Vintage deejays at Vintage 2011: original Blitz Kids such as Princess Julia and Chris Sullivan will be spinning the vinyl to recreate legendary 80s club soundtracks from the Blitz to the Wag
+++ ❚ VINTAGE 2011 IS A MUSIC AND DRESS-UP festival indoors at London’s Southbank Centre (so without the mud), curated by Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway. This three-day party from Friday July 29 celebrates seven decades of British cool from the 1920s to the 80s. Taking its lead from the Festival of Britain (1951), the blurb says there is no single creative focus, just hours of music, fashion, film, art, design and dance each day.
All levels of the Royal Festival Hall are transformed into a multi-venue playground, with ten vintage nightclubs such as The Soul Casino, Let it Rock, The Torch Club and The Leisure Lounge. New this year are The Studio, Prohibition Room, The Bunker Club and the North South Divide. In total there’ll be 70 live performances, 150 deejays, exclusive catwalk shows with Jo Wood and Pearl and Daisy Lowe; decade specific make-overs; vintage food and cocktails and 250 sellers at the vintage marketplace. Each day sees a major Revue in the main auitorium: Heaven 17, Alan Wilder and Thomas Dolby, for example, in Friday’s Electronic Revue… Percy Sledge in Saturday’s Soul Revue… David McAlmont, Sandie Shaw and more in Sunday’s Hit Parade.
Sue Tilley: catwalk show celebrating 80s nightlife
Now take a deep breath. On the Friday at 6pm Cavalcade of the 80s is a catwalk fashion show presented by Sue Tilley, Leigh Bowery’s biographer and Lucian Freud model. Sue says: “Bodymap are showing about six outfits with models including Barry Kamen and Les Child… There is going to be an Antony Price dress… Kim Jones is lending some Leigh Bowery originals… Rachel Auburn is recreating one of her outfits. And there’s the second performance this year after 28 years of the 80s club sensations The Trindys.” The models will include friends from the 80s plus new club kids Daniel Lismore and Felicity Hayward. [“My idea of the 80s”— Sue Tilley interviewed at Dazed Digital]
On Saturday the RFH Penthouse venue goes “back to the futurists” and the New Romantic Blitz Club era with 80s three genuine Blitz Kid super-deejays Princess Julia, Jeffrey Hinton and Mark Moore.
At her blog The World of Princess Julia, the doyenne of clubland deejays gives a quick rundown on how she graduated from the Blitz Club cloakroom to the wheels of steel and says of Vintage: “I think I’ll play a mixture of music that has played a part in my deejay career. It will range from post-punk electronica, disco, retro pop, dance and anything else I find at the bottom of my handbag.”
Classic Album Sundays and Bowers & Wilkins present the Best British Albums at Vintage in four two-hour listening sessions each day in the St Paul’s Pavilion. At 7.30 on Saturday Mark Moore will be introducing Joy Division’s Closer album and the record will be played in its entirety (from vinyl of course) over fab B&W audio kit.
Funk royalty: Chris Hill (left) plays the Vintage festival, but what about Robbie Vincent?
For Sunday night in the Penthouse Chris Sullivan — the original Wag Club host for 19 years and Uber-Shaper of the 80s — recreates the funkier, post-Romantic spirit of Le Beat Route (1980–83, zoot suits) and the Wag (1982+ ripped jeans and Celebrity Squares) along with other gods among dance deejays Paul Murphy and Jay Strongman (who also plays Warehouse on Friday and Let It Rock, Saturday).
Over in the Soul Casino the funk legend that is Chris Hill joins the legends who are Norman Jay and Colin Curtis. Tsssss! Have the Hemingways got any inkling of exactly how many galaxies of star quality they have booked?
In all likelihood, Sullivan says: “There might well be a bit of dancing.” When asked what he’s going to play first to get feet kicking, he responded: “Might well be one of THE great recordings, Eddie Kendricks – Keep on Truckin. Lyrically it’s just there. What a Bobby dazzler!”
Ticket prices are frankly a sting, starting at £60 (wince!), since you are the star turn at this DIY event, but dedicated followers of fashion not yet squeezed by the recession aren’t likely to complain.
