Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  During 1978 the owners of Studio 54 looked at potential sites for a London version (including the New Victoria Theatre in Westminster) but never completed a deal. The New York venue was the most talked-about club in the world. The Berrows were inspired and returned from their trip to give the Rum Runner a makeover, musically and in every other way. The Bowie night started to pick up interest from the fashion crowd who enjoyed the music and appreciated a room full of mirrors; to underline the sense of exclusivity Studio 54 was renowned for, for a while a girl dressed in an iridescent blue plastic catsuit was employed to weed out anyone deemed unworthy.

  David Wright remembers his first Rum Runner outfit included a ‘grandad shirt’, an approximate likeness of the one David Bowie wears on the front of the Young Americans album. He was dating a girl called Sarah who had a strong look, and David decided to wear make-up too – eyeliner, mascara, a little bit of eyeshadow and blusher. Given that Balsall Common was several miles from the club, there were transport complications requiring combinations of trains, taxis, buses.

  Through the decades, centuries even, life after dark has been a search for something beyond the mundane, for escapism. Rising unemployment and collapsing industries were features of urban life in Britain through the late 1970s into the 1980s, especially in the first years of the Thatcher government, and in no city more than Liverpool. There was determined political resistance to the destruction of British industry, which in Liverpool led to the rise of the hard-core Militant tendency within the local Labour Party. But that wasn’t the only response to the economic gloom in the city; madly dressed post-punk Bowie fans – who preferred the label ‘Futurists’ to ‘New Romantics’ – would gather on Thursday and Sunday nights at Cagney’s (off London Road) and also found a home at Kirkland’s wine bar (on Hardman Street).

  Trying on outfits, trying on identities, hearing music daytime radio didn’t play and surrounded by colour and neon, being out at Billy’s, Cagney’s or the Rum Runner was a chance to be somewhere else, to be someone else. David Wright was aware that the late 1970s could be dark and aggressive: ‘Yes, that’s what I remember about the Rum Runner, it was so far removed – especially from Birmingham, which as a city is very drab, well it is to me, it’s a depressing place really; it certainly was back then. There was a cloud over us. And I remember the economic problems, the strikes, all coming through. In many ways it was escapism from the drudgery of everything that was going on. And the club was our little oasis totally removed from it.’

  The Berrow brothers were ambitious, on the lookout for other opportunities. They gave Duran Duran a gig and shortly afterwards offered them rehearsal space at the venue too, and the band moved in. This was before Simon Le Bon joined them – he was recruited thanks to the network of friends the band made at the Rum Runner. His girlfriend, Fiona Kemp, worked behind the bar at the club and told him that Duran Duran needed a singer. The venue became their base, their hangout, and the Berrows became their management. The stories of the Rum Runner and Duran Duran were already intertwined and, as John tells me: ‘If we hadn’t made that short walk and knocked on the door of the Rum Runner, if we hadn’t met Mike and Paul, who knows what that future might have looked like?’

  One afternoon, the Berrows asked Nick Rhodes if he would consider joining the DJ team for one night a week. He took up the challenge, even though they were only offering him a midweek night and just £20 for the night’s work. But he found a sound and nurtured a crowd, playing a mix of glam, punk and sounds from the new wave of electronic artists. Soon there were queues to the road and round the corner; Nick was given a small pay rise and offered Friday nights too. The club’s regulars included Jane Kahn, Patti Bell, John Mulligan (co-founder of the band Fashion), Gay John, Whiskers, Slag Sue and Martin Degville. And, journeying from London, George O’Dowd (soon to be Boy George) visited occasionally, as did Peter Robinson (who was already Marilyn). This ultra-flamboyant crowd were a bit of a ‘clique’ according to David Wright and a touch standoffish. ‘Posers’, some of their detractors called them, and the posers gladly accepted the term.

  As well as the Rum Runner’s Bowie/Roxy nights there were also jazz funk and disco nights in the club, the music during the week feeding into Duran Duran’s sound: songs like ‘Are “Friends” Electric’ and ‘Good Times’. John Taylor also remembers other music thrown in at the Rum Runner, more Giorgio Moroder, singalongs like Frank Sinatra’s ‘New York, New York’. ‘It all felt very cool to be a part of,’ says John. ‘But also raunchy. Let’s face it, it was all about finding a darling for the evening.’

