Photo by Kate Garner
❚ A LAVISHLY DESIGNED OBITUARY of Stephen Linard written by me appears in today’s Evening Standard online and stands as a well-deserved memoir for one of my best friends…
➢ The life of Stephen Linard – A flamboyant Canvey Island boy who went on to shape the Blitz Kids silhouette in the 1980s
Posted in biography, death, fashion illustrations, journalism, London, New Romantics, Swinging 80s, Youth culture, zeitgeist
Tagged Blitz Kids, fashion, Stephen Linard
Stephen Linard in 2018: A last pint at his local pub before moving away from Canvey Island. (Photo @ Shapersofthe80s)
INCREDIBLE!!!! Update – Shapersofthe80s has received 8,100 hits during the three days since Stephen’s death. Thank you to his fans
❚ HARD TO ACCEPT THAT STEPHEN LINARD has now died from the extensive throat cancer that had caused him so much pain recently. He was one of the craziest of eccentrics who frequently made me laugh out loud. We met at a party at Steve Strange’s flat in 1980 when he was among the sharpest half-dozen Blitz Kids who changed their looks daily and put the Blitz Club on the map. We hit it off immediately and I soon latched onto the star trio of Stephen, Kim Bowen and Lee Sheldrick who went everywhere together.
I photographed his degree show and over the years helped him through various projects in that era when St Martin’s School of Art failed to equip its graduates with any guidance for running their own businesses. Luckily, pop stars from Pet Shop Boys to U2 and even Bowie readily adopted his strong styles and in 1983 the American fashion press included him among the eight most influential London designers [see link below], noted for his strong eye for colour.
From 1983 to ’86 Stephen 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. From 1989 until recently Stephen was a key player on the design team at Drake’s, the respected men’s haberdasher off Savile Row (pictured below). The main photo (above) marked a last pint at his local pub on Canvey Island where he lived in his late mother’s house until 2020 before joining the Old Romantic Folks who go on retiring to St Leonard’s-on-Sea.
Only six months ago, as if in anticipation of the worst, Stephen staged a striking exhibition of his early illustrations, titled Total Fashion Victim after the club-night he had hosted at Soho’s coolest hang-out, the Wag. I was lucky enough to write the outline catalogue with him.
Former Blitz Kid and St Martin’s fashion graduate Stephen Linard in 2011: a designer with Drake’s, the gentlemen’s haberdasher, seen here at a staff preview for the opening of its first shop just off Savile Row. (Photograph © Shapersofthe80s)
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: 2023, Total Fashion Victim – Linard’s exhibition of his early work
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
The Blitz Kids WATN? No 28, Stephen Linard
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
1982, Six British designers take London fashion
to the French
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: Overseas influencers
declare eight hot fashion Brits for 1984
➢ Goodbye, Stephen Linard: It was a privilege to know you – by novelist Maggie Alderson
➢ Linard’s entry at the Encyclopedia of Fashion – by Alan
J. Flux; updated by Daryl F. Mallett
Posted in biography, death, London, New Romantics, Swinging 80s, Tributes
Tagged Alan Flux, Blitz Kids, Drake’s, fashion, Maggie Alderson, Stephen Linard, Total Fashion Victim, Vogue, WWD
At his TFV PV: a colourful Linard with some of his early illustrations inspired by Tom of Finland. (Photo © Shapersofthe80s)
❚ NORMAN ROAD in St Leonard’s on Sea hosted more than its usual share of Eighties art fans this weekend. At Lucy Bell’s a book signing by Bowie’s travelling companion and photographer Geoff MacCormack drew fans seeking a signature on his latest title. Only yards away the newish Rogue Gallery was hosting Total Fashion Victim, an archive exhibition of one-time Blitz Kid Stephen Linard’s earliest fashion illustrations while a student from 1978 onward. As his tutor at St Martin’s Rosetta Brooks declared, he was a leader among the small pack of London fashionistas noted for their poser talents. “Each poser,” she believed, “is a ready-made,” exactly as defined by Marcel Duchamp in New York around 1914 when modernism was being born. (His own most famous ready-mades included Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack and the urinal titled Fountain.)
Partying with Linard – Click any pic to launch slideshow:
Here we can judge for ourselves from more than 40 pieces of artwork on sale for the next month, and enjoyed by a considerable crowd at the private view. Among them one of Linard’s designer contemporaries at St Martin’s School of Art was Corinne Drewery, later to become a pop singer with Swing Out Sister, here eye-catching in one of his flapper dresses in ikat with faded rose print which she used to wear circa 1983, “and it still fits”!!!
