Tag Archives: New Romantics

2013 ➤ Double whammy from the Spandau boys

Posted on 13 Apr 2013 | 2 comments

❚ BEING REVEALED currently on Facebook, two major Spandau Ballet announcements. First the biography of the band, a superior coffee-table photobook, Spandau the True Story, which records the entire career of the Angel Boys from Islingon, penned by their longtime shadow Paul “Scoop” Simper and published by the prestige celebrity publisher Genesis. It features unseen pictures taken not only by clubland mate Graham “Heroes” Smith, but also by Shapersofthe80s – the team who were there from the start of the New Romantic story.

➢ Spandau the True Story: sign up today at Genesis Publications, “the home of beautiful music books” … Register your interest
without financial commitment

A second announcement tonight heralds the movie Soul Boys of The Western World, a feature-length documentary containing much unseen vintage footage, produced by Grammy Award-winner Scott Millaney who was a founding member of the promo video company MGMM in the 80s just as the British music industry boomed. His company produced over 1,000 pop promos including Video Killed the Radio Star, Vienna, Dancing in the Street and Rio.

“Scoop” Simper, today an executive celebrity writer at The Sun who wrote the film’s treatment, said tonight: “There is wonderful footage of the Spandau mums and dads when they were all still with us. And never-before-seen footage from Los Angeles and Australia when the band were in their pop pomp. All the band have contributed voiceovers.”

Spandau manager Steve Dagger reveals that a case full of early film footage of the band has been discovered recently. This includes offcuts not used in a prominent TV item just before release of the band’s third single Musclebound in March 1981, and aired on the BBC teatime news magazine Nationwide. Just as the phrase New Romantics was coming into wider use by both media and an emerging generation of UK image bands, including Duran Duran, the BBC cameras capture what Dagger calls “priceless cavortings” within Soho’s heaving Beat Route club.

There’s also a whole film sequence in Jon “Mole” Baker’s shop off Carnaby Street, where Spandau members are seen trying on a variety of outfits by the Axiom collective of designers, which were to be shown in a New York runway show two months later, in what became the “First Blitz invasion” of the US, organised by both the band and the former Blitz Kid fashionistas. These Axiom collections received another runway show at Steve Strange’s Club for Heroes in London in the autumn of ’81, by which time the charts were ablaze with new slipstream bands and British street style began to explode.

❏ On tonight’s Jonathan Ross Show Gary and Martin Kemp (pictured below) were talking about their new TV series Gangs of Britain, due to air on the Crime & Investigation Network (Sky 553 and Virgin 237) on Sundays from April 21 at 9pm BST. It’s three years since Spandau Ballet played live together so the killer question is whether they might reunite for another tour? Gary told Ross: “I pretty much guarantee we’ll do it again next year.” Martin added: “I hope so. I’ve never laughed as much as that year [on the Reformation Tour]. Just to have that year of getting your best friends back together was so lovely. I would say it was the best year of my life.”

Jonathan Ross Show,Martin Kemp, Gary Kemp ,TV series, Gangs of Britain

Another Spandau tour? Martin and Gary Kemp give Jonathan Ross a cautious yes tonight. (Viewable on ITV Player for another month. Screengrab © ITV)

TWEET ALONG TO THE KRAYS

❏ Tomorrow night, if you’re viewing the 1990 British movie The Krays on ITV4 at 9pm BST, Martin and Gary Kemp will be tweeting along with the film. Viewers can take part by using the hashtag #KraysLive while watching the brothers recreating the villainy of the English gangsters Ronald and Reginald Kray who led organised crime in the East End of London during the 1950s and 1960s.
➢ Follow Martin @ Twitter
➢ Follow Gary @ Twitter

EXCLUSIVE PRINTS OF TRUE ARTWORK

❏ New on sale at the Spandau store is a limited edition 20 x 20-inch lithographic print embossed onto the highest quality 270gsm uncoated paper of the True album artwork by Spandau friend David Band, a Scottish artist who also designed sleeves for Altered Images and Aztec Camera and sadly died in Australia in 2011. Reproduced to celebrate Spandau’s 30th anniversary of their No 1 hit, each print is hand-signed (not reproduction signatures) by all members of Spandau Ballet, and hand-numbered by a professional scribe in a run of only 500 prints.

