Nobody lives in the present […] One cumulative effect of mass communication nowadays is that, though transient in intention, it more and more puts itself on record. So the music, manners and modes of the past are instantly and synchronously to hand in a way they have never been before. Revivals of style can go with ever-gathering speed. The cycle, rubbish-camp-acceptable-antique, has now become almost totally telescoped. Mass communication is like the memories in a mind half-asleep. Or like your mind when drowning?
Paul Barker, Arts in Society (London, 1977)You take the best things from the past and you got it, you got it [style] sussed.
Martin Kemp, NME, 29 November 1980I'm just saying that people should do what they want to do, with clothes or whatever you're into.
Steve Strange, Smash Hits, 22 January 1981The video starts with piano chords and a synth-propelled rhythm. The song is “Visage” by Visage, a chart-bound record released in July 1981. Steve Strange (Stephen Harrington) looks at the camera, the frame cutting to-and-from a pencil-drawn sketch of his elaborate makeup coming into being. As the song kicks in, Strange heads to the Blitz nightclub in a chauffeur-driven vintage car. He is accompanied by Perri Lister and Lorraine Whitmarsh, two women dressed chicly and identikit: black hats, grey suits, belts around their waist, red lipstick to offset mascaraed eyes. Poses are pulled as Strange sings the first verse: “New styles. New shapes. New modes: that's the role my fashion takes.” As they enter the club, down steps into a new space reimagined from a small wine bar into an alluring simulacrum conjuring Hollywood images of speakeasy America or a pre-war European cabaret, smartly dressed barflies turn to stare, watching as Strange and his companions promenade. “Oh my visage,” he croons, reveling in the attention. Next, they enter a fashion shoot and turn the pages of a mocked-up Vogue with Strange on the cover in drag. “Vis-u-als. Mag-a-zines. Reflect styles: past, future, in extreme.” Strange's outfit changes from scene to scene: now he exhibits a bolero look caught in the slow-motion flicker of a celluloid light that complements the pulsating disco beat. He and his associates watch themselves on the screen, moving before it, then tearing it down as they turn to face the glare. They re-enter the club and step onto the dancefloor, their studied poise caught in a smoky haze. New outfits again. They have become their own movie. They have stepped out of a magazine. Fantasy becomes life. Life becomes fantasy. The synthetic combines with the imaginative to invent glamorized visions of the past caught freezeframe in the present. “Oh my visage,” Strange croons once more. “Oh my visage.”Footnote 1
The affectations of Strange and his group have since become a defining motif of the 1980s. As co-convenor, with Rusty Egan, of a series of ongoing club nights at Billy's in Soho and then Blitz in Covent Garden, Strange helped spearhead a distinct youth cultural style that served also to reinvigorate London's nightlife. After much prevarication, “new romantic” became the media label of choice, a term first associated with Blitz regulars Spandau Ballet in the early months of what became a stellar pop career. Following Betty Page's (Beverly Glick's) “The New Romantics: A Manifesto for the 80s,” a feature on the band that appeared in the music paper Sounds in September 1980, the moniker entered the cultural lexicon. Writers both astute and bemused tried to explain this mishmash of elaborate fashion and electronic sounds that stoked “controversy in the youth market” for the “first time since the Sex Pistols [and punk].”Footnote 2 Visage, Spandau Ballet, a reconfigured Ultravox, and, a little later, Culture Club emerged through Blitz to become household names. Alongside Duran Duran and others, they rode a “new pop” wave that washed over America in another “British invasion” primed to galvanize a music industry adapting to a range of technological changes and challenges.Footnote 3 The sartorial and musical influences of David Bowie and Roxy Music were common denominators: Bowie, in return, recruited Strange (along with Blitz regulars Judith Frankland, Darla Jane Gilroy, and Elise Brazier) to appear in the video for his number one single “Ashes to Ashes” (1980). Style-wise, highly individualized looks were continually adopted and adapted across genders, drawing from what was soon read as a “postmodern” plundering of the past. These included historic militaria and iconic cinema; Weimar chic and TV sci-fi; decorated religious garb and Japanese geisha; Little Lord Fauntleroy and Elizabethan court dress; a “psychedelic Regency” look of silk and velvet that New Society's Yvonne Roberts described as “Lucille Ball meets Beau Brummell,” replete with makeup and hair set just-so.Footnote 4 To this end, Strange remembered scrambling time by “constantly looking through history books, old film magazines and design articles, trying to come up with ideas for new images,” while his friends experimented similarly with a range of outré cuts, cloths, and accoutrements (Figure 1).Footnote 5 Though always a contested label, new romanticism briefly encompassed everyone from the Burundi-beat piracy of Adam and the Ants to the languidly-somber avant-pop of Japan and the futuristic dance performances of Shock. It became a catch-all term to define what one short-lived magazine recognized as—and thus named itself after—the New Sounds New Styles (1981–82) of a new decade.
