BOOKS
An oral history of New Romantics joins the dots between Bowie, punk and the Lacy Lady in Ilford. By Danny Eccleston.
New Romantics tell all,
Rob Halford tells even more, plus Hawkwind…
Sweet Dreams: The Story Of The New Romantics ★★★★ Dylan Jones FABER & FABER. £15.49
FEW MUSIC scenes have received more opprobrium than the New Romantics – that grab-bag of musicians, entrepreneurs and boulevardiers who emerged from London’s post-punk club scene to dominate commercial pop culture in Britain in the first half of the ’80s. A bunch of fame-grubbing clothes-horses? Certainly. But also, a progressive force that opened new routes for music while embracing most genders, ethnicities and sexual preferences. It was elitist but democratic, aspirational but skint, fixated on self-invention.
As Dylan Jones’s hulking oral history makes clear, glamour was a touchstone from the start – in the pre-punk discos where a young, somewhat feral contingent obsessed over David Bowie and Roxy Music. Crackers, Louise’s and the Lacy Lady in Ilford nurtured punk’s early adopters and its earliest apostates, turned off by the grot and violence and ossifying style codes. As scenester and future costume designer Fiona Dealey recalls, “I wanted to be someone more glamorous.”
In the places this crowd invented to frequent – notably, Bowie Night at Billy’s on Dean Street, Blitz in Covent Garden, Le Beat Route – dressing up, the more fabulously the better, was an escapist response to the grey city and, worse, beige suburbia. The soundtrack – Kraftwerk, gay disco, soul, Bowie, Roxy – was narrowly defined, so much so that Blitz DJ Rusty Egan would run out of records to play. Made-to-measure bands – Spandau Ballet and Visage – arose to plug the gaps, enabled by a ‘new’ instrument that was easy to play and made everything sound like the future: the synthesizer. The scene was eye-catching enough to attract rubberneckers: David Bowie and Jack Charlton, plus the record labels that would turn this DIY subculture into a look-book and mood-music for high streets and shopping malls worldwide. For a band like Adam & The Ants, it was life and death, as their career turned into an insane, MTV-feeding whirligig of reinvention – “indians” to pirates to highwaymen – in which the music was quickly sidelined. “We were like panto,” notes Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni.
The groups from outside Blitz-world – Soft Cell, OMD,
ABC, The Human League,
Depeche Mode, Frankie
Goes To Hollywood – but whose overlaps draw them into Sweet Dreams’ narrative, have fared better, reputationally, than its flagship bands:
‘The Spands’ and their brummie counterparts,
Duran Duran. But they were all, to one degree or another, sucked into the glam boys’ wake. In one of his well-judged authorial interjections, Jones writes that for its high-fliers, “the fame was all-consuming and almost completely self-referential. The interesting thing about their success… was their success.”
Jones’s New Romanticism has a long tail, perhaps too long to make for a punchy ending to his book. But its legacies are well drawn. That there were mainstream, gay-signifying pop stars like Boy George, Marc Almond and Holly Johnson seemed extraordinary at the time and had a long-term positive impact. Black music and dance music would break down some of the rock-snob barriers they faced at the end of the ’70s. Street styles, and their creators, would ascend to high levels in international fashion. Club culture in Britain was transformed. We are all individuals now.
Fiona Dealey, there at t he start, gets something like the last word: “I don’t think that I’ve ever really felt that it’s over. I really don’t.”