❚ ON THIS DAY IN 1981 Spandau Ballet, spearhead band of the New Romantic movement, were flying off to Spain and Portugal by way of a working holiday with sun and sand — a brief tour of principal cities to establish their first European fan base, which remains strong today. Most significantly, on Ibiza, the island which young British sunseekers were starting to make their own, Spandau played at the then spanking new Ku club, as one of the first fashion bands whose visits were to make Ku one of the Mediterranean’s destination nightspots.
Spandau Ballet in 1981: a quick sprint to the Iberian peninsular as well as a hot date at Ibiza’s Ku club
But the day before their departure, Spandau had lit the fuse to a musical bombshell. They changed their sound to outflank the emergent slipstream of new image bands invading the British charts with synth-pop.
That Thursday they had taken over Le Beat Route in Soho, a mythical Mod club during the 60s, now fronted by Ollie O’Donnell, a suited but laid-back young crimper from Keith-at-Smile’s cool salon in Knightsbridge. The downstairs hideaway in Soho was the current Friday-night HQ of London’s nightlife leaders whose jackets and printed ties were hastily shaking off the New Romantic tag even as Duran Duran’s second single revelled in it. The bamboo decor helped: hints of a tropical holiday-camp with baskets for lampshades. South Seas tongue-in-cheek, maybe. Glamorous it was not. The ethos for new one-nighters was never to be smart, always gently ironic.
Here before an invited audience of Friday regulars the innovative Russell Mulcahy directed Spandau’s promotional video for their fourth single, Chant No 1. The bombshell was a surprise change of direction, announced by rat-a-tat congas and a burst of brass. The new tune, Gary Kemp said, had been inspired directly by the dissonant brass on the disco-funk track Wheel Me Out, the debut 12-inch dance single on Ze from US new-wave group Was (Not Was). The eerie sound had been introduced to keen Brit ears during the Axiom fashion show that had preceeded Spandau’s set in New York that May, during the first Blitz Invasion.
Chant No 1 was a blue-eyed funk mover that echoed the band’s teen years on the soul circuit, musically fresh while the lyrics seeped a certain seedy paranoia. There on-camera was a black trio of brass instrumentalists, Beggar & Co, who were the horn section for the British funksters Light of the World, and who’d already had their own hit with Somebody Help me Out.
Gone were the artsy settings and OTT costumes of Spandau’s early videos. This razor-sharp musical documentary intercuts Soho streetlife with a live club performance by Spandau. “Down, down, down, pass the Talk of the Town” urges the deejay’s Chandleresque rap as Tony Hadley sweeps past The Talk, the cobwebbed Mecca of international cabaret from the Judy Garland era. Inside the steamy Beat Route itself we take in the stylish ambience where the “mobile knives” now live to dance, as well as dress up in a distinctly more boy-meets-girl way than the incessant camperie of the Blitz, the long-gone poser-paradise. We glimpse the deejay Steve Lewis before his portrait of Lenin, in a season when Soviet button badges are also de rigueur, and it’s evident that, yes, things are different here.
The video emphatically makes the point that clubland rules. Spandau drummer John Keeble spoke with only slight exaggeration when he said: “For the next couple of years, no new band played live on a stage.” What he meant was that rock venues as the source for original music had been superseded by nightclubs. White socks and hedonism were the key: girls in swirling party frocks with hair cropped like chives, and boys wearing braces and rolled-up sleeves soon walked the streets of every town. Ha! Why, even the NME finally conceded by introducing a “Dance Chart” alongside their lists of Indie garage bands.
Chant No 1: Gary Kemp with one of Beggar & Co’s brass section at front
Once released on July 6, Chant No 1 rocketed straight up the charts to reach No 3 on August 1 (the NME chart actually placed it at No 1). Simultaneously remixed by Richard Burgess as a B-side and as an extended twelve-incher for clubs, the track immediately became an upbeat dance anthem for the school-leavers who were discovering what economic “hard times” were going to mean.
