Blitz Club host Steve Strange: Posing outside his club with Visage and friends in 1979 – today promoting an exhibition. (Detail from photo by Sheila Rock)
❚ A HANDFUL OF EVER-STYLISH CLUBLAND POSERS stepped forward this week to help London’s Design Museum to announce its autumn exhibition titled Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s. It has been developed in close collaboration with the leading Blitz Kid and later costume designer Fiona Dealey, plus broadcaster Robert Elms, Spandau Ballet’s manager Steve Dagger and music executive Graham Ball, formerly one of Dagger’s firm – three clubland contemporaries who were the least like die-hard Blitz Kids! The trendy Tuesday clubnight which opened in Covent Garden’s Blitz wine bar in 1979 is best known as home to the New Romantics movement which revolutionised Eighties youth culture across fashion, music, media, film, art, design and retail.
The chapter some of us dubbed the Pose Age launched the careers of many talents, from hosts Steve Strange (who died in 2015) and deejay Rusty Egan to popstars Spandau Ballet, Visage, Boy George, Sade, Andy Polaris, and Marilyn, as well as key influencers Perry Haines, Chris Sullivan, Midge Ure, Iain Webb, and stylist Kim Bowen, couture milliner Stephen Jones and Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, deejay Princess Julia, Darla Jane Gilroy, Stephen Linard, Melissa Caplan, Judith Frankland, Dinny Hall, John Maybury, Cerith Wyn Evans, Simon Withers, Ollie O’Donnell, Richard Ostell, Paul Sturridge, Franceska King, Milly Dwit, Vivienne Lynn, Theresa Thurmer, Lesley Chilkes, David Holah and a hundred more.
Press call: Tim Marlow, Robert Elms, Danielle Thom and Rusty Egan
The exhibition will feature over 250 items, many unseen by the public, ranging from clothing and accessories, design sketches, musical instruments, flyers, magazines, furniture, artworks, photography, vinyl records and rare film footage.
Yesterday’s press launch at the Groucho club proved one of the liveliest in a long while with spontaneous banter between the Museum director Tim Marlow, Robert Elms, Rusty Egan and curator Danielle Thom. They promised a sensory extravaganza which will surprise us when we walk into the exhibition.
Among other things, Elms reminded us how young his pals all were: “We were called Blitz Kids because we were kids, almost no one over the age of 21 – some of us 16/17… Most of us were really young and creative but also really mischievous. One of the things about the Blitz is that it’s sometimes portrayed as a bit po-faced, all these people posing – we were certainly doing that but it was anything but po-faced. It was scurrilous, dangerous, naughty, it was sexy, all those things.
The Last Word: Robert Elms entertains museum director Tim Marlow (not to mention Groucho Marx, at rear)
“Rusty provided this wonderful backdrop. He never played too loud, so people could dance but at the front end you could still talk. I could get Steve Dagger in my ear saying ‘We’re going to take over the world!’ It wasn’t a disco but a club in the best sense of the word, of like-minded individuals.”
Egan proved as sentimental as ever, reminding us of the legacy of the 1970s: “A hundred kids were coming in on a Tuesday night in the Winter of Discontent. It was a very miserable time, it was also really miserable to be not sure if you’re a boy or a girl but ‘Hey man, Let’s go out into the night’ – and as a DJ I played songs which said ‘He was a she and then, Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’ … Lyrics were very important as they were for the Rolling Stones in 1977 when disco was get up, stand up, boogie oogie. We wanted lyrics.”
Elms had the last word on the Blitz as the event came to an end: “My mates were quite cool. There were a couple of hundred Herberts and urchins, over-dressed, undervalued, who actually went on to define the decade. This is our place in history and this exhibition is overdue. It’s a recognition that this wasn’t just a load of silly kids with high hair.”
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 