Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Almost unnoticed amid the furore about punk, there had been hints of a seismic change in the way people made music. Ever since the beginning of the 1970s, interest had been growing in electronic music, as popularized by Wendy Carlos’s soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the first albums by the German synth-pop pioneers Kraftwerk. To its small band of admirers, electronic music was the future. To the general public, it was the music of high-rise blocks and windswept concrete estates, frigidity and fear. But in 1977 the Munich-based producer Giorgio Moroder put a synthesized backing track on to Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, turning it into a massive worldwide hit. For the first time, electronic music was fun. In Berlin, Roxy Music’s former synthesizer player Brian Eno burst into David Bowie’s recording studio, waving a copy of Summer’s hit and exclaiming that he had just heard the music of the future. ‘If any one song can be pinpointed as where the 1980s began,’ writes the critic Simon Reynolds, ‘it’s “I Feel Love”.’11

  In the past, making electronic music had required an arsenal of expensive synthesizers. But as synthesizers became smaller and lighter, the price of entry plunged. By the turn of the 1980s, the British firm EDP’s Wasp synthesizer cost no more than £200 (just over £1,000 today). ‘A small synthesiser now costs less than a good electric guitar, and it doesn’t take years of practice to get something good out of it,’ reported the Observer in August 1980. ‘The synthesiser sets the musical imagination free very quickly. Not surprisingly, the new generation of musicians is taking to it in a big way.’12

  The result was a new kind of skiffle, with synthesizers instead of guitars, but with the same spirit of do-it-yourself improvisation. In Sheffield, two computer operators, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, formed a band called the Future, later renamed the Human League. In Liverpool, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys formed Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, using a cheap synthesizer bought from a mail-order catalogue. But at first these new synth-pop bands struggled for attention. Their sensibility was closer to progressive rock than to punk; they wrote songs inspired by J. G. Ballard, George Orwell and Doctor Who, not teenage ballads or shrieks of rage. As Reynolds puts it, they appealed to ‘people who read New Scientist and watched Tomorrow’s World’, not people who read Smash Hits and watched Starsky & Hutch. David Bowie once said that watching the Human League was ‘like watching 1980’, a slightly barbed compliment given that he said it in 1979. But when 1980 arrived, most people had never heard of them.13

  What the new generation needed was a story, something to seize the public imagination and capture the attention of the national press. The story eventually materialized, but it was not what many synth-pop pioneers were expecting. It was set, not in Sheffield or Liverpool, but in London, in a shabby Second World War-themed wine bar in a Covent Garden side street, with gingham tablecloths and framed pictures of Winston Churchill. The bar’s name was the Blitz.

  On 6 February 1979 the Blitz began running weekly ‘Electro-Diskow’ evenings, organized by a 19-year-old Welshman with thick make-up and very imaginative hair. This was Steve Strange, who had previously run a popular David Bowie-themed night at a Soho club called Billy’s. Among London’s young partygoers, Strange was already something of a cult figure, renowned for his outlandish costumes: ‘leather jodhpurs and Nazi greatcoat’ one week, ‘clownish, white-face Pierrot’ the next. At the Blitz, he said, he wanted only ‘people who created unique identities’. Guarding the doorway on Great Queen Street every Tuesday, he would cast an unsparing eye over the queues waiting to get in. Sometimes he invited people to look in his little mirror: ‘Would you let yourself in?’ And while some of Strange’s friends saw him as a bit of a joke, he was in deadly earnest. ‘For me,’ he said later, ‘it wasn’t just dressing up for the night.’ It was Art.14