Vivienne Lynn and Steve Strange. Photograph: Derek Ridgers.
The media of the time soon registered a fascination with those the Daily Mail described in late 1978 as “heavily made-up […] poseurs” and “peacocks” trying “to bring a little bezazz and brightness to their lives.”Footnote 6 Scholars, however, have shown scant interest in the new romantics. As the 1980s unfurled, some attention was paid to what Simon Frith recognized as a shift in pop's critical focus from “the forces of production to the moment of consumption.” This meant that new romantics were used as an example of a fracture developing between those holding hard to punk-defined modes of sociocultural critique and others succumbing to “packaged narratives of desire.”Footnote 7 Read as a continuation of 1970s glam, new romantics embraced what the influential music writer Simon Reynolds later described as “fantasy and escapism,” informing and responding to the divergent “post-punk” stylings of youth culture indicative of the period.Footnote 8 Indeed, Jon Stratton's 2022 Spectacle, Fashion and the Dancing Experience in Britain concluded that new romantics “exemplified” the “totalising combination of lifestyle consumer goods within the capitalist order, where mundane life was transformed by way of excess […] into spectacle.”Footnote 9
Historians interested in questions of gender and sexuality have on occasion interrogated the distinctive stylings of the “Blitz Kids” (Figures 2–3). Stan Hawkins and Michael Bracewell both applied the concept of the dandy to position the new romantics’ “feigned masculinity” and fearlessness of effeminacy as an extension of pop's wider reimagining of gender performance.Footnote 10 Blitz became what Shaun Cole called a space of “creative self-expression,” where genders merged and “a whole host of new images [opened up] for men's dress.”Footnote 11 But as Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton have recognized, this meant signifiers of femininity were often colonized by men who impinged on the “multiplicity of selves” available to women keen to “explore the shifting relationship between being and appearance, [between] seeing and being seen.”Footnote 12 If the model and singer Ronny could switch from looking immaculately stern to Dietrich-androgenous (providing a template for Annie Lennox in the process), then pictures from the time also reveal women in an array of styles compiled to present a rarefied female glamour. By contrast, a band such as Duran Duran was able to construct and perform a post-Bowie “masculinity not yet seen in the absence of the association with homosexuality, and not pejorative in any way.” “Gay/straight” semiotics were blurred; the feminine was absorbed rather than rendered abject; masculinity was resignified to present an alternative maleness.Footnote 13 The boys, it seemed, could have it both ways.
Record covers for Visage and Ronny, both 1981.
Seeing new romanticism as a spectacular site of desire and/or gender reimagining reveals a youth culture navigating, informing, and absorbing broader processes of sociocultural and socioeconomic change. Yet popular histories of the period remain obsessed with supposed parallels between new romanticism and the “new beginning” promised by Margaret Thatcher in May 1979, imbuing 1980s pop with an aspirational business acumen that strove for success and therefore equated to “Thatcherism.”Footnote 14 To explain, Kari Kallioniemi argues that the marketing of new romanticism (and 1980s pop music in general) became interdependent on a politics and economics that at once facilitated and castigated the (primarily working-) class, gender, and sexual identities embraced by those within the original Blitz milieu.Footnote 15 Simultaneously, “The Story of the New Romantics” remains—in the media-framed popular memory—the preserve of a few close to the scene.Footnote 16 In these autobiographical accounts, relations between Blitz and Thatcherism recur, sometimes accepting and sometimes denying the connection. Blitz certainly did host an array of future pop stars, writers, stylists, artists, and designers who helped shape the form and temper of the 1980s. But accounts of new romanticism are too often teleological. In other words, they are recounted to chart the success and renown of certain Blitz habitués or to underscore an often-facile correlation between parliamentary politics and concurrent shifts in style, leisure, media, and consumption.
Contemporary interpretations of the formation of new romanticism tell a different story. Exhuming the influences evident through Blitz and performances such as the video for “Visage” allows new romantics to be understood in the process of becoming, during which time the possibilities of what Raymond Williams called an “emergent culture” remained mutable and open-ended.Footnote 17 In reclaiming texts from the period, the multi-accentuality of (proto-)new romanticism becomes visible, exposing what its cultural configurations were deemed to mean—or signify—at the moment of codification and commercialization.
If “new media mediates old media,”Footnote 18 then new romanticism epitomizes the experimentation with new forms of media that transformed the cultural terrain over the late 1970s/early 1980s. This was a time when polaroids, videos, cassettes, and Walkmans became commonplace; when changes in printing techniques helped generate a widening array of colorful and glossy magazines with innovative graphic design; when synthesizers and sequencers began transforming pop's sound; when branding and advertising techniques had profound cultural ramifications.Footnote 19 Yet proto-new romanticism's initial embrace of technology came with a studied alienation that embodied long-standing fears of automation. It traded in both nostalgia and dystopia, aestheticized for an age yet to come.
