❏ Duran Duran play Girl Panic! live at the Coachella music & arts festival, April 17, 2011
❏ Girl Panic! directed for Genaro.tv by Alan Hughes, a professional graphic designer in the UK
❚ ON FRIDAY DURAN DURAN resume their North American tour, which was interrupted in May by Simon Le Bon’s vocal problems. From Sept 23 in Everett, WA, they weave their way to Atlantic City on Oct 29.
❏ Duran Duran’s live version of The Man Who Stole A Leopard ft. Kelis, directed by David Lynch for Unstaged, Mar 23, 2011
❏ Elegant French production of The Man Who… directed by Jethro Massey, with Faith Anne Gosselin, Sorrel & Massimiliano, Mocchia Di Coggiola
❏ Animation of The Man Who… by a production group in Second Life dedicated to use machinima as a medium for telling stories. Producer, Rafale Kamachi
❏ The Man Who… recast as PG-rated kitchen-sink psycho-drama from Russia: scripted, directed, edited by Nina Urmanova. (Some gratuitious bloodshed.)
❏ Mediterranea uploaded by garibaldino2 in Italy
❏ Blame The Machines set to an immaculate print of the 60s sci-fi movie Barbarella (with glimpses of the crazed scientist Dr Durand-Durand who prompted the band’s name at the keyboard of his orgasmatron in which Jane Fonda is being pleasured). Uploaded by MrChuckChapman in the USA
❏ Winning version of Blame The Machines for Genaro.tv directed by Sebastian Mihailescu, currently studying at the Caragiale National Academy of Theatrical Arts and Cinematography in Bucharest, Romania
❏ Winning Russian animation of Being Followed for Genaro.tv directed by Aleksey Khruslov of Kakadu Collapse
❚ “YOU KNOW WHAT MEN ARE LIKE when they get a new bit of kit — it’s like Christmas.” This is Spandau Ballet sax player and all-round percussionist Steve Norman reliving his teenage kicks. “I’m loving my latest toy. It’s a guitar pedal-board with all the bells and whistles. As a guitarist, when you’ve got sounds at your feet — in literally one stomp of the box — you can go from the driving funk of the Isley Brothers to the more soulful sound of George Benson.”
We tend to forget that Steve was playing rhythm guitar as a co-founder of Spandau when they became the Blitz Club’s house band in 1979 with synthesisers well to the fore. Ten years of international chart fame saw him picking up almost any instrument that was needed in the five-piece outfit, most notably the saxophone, on which he was self-taught. His solo breaks became as much a part of Spandau’s stadium sound as Tony Hadley’s bel canto baritone. By the time they were belting through their 2009–10 reunion tour, Gary Kemp was introducing Steve as “The most soulful saxophone this side of Young Americans”!
Right now Steve has three reasons to be jumping. He’s back in training for the first Cloudfish gig in ages: this is his five-piece band with Shelley Preston, ex of Bucks Fizz, partnering on vocals. Second, his new box of tricks is beefing up his funky guitar-playing with “all those wa-wahs and overdriven solo sounds”. And third, he’s back in the songwriting groove, and audiences at the Cloudfish gig in Holland in November will be the first to hear some numbers that have not yet been recorded.
Steve says: “One’s called Kinda Wonderful and another is called Star. It’s a bit dancey — mad for blues guitar, mad for a groovy drumloop. Everything I do tends to have soul running through it. Even if there are heavy guitar riffs, there’s always an element of soul in there. I’d call it funky lounge music. There’s a lot more edge to Cloudfish these days. These songs are groovier. We’ve moved away from the chillout thing.”
Making funky lounge music: Steve Norman and Shelley Preston as Cloudfish
Steve reckons his return to England after living on the sun-soaked Mediterranean island of Ibiza for 12 years has cranked up the Cloudfish tempo.
“I had this conversation with Paul Tucker of the Lighthouse Family and he agrees with me. Living in Ibiza takes the edge away and makes everything fluffier! I noticed when I got back to the UK I got drawn towards more urban sounds and lo-fi and started messing sounds up for the sake of it. Shelley likes that on her voice, too.”
The outing on November 6 is a toe in the water, proposed by a promoter based in Arnhem who feels Holland and neighbouring Germany have been starved of the Norman talent for too long. It’s bad luck that Cloudfish’s regular percussionist Joe Becket has a prior date in London and can’t make it — his friendship with Steve goes back before Spandau’s 1990 tour. (Steve’s longstanding mate Deuce reminds us that Steve met Joe at a legendary Sunday clubnight called Passion at La Valbonne in Maidenhead in 1988. As host Deuce had the bright idea to invite Joe, “through the haze of strawberry-flavoured smoke, to play along with the deejay’s tunes, to maybe make things more danceable. And thus, ‘Joe Bongo’ was born”. )
For Arnhem, Steve says: “It turns out our bass player Joe Holweger is also a fantastic drummer so he’s stepping in, and we’ve gone for Kerim Günes on bass. Henry Broadbent on keyboard is another mainstay — he’s done a fair bit with Kula Shaker, too — which makes five of us onstage, as usual.”