“I Don’t Need This Pressure On” ran Spandau’s chorus as a timely slogan for that summer when Britain went into shellshock from the rare experience of repeated race riots on the streets of London, Manchester and Liverpool. The fashion-conscious band who had been dismissed by the rockist press as fascists and dandies hit back with supreme optimism. This vibrant tune pressed the pop button with fans as well as rival bands who envied the chemistry of Spandau plus Beat Route. It announced a new brand: Team Soho. For ten weeks in the charts, Chant No 1 confirmed its rhythm as the sound of the new pop: once-and-for-all the dominance of the rock guitar was shifting to the supremacy of bass and drum for pop generations to come.
Ironies were everywhere. Not only did the crepe-shoed rocker Shakin’ Stevens occupy the No 1 spot for four consecutive weeks with Green Door, a comforting throwback to 50s nostalgia. By contrast, the cool young band who also held Chant off the top spot for another three consecutive weeks were The Specials, whose haunting single Ghost Town (where “all the clubs have been closed down”) became a poignant epitaph for the inner-city angst starting to erupt among the ranks of the hard-pressed in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. The times were changing, not entirely for the better.
BLAST! Hackney-born William Roberts was an apprentice poster designer, who at the age of 14 attended evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art in London. Within four years he was taken up by Wyndham Lewis, who was forming a British version of the avant-garde Futurist movement. Ezra Pound suggested the name Vorticism, and 19-year-old Roberts’s work was featured in the radical Vorticist magazine BLAST in 1914, a seminal text of 20th-century modernism. A lifetime later, Roberts painted the group (he is seated third from left) in one of the defining images in European art — The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 (detail) — currently showing in The Vorticists: Manifesto for the Modern World at Tate Britain until September. (Courtesy of the Estate of William Roberts/Tate)
London’s grooviest art school is leaving the bright lights for the wide open spaces two miles north of their historic manor, where the impoverished Marx wrote Das Kapital and Hazlitt the finest essays in English, and the painter Francis Bacon was a founding member of the Colony Room, a notorious watering hole for misfits. Can our savviest creative spirits really thrive once uprooted from Soho’s 300-year heritage, its dissenters, eccentrics, streetlife and dens of inquity?
King’s Cross Central: the University of the Arts at Granary Square will form the hub of a new cultural quarter, a 67-acre development that is the largest in London for 150 years. (Courtesy of Anderson-Terzic)
❚ AT MIDNIGHT LAST NIGHT, before an artsy audience spanning many generations, Jarvis Cocker and Pulp were bashing out their hit song Common People in the heart of his ramshackle old college, St Martin’s School of Art, as it was still called in 1988 when he met that girl made famous by its lyrics. While he studied film-making, she seemingly “studied sculpture”. The song says she came from Greece and her Dad was loaded, yet she wanted to slum it by going to live in down-at-heel Hackney. Jarvis explained years later: “It stuck in my mind what she was saying — that she wanted to sleep with common people like me.”
Common People has become much more than an anthem for Jarvis’s generation. Everybody knows the words and the 800 former St Martin’s graduates — gathered to bid farewell to their alma mater as it leaves Soho for King’s Cross — erupted into a riotous sing-along, because those lyrics are stiff with truths that aren’t entirely universal, but they are, or were, peculiarly British. What we now know is that, in real life, Jarvis hardly knew the girl and in the end they didn’t get it together, but what the encounter had triggered in him was an awareness about class differences in our society that, as a lad from Oop North, even at age 25, he’d been oblivious to: that she would always have Daddy to help her “never fail”.
The definitive song of the Britpop era begins as satire but ends in anger. In deeply felt rage. As with the socially mobile 60s, this was the edginess in the 80s that divided British society and in our art schools sparked tangible creative tension, when talented working-class lads came up against genteel gals from the moneyed middle-classes, especially those on the smartest degree course for fashion in the land. Many posh parents saw this as an alternative kind of finishing school, yet the sloganeering designer Katharine Hamnett tells fashion historian Judith Watt in a forthcoming film documentary about St Martin’s, directed by Oleg Mitrofanov: “I actually had to change the way I spoke because I’d come from public school and nobody would take me seriously.”