Linard’s previously unseen work – Click any pic to launch slideshow:
Posted in 20th century, art for sale, Blitz Kids, degree shows, exhibitions, fashion illustrations, New Romantics, stage costumes, Swinging 80s, Youth culture
Tagged Corinne Drewery, Eve Ferret, Helen Robinson, Lucy Bell, Michele Clapton, Princess Julia, Ray Gange, Rogue Gallery, Rose Hibbert, St Leonards on Sea, Stephen Linard, Total Fashion Victim, Val Byers
An exhibition of fashion legend Stephen Linard’s archive of drawings, photographs and garments runs for a month from 8 September and provides eye-opening insights into his startling influence on the other Blitz Kids and on the fashion jetset…
Ex-St Martin’s fashion designer Stephen Linard at the height of his commercial success in 1984, when he worked for three years for Jun Co in Japan. Here pictured by Toscani for i-D magazine’s issue No 15 in “An illustrated guide to detail”. He sports a leather Confederate Army cap $15 bought in transit through Anchorage airport in Alaska. The jacket £250 over giant-collared shirt £120, and trousers £200 are all by Yohji Yamamoto. Waistcoat £180 by Gianni Versace. Artfully placed on his left lapel is a silvered bathroom tap £60 and faucet brooch £40, both from a jewellery collection for Chloe, Paris. He said: “It was worth it for the stir it caused at the Paris collections.”
❚ THE PRESS CALLED THEM the New Romantics and the Blitz Kids, declaring the Eighties the Age of the Pose. Art-school tutor Rosetta Brooks compared their self-consciously styled poses to “street theatre ultimately extended into continuous performance as a post-punk embodiment of Gilbert and George in one person (the individualist).” Each poser, she believed, is a ready-made. Step forward fashion student Stephen Linard for ticking all the above boxes – a flamboyant Canvey Island boy from Southend School of Art (1975-78) who yearned to make a statement in every street or room he graced.
Arriving at St Martin’s School of Art in London (1978-81), Linard pushed the boundaries of excess. Annually, second-year students organised an Alternative Fashion Show but in May 1980 the college’s resoundingly prim middle-class students were out-gunned when Linard sent out his sensational Neon Gothic collection – a stark collision of Space 1999 meets liturgical Gothic meets the masonic livery which was displayed in shops serving the Freemasons’ Hall just along the street from the Blitz Club, the capital’s coolest nightspot.
The audience erupted in cheers. Strutting the runway to the Human League came the then-unknown George O’Dowd sporting a soaraway post-punk mullet atop sharp grosgrain suit with dog collar, Michele Clapton and Myra Falconer wearing risen-from-the-dead pallor beneath shaven heads, along with Fiona Dealey and Julia Fodor (today a Princess). Their vestments were accessorised with religious motifs while emanating a curiously spare chic. Finally, all in white as a “space-age pope”, came gifted Lee Sheldrick, modelling a white silk grosgrain suit with his head shaved bald to become the embodiment of Nosferatu the Vampyre. Resonances abounded for the show’s title to be adopted by the nascent Goth movement.
A stark collision of Space 1999 meets liturgical Gothic: Two robes from Stephen Linard’s sensational Neon Gothic collection in his second year at St Martin’s
One year later Linard was determined to submit menswear for his degree collection, despite the efforts of the head of the fashion department to insist on women’s wear. She actually threatened to eject Linard from the college until strong internal protests backing Linard’s pursuit of menswear ultimately prevailed. Modelled by six of his hunky clubland pals, his collection titled Reluctant Emigrés featured swishy draped cashmere greatcoats, patched pinstripe trousers and city shirts that all evinced an Edwardian air of immaculate tailoring punctuated with edgy details.
Linard’s street-savvy lads made a gasp-out-loud impact, as Fleet Street’s Suzy Menkes noted in print. Historians Alan J. Flux and Daryl F. Mallett have also written: “The clothes were instantly covetable, thoroughly masculine in an entirely new way, and electrifying as only the truly innovative can be.” Linard won his first-class Honours degree.
