to the moon: Marr with his new Signature Jaguar
❚ YES, THIS IS ONE MASSIVE product plug but, wow, Johnny makes it also sound like a mighty love affair. From his fame with The Smiths, Johnny Marr is indisputably the maestro of the UK rock guitar sound of the 80s. Today on his blog he introduces his own bespoke guitar, the Johnny Marr Signature Jaguar, which he has spent years developing with Fender, the Arizona instrument maker.
This 14-minute video amounts to a low-key masterclass by one of the all-time greats in his field. In a play-through of all the Jag’s functions and switches, Johnny details what goes into customising a guitar to meet the individual musician’s needs. He has dealt with each little niggle that has irritated him over the years, the biggest being the jazz switch, he says, which was prone to being thrown at the wrong moment.
Johnny concludes: “For someone who’s grown up from being a little boy thinking that guitars are the greatest object in the world bar none, to have designed your own is a little bit like designing the spaceship that went to the moon.”
His verdict: “It sounds like I’m supposed to sound, I think.”
➢ In issue 351 of Guitarist magazine — “We sit down with Johnny, his tech Bill Puplett and designer John Moore to discuss what makes the Johnny Marr Signature Jaguar so different”
➢ 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
LANDMARK FAREWELLS. . . HIT THE INDEX TAB UP TOP FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 