Radical sculptors of the 60s: Richard Long outside St Martin’s in 1967 (Alammy) . . . One of Barry Flanagan’s giant bronze hares in O’Connell Street, Dublin, in 2006
Why the Blitz Club became the potent subcultural melting pot that it did in 1979 was down to its geography — located midway between St Martin’s on Charing Cross Road, and Central School of Art & Design in Holborn, in the no-man’s land between the then trendily refurbished market area of Covent Garden and the sleazy, yet always cool red-light district of Soho. As one early 80s fashion graduate reminds us: “Essentially, the Blitz was an art students’ club.” Then into their midst, lured by new music, came the working-class soulboys and girls who were themselves several sharp steps ahead of their own class for style. Naked one-up-manship inflamed ambitions all round.
Graduation 1993: for his collection, The Tangent Flows, Hussein Chalayan buried silk garments in his back garden, then exhumed them. Joan Burstein of Browns put the entire collection on show in her windows
The pole position of St Martin’s has been reconfirmed with each generation of graduates who become household names: from Frank Auerbach and Joe Tilson, Lucian Freud and James Dyson, Terence Conran and his son Sebastian, Isaac Julien and Belinda Eaton, Bruce Oldfield and John Galliano, to Stella McCartney and Sarah Burton who stepped into Alexander McQueen’s shoes following his sudden death.
Through the 60s and 70s, both under Anthony Caro’s tutorship then in revolt against it, abstract sculpture had been St Martin’s strength, but with the 80s the fashion department responded to the force of Britain’s subversive street style which was exciting the international media. The impact of alumni such as Jacques Azagury with his New Romantics collection made London Fashion Week an essential stop-over for the fashion world’s globetrotting commentariat.
30 years on: Pistols bassist and St Martin’s painter Glen Matlock unveiled this plaque at his old college. It was designed and made by potter Douglas Fitch and graphic designer Mike Endicott
Is the old Soho alchemy about to lose its magic? Last night’s party for alumni was organised by one of them, Birmingham-reared Katie Grand, stylist and editor of Love magazine and coincidentally partner of Pulp’s bass player, Steve Mackey. It was a generous and fitting farewell to the shabby seven-storey building on Charing Cross Road that has blazed as the beacon among London’s half-dozen undergrad art schools for the past 50 years. Though technically St Martin’s School of Art (founded 1854) merged with Central School of Art and Design (founded 1896) two decades ago, only now does the resultant Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design have a purpose-built new home to house its 3,800 staff and students — two miles away from the life of spice that energises Soho.
President Obama by photographer and St Martin’s alumnus Platon Antoniou: he succeeded to Richard Avedon’s job at the New Yorker magazine
Not for nothing did the anarchic Sex Pistols choose to play their first gig at St Martin’s in November 1975. GQ editor Dylan Jones, who graduated in 1980, told The Independent a while back: “We were 400 yards from the 100 Club, 200 yards from the Marquee, and a mere spit from the Cambridge, which is the pub everyone used to congregate in before they went onstage — the Pistols, the Clash, Adam and the Ants… St Martin’s at the time felt like the most exciting place on earth, not just because of all the wonderful painters, designers and boulevardiers who had studied there, but also because it was central to the whole punk explosion.”
So will the renegade artistic heritage that evolved with the growth of Soho over 300 years become somehow dissipated? Britain’s most visible sculptor Antony Gormley, another St Martin’s graduate, made a case more detached from bricks and mortar in Wednesday’s Guardian: “The place stands for a certain anarchic idea of permanent revolution – of every generation overturning the orthodoxies of the previous one.” Indeed, from the stage in the old St Martin’s studio last night, Jarvis Cocker capped his anthemic song by criticising the government’s introduction of £9,000 annual student fees that are bound to deter new generations of common people from even considering art school. He then indicated the walls of the buliding, and said, “It’s not about THIS … It’s about THAT”, pointing at the heaving dance-floor.
Which seems to suggest that the spirit of the age will ultimately trump any spirit of place. Aha! Germanic Zeitgeist versus the classical genius loci. Discuss.