  The Rum Runner had a key part to play in the career of Duran Duran but, unarguably, out of all the clubs in that era frequented by Bowie fans, androgynous types and the fashion crowd, the most significant was Billy’s. Steve Strange and Rusty Egan approached the owner of Gossips, a Jamaican named Vince Howard, and offered to run Tuesday nights for him. Tuesdays isn’t traditionally a busy night, so it made sense for the owner to give up his space to a couple of enthusiastic party animals who would work to bring in their friends and friends of their friends. Billy’s opened in the autumn of 1978. There was always a soulboy ingredient but also a punk one too. As with many of the similar Bowie/Roxy nights at other locations, the crowd were mainly suburban art-school students who had become disillusioned with punk but liked a challenge and channelled a punk spirit by gleefully customising their outfits. It was always more punk to wear something no one else was wearing than to buy garments off the peg.

  The Billy’s crowd took dressing-up to another level. One of the regulars was Nicola Tyson, then an eighteen-year-old student at the Chelsea School of Art, who has since gone on to make a career as a painter. She’d be at the venues most weeks, in among the other young people decked out in tuxedos and wing collars, mad hats, too much make-up, cummerbunds, customised T-shirts, diamanté brooches, taffeta gowns. On the first night of Billy’s, Chris Sullivan’s look included monocle and spats, Ollie O’Donnell was a tartan teddy boy, and Melissa Caplan went psychedelic. Robert Elms wore what he later called ‘Chinese space-Cossack attire’. Nicola Tyson explains: ‘There weren’t really any rules, apart from push your look as far as you can. Invent yourself. Entertain.’

  There wasn’t often a Tuesday when the attendance went above a hundred, but among the core regulars were several who would later make a career and reputation in art, fashion and especially music, including George O’Dowd, Marilyn, Jeremy Healy (later of Haysi Fantayzee), Siobhan Fahey from Bananarama and Martin Degville down from Birmingham. Rusty Egan’s music selections seemed spot-on but the role of the DJ had not yet been elevated to where it would be in the mid-1990s. At Billy’s the stars were the crowd on the dancefloor.

  As we discovered earlier, the building at 69 Dean Street where Billy’s took place is now the Dean Street Townhouse, a 39-bedroom hotel and all-day dining room. When Billy’s was operating in the Gossips basement in the late 1970s, where the Mandrake had been, the Gargoyle upstairs housed a strip club, which at various times was known as Nell Gwyn’s. There were also revue shows, but none of this could keep the Gargoyle afloat and it soon closed its doors, by which time the buildings were listed Grade II. Word was spreading about Billy’s, but it was still small fry, a tiny niche event on a Tuesday, and numbers were never going to be healthy given the glee with which Steve Strange turned away anyone he deemed less than sensational. And after just three months, Steve Strange and Rusty Egan appear to have had a falling-out with the owner of Gossips.

  The scene moved on to Covent Garden, to the Blitz on Great Queen Street. There Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s weekly night lasted much longer than it had at Billy’s, and generated more media attention. Among the Blitz crowd, many were destined for successful careers in fashion and millinery, including Melissa Caplan, Isabella Blow, Stephen Linard, Judith Frankland, David Holah, John Galliano and Stephen Jones. Although, it’s true, some avoided the creative industries: Carl Teper went on to become an adjudicator for the Parking and Traffi
c Appeal Service.

  From the Blitz club creativity took off, and change initiated. Fashion students got jobs, photographers were given commissions, bands got deals and released records, the music and the look and the lifestyle were propelled into the wider world. The strong visual component of the scene fed into two of the emerging and influential media, both visually oriented, hungry for images. The first was the newly launched style magazines The Face and i-D, which were deeply fashion-conscious, and on the lookout for innovators, futurists and posers. And the second was the rise of promotional videos.

  The first key video to highlight the New Romantic scene was David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’. Bowie always had an eye for the new and daring, and made a point of paying a visit to Billy’s one week and inviting a handful of the club’s regulars to join him on set the following day, including Darla Jane Gilroy and Judith Frankland. Bowie was dressed in the style of a Pierrot, and Steve Strange was featured as well. Strange was in awe: ‘I had queued outside a record shop in Pontypool to buy his new album when I was thirteen, and now he wanted to work with me. When I was handing out flyers for Billy’s I’d never thought something like that might happen.’