These new media and technologies enabled elaborate modes of—sometimes fleeting, sometimes enduring—self-creation and self-reinvention.Footnote 20 New romanticism thus exposed how the intricacies of selfhood were encountered and constructed through a nexus of mediated image and spectacle.Footnote 21 New romantics forged an array of identities from “looks” they adopted, then adapted from visual culture. They performed the multiplicity and instability of a modern self that could forever be reinvented and reproduced, feeding into early postmodern readings of the late twentieth century. Many Blitz kids—including Boy George (George O'Dowd) and Steve Strange—were themselves willingly commodified to become “agents and objects” of cultural production, their assembled self-identities projected and fragmented across the realms of pop music, fashion, and tabloid media.Footnote 22
Commodification and consumer behavior are central to our understanding of postwar British culture.Footnote 23 What became new romanticism was at once a product of trends in consumption and an attempt to escape high-street uniformity. The objective was to stand out; to look better; to be distinct, original, and different; to be set against—as much as escape from—the banalities of social and stylistic routine. Hence the emphasis on bespoke design and stylistic bricolage; but also the untethered recycling of stylized images from the past. The tensions between originality and reconstruction, between past and present, between agency and the constraints of social and commercial mores, between marginal and mainstream, between queer and heteronormative are central to parsing new romanticism's engagement with and contribution to Britain's consumer culture.
Consequently, new romanticism helps us to reconsider the post-1945 period in terms not limited to the overly-determined periodization of “consensus”/“social democracy” and “Thatcherism”/“neoliberalism.”Footnote 24 What was initially described as a “cult with no name,” like the 1980s themselves, might just as well be understood as the product of preexisting developments in technological, sociocultural, and socioeconomic change. By recognizing how longer processes of structural and social transformation framed and underpinned late twentieth-century youth culture, we can understand shifts in discourse and sensibility that both explain and repurpose our postmodern conceptions of time and space.
Like some new romantic looking for the TV soundFootnote 25
The basic back story has been told a number of times and goes something like this. New romanticism signaled a distinct moment along a cultural trajectory that ran through David Bowie, Roxy Music, soul clubs, gay clubs, punk, disco, and Europhilia toward inspiring a whole host of stylistic ingenuities over the 1980s. Billy's, the small club in Soho where Steve Strange and Rusty Egan presented “Bowie nights” on Tuesdays in late 1978, marked the conception. Blitz, from February 1979 through October 1980, served as the incubator for much proto-1980s creativity, where fashion and aspiration found synergies to fuel new media, music, and lifestyles (Figures 4–5). Born of Blitz came pop stars such as Spandau Ballet and Boy George, ready to revitalize the charts and fill the pages of a pop-centric Smash Hits, soon to become the best-selling music magazine of the 1980s. Their coming of age was ornamented by designers fresh from St Martin's and other London art or fashion schools experimenting with styles en route to prestigious careers, among them Michele Clapton (whose costume designs would win her a BAFTA and three Emmys between 2009 and 2016) and the milliner Stephen Jones (OBE). Holding court and managing the door with discernment was Strange, who—like Boy George and Marilyn (Peter Robinson)—cultivated his own distinctive look, playing with and/or wholly subverting notions of masculinity. Egan's job was to provide the soundtrack, moving from the assuredly erudite glam-rock-turned-electronic-pulsebeat of Bowie and Roxy Music toward European electronica and early synth-based pop to herald an eclectic mix of music—e.g. Kraftwerk, Gina X, Telex, John Foxx's Ultravox!, The Normal, Fad Gadget, The Human League, Japan, Simple Minds—that rejected rock's clichés and envisioned a future world of clubs not gigs; of dancing not spectating; of dressing-up not dressing-down; of pop stars not grizzled rockers; of elongated 12-inch singles and stylized videos.
Melissa Caplan and Stephen Linnard. Photographs: Derek Ridgers.
Close by, eager scenesters and fashionistas found space to propagate what they recognized as a “new movement.” This allowed Robert Elms to write features for The Face and, with Steve Dagger and Chris Sullivan, ensure new romanticism fed back to embrace a mod-inflected soul boy heritage.Footnote 26 Blitz provided a “mutual admiration society for budding narcissists,” Elms insisted: “[A] creative environment where individualism was stressed and change was vital.”Footnote 27 Though inspired—like Strange and Egan—by the style and energy of the Sex Pistols, and the ways their manager Malcolm McLaren manipulated the media and the music industry to construct a recognizable scene and subculture, they recoiled from the affected yobbishness and earnest social realism that ostensibly defined “punk” by 1978–79. “Punk was a fashion,” Sullivan insisted. “It wasn't anything to do with politics and really angry kids.”Footnote 28 Instead, he and others began to imagine, and then start, their own clubs and pop groups, reviving the zoot suit and delving into sounds from the non-rock past (jazz, swing, funk, soul, salsa, Dietrich, Piaf, Sinatra). A glossy “style press”—The Face, i-D, Blitz—emerged in 1980 to disseminate the aesthetic awareness associated with Blitz, meshing music with fashion, design, and art to further eclipse the once preeminent music press (NME, etc.) and evolve toward catalogues of cultural consumption that pertained to construct confident and continually updating selves. By 1983–84, both the pop charts and London's clubland were seemingly transformed. Elms and Dagger had respectively propagated and managed Spandau Ballet to stardom; Sullivan had opened the uber-hip WAG club in Wardour Street; Dylan Jones—later to collate the most extensive oral history of new romanticism—had found his way to i-D, from where the briefly ubiquitous Perry Haines served time as a “consultant” to globetrotting Duran Duran; Boy George's Culture Club had broken America on the back of MTV; stylistic motifs associated with new romanticism had infused Paris catwalks and fed into the visual palette of film and design. The once would-be trendsetters of London's suburbs, squats, and housing estates now defined the times from inside the media, fashion, and music industries.
