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. ”
❚ THIS TIME THE DAILY MAIL got there first, shock, outrage! Pop singer George Michael’s boyfriend Fadi Fawaz posted a picture yesterday via Twitter of the pair cuddled up on a sunshine holiday, with the caption, “Isn’t he the cutest?” Minutes later George responded with a second snap saying “Yes he is :)”
The star then tweeted to say: “Oh and by the way everyone, if u are wondering why Fadi is the one sending you the pics lately, it’s cos I jumped in the decking pool with my iPhone in my shorts pocket yesterday.”
If we scroll further back in the boyz’ Twitter accounts we’d have seen several holiday snaps in recent days. With one pin-up of his favourite chunk of beefcake, who is a leading hair and beauty stylist in London, 48-year-old George tweeted the comment: “Sun, sand, and a bit of this doesn’t hurt either.” Earlier, George posts another pic of the carefree couple, saying: “This is an oldie from Venice, we clearly have no idea the paps were there, I look way too happy.”
George replies with a second snap: hunky boyfie to the fore
The boyz are yachting and jet-skiing at an undisclosed location George reveals is in the “southern hemisphere” and is a “bit classier than Club Trop, and the drinks are far from free”. It is, he adds, his first real holiday in many years, and “I might remind the media that my ‘new man’ is in fact the same man they photographed me with at Nobu… in 2008!”
The Mail report reminds us that the 80s superstar is continuing his recovery after narrowly escaping death only weeks ago during a serious bout of pneumonia. George’s tweets confirm this: “Even my tracheotomy scar is healing nicely in the sun — was looking a bit Bride of Chucky for a while.”
He also announced: “People, I’m excited… just finishing a ballad that I think is going to make you think my eighties self has been re-born, which I suppose it has in a way.” As for resuming the tour that was cancelled because of his illness, he told one fan: “Realistically I can’t see my vocal cords being being ready till the summer.”
Dear Sir! Daily Mail readers are, as we know, unshockable. Comments beneath the romantic pictures posted online include:
❏ “Go get a room gm. Spare us please” — the Lady, who prefers dogs to SOME people
❏ “Old man with a toyboy. YUK!!” — Alan, Sussex
❏ “George has finally found the love of his life… A guy who looks like himself.” — Realist, Coventry
❏ “I have always thought that George Michael & Sir Elton John would have made a lovely, great couple. Both excellent musicians, in their own niche. Both lovers of children & animals. Good luck to them all.” — Pamela Hutton, Sydney, Australia.
AND NOW FOR SOME MUSIC: GEORGE’S LATEST SINGLE HE WAS PROUDLY TWEETING ABOUT
… AND BOYFIE FADI’S FAV SONG (BY FAMED
LEBANESE LEGEND)
❏ Fadi tweets “My fav song of Fairouz” — Music facts: Nouhad Wadi Haddad, also known as Fairuz/Fairouz which means “Turquoise”, is a 76-year-old Lebanese artist widely considered to be the most famous living singer in the Arab world.
LET’S NOT FORGET GEORGE’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
❏ Dec 23: “This has been the worst month of my life.” George Michael gives an emotional and breathless press conference admitting his life has been hanging in the balance as he battled pneumonia in Austria. Unbelievable American newspaper headline immediately before his recovery: Radicals Condemned for Praying for George Michael to Die
❏ Dec 13: A couple of weeks earlier George had been bearing up by compiling a playlist of his all-time favourite Christmas songs, top of which was his own December Song (I Dreamed of Christmas), “Written with my best friend, David Austin”.
Snapper and Stone: Derek Ridgers seen at last night’s Sunday Times party at the Saatchi Gallery beside his photo of Keith Richards, published by the Magazine in 1986. (Nokia mobile snap by yours truly)
◼ WHAT ARE THE ODDS on any photographer having an iconic photograph included in the exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Sunday Times Magazine, the UK’s first newspaper colour supplement? Launched in the dull days of 1962 when papers appeared only in black-and-white, as did TV, the mag proclaimed itself the paper’s Colour Section to point up its USP. Since then it must have published at least 250,000 pages, so the odds of being shown in the powerful new exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery are stacked against most of its contributing photographers. Only 60 were chosen for the show.
This elegantly mounted selection of 100 historic pix, plus various supporting mementoes, packs a surprising punch. The vitality of the huge images is an object lesson in what makes photographic magic.
