Who Dares Wins
Page 43
As Logan explained to the publishers, The Face would be a magazine with photography front and centre, embracing the latest musical trends and devoted to the cult of the image. ‘I’m looking for the kids who participate in the music scene,’ he told the Evening Standard. ‘The ones who have a good time rather than just sit at home listening to the hifi.’ He made it sound remarkably similar to the magazines that had become synonymous with the pop-cultural explosion of the early 1960s, such as Jocelyn Stevens’s Queen or the ground-breaking Sunday Times Colour Section. Indeed, his pitch explicitly envisaged it as an ‘“unofficial” monthly colour supplement’ to ‘weekly tabloids’ such as the NME, Melody Maker and Sounds.28
The advent of The Face was very good news for bands like Spandau Ballet. Like them, the magazine saw pop culture as a visual phenomenon, devoting enormous amounts of time to its own image. In the late summer of 1980, Kemp’s friend Robert Elms joined Logan’s bandwagon, kicking off with three pages about – surprise, surprise – Spandau Ballet, ‘openly poseur, stridently elitist’, who were ‘attracting the capital’s pretty young things to an androgynous man’. Some people might have thought this a bit over the top given that they had yet to release a record. But since The Face’s early sales had not been as brisk as Logan had hoped, he decided to throw in his lot with the Blitz Kids. In the November issue he gave Elms his head, commissioning a long essay on ‘The Cult with No Name’. Elms duly went back over the top, waxing lyrical about the ‘immaculately if extraordinarily dressed young socialites’ who had frequented the Blitz, a ‘creative environment where individualism was stressed and change was vital’. That made the Blitz sound like a branch of the Young Conservatives. But it worked. For when Elms announced that he and his friends were setting ‘the styles to be copied in terms of both look and sound’, at least some of the readers believed him.29
The Face was not the only new magazine to profit from the new mood. In October 1980 the former art director of Vogue launched his own quarterly style magazine, i-D, which appealed to a similar market. Another fashion magazine, Blitz – the name apparently a complete coincidence – appeared in the same year, while New Sounds New Styles, with its truly terrible title, followed in 1981. None of them, it has to be said, was as much fun as Smash Hits. But they represented a marked turn against the political earnestness of the punk years, as well as an enthusiastic embrace of consumerism, hedonism, dressing up and showing off, wrapped up in the single word style. Even the look of the new magazines seemed more colourful, a ‘bold, bracing geometry of hard angles and primary colour blocks’. Above all, though, they represented the triumph of aspiration. A few years later, after British pop had conquered the American charts, the broadsheets devoted long essays to the appeal of Britain’s music videos, ‘glossy brochures for fantasy lifestyles’. But their directors were merely putting on screen what magazines like The Face, and the colour supplements that inspired it, had been doing for years.30
By the middle of 1980, therefore, there had been a palpable shift in the cultural temperature. Punk was out; what Elms called ‘the Cult with No Name’ was in. Even David Bowie, the patron saint of silly outfits and clown costumes,fn2 gave his seal of approval, visiting the Blitz in May 1980 to recruit performers for his ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video. They filmed the following morning on a beach near Hastings. Bowie, at his most grandiloquent, was dressed as a Pierrot, while Steve Strange and his friends were wearing long robes and otherworldly black hats, and looked like extras from Blake’s 7. Later, the video was seen as a landmark in the popular culture of the 1980s, a riot of clashing images and computer graphics. But Bowie remembered it for another reason. Early in the morning, while they were filming on the beach, an old man walking his dog wandered into shot. Exasperated, the director pointed to Bowie and asked if the man knew who he was. The man looked him up and down. ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘It’s some cunt in a clown suit.’31