  Music was an essential part of the Blitz’s appeal. As the Evening Standard’s pop columnist David Johnson recalled, it pounded out a relentless soundtrack of Kraftwerk, Gina X and Giorgio Moroder: ‘hard-edged European disco, synth-led but bass-heavy’. Yet what many of its regulars really remembered were the clothes. Inside, wrote Johnson, ‘Hammer Horror met Rank starlet. Here was Lady Ample Eyeful, there Sir Gesting Sharpfellow, lads in breeches and frilly shirts, white stockings and ballet pumps, girls as Left Bank whores or stiletto-heeled vamps dressed for cocktails in a Berlin cabaret, wicked witches, kohl-eyed ghouls, futuristic man machines.’ Another young regular recalled a ‘costume box of a club’, where on his first night he saw ‘two boys, one in a shoulder cape and cummerbund, the other a military shirt with Sam Browne belt … two girls in black taffeta, glam with gothic trim … an androgynous thing with a shaved head, false eyelashes and a ruff … a red sash … Chinese slippers and winged collars’. On later visits he saw ‘feathers and boas’, a ‘crushed stovepipe hat and Artful Dodger trousers’, a ‘silver-topped cane’ or two. ‘The neckerchief’, he writes, ‘was in evidence everywhere’ – a line that would make a good epitaph for the entire period.15

  The Blitz’s appeal was very obvious. When it opened, the Winter of Discontent was in full swing: atrocious weather, industrial unrest, political paralysis, national gloom. Its first visitors had to pick their way past the heaps of sodden cardboard boxes and bursting black bin-liners, thanks to the public sector strikes that had turned the West End into a rubbish tip. ‘The city was broken, it was a horrible place,’ recalled one Blitz habitué, while another remembered that they ‘badly wanted a new swinging London’. For youngsters alienated by punk, depressed about their prospects and desperate for a bit of excitement, the Blitz was pure escapism. As Strange put it, his customers were ‘people who work nine to five and then go out and live their fantasies. They’re glad to be dressed up and escaping work and all the greyness and depression.’16

  Yet even at the time, the Blitz was invested with an extraordinary mystique. Its regulars, the so-called ‘Blitz Kids’, saw themselves as pioneers, striking out for a brave new world of individual self-expression. And for some of their supporters, their self-conscious flamboyance carried immense significance. One early visitor, the style journalist Peter York, wrote endless columns about the cultural symbolism of ‘dressing up’. The Standard’s David Johnson claimed that ‘dressing up at the Blitz became an act of affirmation’, while the pop journalist Dave Rimmer even argued that, at the Blitz, ‘each individual consumer choice [was] a creative act’, leading inevitably to ‘the creative equality of consumption’. A cynic might think this a very extravagant way of talking about a couple of hundred teenagers in pink feather boas and copious amounts of eyeliner.17

  Was the Blitz really so novel? Enthusiasts for the Blitz Kids often claimed that they were different from, say, Mods, Rockers and Teddy Boys because they chose their clothes for themselves, instead of wearing a uniform. There were ‘so many different styles on parade’, writes Rimmer, that ‘it looked more like a costume ball than a single, homogenous scene’. But the people photographed in his book look almost exactly the same: whitened faces, heavy eyeliner, white shirts, black capes, like people queuing up to make a withdrawal from a Transylvanian blood bank. It is hard to believe that dozens of 19-year-olds independently decided to invest in an Elizabethan ruff, or that across Greater London hundreds of youngsters simultaneously realized that there was no such thing as too much eye make-up. In any case, as one Blitz Kid remarked, ‘Kids have always spent what little they have on records and haircuts. They’ve never spent it on books by Karl Marx.’ ‘They especially liked dressing up,’ agreed Paul Theroux in 1982. ‘That seemed to be part of the English character – entering into fantasy, putting on different clothes and setting the old dull personality aside.’ As it happens, he was talking about steam-train enthusiasts. But he could easily have been talking about the Blitz Kids.18

  It was not long before people noticed the Blitz. After all, the whole point of dressing up was to get people to look at you. In January 1980 David Johnson became the first journalist to write about the crowd at Strange’s Electro-Diskow, which h
e called ‘the 80s Set’. The Guardian’s Martin Walker goggled at ‘two women in spangled leotards with shaven hair … and between them a man in metallic robes, his face smeared away in white mask, another face painted onto the back of his shaven head’. Even Newsnight sent a film crew to see what all the fuss was about. One of the most entertaining pieces, however, came in the Mirror that March. ‘The Blitz Kids’, the paper declared, were ‘the chosen few [who] like to think of themselves as a new kind of artificial aristocracy’ – a line that would have been familiar to anybody who remembered Swinging London:

  Punk is past it. Mods are old hat. A new youth cult is, according to its bizarre disciples, all set to sweep Britain.