McQueen lives on: The 2011 Costume Institute Met Gala, held in New York on May 2, honoured the life of the British fashion designer Alexander McQueen who died in February 2010 at the age of 40. His Savage Beauty exhibition is running at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until July 31
❏ SOME OF US WHO were later required to recruit new talent in our workplaces learnt a novel lesson in 1970 by watching a compelling BBC documentary shot at St Martin’s. How do you assess somebody for a creative job which has few boundaries and rests heavily on self-reliance? Invite them to an interview, don’t say a word and see how they react! Such was the inspiration yielded by Christopher Burstall’s documentary A Question of Feeling, which observed a dozen first-year sculpture students including Richard Deacon who were locked in an empty studio and not allowed to speak. Each was given one particular material — a block of polystyrene, say, or a bag of plaster. They were left to deduce for themselves that these were raw materials with which to work, without critical feedback, despite their tutors’ constant surveillance.
The experiment known as “The Locked Room” came in response to the prevailing trend towards non-objective art, itself a reaction to Anthony Caro’s giant abstract works in steel, all of which posed the problem of how you set about teaching conceptual art. This was a bold attempt to erase tradition. Tutor Peter Kardia said: “I wanted to put them in an experiential situation where they couldn’t grasp what they were doing. What I wanted was ‘existence before essence’.”
❏ JUDITH WATT, fashion historian who has taught the history of fashion and writing to Fashion Communication and Promotion BAs since 1998, reports:
“Most current students were not invited to the party; so it was helpers — many my lovely students — and those who graduated this June. It was a shame, as students are so much of what makes up St Martin’s unique character (with the added magic dust of some staff). There was a mix in terms of the alumni, but so many of the youngsters have no idea about those important days of the late 70s to the mid-1980s, when St Martin’s was the beating heart of British fashion and style; who the people were, or the magic uniqueness of it. Stephen Linard was there, and I thought of how many of my students have xeroxed pictures of him and his work from The Face, i-D and Blitz but didn’t know he was in their midst. Which spoke volumes about them, and the hideous metamorphosis of fashion, not him.
“John Galliano (obviously) was not there but homages of all kinds to him were graffiteed on the walls. I saw Dean Bright, Jacques Azagury, Ninevah Khomo, Claire Angel, Paddy Whitaker and Keir Malem, Christopher Brown, Andrew Groves, David Kappo, Tristan Webber, the lovely Christopher Kane. Sadly not there were Fiona Dealey, Rifat Ozbek, John McKitterick, Ike Rust, John Maybury, Simon Ungless, and, of course, Amanda Lear. Great line up really … Most asked-about former tutor was Bobby Hillson, who set up the MA Fashion course and was the person who arranged for Lee McQueen to enroll as a student and who supported him in those early days. She was sadly not there … and was sorely missed.
“Jarvis Cocker hit just the right note … it’s a long time since St Martin’s has felt like an art college to me — and last night it did again. Pulp playing Common People was particularly apt, as of course it’s the thread that binds so many of the people who make up the subversive British music and style underground. With the fees now at around £9,000 a year, that may be a lot more difficult to find.”
Two alumni, two gatecrashers, four ex-Blitz Kids: At St Martin’s farewell to CXR party, Corinne Drewery (fashion, Swing-Out Sister), Christos Tolera (ex-college cafe customer), Stephen Linard (fashion, own silk suit), Robert Leach (ex-Kingston — photo from his Facebook album, Goodbye Charing Cross Road, June 24, 2011)
❏ HOW TO DRESS FOR A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME PARTY — Fashion note by Stephen Linard (class of ’81, pictured above):
“That suit is a one off from 1990, silk rep candy stripes, to my own design. I was the belle of the ball. Etro print shirt, Drake’s linen madras check scarf, printed pastel paisley hank, lime-green suede Paul Smith Hush Puppies.”