Whatever Bowie’s friend on the beach might have thought, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was an undisputed hit, topping the singles chart at the end of August. The sound was Bowie’s own, but the look was very much of the moment: flamboyant costumes, a white-faced clown and above all an atmosphere of doom-laden futurism, which Bowie called ‘nostalgia for the future’. And where Bowie led, Steve Strange inevitably followed. Three months later, his band Visage released ‘Fade to Grey’, which became one of the defining hits of the early 1980s. Today it is probably best remembered for its video, all slow-motion close-ups of glassy-eyed models with elaborate hairstyles, robotically intoning lyrics to the camera. Much of this was obviously borrowed from Bowie, not least Strange’s clownish get-up. If you thought about it, the song was completely meaningless, the non-story of a man with a suitcase sitting on a railway platform. But you were not supposed to think about it. You were supposed to enjoy the disco-influenced rhythms, to savour the portentous French lyrics, to yield to the atmosphere, at once fey, funereal and futuristic, as if Aubrey Beardsley had popped up in Doctor Who. It was ridiculous, of course. But it was fun.32
By the time ‘Fade to Grey’ reached the Top Ten, the emerging generation had a name. They were the New Romantics, a label coined by the Sounds journalist Betty Page in a Spandau Ballet profile on 13 September. Later, critics pointed out that it lumped together two slightly different trends. On the one hand were ambitious pop bands, often from London and associated with the Blitz and other dance clubs, such as Visage, Ultravox and Spandau Ballet. On the other were the electronic groups from industrial cities like Manchester and Sheffield, such as the Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who were more obviously indebted to Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder. But the name stuck. As Gary Kemp wrote, it ‘seemed to sum up the anachronism of the fashions and the whimsical approach to clothes’, as well as the ‘mood-noise of the lyrics and music, with its conceit that it all somehow meant something grander’. Above all, Kemp thought ‘it highlighted the cult of self, a powerful philosophy that would exemplify the coming decade’.33
If Visage popularized the New Romantic formula, Ultravox carried it to perfection. They shared some of the same personnel, not least the singer Midge Ure, who had produced ‘Fade to Grey’ while using Strange as a front man. That autumn Ultravox released perhaps the emblematic pop single of the early 1980s, the magnificently faux-decadent ‘Vienna’. Like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Fade to Grey’, it came with an immensely pretentious and hugely enjoyable video: misty black-and-white streets, gorgeous models in fur coats, decadent candle-lit parties, an opera house, men in sashes, a random horse – the works. ‘It means nothing to me,’ runs the chorus, and it probably meant nothing to anybody else either. Melody Maker thought it ‘unbearably po-faced’, which was a bit rich coming from Melody Maker. But the public loved it. Wreathed in industrial quantities of dry ice, ‘Vienna’ entered the singles chart in mid-January 1981 and remained there for an impressive fourteen weeks, four of them at number two. Famously, the song that denied it the top spot was Joe Dolce’s mock-Italian ‘Shaddap You Face’. That shows how foolish it is for historians to read anything into the singles charts.34
By now the New Romantic moment had definitively arrived. Like the beat groups of the early 1960s, synth-pop groups were riding a wave of popular enthusiasm. Youth culture, declared the Observer in March 1981, belonged to the ‘electronic Futurists’, with their ‘bold and imaginative use of the latest in musical technology – synthesisers, computers, electronic gadgets in general’. And, as predicted, the summer of 1981 belonged to Spandau Ballet’s ‘Chant No. 1’ and Duran Duran’s ‘Girls on Film’, the Human League’s ‘The Sound of the Crowd’ and ‘Love Action’, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s ‘Souvenir’ and ‘Joan of Arc’, Depeche Mode’s ‘New Life’ and ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’, even Adam and the Ants’ ‘Stand and Deliver’ and ‘Prince Charming’. As Simon Reynolds remarks, it was as if ‘an invisible switch had been pulled and the floodgates opened to irrigate the charts with a rejuvenating gush of colour, exuberance and optim
ism’.35
Perhaps not since the mid-1960s had British pop seemed so catchy, so imaginative, so alive. The bestselling record of 1981 was Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’; the coveted Christmas number one, meanwhile, was the Human League’s splendid ‘Don’t You Want Me’. Even abroad the New Romantics seemed unstoppable. ‘Tainted Love’ spent a record-breaking forty-three weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the charts in Canada, Australia and West Germany. Amid growing fears of a second British Invasion, the New York Times launched a pre-emptive strike, denouncing the ‘clichéd rhythms, clichéd arranging ideas and clichéd overall sound’ of the ‘British electro-pop bands’. But even the world’s most pompous paper could see the writing on the wall. ‘One suspects’, it said sadly, ‘that it’s only a matter of time before a group like Soft Cell or the Human League scores a substantial pop hit here.’36