  They call themselves the Blitz Kids. Their idea of fun is sheer fantasy and almost anything goes …

  THEY dress in clothes ranging from crinolines to clown costumes.

  THEY LISTEN to loud, repetitive electronic music by cult bands.

  THEY DANCE using a mesmeric mixture of mime and robot movements …

  On my visit I saw a Marilyn Monroe lookalike … drinking … cuddling a clown.

  And another young ‘nun’ being shot a line by a cowboy.

  In fact, the Mirror admitted that most of the Blitz Kids were ‘ordinary young people with everyday jobs’, who simply liked to spend their money on ‘their look of the moment’. The clown, for example, was actually Richard Wakefield, a 19-year-old telephonist from Putney in south-west London. He usually dressed less extravagantly, he said, although ‘the ladies I work with say I cheer them up’. As for Marilyn, she was Jayne Sparkes, an 18-year-old secretary. She found the Blitz a nice change, because ‘in pubs people usually ask you if you’re going to a fancy dress party. When you say you’re not, it’s just the way you dress, they often get a bit rude or insulting.’19

  Among the young men and women who flocked to Covent Garden on Tuesdays was an ambitious 19-year-old called Gary Kemp. Born into a working-class family in Islington, he had grown up in a world that seemed an eternity away from Swinging London. His father was a printer, his mother a part-time sewing machinist. They lived in a terraced house with no bathroom and a ‘reeking, damp’ outside toilet, infested with insects. Money was scarce: Gary remembered his mother bursting into tears when she realized his shoes were too small, because she could not afford a new pair. ‘Everyone we knew owned very little,’ he wrote: ‘houses were rented, and everything we sat on, slept on, drove in and watched was on HP [hire purchase].’

  Growing up in the 1970s, young Gary dreamed of clothes and parties, of making money, bettering himself and getting on. When, as a 12-year-old, he saw David Bowie on Top of the Pops, he fell in love with pop music, a ‘theatre of glittering aspiration’. Later, he and his school friends were attracted to punk and formed their own band. But by the end of the decade they preferred soul music, cutting their hair in wedges and dressing in smart waistcoats. Even their band’s name, the Gentry, was a sign of generational rebellion. Kemp called it an ‘anti-punk statement’.20

  Gary Kemp, his brother Martin and their schoolmates first discovered Steve Strange’s club at the end of 1978, having heard that it was full of ‘people in amazing gear’. It was ‘very clothes orientated’, he remembered. ‘The music was irrelevant really.’ There they befriended a student called Robert Elms, ‘a cockney with the vocabulary of Nietzsche’, who was similarly keen to break free from punk’s dour grip and embrace the ‘thrill and flash of youth and style’. It was Elms who suggested they call themselves Spandau Ballet – a name that both recalled punk’s obsession with the Nazis and captured the growing fashion for German electronica. Yet although people often think of Spandau Ballet as a synthesizer band, they always saw themselves as a soul-influenced pop group. ‘It’s not weird electronic music at all, it’s dance music,’ Kemp told Sounds. ‘There’s only one synthesiser in it and it’s not even dominant … The songs themselves are very emotional, melody wise, not cold or clinical.’21

  What set Spandau Ballet apart was their enthusiasm for dressing up. Every appearance saw some fresh attack on conventional taste: billowing shirts and ballooning breeches; capes, cravats and cummerbunds; tunics and tabards; smoking jackets, waistcoats and monocles – as if they had raided a Victorian fancy dress shop and wanted to wear everything at least once. People mocked them for it, but they remained unrepentant. When Sounds accused them of ‘posing’, Gary Kemp called it a ‘terrible word’. ‘Do you dress for functional reasons only?’ he demanded. ‘You dress to attract and look good, don’t you? … They rattle on about other people’s works of art when the real work of art should be you.’ His friend and manager, Steve Dagger, made the same point a few weeks later to the NME. ‘You can make a statement with the clothes you wear,’ he explained. ‘You can’t express anything with the records you might buy but you can express yourself with the clothes you choose – turn yourself into a piece of art, if you want to see it in those terms.’22