With the gig being on a Sunday evening, British fans keen to sample the new Cloudfish sound will need to overnight in Arnhem (last week Shapersofthe80s worked out the cost of three ways to get there), but the good news is that it’s a beautiful part of Holland for a sightseeing weekend. Tasty beer too.
Nevertheless, the burning question remains: What about a UK gig? To which Steve says: “Definitely, you’ve got to play your home town. But we want to see how this one goes first.” Right, we’ll take that as half a promise.
❏ Sep 21 update: Next week Steve will be in Arnhem, Holland, on promotional duty for his Cloudfish show at Max Brothers on November 6. Fans can meet him at a meet-and-greet session 19:00–20:00 hrs at the Cafe De Schoof, Korenmarkt 37 on Thursday Sep 29. The next day, you can hear a live interview with Steve on Optimaal FM between 09:00–11:00 hrs, also available via webplayer at Optimaal FM
❏ Sep 21 update: The competition to meet Steve in Arnhem in November is to be decided today and the winners wll be announced online at Six Degrees Promotions
+++ ❚ IT’S PRETTY CLEAR who is the jazz singer in this much-anticipated video (above), released today. The old croaker Tony Bennett may be the last living legend in the crooner tradition, but he is utterly outclassed by the astonishing retro inflections of Amy Winehouse. She was his fan, so the 1930 standard Body and Soul, written for another showbiz legend Gertrude Lawrence, makes a noble epitaph for Amy. However, look to any number of earlier performances on video to appreciate the full measure of her sinuous, soulful, contralto voice, her body and her soul. She sang, as the Guardian obituary said, “as if her heart were damaged beyond repair”. Watch, as one example, her live acoustic version of Love is a Losing Game in 2007 (below) through to its ineffable conclusion.
Amy Winehouse Foundation launches
on her 28th birthday
➢ From today’s Daily Telegraph: “ The Winehouse family have launched the foundation to mark what would have been the singer’s 28th birthday. Her mother Janis said: “We want to give money to projects that make a direct difference. It is a source of great comfort to know that Amy would be proud of this.”
“ One of the first major sources of income for the Amy Winehouse Foundation will be from her duet with Tony Bennett, which is released today. It was given its first play on the Ken Bruce show on Radio 2 this morning. Winehouse’s father Mitch said: “Amy was very generous and we kept coming back to the thought of how much she loved children. It seemed appropriate that the focus of our work should be with young people, those who are vulnerable either through ill health or circumstance. ”
Amy’s last studio recording
❏ The duet with her 85-year-old hero Tony Bennett, and titled Body and Soul, was Amy’s last recording. Released today by Columbia Records, the song was laid down on March 23 at Abbey Road Studios in London for Bennett’s upcoming Duets II album.
Amy was found dead at her flat in north London on July 23. Her critically acclaimed second album Back to Black, produced by Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, was much more Motown-flavoured R&B than her jazz-influenced debut, Frank, which won an Ivor Novello Award and prompted Billboard to describe her voice as “astounding”. Released in 2006, Back to Black reached No 1 several times in the UK, No 7 in the US, and yielded five hit singles aching with explicit and heartfelt lyrics, most notably Rehab. Renewed demand during the past month sent it back to No 1 to become the UK’s best-selling album of the 21st century.
+++ ❚ “ RICHARD HAMILTON, the most influential British artist of the 20th century, has died aged 89. In his long, productive life he created the most important and enduring works of any British modern painter… Hamilton has a serious claim to be the inventor of pop art… Driven by intellect and political belief, Hamilton created undying icons of the modern world.” ➢ Read Jonathan Jones at The Guardian online
IN 1957 HAMILTON DEFINED THE EVERYDAY
COMMONPLACE VALUES OF POP ART…
“ Pop Art is:
Popular (designed for a mass audience)
Transient (short-term solution)
Expendable (easily forgotten)
Low cost
Mass produced
Young (aimed at youth)
Witty
Sexy
Gimmicky
Glamorous
Big Business ”
❏ His definition appeared as part of a long rumination on post-war art in a letter to Peter and Alison Smithson, published online at Warholstars.org, but taken from The Collected Words 1953–1982 by Richard Hamilton (Thames & Hudson 1982)
TUSA:“Your definition hasn’t, as you said, stood the test of time because pop art as we now know it and as it became, has ended up being anything but transient, expendable and commercial. It’s been in a way co-opted by the systems and the commercialism of the fine-art world itself.”