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Posted in Film, London, Pop music, TV, Youth culture

Tagged Axiom, David Band, Gangs of Britain, Gary Kemp, Jonathan Ross Show, lithograph, Martin Kemp, New Romantics, Paul Simper, Scott Millaney, Soul Boys of The Western World, Spandau Ballet, Steve Dagger, True

➤ Smash Hits and other mould-breakers of the 80s

Posted on 20 Dec 2012 | Leave a comment

Neil Tennant ,Smash Hits, Radio 4, documentary

1983: Neil Tennant as Smash Hits writer. (Photo by Virginia Turbett)

❚ ANOTHER NICELY PACKAGED Radio 4 documentary today celebrated the crucial years 1982–85 which Neil Tennant describes as “the golden age of 80s pop”. They luckily coincided with his tenure as a writer on Smash Hits magazine before stepping into the pop charts himself as half of the Pet Shop Boys. Obviously in a prog titled Neil Tennant’s Smash Hits Christmas Tennant and his cronies were full of back-slapping at the moulds they broke with the mass-selling fan mag, driven initially by two selling points – song lyrics and pull-out pinup posters.

Smash Hits, Radio 4, documentary,Pete Murphy

1982: Peter Murphy of Bauhaus (you really don’t want to see its Christmas cover star)

Launched in Nov 1978 as a monthly title, Smash Hits trailed “The words to 18 top singles” as its key feature. The mag was the invention of former NME editor (and later founder of The Face) Nick Logan who conceived it on the kitchen table and initially toyed with the title Disco Fever, presumably in homage to that year’s horror movie Saturday Night Fever. He chose the Belgian new-wave joker Plastic Bertrand for the cover of a pilot issue in the post-punk vacuum when any new direction seemed significant, but actually launched with Blondie. Smash Hits soon went fortnightly, ran for 28 years, and died with Celebrity Big Brother’s Preston gracing its last cover in 2006. In his Guardian obituary for the mag, Alexis Petridis wrote: “The period between the rise of Adam and the Ants and the collapse of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s ‘Hit Factory’ empire may prove to be the last truly great pop era, in that it produced not just great pop music, but great pop stars.”

Tennant ignores the fact that 80s classic pop began with the music of Spandau Ballet and Adam Ant a couple of years earlier than his joining the mag. Also unmentioned in today’s doc was that the mould-breaking writing of this era was actually led by The Face and the subcultural flagship magazine New Sounds New Styles, which gently parodied the posers of the New Romantics movement and closed in 1982 through lack of promotion by its publisher Emap, who also happened to publish Smash Hits. The fresh rebel writers of NSNS had adopted a tongue-in-cheek tone which kickstarted a shift of power away from stars and their publicists into the hands of writers themselves. Once the 80s had revived the long-dead credibility of pop music – dubbed “pure pop” in vigorous public debates – Smash Hits took its cue by adopting a knowing approach to pop journalism and providing a cheeky foil to Britain’s four seriously po-faced weekly rock-music newspapers. We cannot underestimate how its humour helped sophisticate the Smash Hits reader, pragmatically described by Tennant as “the 12-year-old girl in Grantham”. Which was a neat way of deflating his own pomposity.

Spookiest quote today came from Toyah, after remarking that the pop scene has lost the airy optimism of the 80s: “We now view fame as something dark and faintly abusive.” Oo-er.