The fashion press feted him upon graduation. His outrageous fashion details flagged direction for the two dozen sharpest Blitz Kids who shaped the New Romantics silhouette from the Blitz onwards. Most significantly, Linard changed his own appearance daily from his foppish Fauntleroy dandy, to the Endangered Species outfit made from animal skins, to the cowboy gilded from hat to toe. Linard has admitted: “The competition pushed you on, especially Lee Sheldrick. At the Warren Street squat [where they lived] you might change what you were going to wear eight times on a Tuesday to try to outdo everyone else at the Blitz.”
Inspiration was all around. In 2020 Linard said: “The Blitz was an art students’ club. The place was choc-a-bloc with artists: Brian Clarke, Zandra Rhodes, Molly Parkin, Antony Price, Duggie Fields, Kevin Whitney and us because it was halfway between Central School and St Martin’s. People who said ‘Oh you Blitz Kids don’t DO anything’ were talking rubbish, because WE all did. We were the ones with our work in the glossy magazines long before the rest.”
Smiles from the press at Linard’s degree show: The Reluctant Emigrés wore pinstripe trousers in Savile Row fabrics and city shirts in feminine couture fabrics evoking Edwardiana. (Photo by Shapersofthe80s)
Linard’s styles had always been sought after by pop-star contemporaries from Spandau Ballet, Boy George, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Haysi Fantayzee and The Slits, to U2, the Bee Gees, Womack & Womack, even Cliff Richard and Johnny Mathis, and ultimately to the great god David Bowie himself.
In 1982 the Railway Children collection of stripey Edwardian coats and frocks for school-girls became the first of Linard’s two womenswear collections. He was one of six budding British designers taken to Paris by Blitz Club host Steve Strange to help launch his Anvil album, but also to show that the English could be as stylish as the French – staged at Europe’s coolest nightclub, Le Palace.
Meanwhile Linard’s reputation went on growing among the international fashion set. 1983 brought his collection Angels with Dirty Faces, inspired by the Bogart-Cagney gangster movie set in the Thirties 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”.
As recently as 2018, Laird Borrelli-Persson was writing in Vogue online: “Stephen Linard deserves credit for many innovations in fashion and its presentation that we take for granted… One of the Blitz Kids whose dandyish ways had an outsize impact on 1980s style, his early work was distinguished not only by irreverence, but also by a strong sense of narrative… Linard insists his aim was not to cause outrage. ‘I was into doing couture stuff and I was ‘just making clothes,’ really, as Sonia Rykiel used to say’.”
PS: Since you ask, Total Fashion Victim was the name of the one-nighter Linard hosted at the Wag Club during the Eighties.
St Martin’s Alternative Fashion Show 1980: Linard’s Neon Gothic collection modelled by his most stylish Blitz Kid friends – from the left, Michele Clapton, George O’Dowd, Lee Sheldrick in white as a space-age pope, and Myra Falconer
Stephen Linard seen in i-D magazine’s fifth birthday issue, No 30 in 1985, as one of their gallery of creative protagonists they titled 99 People of the 80s, all photographed by Nick Knight.
Posted in art for sale, Blitz Kids, degree shows, exhibitions, fashion illustrations, Goth rock, History, New Romantics, nightlife, Swinging 80s, Youth culture
Tagged Graham Smith, Nick Knight, Rogue Gallery, Rosetta Brooks, St Leonards on Sea, St Martin’s School of Art, Stephen Linard, Total Fashion Victim
❚ TODAY WAS THE DAY in 1980 when London’s now fabled Blitz Club was blessed by a visit from David Bowie. He came with a purpose – to whisk away four of the most outlandish Blitz Kids to strut with his pierrot through the video for his new number, Ashes to Ashes, from an imminent new album. It earned each of them £50, helped Bowie to No 1 in the singles chart the following month and boosted demand for black ankle-length robes among trendsetters.
Ashes To Ashes video 1980: Blitz Kids as chorus to Major Tom
Every Tuesday for 16 months, king of the posers Steve Strange had been declaring a “private party” in the cheap-and-cheerful Blitz wine bar near Covent Garden, along with his co-host Rusty Egan who was pioneering Elektro-Diskow dance music as deejay. Your Look was everything and outrage ensured entry. Inside, precocious 19-year-olds presented an eye-stopping collage, preening away in wondrous ensembles, in-flight haircuts and emphatic make-up that made you feel normality was a sin. Hammer Horror met Rank starlet. These were Bowie’s offspring, individualists who had taken him at his word to be “heroes just for one day”, living amusing lives, creating disposable identities, and wearing looks not uniforms. Now, on this day, their god came among them with the very serious mission of paying homage to some of his bizarre principal characters and moving himself on into the next phase of his life… Unwittingly the Blitz Kids would become his little helpers.