Of course, a messier history exists beneath the sheen of eighties success. Most obviously, the prevailing narrative has become overwhelmingly male and, given the “gender-bending” heralded as a defining feature of the Blitz crowd, oddly heteronormative. The “blokes” never “mention […] the women in the scene,” the designer Fiona Dealey later complained. “The Blitz was our youth club and I feel they hijacked it.”Footnote 29 If Steve Strange and Boy George always get their dues, the narrative tends to follow Elms, Jones, and Sullivan through their club, music, and media careers into the 1990s. “I was fed up of people wandering around with make-up,” Sullivan later remembered of his post-Blitz clubs and the formation of Blue Rondo á la Turk in 1981, “fed up of electro music. I wanted to do something with men […] in suits, without a synthesizer in sight. I wanted to do something that represented the heterosexual side of the scene.”Footnote 30 Although Strange opened Club for Heroes in 1981, this soon gave way to a 1982 residency at Camden Palace that The Face's founder Nick Logan felt was “anathema to what had gone before” (that is, commercialized and seemingly behind the times).Footnote 31 The queerness of Blitz, first signaled by the multi-sexual mix of those frequenting the club, was therefore rerouted back through the gay underground into clubs such as Cha Cha (opened in the back of Heaven in 1981) and on through Philip Sallon's Mud Club (1983) and Leigh Bowery's Taboo (1985).Footnote 32 It was there—alongside Skin Two, the fetish club opened in 1983, and, perhaps, among the Neo-Naturists who took nakedness into clubs and galleries throughout the 1980s—that we find further continuation of the otherness associated initially with new romanticism.Footnote 33 Simultaneously, clubs such as the proto-goth Batcave allowed for residual punk-glam influences to find new and elaborate expression from 1982.
The dominant narrative is also decidedly London-centric. Birmingham's Rum Runner usually gets credit for spawning Duran Duran and providing a stage for the flamboyant Martin Degville (an inspiration for Boy George) and the designers Jane Kahn and Patti Bell. But the recurring club nights hosted at venues such as Croc's in Rayleigh, Cagneys in Liverpool, Sherry's in Brighton, Le Phono and The Warehouse in Leeds, Valentino's in Edinburgh, and Cardiff's portable Tanzschau are unfairly presented as merely duplicates trying to recreate London's swish in the provinces (Figure 6).Footnote 34 For example, Keenan Duffty remembered the New Outlook in Doncaster hosting “a male nun, a Cossack, a Che Guevara lookalike, a bloke in a wedding dress and the Chip Shop King of South Yorkshire,” an array of “style misfits” who no doubt encouraged his move to St Martin's and career as a fashion designer.Footnote 35 Yet, we could instead turn to Manchester's Pips as a precursor to Billy's and Blitz, a nightclub with its own mid-1970s room for Bowie and Roxy Music acolytes to gather in “homemade outfits […] glamourous and beguiling.”Footnote 36 In Leeds, the Adelphi did Bowie nights on a Friday in the late 1970s, while Sheffield's Crazy Daizy put aside Wednesday for Bowie and Roxy fans even earlier in the decade.Footnote 37 Back in the northwest, Holly Johnson (later of Frankie Goes to Hollywood) remembered how “young people in their droves had been turning up for Roxy and Bowie nights at discos [in the mid-70s] and it was all becoming a bit commonplace.”Footnote 38 Certainly, Johnson's crowd in Liverpool—not to mention the resplendent Pete Burns (later of Dead or Alive)Footnote 39—comprised one of several comparable milieus to those congregating in Soho and Covent Garden between 1978 and 1980. If Billy's and Blitz overtly conceptualized and aestheticized club nights, there were precedents in embryo, not all of which took place in London.
Ticket for Cagneys (1980). Reproduced with permission of Steve Proctor.