Neil Tennant ,Smash Hits, Radio 4, documentary, Pet Shop Boys

April 1985: Tennant as cover star and Pet Shop Boy with Chris Lowe

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Posted in Culture, Fashion, London, Pop music, Youth culture

Tagged documentary, Magazines, Neil Tennant, New Romantics, New Sounds New Styles, Radio 4, Smash Hits

2012 ➤ Soho’s nightowls revisit the club that sifted the Artex monkeys from Bowie’s Heroes

Posted on 21 Nov 2012 | Leave a comment

Cultural observer Peter York: eager for the Sullivan autograph on the new edition

❚ THE 80s BLITZ KIDS turned out in force last night. As Kitten Kouturist Franceska Luther King remarks today: “an elegant crowd, older, but still the same spirit.” Those clubbing compulsives who defined the sounds and styles of Soho 30 years ago, swarmed into the tiny steaming Artex-lined cellars of the St Moritz restaurant, the fit all the tighter thanks to a fair few middle-aged paunches. For three months in 1980 this was the site of their milestone one-nighter which signalled the first faction to break away from the futurists at Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s pioneering electro-diskow, The Blitz. In host Chris Sullivan’s words, this was “the more alert end of the Blitz crowd” – in other words, the hardcore fashionistas.

Initially St Moritz’s music evoked interwar Berlin cabaret but the effect of Charles Fox, the theatrical costumiers, staging its closing-down sale in Covent Garden injected a huge Hollywood movie wardrobe. Sullivan notes: “You could be a gangster, a geisha, or Geronimo.” The New Romantics had been born – just like that!

“No single shop sale ever had such an influence on street fashion before or since,” Sullivan writes in the fabulous photo-book, We Can Be Heroes. This ribald account of the dawn of UK clubbing in the 80s, led by the eye-popping photographs of Graham Smith, was the reason for last night’s beano. Soul-music diehards Smith and Sullivan graduated from The Blitz to become two of the St Moritz deejays (along with Robert Elms and Steve Mahoney) and half a lifetime on they were hosting yet another launch party. The book’s revised and amended second edition of 2,500 copies is released this week through regular retail outlets. Copies of last year’s limited edition are still available from the fund-it-yourself publisher Unbound.

St Moritz 1980: Chris Sullivan and Michele Clapton – from Smith’s book We Can Be Heroes

Back in the day, the St Moritz posse distinguished themselves from The Blitz by playing retro lounge-lizard tunes from Lotte Lenya or Nat King Cole. In today’s arts pages of The Times Sullivan recaps how, in their efforts to avoid the present, he and his cohort helped create the future: “We decided to oppose Blitz futurism and turn the clock back with music from Marlene Dietrich, Monroe, Sinatra and soundtracks from A Clockwork Orange, Last Tango in Paris and Cabaret. It was an alarming success.”

Rob Milton: Shooting the Pump in the deejay booth

♫ Click to hear Shoot the Pump in a new window

Fashions in music moved apace. Within a year successive London club-nights at Hell, Le Kilt and Le Beat Route were stirring into the club mix not only familiar 70s soul but the edgy new urban sounds of North America.

Choosing the soundtrack last night at St Moritz were the were the astute ears of David Hawkes, Christos Tolera and Sullivan himself, plus Dirt Box co-founder Rob Milton, who raked the dancefloor early in the evening with the crazed beats of Shoot the Pump. This intoxicating debut single from 1981 was a state-of-the-art fusion of emergent street sounds – rap, hip-hop and funk with a hint of mutant disco – from the “playin’ brown rapper” and graffiti artist J Walter Negro & the Loose Jointz (on Zoo York Records via Island). J Walter is urging his crew of Zoo Yorkers to spray docile citizens with the water from a fire hydrant: “You make like a monkey with monkey wrench, cos you feel a little funky, got a thirst to quench.” In 1980–81, something similar was pumping the adrenalin in London.

CLICK ANY PIC TO LAUNCH CAROUSEL:

St Moritz 1980: Chris Sullivan and Michele Clapton – from Smith’s book We Can Be Heroes

Rob Milton: Shooting the Pump in the deejay booth

Cultural observer Peter York: eager for the Sullivan autograph on the new edition

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Posted in Clubbing, Fashion, London, Media, Pop music, Youth culture

Tagged Blitz Kids, Books, Chris Sullivan, clubbing, Graham Smith, New Romantics, photography, Soho, Unbound publishing, We Can Be Heroes

2012 ➤ Shapersofthe80s clocks up half a million page views

Posted on 16 Nov 2012 | Leave a comment

❚ YESTERDAY THIS BLITZ KIDS WEBSITE hit a total of 500,537 page views since we launched in autumn 2009. Last year visitor numbers doubled. See what were the hottest topics at Shapersofthe80s during 2011.