  Spandau Ballet made their first public appearance at the Blitz’s Christmas party in December 1979, dressed in a surely unforgivable mixture of wing collars, bow ties, ‘tartan trousers and green velvet slippers’. They went down very well, and soon the record companies began to circle. Being so young, they were cocky: interviewed by London Weekend Television’s Janet Street-Porter, Kemp boasted that they were bound to ‘sell thousands of records’. By the summer, they had played a few more gigs, including one on HMS Belfast, and soon afterwards they signed a reported £85,000 deal with Chrysalis. In a sign of the times, Chrysalis agreed to let them manage their own merchandising rights and promised to produce a video with every single they released. Spandau Ballet were ‘not just a band with an audience’, Kemp told the record company; they were a ‘multimedia phenomenon’. At this stage, they had only played eight live dates, so that was a very grand way of putting it. But it paid off.23

  In the national press, Spandau Ballet were a story even before they had released their first record. ‘Coming up Poses’ read the Mirror’s headline on 22 October, hailing a band that was ‘going to be one of the big sounds of the Eighties’. And when, two weeks later, they released their first single, ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’, it duly reached number five, a strong debut for a band that only weeks before had been largely unknown. All the same, this was not quite the all-conquering performance they might have hoped for. Indeed, of their next eight singles only one made the top five, and it was not until the spring of 1983 that ‘True’ gave them their first number one. In pure sales terms, the likes of Adam and the Ants, the Human League and even Shakin’ Stevens left them standing.24

  But there was something about Spandau Ballet. One way of putting it is that, like the Beatles in the 1960s or the Sex Pistols in the 1970s, they were thought to embody the spirit of the age. When people said that about Spandau Ballet, however, they did not mean it kindly. ‘Somehow, Spandau Ballet have managed to antagonise people who have only ever heard their name or seen a photograph,’ observed the NME in November 1980. Most people thought they had got their deal ‘just on the strength of their clothes and their photos’. And as the NME remarked, that made it ‘one of the biggest snubs the long-suffering rock fan with his cherished notions of musical validity and paying one’s dues has had since the Sex Pistols sent the whole thing spinning some three years back’.

  The animosity between Spandau Ballet and the traditional rock music press is a very good example of the cultural fault lines running through the early 1980s. The people who wrote for papers like Melody Maker and the NME tended to be older, more middle-class and more politically committed. They saw themselves as guardians of the spirit of the 1960s, preserving the values of seriousness, authenticity and commitment. By contrast, Kemp and his friends had no time for rock music, bypassed the music press and presented themselves as youthful rebels against an ageing establishment. ‘With what we’re doing, there’s no one over the age of 23 involved,’ Kemp boasted. ‘Everybody doing it – running the clubs, playing the records, dressing up, making th
e music, making the clothes – none of them are over 23.’ It was ironic, he said, that the press ‘don’t mind some old shark like [the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm] McLaren manufacturing something to make some money out of the kids, and yet they slag us off, us, the actual “kids”. I just don’t understand it.’25

  Kemp talked of rock critics the way many young men of his age talked about their parents – or the way Mrs Thatcher’s upwardly mobile supporters talked about the old patricians. ‘A lot of the music papers have got their own archetypal view of the social system and order, and how it should be,’ he told Sounds, ‘and the thought of people like us actually spending their money on looking good and expensive and enjoying themselves, they just can’t stand it.’ Indeed, like a certain person who lived just off Whitehall, he saw himself as a champion of working-class ambition against a snobbish old guard. ‘Middle-class journalists’, he said scathingly, ‘always connect style with being bourgeois and they spend their whole lives trying to escape it. I don’t feel guilty because I’ve made enough money to own my own home. It’s only the middle classes who feel that kind of guilt.’26

  But Spandau Ballet did have their supporters. The early 1980s were years of great innovation for magazines and comics, with music and style publications in the vanguard. In 1978 the former NME editor Nick Logan had launched Smash Hits, a breezy, glossy publication that celebrated the music in the charts instead of debating whether some obscure punk band might be influenced by the Situationist International. By the summer of 1979, it was selling more than 166,000 copies every fortnight, more than Melody Maker and only 35,000 fewer than the NME. A few months later, Logan floated the idea of another glossy magazine, this time aimed at affluent music fans in their late teens and early twenties. He called it The Face, and the title could hardly have been more appropriate.27