Bowie at the Blitz Club 1980: Russ Williams, John Lockwood and Andy Bulled papped by Tommy Crowley
Memories of Tuesday 1 July vary. The 21-year-old Steve Strange found himself requesting extra security to stem what the soon-to-become pop singer Andy Polaris also records in his diary as a “minor riot”. In contrast, the coolest heroes in the club refused to pander to the great star and merely contemplated their drinks.
Strange writes in his autobiography, Blitzed: “We had no prior warning, and [Bowie] arrived with two other people and his PA [Corinne] ‘Coco’ [Schwab], whom I didn’t think was very nice.” The guests whose names Strange forgot were, according to the Polaris diary, singer Karen O’Connor (daughter of comedian Des) and painter-photographer Edward Bell, who designed the cover artwork for the imminent Scary Monsters album and singles.
Strange’s book claims: “We managed to sneak them into the club the back way to avoid a fuss and usher him upstairs to a private area. David himself was charming and asked if I would join him upstairs for a drink when I had finished on the door. I wanted to go straight away, but, annoyingly, I had to do my job first and stay at the door.”
The book continues: “Word soon spread like wildfire that David Bowie was there. He was probably the reason most people at the club had got into pop music in the first place. He had changed his look and his sound so many times, there were more than enough images to go round. The alien from Low and The Man Who Fell To Earth, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Ziggy Stardust. He was the one person that everyone there would cite as an influence, even more important than punk.
Bowie’s chorus near Hastings, July 1980: Polaroid snapped by a crew member on the beach during filming of Ashes to Ashes with Blitz Kids Steve Strange, Darla-Jane Gilroy, Judi Frankland and Elise Brazier keeping warm in a mackintosh between takes. When they got back to London, they all went clubbing at Hell
“He said it was a great scene and asked me if I would like to appear in the video for his next single, Ashes To Ashes. He also asked me if I could suggest a make-up artist for him, and I recommended Richard Sharah, the man who did my make-up. He said: ‘I’d like it left to you to pick the clothes you are going to wear, and to choose three other extras for the video.’ This was the most important moment of my life. I rushed around and found Judith Frankland, Darla-Jane Gilroy and another girl [Elise Brazier] for the video.” Here, as with so much of his flaky book, Strange’s memory leaves the rails. Other witnesses suggest subtle variations to his account…
Enter the next witness, Ravensbourne graduate Judith Frankland, designer of Steve Strange’s Fade to Grey outfit and of two gowns worn in the Ashes video which were inspired, she says, by the nuns in The Sound of Music and coincidentally had been unveiled in her sensational degree collection “Romantic Monasticism” at the Café Royal during June. She says: “In a wonderful twist of fate, Steve was resplendent in my black wedding outfit that night and was chosen straight away. He was asked to select people he felt could be right. Bowie did see George O’Dowd but as I remember he was wearing his big leather jacket look that night, so he was out. I was invited as was Darla up to the table where David and Coco were sitting and offered a glass of champagne. Darla and I were both dressed in a similar ecclesiastic style, Darla in her own black outfit with white collar, and we were also asked to take part for what at that time was a decent sum of money for penniless, decadent students.
“We were told Coco would call us the following day with the details. I woke the next day thinking I’d dreamt it and you know I guarded that communal pay phone on the landing like a rottweiler until she did: be outside the Hilton the next morning, Thursday, she said, at some ungodly hour, fully dressed and made up the same way I had been at the Blitz, and to get the coach to a secret location.
Ashes To Ashes video 1980: Blitz Kids as Greek chorus (© Jones Music / EMI Records Ltd)
“When we arrived at the beach near Hastings [not Southend, as Strange reports], the crew was set up and David Bowie greeted us dressed in the pierrot outfit he would be wearing. He coached us for a few minutes on the words we were to mime and then the day was spent in what we Lancastrians call sinking sand, sloppy sand, and the further out we got on the beach the messier and sloppier and muddier it was. I wore flats which was a wise choice. Then we were up and down that field with the bulldozer and every time we had to do a take it had to back up and the field got muddier. The bulldozer wasn’t that close but if he’d stepped on the gas we would all have been gonners.
