Secret Thesis - 1980s Division (t'was Blitz to be alive in that dandy dawn)

There's an exhibition at the Design Museum in High Street Kensington dedicated to the New Romantics and the club scene of Blitz and Billy's and Le Beat Route. On a recent visit to London I checked it out. 

I thought it was well done, informative, and fun - worth a visit for sure (it's running until March 2026). 

But, but, overall it did rather confirm my Secret Thesis about glam, which applies equally to all the neo-glam echoes (New Romantics / Futurists, Romo, electroclash). 

Which is that the sonics are more enduring than the sartorials. 

(Okay that doesn't work with Romo but with the others, definitely).

Take the tunes by Visage that you can hear-see in the videoscreen area. 

Not only do "Fade to Grey" and "The Damned Don't Cry" sound better than their videos look, but New Romantic music generally has aged much better than New Romantic style - judging by the clothes displayed on mannequins in this exhibition, or the graphic design of the magazine covers and spreads framed or glass-cased for your discerning eye's delectation.

As for the disparity between how Bowie and his accomplices sound on "Ashes To Ashes" and how he's togged up in the video... 

Bowie and choreographer Toni Basil hanging with his progeny, scouting for talent maybe for the "Ashes to Ashes" promo

Actually, in truth, the Visage promos weren't so bad - "Damned Don't Cry" especially is budget-Visconti stylish. And even "Vienna" by Ultravox, which I hadn't liked at the time, sounds and looks quite grand in its gauche way. 

But overall the gap between the visuals and the aurals reinforced my Undeclared Thesis. With glam and its descendants, the clothing / coiffure / cosmetics, once shocking or startling, very soon becomes: 

a/ dated 

b/ revealed - more often than not -  as garish, over-done, and even surprisingly tatty.

Almost timelessly elegant... almost... 

"I'm so weird"

That's the young Boy George I believe, looking gaunt, snapped for a Blitz Culture feature in ZG, the house journal of St Martin's College.

Now the clothes in the right-hand pic are quite cool in a mid-70s Doctor Who, "royal court of some distant alien civilization"way... 

Okay this is chic - both the sketches and the photo - almost worthy of Jean-Paul Goude

Again, this zany zany spread above reminds me of the "Slave to the Rhythm" video

Whereas - and granted I couldn't design my way out of paper bag -  this is a bit of a mess. I suppose it must have seemed like an energy-burst at the time. 

In contrast, this pair of flyers are just "huh?"

This is how you represent the super-stylists place-to-be-seen?

Again, was this really designed to make people think "this is where I want to be"?

"I'm in with the in-crowd"

This is striking, yes... and I covet the early iDs (and appreciate their 'street fashion' approach, kids caught on camera in the wild, self-fashioned looks rather than boutique-bought) and piningly wonder why no one has scanned all of them and put them out there on the internet commons (you can find the odd early-issue online, some incomplete issues and stray spreads... to buy the intact originals on Ebay or from a vintage magazine seller online would be astronomic) 

"& sweat is best" - I think "sex & sweat is best" was a slogan coined by iD co-founder Perry Haines... maybe adapted from  Sex Sweat and Blood, a 'new danceability' compilation, on which his track "What's Funk" featured

Of all the garments on display, this struck me as perhaps the most chic - I do like that little outline figure of a man near the hem, the diagonal double-lines, the belt, and just the nacreous gleam of the fabric (albeit something of a lobster-y hue). 

This though just seems a bit drab and boxy. 

 

I do like the sort of leafy fabric texture here

Whereas this just looks unflattering. If not for the quasi-military insignia on the collar and the arm, it looks a bit pants-suit executive woman. 

Sort of avant-frumpy

This one is from a spoof by the Not the Nine O' Clock News crew, but actually no worse than many of the things you might have seen in the clubs, or in the real-deal videos

"Nice Video, Shame About the Song"

Lufthansa Terminal, haha

This one is pretty cool as echt-New Wave graphix

Draft for Robert Elms sleeve note to Spandau Ballet's Journeys to Glory.

Now I had assumed the exhibition was in tandem with the Elms book Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s. But it seems the Design Museum have their own book / catalogue they are touting: We Can Be Heroes: The Blitz Club -  Where Style Was Born, co-authored by Blue Rondo man Chris Sullivan and Graham Smith (although there is an intro by Elms, along with no less than three forewords - by Boy George, Gary Kemp and Steve Strange (from beyond the grave??)).   As for the exhibition itself, that was curated by Michelle Thom.