HAMILTON: “When I made that list I thought what are the characteristics of what we call pop art, and then I listed them, big business and so on; the record system, Hollywood and all the other things. Then I looked at this list that I had made, which had nothing to do with fine art or anything that I was painting or doing and said, is there anything in this list which is incompatible with fine art? And my answer was no, except for one thing and I said, Expendable. Now, is fine art expendable? And I thought, no; I can’t quite stomach that. Everything else, OK, but expendability as a throwaway attitude is not something that can be acceptable as pop art, and I was proved wrong. Warhol approached art from the point of view of expendability, so I admire him enormously for having brought my attention to the fact that I was wrong.”
HAMILTON AS COMMENTATOR ON
A FABLED DRUGS BUST
❏ Hamilton’s Swingeing London series of paintings and prints were his response to the arrest of his art dealer Robert Fraser and his imprisonment for the possession of heroin. This followed the now fabled police raid on a party at the Sussex farmhouse of Keith Richards, of the rock group the Rolling Stones, in February 1967. There they found evidence of the consumption of various drugs and in June, Fraser and Mick Jagger (the band’s lead singer) were found guilty of the possession of illegal drugs. This gave rise to the sarcastic newspaper headline “A strong sweet smell of incense” which Hamilton incorporated into a huge collage of the resulting newspaper cuttings which he titled Swingeing London 67 — Poster. ➢ Read Keith Richards’ account of this raid and the truth about the infamous Mars bar
❏ Video above: This Is Tomorrow (1992), clip from a C4 television documentary by Mark James in which the Father of Pop Art Richard Hamilton talks about his time as a tutor to pop star Bryan Ferry at Newcastle University art school
3D cover by Kraftwerk: view with blue-red glasses supplied with the mag
❚ THE ELECTRONIC BAND KRAFTWERK exploded into the hippy haze of 1970 and filled the air with an insistent machine-made beat that spoke of the future. Indisputably, the German four-piece formulated a revolutionary kind of non-guitar music that reshaped the thinking of musicians as diverse as Bowie, Afrika Bambaataa, Coldplay, New Order, Johnny Marr, Franz Ferdinand and Radiohead. New genres such as house, synth-pop and techno were heralded by the 1974 hit album Autobahn.
Today, however, the pioneering Ralf Hütter (a Beach Boys fan) and his usually reclusive pals slip out of their comfort zone to become guest editors on the October issue of Wallpaper magazine, which features a new portfolio of Kraftwerk imagery in 3D. Oops!
Of necessity in print, they have chosen the vintage blue-red 3D technology from the 50s to create ten graphics as double-page spreads. Yet however hard you try to flatten the glossy and flexible magazine, the deep gulley down the middle beams out its own distracting reflections! (The images might well improve if viewed on the iPad edition.) Successful, they are not: 70s minimalism always teetered tinglingly on the brink of being boring, and creatively Kraftwerk’s bland graphic renderings of autobahn, calculator, PC, pills, robots, cyclists and the band themselves say nothing new. They wouldn’t guarantee a pass degree at a British art school. Disappointingly, the 3D effects grab you in only two illustrations — one of breaking glass, another of a car’s dashboard radio — prompting the message to Ralf, especially at the age of 65, that, as graphic artists, his band may have seen better days.
There’s much more value in a brief evaluation by the leading British designer Peter Saville of how Kraftwerk opened his horizons to the European cultural canon. The advantages of the analogue era, he reasons convincingly, can be fully appreciated only now, from the perspective of the digital age.
➢ Electronic Sound Pictures — It could be that Kraftwerk’s specially developed multi-channel 3D video installation may offer a more immersive gallery experience. Fans will have to travel to Germany, to the Kunstbau at the Lenbachhaus, Munich, where the exhibition runs Oct 15–Nov 13. There’s also an accompanying book, Kraftwerk 3D, with 3D-glasses.
❏ Incidentally, the October issue of Wallpaper also interviews Ian Schrager, notorious partner behind Studio 54, the definitive New York nightclub of the 70s, who was jailed for income tax evasion. He later went on to invent the “boutique hotel” along with its “lobby socialising” and philosophy of “hotel as lifestyle” that has been ripped off by hoteliers across the globe.
At 65, with millions in the bank, he is about to launch his new Public hotel chain in Chicago. Business writer John Arlidge reports that “the master tastemaker senses the universe is turning on its axis again, just as it did when old-fashioned class divisions that ruled New York nightlife were swept away, enabling him to create Studio 54”. Schrager insists that there’s “a new simplicity” and “it’s structural”. He argues that many big hotel chains have failed to keep up with the consumer. The essential-services-only Public brand, he says, “will be an entirely new class of hotel that will be a big wake-up call to the industry”.
➢ 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 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
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