“We were finally told we had all ‘done well’ and set off in the coach straight from the shoot to Hell [Strange’s Thursday club-night with a sacrilegious flavour] – well, home first to get freshened up. Steve dropped off his very muddy wedding dress and Hell was a rowdier night than usual. Steve brought one of the labourers from the bulldozer site with him and dressed him up in a Modern Classics suit. The poor guy was disturbed by it all, to say the least.
“We’d also been asked to go to the Ewart Studios in Wandsworth that weekend to shoot another scene – the kitchen with Major Tom in the chair and us providing the chorus. This involved an explosion behind us four as we faced the camera. We were told to duck out and run after we had mimed our lines or we could be hurt. This was difficult in a hobble dress, so I hoisted it up as high as I could and got ready to run. Quite a sight for the superstar sat behind me! Health and Safety would be all over that now.
“May I add that at the studios David Bowie joined us mere mortals in the canteen. Yummy. What a nice man he was, well he was to me, very kind and patient with us all.”
London’s Cafe Royal, 1980: Judith Frankland’s graduation show climaxed with a wedding dress in black and white taffeta, brocade, velvet and satin. All crowned by Stephen Jones’s veiled head-dress. As worn by Blitz Club host Steve Strange in the Ashes to Ashes video. (Niall McInerney’s slides scanned by Shapersofthe80s)
St Martin’s Alternative Fashion Show in May 1980: Stephen Linard’s “Neon Gothic” collection modelled by his most stylish friends, Myra, George O’Dowd and Michele Clapton, with Lee Sheldrick in white as a space-age pope
❏ Co-directed by Bowie and David Mallet, location scenes for Ashes to Ashes were filmed on 3 July 1980 at Pett Level, a stony beach on marshlands about six miles east of Hastings in East Sussex, known to Mallet since he was a boy. The drama of waves splashing against a towering cliff excited him. The video was the most expensive music video made to that date, costing £35,000 (about £151,000 in today’s money). The whole dreamscape was enhanced with effects from the then novel Quantel Paintbox to create a visual enigma, echoing a distant past, yet suggesting “nostalgia for the future” in Bowie’s own words.
At the time Bowie dropped in on the Blitz, the fashion mood had darkened for post-punk no-wavers. Black was back in gothic style without that word being applied, mostly. One exception was Stephen Linard who stole the annual Alternative Fashion Show in his second year at St Martin’s with his “Neon Gothic” collection in May 1980, when the event was coordinated by Perry Haines. Fellow Blitz Kids modelled a stylish collision of Space 1999 meets liturgical gothic, strutting to the Human League’s newest release, Empire State Human. Among them, Lee Sheldrick, the gifted eminence gris behind so many other students’ creations, had also shaved his head bald to become the embodiment of Nosferatu the Vampyre. The following week Steve Strange teamed up with fellow Welsh soul-boy and Camberwell student Chris Sullivan to open a no-holds-barred club-night at Hell with the invitation “to burn in Hell – demoniacal dress is desired”. Bowie knew what he was looking for.
One of Bowie’s long-standing collaborators, Natasha Korniloff, designed his pierrot costume for the video and Gretchen Fenston his hat, while he gave Richard Sharah a free hand to design the make-up. On the night of Bowie’s visit to the Blitz, Steve Strange and Judi Frankland were sporting her graduation garments, Strange in the black wedding dress crowned with a Stephen Jones head-dress and veil made of stiffened lace on a metal frame. Judi recalls: “The wedding dress was the reason Steve and I got close. He called me up wanting to buy pieces of the collection. He also bought a jacket he wore on the cover of Fade to Grey and gave me a credit on the sleeve. That dress, all sand, sea and mud, ended up in the bottom of Steve’s wardrobe. It had a stand-up collar that was caked in his makeup. Never wore it again though he got some money off the video people to get it cleaned. The veil also got squashed in his wardrobe.”
Darla-Jane Gilroy wore an ecclesiastical black velvet dress designed and made by herself, silk grosgrain coat and white collar with crucifix, plus a Stephen Jones hat. Elise Brazier personified a ballerina in a party frock plus tantaliser in her hair. This and another hat came from Fiona Dealey and Richard Ostell. All would soon be finding fame in the fashion business, with Elise becoming one of Premier’s leading models.