Probably the best thing visually in there was a contemporary work - a simulation of what it would have been like to be amidst the bustling poseurs at Blitz, as the club gradually fills up. Improved mightily by its sort of faded-by-time, mists-of-memory effects.

There's a sort of doubling of retro, or of nostalgias, effect looking at this simulacrum because the original club Blitz was - immediately before being taken over the poseur posse - a 1940s / WW2 themed club, hence the propaganda poster decorations. 

I wonder if the proprietors straight up nicked the idea from the 1976 episode of Rock Follies that features a Forties revival club called The Blitz, with air raid wardens as waiters, rationing-style food (cold spam, potato pie, tripe and no onions), gas masks, etc, and in which the Little Ladies perform as The Victory Girls singing songs about the war effort and how Glenn Miller's plane has gone missing. From about  36.52 mins in.

A virtual Rusty Egan on the wheels of steel 

Unlike a similar diorama I saw of CBGBs in a New York museum that notably failed to reproduce even a scintilla of the squalor of the original venue, with the ersatz Blitz there were ash trays with actual cigarettes in them - well, one cigarette that had been lit but evidently not smoked. Still, points for effort on the historical veracity front. Even the most stylish of clubs were rank places, chokingly thick with cig smoke, drink spillage staining the tables and sticky on the floor....

Talking of simulations...

Blitzblogger!

They have this clever machine that takes your picture and makes you look like a New Romantic

In this rendering, I resemble more a Buggle.

The interloper!

After feeling my bitchery build up inside and form itself into a future blogpost as I walked through the exhibits, I was secretly touched to find myself included among the gift shop offerings, even though there's only one chapter in Rip It Up that touches on the New Romantics

Shock and Awe would have sat better in this context, in truth - despite its Secreted Thesis.

From 1978 - 

“A passion for the sham…. A sickness of pretence“

 

I have noted here before the low regard for plastic in post-WW2 highbrow culture - which was transvaluated into a positive by Warhol and other Pop Artists, and in turn espoused by Bowie as an anti-authenticity riff (his Young Americans mode of "plastic soul";  he also described Ziggy as a “plastic rocker”) Sort of “synthetic and proud of it, me!” “Guaranteed not the real thing”.

In this eerie 1962 Monitor short film "The Lonely Shore"- which imagines a team of researchers in the far future visiting the ruined wasteland of Britain and trying to reconstruct the lost civilization using archeological fragments and ancient artifacts whose function and meaning can only be speculated about -  the 1960s literati loathing for plastic is evident with comments about a curiously repulsive substance out of which many objects are fashioned. 

The artificial colours of these man-made materials are connected to a general critique of artifice, pretence, fantasy, and superficiality that is seen as the malaise that rotted out the Lost Civilization, which had waned through its loss of connection to the virile and vitalizing energies of Nature. 

Again, very par for the course for post-WW2 discontents against modernity, cutting across from highbrows like J.B. Priestley with his admass society critique, to the the counterculture of beats and hippies, with their Rousseau-esque "nostalgia of mud", earthen palette of brownish fabrics, additive-free macrobiotics etc

One of the slogans of King Mob - the UK cell of the Situationists - was “Smash the Plastic Death”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Informational lowdown from Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain:

"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "  

Ha, I mentioned J.B. Priestley and his "admass" idea, and here it's his missus, Jacquetta Hawkes, writing the text to "The Lonely Shore" 

As Holloway observes, she looks to have been a fascinating polymath. Amongst other things, she was an archaeologist, which fits with the framing of "The Lonely Shore", she was renowned for her book A Land, about British geology and archaeology. 

Dexys as glam (slight return) (secret thesis: slight return's slight return's slight return)

Came across this snippet from Kevin Rowland's The Q & A in The Guradian a few weeks back (Kev promoting his memoir Bless Me Father):

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

I’d have stuck with the original Dexys Midnight Runners look we started in 1978, which became known as the New Romantic look a couple of years later. Our management and record label talked us out of it. Later, Duran Duran and Spandau came out with that look and that made us look old-fashioned.

So 'tis proven!

What is proven? you ask.

The argument of this old post: 

Back when I was reading old Dexys Midnight Runners interviews for Rip It Up, I came across a passing reference to how before punk, Kevin Rowland had been into Bowie. 