Partying with her stars: Willie Walters, BA fashion course director, in a shirt by Lucie Sutton. Photographed by Alexandra Gordienko
❏ Kay Barron, FCP/CSM graduate, reports at Grazia Daily:
“Everyone regressed to their student selves. In fact some (sorry) became even younger when Pulp took to the stage. I would like to apologise for pushing, screaming and bouncing on people’s feet like a 16-year-old as Jarvis (an ex-student himself) wiggled his way through Disco 2000, Sorted for Es and Whizz, Misfits and Common People (natch). They have never sounded better.
“This party was as legendary as the college. Beyond any fashion party, as no-one was putting on airs and graces, everyone was relaxed and felt bloody lucky to be there.
“St Martin’s is bigger than a building. Give it a year or two and the spanking new building in King’s Cross will be as rough around the edges as CXR, and another 72 years of creative genius will be shaped there. And there will be 800 new alumni enjoying Absolut cocktails, and drawing obscenities on the wall — really, all that talent, and penises are still the illustration of choice!”
Iain R Webb Absolutly aglow. Photographed by Robert Leach
❏ Iain R Webb, CSM professor of fashion, reveals all about his 1970s soulmates at the Harper’s Bazaar blog, and puts Friday’s bash in perspective:
“The Farewell to Fashion at Charing Cross Road party was a strange cocktail (fuelled by lashings of Absolut vodka) of nostalgic sad tidings and glittering ecstasies. Past generations of graduates, from Swing Out Sister’s Corinne Drewery (who DJ’d in the Illustration studio) to Katie’s ex-classmate Giles Deacon, rubbed shoulder pads with the current cohort and a Sex Pistol — Glen Matlock, who along with the original Pistols line-up played their first gig at St Martin’s. Dressed up to the nines (and tens in some cases — the boy in the gold knitted dress that unravelled as the evening wore on), the colourful crowd (who says fashion folk only wear black?) displayed a flagrantly flamboyant individuality that is the very lifeblood of the college and has played no mean part in the success of its alumni who have over the decades become big players on both sides of the catwalk.
“The St Martin’s media mafia still fills the international front rows, Twitter on about trends and play dress-up with popstars and supermodels. The party on Friday night was an appropriately loud, glittering and bumptious, sexy and downright messy affair. Confirmation of the enduring talent born out of St Martin’s School of Art.”
Farewell CXR<3 thanks for the amazing memories: fashion print-maker Chi He from Shanghai (second right) and friends at the St Martin’s party. From her Facebook album
❏ CHRISTOS TOLERA, painter, musician and not a former student, who nevertheless idled many away teenage hours in the St Martin’s cafe, reports:
“Pulp started with Misfit and ended with Common People which I listened to in the rain from Charing X Rd as I left. If I was 22 I think I would have thought it was one of the best gigs ever. Jarvis was charming in between songs and had presence but was drowned out during the enthusiastic performance.
“However the energy in the room was palpable and reminded me of the olden days, of gigs in warehouse spaces and a certain abandon rarely seen in these overly organised and calculated times. I left because I wasn’t drunk and had seen enough. It made me feel old. I didn’t really have anyone with me who was looking through the same eyes, seeing what I was seeing. There was something quite romantic about listening to the last song from under an umbrella on the street, with no one really aware that the very audible racket coming from the first-floor window was actually Pulp and not a dodgy covers band.