The stylistic interplay of past, present, and future held evident tensions that similarly problematizes new romanticism's origin story. New romanticism's “coming out” party was a Valentine's Day Ball at London's Rainbow Theatre in 1981, a “People's Palace” full of “photographers, professional and amateur,” snapping “urgently away at a passing peacock throng that was only too willing to oblige with a pose and a pout.”Footnote 40 In an instant, new romantics were ensnared by the media spectacle, their image reified and style codified as a fashionable mélange of billowing shirts with frilly cuffs, ruffs, sashes, and makeup applied with a futuristic glaze. Adverts—such as for the Leeds-based shop Fab-Gear—appeared almost immediately in the NME, providing identikit outfits for Steve Strange replicas.Footnote 41 Bands such as Classix Nouveaux were aligned to “the scene” on account of their flamboyant dress and songs of “Night People” and robots dancing. Comedy programs caricatured the artifice and aesthetics of new romanticism. The “Nice Video, Shame About the Song” sketch on BBC's Not the Nine O'clock News from February 1982 was a veritable mix of Weimar chic, synths, makeup, historic costumes, and dramatic color-shifting effects. No longer able to continually transform out of sight, the photos and polaroids snapped in Warholian fashion to simulate stardom in a self-made world after midnight became artefacts of a very particular look, time, and place.Footnote 42 As Bowie crooned in 1975, “Fame: what you get is no tomorrow.”Footnote 43
Equally, however, the aesthetics and moods cultivated at Blitz were dissolving and diverging by the time new romanticism was named. Speaking in 1980, Perry Haines had already waved “goodbye/riddance” to the “Flash Gordon clones” of 1979.Footnote 44 In the guise of Spandau Ballet, he and Elms heralded a “new movement, as yet unlabelled, arising to tear down the high-tech backdrops that threatened fashion […] A new movement that respects romance and adores the classics.” It was “no longer on to look ‘strange’,” Haines concluded, the aim of his jibe obvious.Footnote 45 For Sullivan, at least, it was about “turning the clocks back.”Footnote 46 “I wanted to take things back to before punk, to the first clubs I attended […] venues such as Crackers and Lacy Lady that played great Black music, where the dress code entailed ’40s, ’50s and ’60s with a soupçon of now.”Footnote 47 By contrast, Strange saw Visage as “a passport into the new age of the eighties,” while Egan always insisted “I was a futurist, I liked new records not retro.”Footnote 48 In other words, he saw the DJ sets that heralded the advent of new romanticism as closer to the broader upsurge of synth-generated music evident in 1978–81 than the lounge music, soul, funk, and salsa sounds enjoyed by Sullivan at the St Moritz club or Le Kilt. Labelled “futurist” in the music press and associated with labels such as Daniel Miller's Mute and Stevo Pearce's Some Bizzare [sic], the moniker loosely incorporated an array of synth-pop and post-punk acts—from Depeche Mode and Soft Cell to even Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire—whose records were played by Egan but also at “Sci Fi Discos” and “Electro Diskows” across the country (Figures 7–10).Footnote 49
Futurist charts, Sounds, 30 August, 29 November, 13 December 1980, and 28 March 1981.
Although a commitment to nightclub life ensured a semblance of correlation that was retained across the diversifying sounds and styles unfolding post-Blitz, a breaking point was formally declared by Elms in his “Hard Times” article for The Face in September 1982. While the shift toward “men in suits” had first been noted in the winter of 1979, a definite change of sensibility was now intimated, transforming from the bold and the bright to “an entrenched die-hard mentality where ‘Good Times’ is replaced by ‘Money's Too Tight (To Mention)’.” The dancing did not stop, Elms reported, but the attitude hardened: “gay abandon has evolved into a clenched teeth determination where […] sweat has replaced cool as the mark of a face.” All semblance of dandyism and camp was jettisoned for function: denim was back and the Europhilia associated with Blitz was displaced by Black American influences.Footnote 50 In the meantime, most post-Blitz pop stars began diluting or rejecting any lingering new romantic styling to concentrate on conquering the charts and infusing the pop plurality of 1981–84.Footnote 51
These faultlines raise questions as to how (sub)cultural identities, performances, and spaces complicate our approaches to periodization and social change. They reveal disparities between those keen to reconstruct imagined pasts and those preoccupied with continual innovation; between those looking for validation via cultural capital and those prompted by a need for recognition/attention; between those guided by markers of material success and those keen to adopt artifice (and pleasure) as a means to self-reinvention. They further suggest that as much as new romanticism marked the start of something—“the 1980s”—it was also a manifestation of the end of a period that had opened spaces and the means to experiment both creatively and in terms of gender and sexuality. How then was new romanticism understood at its moment of becoming?