  At the time Steve Strange was frontman in Visage with Blitz DJ Rusty Egan on drums, along with Rusty’s fellow ex-Rich Kid Midge Ure, Barry Adamson, John McGeoch and Dave Formula from the band Magazine, plus the Ultravox keyboardist Billy Currie. Their first single, ‘Tar’, was released in September 1979 and was less than moderately successful. The follow-up, ‘Fade to Grey’, was released just after ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and was a huge hit. Another Blitz kid, Princess Julia, featured in the ‘Fade to Grey’ video; she went on to have a successful career as a model and then a DJ (she was a resident DJ at the ultra-flamboyant club night ‘Kinky Gerlinky’ in the 1990s).

  Spandau Ballet also emerged from the Blitz scene. They considered themselves a white soul band, yet in an earlier incarnation, as the Makers, they’d played punk venues like the Roxy. Their live appearances at the Blitz in late 1979 and early 1980 positioned them at the forefront of what was happening at the club and they soon attracted positive coverage in the style magazines. Like Duran Duran in their early days, they were also careful in their choice of where to perform, preferring to play the Scala cinema and the Blitz rather than pubs or standard rock venues. The Spandau debut single ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’ was a British Top Five hit in the period between ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Fade to Grey’.

  At the Rum Runner, John Taylor and friends weren’t much aware of what was going on around the country. ‘At that moment all I cared about was Birmingham – Broad Street mostly, and the club and our friends who went there,’ says John. But when journalist Betty Page first wrote in Sounds about Spandau Ballet and the Blitz in September 1980, John showed the article to the rest of the band. ‘It sounded as if there was an exact mirror of our scene going on in London – the same impetus, the same impulses, and Spandau were their band as Duran were Brum’s.’

  Duran Duran tracked down Betty Page and invited her to visit them at the Rum Runner, which she did. This was their first national press. The phrase ‘New Romantics’, said to have been coined by Perry Haines, was used throughout her piece, as Betty Page drew the link between the Blitz and the Rum Runner and Spandau and Duran Duran. Haines later helped style Duran Duran. He’d co-founded i-D magazine earlier in 1980 and ran a night at Gossips after Billy’s had closed.

  One of the elements at Billy’s, the Rum Runner and the Blitz that spread into the mainstream was androgyny. It was a remaking and reassertion of the gender-bending that David Bowie had displayed so conspicuously in the early 1970s, but that’s not to say it didn’t have major impact. When Boy George emerged with his first single ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ there were people confused and disconcerted by his appearance, but there were also others, including those who would never have found their way to the Blitz, who were thrilled and empowered; via TV appearances, videos and photoshoots the Blitz had come to them. The second quarter of the ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ video was filmed in the Gargoyle. Everyone but the Boy is dressed in a 1930s style.

  Things were moving fast for Duran Duran. They’d recorded ‘Planet Earth’, a melodic, synthesizer-led single, pulsing with a Moroder-ish dancebeat. Their original version was tweaked and then released on 2 February 1981. Not only was it an immediate hit in the UK, but overseas too, going Top Ten in Australia. The lyric namechecks the new scene in the line ‘Like some New Romantic looking for the TV sound’. Six months later, eighteen months after walking into the club’s offices, John and Nick and the rest of Duran Duran were pop stars. Princess Diana, a flawed but nevertheless significant barometer of the nation’s taste, would declare Duran Duran to be her favourite group.

  Meanwhile at the Rum Runner, the Berrows had already opened up more space in the building and several other bands were rehearsing there, including Dexys Midnight Runners and the Beat (the latter filmed much of the video for the single ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’ in the club). The frontman of Dexys was Kevin Rowland, who was as preoccupied with clothes and the look of his band as any New Romantic. Dexys took to wearing a belligerent look, the antithesis of the gaudy flamboyance of the Rum Runner regulars – woolly hats, and black donkey jackets like a gang of New York dockers. They scored their first UK number one with ‘Geno’, inspired by Kevin’s experiences watching a show by Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band in 1968 at the Railway Hotel on Station Road in Harrow. Kevin was fourteen, he was hooked: ‘The atmosphere was amazing. It felt great to be a part of it.’