“All in all I found it sad. Not the band but the memory of me as a 17-year-old hanging out in the cafe at St Martin’s thinking I’d arrived only to find out I was just passing through like the rest of us. My night was summed up when the girls in the cloakroom asked why I was there and I told them I’d modelled in a seminal show (Stephen Linard’s) there in 1980. ‘Oh, that was nine years before I was born’…”
HELLO TO THE SPECTACULAR NEW UNIVERSITY CAMPUS BESIDE THE CANAL AT KING’S CROSS
King’s Cross Central: The focus for CSM’s new home will be the Grade II listed Granary Building of 1851, built to a design by Lewis Cubitt
❏ THIS WEEK marks the end of an era, as CSM leaves its two buildings in central London and moves to a new premises in King’s Cross, just across the road from The Guardian. The move won’t be welcomed by Professor Louise Wilson, legendary course director of MA fashion, who believes that the very grottiness of the Charing Cross Road building has helped drive her students – from McQueen to Christopher Kane – to succeed. “You feel that you’re better than this corridor,” she says. “In the new building you want to hide…”
❚ WACKIEST AMONG THE 80s BLITZ KID RACERS was Stephen Linard, the Essex boy who nevertheless graduated from St Martin’s art school with a first-class degree in menswear 30 years ago this summer. Modelled by six of his hunky clubland pals, his collection titled Reluctant Emigrés featured swishy draped greatcoats, pinstripe trousers and city shirts that all evinced an Edwardian air of immaculate tailoring while declaring edgy details with organza and contrast patches. Amid the women’s outfits shown by most of the other fashion graduates, Linard’s chic street-savvy lads had a gasp-out-loud impact, as commentator Suzy Menkes noted after the show. The influential South Molton Street shop Browns immediately wanted to develop the range, but Stephen decided instead to sell his original garments to a short-lived synthpop band called Animal Magnet. “I needed the money,” he says now in a shocking confession of short-termism.
A hugely original and resourceful talent, Stephen was feted by the fashion press upon graduation. His high-visibility fashion leads were key among the 15 sharpest Blitz Kids who shaped the New Romantics silhouette from Covent Garden’s Blitz club — Stephen Jones, Kim Bowen, Lee Sheldrick, Helen Robinson, Melissa Caplan, Fiona Dealey, Judi Frankland, Michele Clapton, David Holah, Stevie Stewart, Julia Fodor, Dinny Hall, Simon Withers and über-wag Chris Sullivan were the others. Most significantly, Linard advertised his bizarre imagination by changing his appearance on an almost daily basis, from his foppish Fauntleroy dandy, to the Endangered Species outfit made from animal skins, to the Bonnie Prince Charlie tartans copied for his character in Worried About the Boy, last year’s TV biodrama on Boy George, who became a soulmate the moment Stephen walked into Billy’s club, where the Swinging 80s were hatched in 1978.
Click any pic below to enlarge Linard’s degree collection 1981:
So… where is he now, the dignified Stephen Linard pictured this month sporting a three-button, three-piece linen suit in a faded shade of indigo, and handmade in Venice? Well, since 1989 Stephen has been on the design team at Drake’s, the respected men’s haberdasher which has just opened its first shop at No 3 Clifford Street, just off Savile Row, the global epicentre of serious tailoring. Those with fond memories of Bowring Arundel & Co — for whom Stephen’s late father once supplied handmade leather goods — have welcomed the arrival of the new shop. Though Drake’s was founded in 1977, the firm has never had its own retail outlet.
Michael Drake, a former head of design at Aquascutum, was its co-founder (and incidentally, “my grandmother’s nephew,” Stephen said). He began making the finest accessories, from cashmere scarves and printed silk handkerchiefs to knitwear, shirts and the elegant neckwear that has made Drake’s the largest independent producer of handmade ties in England. It enjoys a prodigious export market, by designing collections for international luxury shops and collaborating with such style-leaders as the Japanese fashion label Commes des Garçons.
Today the creative director Michael Hill encourages his designers to refresh the seasonal ranges with new textiles, both for readymade production and for bespoke handcrafting at Drake’s workrooms in the artisan quarter of Georgian Clerkenwell. A revival of bespoke suit-making has seen a new appetite for accessories in raw shantung and Indian tussah silk — its slubbed texture playing well with both formal suits and casual jackets — as well as traditional madder silk from Macclesfield in Cheshire, where Stephen is a frequent visitor ensuring that exacting standards are met.
A stylish touch to Drake’s new strategy has been to recruit the impish graphic artist Adam Dant, whose witty drawings adorn the shop and the stylishly written Drake’s website. In particular it commissioned him to create one of the Hogarthian “mockuments” which won him the Jerwood Prize. Rather like flowcharts, these reveal the inner workings of an institution and its people, and Dant’s depiction of Drake’s Clerkenwell factory provides the lining to one antique vitrine, formerly property of the Victoria and Albert museum and now in Clifford Street, displaying shantung ties and enormously long (in the Italian style) knee-socks.