Grit and glamour on ST Magazine covers: Don McCullin’s exhausted mother and weeping child in Bangladesh, 1972 … Marilyn Monroe on a 1973 cover, photographed in a famous series of naked pictures by Bert Stern, a month before her death in August 1962
Right from the off, the Mag established its benchmark: “photographer first”. In Feb 1962 the 24-year-old David Bailey’s launch issue cover shots at Chelsea Reach showed the model Jean Shrimpton wearing a Mary Quant outfit and announced the dawn of Swinging London. Inside pages featured pop artist Peter Blake five years before he designed the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album sleeve, and a short story titled The Living Daylights by 007 author Ian Fleming.
In the words of Michael Rand, the Mag’s art director for 30 years, its credo was “grit plus glamour — fashion juxtaposed with war photography and pop art”. This meant serious investment in photo-reportage from the world’s troublespots. He went on to champion the work of Eve Arnold, Snowdon, Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy, Richard Avedon, Eugene Richards, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark. Rand says he felt a great responsibility to project the honesty of their pictures. Risking his life in the warzones of the late 20th century, Don McCullin survived sniper bullets to return with some of the century’s most haunting pictures, and to write movingly of the impact on his own soul from having witnessed at first hand the pain and the pity of shell-shocked soldiers and starving children in Biafra, Vietnam and Northern Ireland. In 1989, Stuart Franklin, onetime president of the Magnum agency, leant out of a hotel window to give the world the unforgettable image of a young man single-handedly halting a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square.
First group pic of key Blitz Kids, April 1980: George O’Dowd, Vivienne Lynn, Chris Sullivan, Kim Bowen, Pinkietessa and Steve Strange immmortalised by Derek Ridgers for The Sunday Times Magazine
All the more reason to be extra-impressed at last night’s party launching the exhibition to meet my old ally on London’s clubbing scene in the 80s, Derek Ridgers. You know his pictures of everyone within a mile of Steve Strange, king of the posers, because they’re all over this website, and as half a dozen key Blitz Kids well remember, he snapped their first published group shot at the Blitz for the ST Magazine in April 1980. Last night Derek had been chatting on and off for at least half an hour while we sidestepped the namedroppy media luvvies and posey models to mingle with the veterans Mike Rand and Beatle biographer Hunter Davies, ST picture editor Ray Wells and snapper Uli Weber (standing in front of his demonic pic of Boy George sprouting a pair of satanic horns, while his pic of Kylie Minogue in the bath is on the poster for this show).
Eventually Derek, who is modest to a fault, asked if I was carrying a camera and I had to say no, thinking it a bit uncool at a swanky champagne bash for 700 media A-listers (which was obviously his view too since his own holster was empty). We did then discover that we were both toting the same unsmart workhorse Nokia 6300 mobile with 2Mp cams onboard. OK, they’ll do, so would I mind taking a pic of him beside his own exhibit at the end of the gallery? Excuse me, Derek? Nice old mild-mannered Derek with his long hair tied in a tail, and knapsack over his shoulder? Renowned for his book full of skinhead and punk portraits, not to mention the dodgy habitués of sexclubs like Skin Two, of David Claridge vintage? Derek’s IN this show? Yes he is. Even with the odds stacked at 250,000 to one against, it’s true. “I was amazed when they sent me an email asking if they could show this photograph,” he said. “So I said, yes, I didn’t mind.” How cool is that?
What we see is a charismatic mugshot of wrecked old Scary Stone, Keith Richards, snapped back in late 1985 when the face of the “10th greatest guitarist of all time” was engraved with a tiny fraction of the million lines it boasts now. He was settling into his marriage to the model Patti Hansen, and Derek persuaded the rock star to pose for him after a chance encounter at the Savoy hotel in London. He says: “There was no KR entourage whatsoever. He couldn’t possibly have been any more helpful. I guess that’s what makes him the guy he is.”
Full marks for initiative, Derek. In 2012 The Sunday Times remains the UK’s best-selling quality newspaper. In the season of Oscars and artsy prizegivings, to be included among the 60 top photographers in the life of its mighty Magazine is pretty well the best gong a lensman can win.