Oh look at the strange boy, he finds it hard existing …Footnote 52
For Raymond Williams, “emergent” cultures encompass “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships […] continually being created.” These always relate, in some way or other, both to the “dominant culture” of a particular period and to “residual” elements of the past. “It is exceptionally difficult,” he points out, “to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture […] and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional.” Nevertheless, emergent cultures are dependent on “finding new forms or adaptations of form,” creating or occupying spaces as they come into being.Footnote 53
New romanticism's formative influences and responses to the dominant culture complicate any binary reading of its relationship to the past and present. In tracing new romanticism's becoming, we need to locate the array of emergent looks, sounds, and sensibilities in relation to ongoing socioeconomic transformations (such as deindustrialization, globalization, and financialization) beyond simply the advent of “Thatcherism.” We must consider the cultural intervention of punk that critiqued the music industry and stimulated youthful agency; the residual influence of pop and youth culture's past that punk scrambled but never wholly denied; the wider cultural influences that circulated and coalesced through film, fashion, art, and literature; the pertinent sexual and gender politics permeating the 1970s–80s; the technological innovations that brokered affordable new media, fashions, and sounds.Footnote 54 Only then do the “styles,” “shapes,” and “modes” Steve Strange sang about begin to coalesce.
Where to look? Not the weekly music press, which proved slow to recognize (or at least cover) what was happening at Billy's and Blitz. The club- and style-based nature of the scene rubbed against the gig- and record-oriented coverage prevalent in the NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker.Footnote 55 Nor does the more chart-focused Smash Hits reveal much before 1981. Galvanized by Gary Numan and Adam Ant heralding the post-punk return of the pop star, attention turned to Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran over 1981–82, with the latter, especially, becoming regular cover stars. Prior to that, Steve Strange was dismissed as “possibly the worst dresser of his generation” but otherwise ignored until a front-page appearance in January 1981.Footnote 56 As this suggests, new romantics were reported as pop music rather than stylists, as stars rather than creatives.
The Face, i-D, and Blitz offer richer pickings, though all three magazines started almost at the moment when Strange and Egan vacated Blitz in late 1980. True, the earliest issues of i-D celebrated the multiple street styles so evocative of the immediate post-punk period, pioneering “straight up” photographs that often featured Blitz habitués.Footnote 57 It was in The Face, moreover, that Elms pitched Spandau Ballet and presented “the cult with no name” as the harbinger of a new generation.Footnote 58 But all three “style bibles” provide better trace of Blitz's immediate legacy than new romanticism's formation. Indeed, it was David Johnson's “On the Line” column for London's Evening Standard and LWT's Twentieth Century Box that proved quicker off the mark. Johnson eagerly propagated the “Now Crowd” living for the moment throughout 1980, while LWT's feature on Spandau Ballet helped generate a buzz around the group as they played invite-only gigs and fostered expectations of becoming the “next big thing.”Footnote 59
Better, then, to explore the more marginal fashion, society, and arthouse publications circulating in the late 1970s, magazines that fledgling new romantics read and aspired to appear in (Figures 11–14). It was in the likes of Harpers & Queen, Tatler, and Ritz that reports on London's clubland ventured into Billy's and Blitz, aligning glamorous aspiration with high-life glitterati in ways resonant of Roxy Music's stylized visions of penthouse perfection. Featured next to images of film stars and society stalwarts, and alongside clubs such as The Embassy on Old Bond Street, Blitz's youthful coterie appeared like a new generation of decadent dandies and would-be neue-frau bohemians usurping the capital's pleasure domes. Writing in Tatler, the cultural anthropologist Ted Polhemus described Blitz's “low-tech décor of war-time austerity” as a “post-punk kingdom of heaven and hell.” Thus, to the “Electro-Diskow” sounds of “German electronic pop with J. G. Ballard lyrics about love in a crashed car,” “a girl dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast in Tiffany's is dancing with a boy in a jet-black plastic space suit […] His hair slicked back Valentino-style.”Footnote 60 Polhemus wrote of the Blitz milieu “tapping our image resources” to reenvisage themselves in the context of post-punk Britain.Footnote 61 Allusions to Weimar Germany were common, the travails and decadence of pre-war Berlin transferred to the turbulent 1970s, with “cabaret” becoming a buzzword amid the outfits, poses, and demeanors of a crowd schooled by such films as Bob Fosse's 1972 adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels and the aesthetics of German Expressionism.
Covers of Ritz (1978); Deluxe (1978); Mode Avantgarde (1979); VIZ (1980).