  After the demise of Blitz, a number of related club nights were started. Steve Strange, Rusty Egan and Chris Sullivan launched ‘Hell’ at Mandy’s Club in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, on Thursdays. Pursuing a more transgressive ethos, a mixed fetish night called ‘Skin Two’ opened one Monday at the end of January 1983, at Stallions in Falconberg Court, off Charing Cross Road, a gay bar with aquariums embedded in tree trunks as pillars. Hosts were ex-Blitz regulars David Claridge and Daniel James (a mask maker who specialised in latex-based creations), and guests on the opening night included John Sutcliffe – the boss of the rubber/bondage clothing range AtomAge – and the artist Allen Jones, best known for his forniphiliac sculptures. Entertainment on the opening evening included music provided by the club’s first resident DJ, Chris Buxbaum, and a live performance by the model Sue Scadding, who shed clothes to a soundtrack of choral music.

  The first days of Skin Two had links not just to Blitz, but to the Rum Runner too. Jane Kahn of Kahn & Bell was spotted on the opening night, and Bev Glick was also present – she was the ‘Betty Page’ who had championed Duran Duran in their early days. Claridge and James had attempted to limit media coverage but there were several journalists there, including Betty’s then boyfriend Tony Mitchell, who wrote for Sounds, and also cultural historians Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter who reviewed their Skin Two night out for the porn magazine Fiesta. Claridge had also arranged for a photographer to capture the scenes: Peter Ashworth.

  There was also Le Kilt, which took place on Tuesday nights at 60 Greek Street and which in turn inspired Le Beat Route, which was on Friday nights in the basement of 17 Greek Street, where you’d hear old funk classics and new New York rap. We’ll hear more of the legacy of the Blitz in later chapters. After Billy’s, 69 Dean Street still had more to contribute to music history. In the summer of 1982, although the Gargoyle had stumbled to an ignominious end, and the strippers had left the stage, the lift was still in operation and upstairs there was a new night run by Olli Wisdom and Jon Klein. They called this midweek gathering the Batcave. In its advertising it promised ‘absolutely no funk’.

  The Batcave was the beginning of the tribe called ‘goth’. Every Wednesday the club was done up like it was Hallowe’en, bedecked with netting that was supposed to look like cobwebs. At the Batcave you’d be among Dave Vanian clones, dark-haired girls, ex-punk psychobillies, and a large number of whey-faced Bauhaus fans; you�
��d hear DJ Hamish MacDonald playing Siouxsie and the Banshees records, and the Cramps, and Eddie Cochran; and you’d also be treated to live music courtesy of bands including Specimen and Alien Sex Fiend. Nick Cave occasionally visited. Marc Almond met Lydia Lunch there, who’d just gone solo after starting out in Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. This was a while before she got the lead role in the film Fingered.

  The Batcave moved on to a larger venue, the Subway in Leicester Square, and the DJ line-up was extended to include Anni Hogan of Marc and the Mambas. By this time it had helped define a movement, and most towns and cities had some kind of goth club, sometimes also overlapping with those labelled ‘alternative’ and/or ‘industrial’. In 1983 ‘Alice’ was released on an EP by Sisters of Mercy, a band fronted by former F-Club regular Andrew Eldritch. The Batcave certainly had its moment, but as the 1980s progressed the part of the country that seemed to believe in goth the most was Leeds, where life is shorter and the skies are darker.

  I once got a chance to ask novelist David Peace about the goth scene in Leeds and the West Riding. David Peace had been a regular at Raffles in Wakefield, close to where he grew up. There, DJ Electronic Glen would be playing Bowie, T. Rex, the Human League and Gina X. He also paid a few visits to Le Phonographique in the Merrion Centre in Leeds: ‘The Phono seemed to me, at least in 1982, to still be more for the old Bowie crowd. To be honest, the music wasn’t that different from the stuff Electronic Glen was playing – although Raffles, at least at that time, seemed to play more Cramps and Meteors, compared to the Phono. So Raffles was that bit more macho and rougher.’