What did all these groups have in common? What made them distinctive? One common factor was the influence of David Bowie, whose song ‘Starman’ (1972) had inspired the young Gary Kemp. Steve Strange’s first club nights had been billed as ‘Bowie Nights’, the tone set by his song ‘Heroes’ (1977), the extroverted atmosphere reminiscent of Ziggy Stardust in his pomp. But punk played a pivotal role, too. Many New Romantics had been punks at school. Their shock-and-awe approach to clothes came directly from punk; so did their cocky do-it-yourself spirit. The difference was that while punks had been reacting against the grandiose pretensions of the mid-1970s, Kemp’s generation were rebelling against punk itself, the spiky hair and snarling aggression. ‘Punk had become a parody of itself, an anti-Establishment uniform … a joke, right down to the £80 Anarchy Tshirts,’ recalled the future Boy George. ‘Punk was safe, we were spinning forward in a whirl of eyeliner and ruffles.’37
None of this, perhaps, was very remarkable. What was remarkable was that when the New Romantics looked abroad for inspiration, they looked across the North Sea, not the Atlantic. Ever since the advent of rock and roll, the dominant influence on British music, from rhythm and blues to soul and disco, had been American. But the New Romantics were different. Uniquely among modern British youth subcultures, they looked to Europe, especially Germany. As before, Bowie had got there first, moving to West Berlin in 1976 and releasing two enormously influential albums, Low and ‘Heroes’ a year later. As Dave Rimmer writes, Bowie inspired British bands to abandon the ‘extraverted “American” idea of rock ’n’ roll authenticity’ for the ‘introverted “European” artifice’ of ‘synthesizer pop and electronic landscapes’. To be European was to be ‘withdrawn, passive, fatalistic’, and so much worldlier than the earnest, unsophisticated Americans. The Blitz played lots of German dance music, but virtually nothing American. ‘Fade to Grey’ was partly in French; Ultravox wrote a song about Vienna; Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark wrote two songs about Joan of Arc. Even Spandau Ballet, whose hearts lay in American soul, were named after Berlin’s infamous prison.38
What was also remarkable was that to be German, or at least German in spirit, was to belong to the future. Under the influence of Kraftwerk, pop music in the early 1980s had a sense of its own modernity, of reaching towards tomorrow, that had been almost completely missing for the previous decade. The Sex Pistols had proclaimed that there was ‘no future’, yet for Gary Numan, the Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, there were, in Reynolds’s words, ‘still places to go … a whole new future to invent’. Hence the robotic dancing and dehumanized vocals, the lyrics about cyborg lovers and cities of the future; hence the nickname ‘Futurists’, which some of them preferred to ‘New Romantics’.39
To the general public, though, what set the New Romantics apart was their extraordinary aesthetic. The photographers’ darling was Adam Ant, formerly Stuart Goddard, who had started out as a punk before reinventing himself as an extra from The Pirates of Penzance. If songs like the chart-topping ‘Stand and Deliver’ and ‘Prince Charming’ were bombastic, his look was pure pantomime, described by the NME as ‘half pirate, half Red Indian … a strange blaze of gold and scarlet; a bizarre collage of feathers and braid … with vivid paint slashed across brown skin and teeth that flash startling white’. By tying a silk scarf around one arm, Ant said, he was acknowledging a ‘debt to the Royalist/Cromwellian era’, while his tricolour cummerbund paid homage to ‘the idea of the French Revolution’. The overall impression, he hoped, evoked ‘the early American settlers when they’d incorporated some of the Indian styles’.40
Although many people found Adam Ant ridiculous, his swashbuckling eclecticism, which took the foppishness of the Blitz Kids to its ultimate extreme, went down very well with the national media. It is probably no coincidence that his gold-braided heyday came at the very point when the recession was at its worst and the thirst for escapism was greater than ever. Indeed, by the beginning of 1981 the fashion pages were full of sashes, breeches and knickerbockers. When London’s leading designers unveiled their latest collections that spring, the show opened with what one observer called ‘a flurry of frills and a rustle of taffeta’, all ‘rich velvets’, ‘figured brocades’, ‘lace trimmings’ and ‘high-necked ruffs’.41