Likewise, relatively short-lived titles such as Boulevard, Deluxe, Mode Avantgarde, VIZ, and ZG give sight to the cultural references and influences that informed the styles and sensibilities expressed after dark in Soho and Covent Garden. These were magazines of art and fashion, bold on imagery and keen to recognize “hybrid styles” across “diverse areas of cultural activity.”Footnote 62 Therein we find early reports on Helen Robinson and Stephane Raynor's shop PX, whose “clothes for the modern world” were initially caged in lockers retrieved from the old MI5 headquarters on Curzon Street and sold behind a white steel shutter with a TV monitoring the street.Footnote 63 Articles on Jon Baker's Axiom and Willie Brown's Modern Classics (which were both clothing outlets and fashion labels) broadened the stylistic array, making connections between DIY designers and those beginning to garner a reputation. Attention often focused on the self-created looks of Kim Bowen, Melissa Caplan, Judith Frankland, and others, women whose originality retained an otherness that both startled and unsettled. The rouge-smeared eyes of Scarlett Cannon and the dark glamour of Princess Julia (Foder) preserved a trace of punk's provocation and difference. Similarly, the coverage given to Stephen Linard's stunning “Neon Gothic” designs presented at St Martin's in 1980 revealed a fascination with religious imagery that generated an otherworldly effect intensified by the makeup and shaved heads of Michele Clapton and Myra Falconer. As well as pre-“Boy” George's regularly transforming and startlingly imaginative looks, the “space age pope” style of Lee Sheldrick appeared more Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu than 1980s nouveau riche. With an emphasis on “looking radically different” (Cannon) and “being distinct” (Clapton), the innovations of those in and around Blitz stunned as much as seduced (Figures 15–16).Footnote 64
Myra Falconer and Michele Clapton. Photographs: Graham Smith; Scarlett Cannon. Photograph: Derek Ridgers.
Such images were set next to features on the sexually exploratory artwork of Allen Jones and photography of Helmut Newton (who in 1982 shot the cover for the second Visage album). Exhibitions, including ICA and Haywood Gallery shows dedicated to interwar German art and society, were covered. Fashion shoots from 1978–79 reveal military uniform looks akin to those modeled at Billy's and early Blitz, with lines from Ventilo and Hechter offering clues to how PX and Oxfam-sourced variations might be repurposed for nights out.Footnote 65 Consummate stylistas—Jordan, Grace Jones, Amanda Lear, Antony Price—featured repeatedly, as did the filmmaker Derek Jarman and references to Andy Warhol, Duggie Fields, Quentin Crisp, Vivienne Westwood, and Malcolm McLaren. With their airbrushed illustrations of faces painted with futuristic cosmetics, 1979 covers of Mode Avantgarde signposted the color palette of the 1980s. VIZ's profile of Richard Sharah revealed the source of Steve Strange's elaborate makeup. Adverts flit from the glamorous to the futuristic, with shops such as Bastet (South Kensington) and Metropolis (Covent Garden) evoking Fritz Lang and presenting in ways that complemented the aesthetics performed in Blitz. In ZG, produced out of St Martin's by Rosetta Brooks, issues were dedicated to themes that “challenge our most deep-rooted orientations to the world whether in terms of art/culture, elite/popular, or male/female”: sadomasochism, image-culture, future dread, desire, heroes.Footnote 66 A first issue article on “Blitz Culture” wrote of street-level performance art, recognizing “the look” as less to do with achieving a perfect reproduction of a particular style or “cinematic stereotype,” and more a play of juxtaposition designed to distort and skew. “Posers,” Brooks suggested (citing the photographer Diane Arbus), revealed the flaws or “the gap” between “intention and effect.” By so doing, the styles presented at clubs such as Blitz might disturb and unsettle, thereby revealing more leftfield impulses behind the “constantly shifting and symbolic maze.”Footnote 67 Deviancy and hard drugs have often been written out of the prevailing new romantic narrative. But such darker fascinations, which circulated through these magazines, informed the spirit of Blitz and help contextualize, for example, the OD deaths in Warren Street squats and drug-induced problems that later befell Strange, Boy George, Marilyn, and others once the glitz turned shit.Footnote 68 The magazines that began to identify the culture of proto-new romanticism reveal how shared references, interests, aesthetics, and stimuli circulated and contributed to the bricolage that eventually cohered into a nameable subcultural style.Footnote 69
Two writers, in particular, offered pertinent insights into the becoming of new romanticism, grappling with cultural formations that bore trace influences and promised new possibilities. In late 1977, Stephen Lavers and Peter York combined to write “The German Connection” for Harpers & Queen. Here they argued that synthesizers and electronics—as pioneered by Kraftwerk (among other 1970s German groups), then adapted by David Bowie with Eno in Berlin, and applied by Giorgio Moroder to Donna Summer's pulsating “I Feel Love” (1977)—proffered a futuristic collision between punk and disco. “In a technological age, a formalized primitivism is an avant garde stance,” their article asserted. “The only logical counterpart to modern Ludditism is the cult of the machine. The only counterpart of intellectual primitivism is intellectual futurism. They are, of course, intimately linked.” In a time of no future, signaled both by socioeconomic strains and political dissensus, the “arts mafia” were looking to Futurism as an answer to punk's angry despair, York and Lavers argued: that is, seeking an escape from the “horrors of the present” but “accepting the modern world and trying to shape it.”Footnote 70 “We are the robots,” to quote Kraftwerk.Footnote 71
