NEW ROMANTIC
Each decade of popular music so far has its merits and its
embarrassments. But perhaps the most derided of them all is the
Eighties.
Looking back on this most confused of eras - a juxtaposition
of gloom (urban decay in Sheffield) and luminescence (the
fluorescent socks your aunt bought you in 1983) - it's easy to
forget among the chaos that some astonishing music was made.
And in the first half of the decade, the force majeure in
terms of British pop laboured under the regrettable - but
perfectly apt - term of New Romantic.
The term didn't emerge overnight though. For three years the
scene - initially little more than the unusually dressed
clientele of a single London nightclub (Gossips) and
specifically its Tuesday night session, 'Billys - A Club For
Heroes' - didn't have a convenient title.
The concept of clubber Steve Strange, Billy's began life as
punk's first wave breathed its last in 1978, and later moved
from Gossips to a venue called The Blitz, a club decorated with
World War II images.
The crowd, a mixture of ex-punks and others looking for a
cultural identity, were fond of dandy-ish, vaguely late 18th
century clothing and make-up lifted straight from punk's
dressing-up box.
The air of fierce elitism which simultaneously protected and
elevated the club and those who frequented it was reinforced by
the snobbery of its staff. Doorman Strange turned away anyone
who wasn't dressed appropriately, or who looked as if they might
only be there to snigger at the freaks: famously one such
casualty was none other than Mick Jagger. Strange said he wanted
simply to create an environment where the clubbers could party
unmolested.
Meanwhile, an early cloakroom attendant was Boy George (then
just plain George O'Dowd), who was later fired for thieving from
people's handbags. As he later wrote in his autobiography, Take
It Like A Man :
"Tuesday nights
we went to The Blitz club in Covent Garden, hosted by Rusty
Egan and Steve Strange . . . Steve lorded it on the door,
making us wait while he turned away some poor freak from the
sticks. I felt sorry for some of them, they'd spent so long
putting on their make-up and landscape hats. The success of
The Blitz led him to believe he had created the New Romantic
scene."
 The
music was as exclusive as the dress code. The club DJ was
ex-Rich Kids drummer Rusty Egan [pictured at right] who formed a
band called Visage with Strange in 1979 and filled his DJ
playlist with the music of David Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk,
Chic and the new electronic artists such as Gary Numan.
By the end of 1979, Spandau Ballet had formed and were
playing regular dates at The Blitz.
Other clubs opened with similar attitudes to music and
fashion and as the scene expanded, the media inevitably focused
their attention on it.
By the close of 1980 Spandau Ballet had scored a hit with To
Cut A Long Story Short and Visage had entered the
Christmas Top 10 with their never-equalled Fade To Grey.
However, Adam and The Ants had also taken the charts by storm
with three Top 10 singles at the end of the year, while Malcolm
McLaren's new project, Bow Wow Wow had also emerged from
the indie gloom - although they wouldn't hit their commercial
peak until 1982.
Even though the latter two bands had little if anything in
common with Visage and Spandau Ballet, after journalist and
author Jon Savage wrote a feature in The Face entitled
'The Cult With No Name' it became apparent that someone would
have to find a proper name for the so called "Blitz
scene".
The 'New Romantic' tag (which had more to do with the look of
the Blitz scene and Spandau Ballet than anything else) was the
one that stuck and travelled around the world.
The media and fans of the rapidly-rising Spandau Ballet
latched onto the New Romantic tag like starving piranhas, to the
horror of the inner circle who had revelled in their
exclusivity. Suddenly, any new band which had a synthesizer and
liked a dab of lipgloss were New Romantics.
The roll-call expanded with great speed and before long a
raft of acts including The Human League, Japan, ABC and Ultravox
- all of whom came to prominence at around this time - were
regarded as members of the clan, regardless of their musical
diversity.
Global awareness was gained when two bands, Duran Duran and
Boy George's new band, Culture Club, had worldwide hits.
The rise of Soft Cell, prime movers of scene face Steve 'Stevo'
Pearse's Some Bizarre record label, added to the confusion: the
duo - whose commercial peak would come in 1982 - were not New
Romantics as such, but they certainly liked synths and make-up.
The die was cast, and Stevo's 1981 label compilation - which
featured many fledgling New Romantics - was the scene's early
benchmark.
Of course, many of the British public were appalled. On the
surface, the New Romantic movement seemed - to those not in its
thrall - to be based merely on a load of new wave elitist
snobbery and an obsession with effete clothing.
How we laughed at "the clumsy boots, the peek-a-boo
roots" that Adam Ant (not quite a New Romantic but
definitely flirting with the idea) mocked so deftly in Stand
and Deliver.
And with good reason: by the mid-1980s, when the movement had
emerged from its painfully exclusive origins and spread into the
mainstream, the quality of the music being made had faded.
What to conclude about the New Romantics? Yes they were
self-indulgent. Yes they looked stupid. But in their own way,
and on their own terms, they played as important a role in their
era as the punks and the glam-rockers did in the previous
decade.
Mocked mercilessly on all sides for their foolish image and
relentless tribalism, the New Romantics still managed to hold
their own for a brief moment
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