HOW THE MUSIC CHANGED

❏ In 1980 Spandau Ballet were the houseband of the Blitz Kids, whose New Romantic manifesto insisted that style was as important as their new synthesised brand of dance music. When London’s Blitz club hosts Steve Strange and Rusty Egan invented the notion of the once-a-week clubnight, they changed British nightlife habits for ever. Spandau’s music made no less a dramatic gear-change by placing the bass guitar and the bass drum at the front of the sound, as a driving rhythm for dancefloor movers. Within a year of their first hit, To Cut a Long Story Short, the rhythm of the UK pop charts shifted from the lead guitar to the 4:4 dance beat of the bass drum.

New Romantics, Blitz Kids,Spandau Ballet, John Keeble, 1980

Spandau songwriter Gary Kemp claimed at the time: “RnB was the backbone of pop music from 1962 to 1980. And since then, funk. Dance rhythms are the musical basis for all rock bands now. Really, you can’t say ‘rock band’ any more because the music isn’t rhythm-and-blues.”

John Keeble (left): “It’s the difference between listening to funk instead of the RnB they all played in the Sixties.”+++ +++

➢ Keeble: what changed the rhythm of the pop charts

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Posted in Clubbing, London, Media, Pop music, Social trends, Technology, Youth culture

Tagged Blitz Kids, net stats, New Romantics, Pop charts, Spandau Ballet, theblitzclub

2012 ➤ Blue Rondo breathe fresh life into Mr Sanchez a whole aeon later

Posted on 2 Sep 2012 | Leave a comment

Chris Sullivan,Blue Rondo , Christos Tolera,Glasgow, clubbing, Maestro’s

Maestro’s in Glasgow, 1981: suited and zooted onstage are Blue Rondo vocalists Chris Sullivan and Christos Tolera

◼ “HERE’S A NEW BLUE RONDO REMIX — at last we’ve got it right. Recorded in 1981 … remixed in 2012.” So says the Latin-funk combo’s founder and frontman Chris Sullivan on Facebook today, after posting on Soundcloud a pacy instrumental mix of the London clubland band’s first hit, Me & Mr Sanchez, which stayed four weeks in the UK chart in 1981. Wait for the virtuosi to open up in the second half.

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In the topmost pic we see vocalist Sullivan onstage demonstrating his northern soul choreography alongside sidekick Christos Tolera. This pic was taken during Blue Rondo’s promotional tour for their debut single at Glasgow’s trendiest nightspot Maestro’s on 6 Nov 1981, the day of its release. As a former fashion student at St Martin’s School of Art, Sullivan almost single-handedly introduced the zoot suit to Soho’s nightclub scene, and designed styles for both himself as leader of the band and for Tolera and Beat Route host Ollie O’Donnell, among many others.

Under its full name of Blue Rondo à la Turk, the stylish seven-piece was among the first of the Blitzworld’s new image bands to change the musical gear of 1981, in their case towards a tongue-in-cheek collage of carnival rhythms inspired by the Brubeck era of jazz. If you visit Soundcloud you’ll also find a fresh 2012 remix of the single, complete with vocals. “Mark Reilly did the lion’s share,” says Sullivan, referring to Rondo’s guitarist, who still flies the flag for his band Matt Bianco, which he formed in 1983 with the late Kito Poncioni and Daniel White, both Rondo members. The new remixes have been brought about only now because “it has taken us a few years to get the masters back,” Sullivan says. “More to follow as well.”

➢ From the summer of New Romance in 1981, read how the UK charts were bursting with a new generation of pop sounds … Also, view Rondo’s video of Sanchez … Then click through to my eye-witness account of the day that Blue Rondo à la Turk set off on their road to fame — here at Shapersofthe80s