Even the Mirror, the voice of the Labour-voting working classes, ran a double-page spread on the ‘outlandish fashion movement sweeping Britain’, evoking a ‘pantomime fantasy of the past’. The accompanying picture showed the 19-year-old George O’Dowd, wearing Chinese slippers, leg warmers, a ‘black crepe Twenties dress’, several tasselled belts, a long scarf, his mother’s blouse and a black felt hat. The future Boy George was hardly typical, but the trend was undeniable. ‘High camp Romance has now taken over from the cult of spit and sick,’ wrote The Times’s fashion editor, Suzy Menkes, exulting that high-street stores were stocking up with ‘ruffles and lace, brocade jackets and big-sleeved shirts’. This, she thought, ‘must be a lighthearted relief for the jeans-and-sweatshirt generation who have had precious little chance to dress up … Long live Romance! Long live King Adam and his Ants!’42
The New Romantics were not, of course, the only game in town. Not everybody spent their Saturday evenings dressed as Long John Silver, and most teenagers in 1980 or 1981 looked as nondescript as ever. In any case, youth culture was far more fragmented than it had been twenty years earlier. These were not just the years of Ultravox, the Human League and Spandau Ballet; they were also the years of Kate Bush, 2-Tone and Joy Division, Madness, the Police and the Jam. When the Sun ran a feature on the ‘seven tribes of Britain’, the New Romantics were jostling for attention alongside punks, skins, mods, rockabillies, heavy metal fans and ‘new psychedelics’. All the same, the New Romantics were the most novel, the most forward-looking and the most obviously fashionable. No other youth tribe attracted so much attention, or became so closely identified with the political and cultural currents of the day. And as a result, none inspired such hatred from its predecessors.43
From the start, most established critics loathed the Blitz and all its works. This ‘narcissistic little scene’, the former Melody Maker editor Richard Williams wrote at the end of 1980, consisted of ‘young peacocks … in search of paparazzi to record them for the gossip columns’. As for their music, it was ‘the ultimate and most depressingly sterile rerun of avant-garde pop’s over-extended infatuation with the life-is-a-cabaret ethic. Fun for some, certainly, and cash for others, but it has no heart.’ A year later, after the New Romantics had conquered the charts, the NME’s Ian Penman lamented that 1981 had been a year when ‘dressing up became de rigueur’ and when ‘the narcissist’s determined gaze could be found everywhere’. As prime examples, he pointed to the ‘promo videos of Steve Strange, Spandau Ballet and Adam Ant’, which represented the triumph of ‘pure narcissism’.44
By this stage, the critics’ minds were made up. The new generation were shallow, derivative, greedy and, above all, terminally self-absorbed. Their defenders pointed out that they were hardly the first pop musicians to enjoy dressing up and making money. But to critics who had come of age
in the 1960s and 1970s, the New Romantics broke the rules that had supposedly governed rock music since its foundation. At a time when working-class life seemed to be disintegrating, they seemed to be on the side of change, rather than fighting for tradition. They gave too much thought to their clothes, and far too much to their videos. They were not overtly manly, wore eyeliner and lipstick, whitened their faces and even borrowed women’s clothes. Instead of hurling themselves around the stage, strumming their giant phallic guitars, they stood almost motionless at their keyboards, tapping away like secretaries. Rock music was supposed to be authentic, primal and physical, but these newcomers were affected, prettified and pretentious. Where was the drummer, dripping with sweat? Where was the industry, the anger, the aggression?45
The fact that all this unfolded against the backdrop of the longest recession since the 1930s, with millions of men losing their jobs in manufacturing industries, women joining the labour force in record numbers and a woman assuming the most high-profile job in the land, was no coincidence. Even rock music had fallen victim to the twin horrors of feminization and computerization. ‘There are some days when you turn on the radio and every record begins with a bleep or a bubble,’ complained Melody Maker’s Penny Kiley, who had a ‘nightmare vision of a world taken over by musicians in bleak industrial suits and robot haircuts, and punters with dyed red hair and baggy trousers’. To thousands of youngsters, of course, such a world probably sounded quite fun. But to Melody Maker, robots, computers, bleeps and bubbles were the work of the Devil. After Gary Numan moved to the United States in 1982, the paper suggested that, since ‘almost single-handedly he made computer printouts designed as pop songs fashionable’, Mrs Thatcher should consider ‘remobilising the Task Force to prevent his re-entry to this country’.46