Included among Dant’s portraits of colleagues who are said to have influenced Michael Drake is Stephen Linard’s and it echoes an emblematic photograph published in i-D magazine in which he wears a Yohji jacket and jaunty Confederate Army leather cap, “bought in Anchorage airport in the days when I was rich — bathtubs filled with champagne”. This is a reminder of the period 1983–86 when he lived in Tokyo designing for Jun Co, the fashion giant, on a salary which, he liked to boast, exceeded the prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s. In the mid-80s, to be an English designer brought you popstar status in Japan, as those fellow Blitz Kids Stephen Jones and Lee Sheldrick also discovered.
Close-up of the portrait: Linard is one of many talents associated with Drake’s who have been captured by the artist Adam Dant. His reference was a photograph dating from 1983 — note the ornamental bath tap. Courtesy of Adam Dant and Drake’s
Long before he joined the “Japanese invasion” effected by Britain’s emergent new wave of streetwise fashionistas, Stephen had gained the admiration of the international fashion glossies. With 1983 came his collection Angels With Dirty Faces, inspired by the Bogart-Cagney gangster movie set in the 30s depression. It was both pretty and poignant and it sold worldwide. That year, the snappiest magazine of the day, New York, headlined a special fashion section The British Are Here, and selected as the UK’s five leading lights Jean Muir, Zandra Rhodes, Katharine Hamnett, Vivienne Westwood — and Stephen Linard, “one of the most creative of the young designers”.
Linard designs from his heyday: bias-cut tea dress, $100 in Bloomingdale’s, from his 1983 Angels With Dirty Faces collection, here photographed by Tony McGee for New York magazine. Right, Neil Tennant wears a Reluctant Emigrés topcoat by Linard in the Pet Shop Boys video for West End Girls (Parlophone 1984)
Stephen’s clothes had always been sought after by his popstar contemporaries from Spandau Ballet, Boy George and The Slits, to U2, Womack & Womack, even Cliff Richard and Johnny Mathis, and ultimately to the great god David Bowie himself. (Stephen had to turn down the invitation to go on location to appear in the Ashes to Ashes video in 1980 “because I was on a disciplinary warning at St Martin’s over attendance”!) His Reluctant Emigrés collection enjoyed a curiously long life and in 1984 we see Neil Tennant lording it in one of the black linen topcoats in the Pet Shop Boys video for West End Girls, their first single which went to No 1 in the UK and US.
Many Linard looks have been coveted by the fashionistas but, as with so many gifted designers, let’s say a head for business came second to his eye for fashion. The timing of funds hit the rocks in more than one of Stephen’s creatively successful ventures, and decades ago he complained loudly that the St Martin’s fashion department didn’t do enough to equip graduates with basic business skills. (This, we are assured, has since been addressed by the college.) In the end it wasn’t surprising that he accepted the offer to join the Drake’s family, which seems to have dealt him a lucky hand.
One tip for wearing the perfect handmade tie? “Never tuck the smaller blade through the ‘keeper’— the loop on the back of the large blade. Much more stylish to let it flap free. Like undoing the button-cuff on your jacket, to show you don’t care.”
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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
LANDMARK FAREWELLS. . . HIT THE INDEX TAB UP TOP FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
All levels of the Royal Festival Hall are transformed into a multi-venue playground, with ten vintage nightclubs such as The Soul Casino, Let it Rock, The Torch Club and The Leisure Lounge. New this year are The Studio, Prohibition Room, The Bunker Club and the North South Divide. In total there’ll be 70 live performances, 150 deejays, exclusive catwalk shows with Jo Wood and Pearl and Daisy Lowe; decade specific make-overs; vintage food and cocktails and 250 sellers at the vintage marketplace. Each day sees a major Revue in the main auitorium: Heaven 17, Alan Wilder and Thomas Dolby, for example, in Friday’s Electronic Revue… Percy Sledge in Saturday’s Soul Revue… David McAlmont, Sandie Shaw and more in Sunday’s Hit Parade.
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