Well, who wasn't, out of that punk-into-postpunk generation? 

Still, it surprised me somehow - Rowland being so into Truth and Soul(-baring) and Authenticity, how could he really have any time for someone bound up with artfice and the Pose - with the idea that the performer is an actor?   

Then the other day I discovered that Rowland's very first group Lucy & the Lovers had been  influenced by Roxy Music.

(In fact, in '83, onstage, Rowland slagged off Bowie-circa-Let's Dance as a bad copy of Bryan Ferry). 

The glam connection starts to make sense, if you think about Dexys's serial reinvention  - how each successive album involved a New Look. 

And it really starts to make sense if you consider subsequent developments.

Video for "Rag Doll" - single off the 2020 rerelease of My Beauty - featuring Rowland's grandson, Roo – “who has been wearing dresses since he was 13”. The song is by the Four Seasons’ as in "Walk Like A Man".

Cheeky glimpse of suspenders here

The My Beauty move seemed to involve Rowland revealing - and reveling in - his own long-suppressed feminine side.... asserting publicly his right to softness and the wearing of "pretty things".

While still remaining a man, and a hetero man for that matter. 

Here's what he wrote to Alan McGee about the album and what he was trying to do

He has headed stationery!

It's a striking switch-up especially c.f. the first-phase Dexys look, which was so butch - the "spiffy" Mean Streets / On the Waterfront gear, followed later by boxing training hoods that created a vaguely monastic look.... the cult of Intense Emotions... "punish my body until I believe in my soul"...  the working out together, jogging en masse to create team spirit ... . the missionary zeal... the thematics of fire and fortitude ("Dance Stance", "Burn It Down")... the fixation on the harder, horn-pumped type of Sixties Soul... the jousting jabbing horns

Such grave, earnest young men - so uncamp, it goes all the way round to become camp

Another glam-echoing thing about My Beauty - it's a covers album, in the tradition of Pinups and These Foolish Things. An artist explaining himself through choices of others material and through the delivery. Although in this case, it's not an inventory of influences or pantheon of ancestors, so much as an emotional accounting, a "this is where I am now" / "this is who I've always been inside" unveiling. 

The other "glam" syndrome at work here is that irony that holds both generally and applies in this specific case with Dexys - which is that the clothes age faster and far worse than the music does. 

aka "the secret undeclared thesis"

Mind you, some of the recent get-ups looked awful from the off. 

Like, what's he going for here?

The cover of this most recent album The Feminine Divine is a catastrophic taste failure - this looks more like a Goa Trance flyer or compilation than something you'd  associate with Dexys Midnight Runners

Psytrance imagery actually makes sense as Kev in recent years got into Tao and tai chi and went on a retreat to Thailand to get his head sorted

The album's tracklist  

The One That Loves You

It's Alright Kevin (Manhood 2023)

I'm Going To Get Free

Coming Home

The Feminine Divine

My Goddess Is

Goddess Rules

My Submission

Dance With Me

From a Guardian profile of Kev by Tim Adams

"It’s Alright, Kevin (Manhood 2023)"...   sees the singer in a lively therapy session with his backing chorus: “Were you always feeling edgy?” they wonder.

“Yes,” he admits.

“Afraid the mask would slip and they’d see?”

“I carried so much weight on me / I never truly was myself / Just an amalgam off the shelf …

“And did you ever get found out?”

“All the time”

“Did that compound your sense of doubt?”

“Totally. It was so hard not being real /Let me tell you how for years / I was waking up in fear / What would they think of me, no personality? / A no one from the start …”

The album is a kind of pilgrim’s progress, in which a character not a million miles from our Kev confronts the controlling habits of his earlier masculinity – “I had so much hate in me” – in order to celebrate not only his own freer, feminine side, but the guiding female spirit of the universe.....

. “I think we are going through a big change,” Rowland says, “different ways of relating. And we can either be entrenched in our old views – ‘I’m not bloody changing’ – or we can go with it…”

Oh and looping back to where we started

"Rowland tells a poignant story from the time about how he couldn’t quite bring himself to say hello to Bryan Ferry when he had the chance.

“I stood next to him once in the studio,” he says, “We were both recording something and Top of the Pops was on and we both came down to watch it. I was dressed in a scruffy old tracksuit and we didn’t speak – I was always very shy in those kind of situations. And Roxy Music were heroes of ours, if you like. If you listen to the early albums, he is really singing from his soul.”"