Stephen Linard: sporting a wooden cross by Dinny Hall and the rabbinical outfit that caught Bowie’s eye in July 1980
Stephen Linard supplies his own footnote to that great Tuesday at the Blitz. “Bowie actually sat at the bar next to my sister Bev, with me on the other side of her and I told her “Don’t look. Be cool.” So of course she looked, she was only 17. So did I. I was only 21. I was in all my Jewish rabbinical gear and Bowie’s PA Coco asked if I would be in the Ashes to Ashes video, but they wanted us up at the crack of dawn and were only offering £50! Anyway, I was on a warning at St Martin’s over attendance, so I had to say No.”
Steve Strange has the last word: “It seemed like a very long day for a three-minute film. I was delighted when I was handed my wages of £50 by a member of the production team. I didn’t tell them, but I would have paid them to have appeared in a video with David Bowie.”
Storyboard for Ashes to Ashes, 1980: The opening scene of pierrot on the beach sketched by Bowie to guide his co-director David Mallet
❏ Bowie’s brief to David Mallet for the video was simply: “A clown on a beach with a bonfire.” Yet you can be sure Freud would have a field-day turning over every mortal motif in Ashes to Ashes, which was originally titled People Are Turning to Gold… Bowie storyboarded the visuals himself (“actually drew it frame for frame,” he said) to include the pierrot of his Lindsay Kemp era, the number of “Madmen” in his own family symbolically in a padded cell, his first hit Major Tom the spaceman now in an exploding kitchen with his own Greek chorus, the images of mourners round a funeral pyre, the JCB bulldozer (that Bowie had spotted parked up near the beach and hired on impulse) to signify “oncoming violence” and seemingly pushing along the Blitz Kids in the pierrot’s wake like a funeral procession pulsating with a mother’s invocation “to get things done…” Not to mention the song’s title itself, derived from the burial service in the English Book of Common Prayer which commends: “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”.
All of which suggested a surreal sweeping away of the past, capped by the unleashing of the dove as an emblem of ritual cleansing, and so paving a way for the future. In September 1980, Bowie revealed his thinking to NME: “The sub-text of Ashes To Ashes is quite obviously the nursery rhyme appeal of it and for me it’s a story of corruption. When I originally wrote about Major Tom I thought I knew all about the great American dream and where it started and where it should stop. [Now] the whole process that got him up there had decayed and he wishes to return to the nice, round womb, the earth, from whence he started. It really is an ode to childhood, if you like, a popular nursery rhyme.”
Years later, Bowie told author Nicholas Pegg that with Ashes to Ashes he was “wrapping up the Seventies really” for himself, which “seemed a good enough epitaph”. On Bowie’s death his lifelong friend George Underwood called him an emotional, passionate person: “He had created this fierce storm, but he was the only one in it.” Take your pick.
Ashes To Ashes video 1980: Bowie’s pierrot getting out of his depth
➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s: The Blitz Kids WATN? No 37, Judith Frankland
➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s: The Blitz Kids WATN? No 28, Stephen Linard
➢ Blitzed! The Autobiography of Steve Strange (2002)
➢ The future isn’t what it used to be, by Angus MacKinnon
in NME, 13 September 1980
➢ Chris O’Leary’s impassioned survey of the Bowie catalogue
Ashes To Ashes video 1980: Bowie’s pierrot at Pett Level in Sussex with “mum” (© Jones Music / EMI Records Ltd)
Posted in anniversary, Blitz Kids, Clubbing, Fashion, Goth rock, History, interviews, London, New Romantics, Pop music, Swinging 80s, videos, Youth culture
Tagged Andy Polaris, Ashes to Ashes, Blitz club, Coco Schwab, Darla-Jane Gilroy, David Bowie, David Mallet, Edward Bell, Elise Brazier, Fiona Dealey, Hastings, Judith Frankland, Karen O’Connor, Natasha Korniloff, Richard Ostell, Richard Sharah, Stephen Jones, Stephen Linard, Steve Strange
✱ 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”.
◆ 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
✱ 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
✱ 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
➢ Search for all on Bowie here
at Shapers of the 80s
✱ “I’m not a rock star” Bowie often said – No, David, you were a messiah – Obituaries and key videos on the godlike one
✱ Prince Rogers Nelson RIP: ‘A funny cat’ and ‘sole authentic genius’ of the 1980s
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 