Grit and glamour at the Saatchi Gallery: Tim Hetherington’s photographs observe American soldiers asleep in 2009 in Afghanistan. He said they are about “the intimacy of war. We’re not talking about friendship. We’re talking about brotherhood.” He was killed in Libya in 2011 … Minutes before a tense Amy Winehouse went onstage at a Mandela tribute concert in 2008, Terry O’Neill persuaded the singer to pose for a pic dedicated to the great man. O’Neill said: “She steeled herself for it.” All published in the ST Magazine. Gallery views by Shapersofthe80s
Beijing 1989: Stuart Franklin photographed pro-democracy student protesters in Tiananmen Square which made a cover shot for the ST Mag. Two days after the massacre of hundreds of civilians, he caught “Tank Man” defying Chinese T-59 tanks armed only with his shopping bags
Glamour and grit: Faye Dunaway in Beverly Hills at 6am the day after winning her 1977 Oscar for Network, photographed by her future husband Terry O’Neill… Right, in 1976 Don McCullin catches six Christian Phalangist militia playing music over a girl’s corpse after they went into East Beirut to “clean up the rats”. One had a Kalashnikov and another a lute stolen from the home of the people they’d just killed. McCullin says: “It haunts me to this day.”
Grit or glamour, the eyes have it: Nigel Parry nails the steely ambition of Tony Blair in 1994, weeks before becoming the Labour Party leader and going on to win three general elections … Uli Weber nails the demons of pop singer Boy George on tour in 1993, after emerging from one of his early descents into drug-fuelled despair
➢ Update: The Sunday Times Magazine 50th Anniversary Exhibition runs at the Saatchi Gallery, London, was scheduled to run until Feb 19, excluding Feb 11–14, now extended to March 18. Entry is free. The Magazine published a dedicated anniversary issue Sunday, Feb 5.
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
British artist David Hockney posing yesterday at the Royal Academy of Arts in London with his painting The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011. Photograph by Luke MacGregor, Reuters
“ The Royal Academy of Arts in London has never been host to an exhibition quite like David Hockney’s A Bigger Picture. The academy has a history dating to 1768. The one-man show, which runs from Jan 21 to April 9, is a tour de force. It consists almost entirely of new work, using both low-tech media such as painting and the latest high-tech tools. Hockney approaches the time-honored subject of nature in a fresh, contemporary way. The result is spectacular.
Hockney has also come up with a more hi-tech kind of picture created by multiple, high-definition cameras set at slightly different angles. The result is a moving photo-collage: a bigger picture because it sees more, from varying points of view. Most of the films on show are landscapes, though the most recent is a dance spectacular, shot on 18 cameras in Hockney’s studio. It gives a wonderful festive finale to the exhibition, in which Hockney paints the stage in sumptuous color, and shoots the action like a combination of Pablo Picasso and Busby Berkeley ” … / continued online
“ [Hockney] is commanding new technologies in a countercultural quest to prove that painting, in an age dominated by conceptualism and installation, can be as theatrical and monumental as any 21st-century spectacle. ”
“ Hockney is best known as the raunchy Californian sensualist who painted sun-kissed boys gliding through the azure swimming pools of Los Angeles in the Sixties. And yet here he presents himself as a modest pastoralist, content to hymn the bounty of nature with quiet exultation – dancing, like Wordsworth, among the daffodils. Once inspired by distant destinations such as Egypt, China and America’s West Coast, he now seems happy pottering about a neglected nook of England. The prodigal son has returned to within 65 miles of Bradford, where he was born in 1937, and settled down. The internationalist has turned parochial. The radical has come over all conservative … Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I don’t understand paintings like these. Fresh, bright and perfectly delightful, they are much too polite and unthinkingly happy for my taste: if they offer a vision of arcadia, it is a mindless one… ” / continued online
HOCKNEY REVEALS A ‘new vision of the world’ IN OUR OWN INTERVIEW 30 YEARS AGO
❚ WHILE IN LONDON FOR A FORTNIGHT in 1983 David Hockney says that he has resumed painting after a two-year break pursuing photography. The freshly primed canvases in his London studio testify to the urgency with which he wants “to deal with the ideas that are bubbling away”. He lobs in a shocker: “I’ve looked at some cubist paintings for 25 years without understanding them. Suddenly I see cubism differently, more clearly. And my experiments have led me to a couple of theories of my own . . .”
➢ 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
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