Lavers also wrote for Ritz, a paper started in 1976 by David Bailey and David Litchfield as a British equivalent to Andy Warhol's Interview. Attuned as he was to the political and aesthetic innovations of early punk, Lavers recognized Strange's and Egan's vision for Billy's and Blitz as being in line with his own preferred “direction for […] post-punk.”Footnote 72 “The elements of a successful youth culture,” he insisted in August 1979, were “an identifiable genre of music, a distinctive look and, if possible, a radical ideology or mode of behaviour.”Footnote 73 The music was there, via Egan's electronic soundtrack and Visage's first single release in late 1979.Footnote 74 The style was “in embryonic form,” developing from a straight Bowie or Bryan Ferry “clone approach” into “a synthesis of the PX “extraterrestrial uniform,” the [Kraftwerk] “extremist normality” look [shirt, tie], and a plain monochrome minimalism.” Cross-dressing, which Lavers suggested stemmed from Bowie's dragged-up performance for his recent “Boys Keep Swinging” video, was also now apparent. “All that is missing,” Lavers concluded, was the “attractive ideology,” though he predicted one would soon emerge.Footnote 75
York, meanwhile, continued to offer a more detached but equally intrigued analysis from the pages of Harpers & Queen. For York, the Blitz crowd was an extension of the “junior grade Them” he recognized in punk ca. 1976. “Them,” York explained, were people who constructed a look and a way of living that was neither socially acceptable nor sexually appealing. They dressed “to look interesting,” conflating art school tutelage with camp to forge a “strange sensibility” that allowed “ideas” to be put into everyday life. They were the “cognoscenti of trash” and the “aficionados of sleaze,” committing to novelty and being ahead of either fashions or trends. “Them” tended to present as apolitical, instinctively elitist, and concerned primarily with aesthetics. They appeared detached from material reality, living instead in self-made worlds that constructed or reassembled “versions of” a style, film, or photographic image. Circulating in the world of “Them” were Ferry, Bowie, Fields, Jarman, Zandra Rhodes, and Andrew Logan (whose “Alternative Miss World” was a touchstone). Their forebears and influences included Warhol, Crisp, Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy, and Vogue's Grace Coddington. The first punks—followed by the Blitz crowd—were to York both part of and a reaction to “Them.” They comprised a new bohemia “literate in the language of style” but generationally distinct from their forebears,Footnote 76 “Post-Modern,” even.Footnote 77
“Post-Modern,” at least for York, suggested an attitude resonant of the 1970s. It pertained to a performance or creation that was “stylish, ambivalent, ironic, eclectic, a touch retro, a bit classy (but that classiness [is] distinctly ironic; post-classless, you understand).” Fragmented, rejected, and revolutionary ideas were assimilated, transitioning from pastiche toward parody and then what York feared would become a meaningless “mush.” In other words, the past was looted and reworked until it lost all significance. An “uncomfortable transition” was in play, York fathomed, whereby “period references will be used without any self-consciousness.” Having absorbed images from TV and magazines, young people were “cross[ing] borders they no longer see.” Thus, Billy's and Blitz were “hopelessly Post-Modern,” combining “period idea[s] of the future” with repositioned signifiers of the past.Footnote 78
According to York, the question “what is postmodernism?” was doing the rounds among “Them” in 1979, the year in which Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition was published. Fredric Jameson and David Harvey had yet to formulate their critiques. The term itself was still in the process of entering the public discourse via books such as David Watkin's Morality and Architecture (1977), a title later borrowed and reversed by Blitz playlist regulars Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark for their third album (1981). York used the term vaguely, evoking a structure of feeling rather than a definite concept. Yet we can see here some grasping toward what Jameson would later recognize as a weakening historicity, a fascination with surface dimension, and the collapsing of reality into mediated images driven by new technologies.Footnote 79
Initially, then, postmodernism was the lens through which Blitz culture was interpreted, informing the thoughts of influential NME writers such as Paul Morley and Ian Penman as they began to consider “today's usage of yesterday's future visions.”Footnote 80 Style as self-creation was the principal motif, a theme Jon Savage also explored in his review of David Bowie's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) for The Face in 1980. Bowie was an “agent of transformation,” Savage argued. Not only did he liberate “a whole range of fantasies” hitherto repressed, fusing futurism and gender confusion with choice cultural references to fantastical lives and mediated moments (Isherwood's Berlin, Warhol's New York, William Burroughs, Jacques Brel), he also embodied the enticing possibilities of combining pop and style. Now in 1980, Savage continued, Strange was the “most recent, the most absurd, yet [also] the most magnificent exponent of the suburban pose which never dies.”Footnote 81
At the moment of its becoming, therefore, new romanticism was a mélange of recognizable reference points coalescing as an emergent culture ready to be codified in the context of a new decade with newly positioned politics and economics. That is, the crucibles of new romanticism—Soho and Covent Garden (between the closure of the market in 1974 and the later 1980s retail renovation)—were presented as seedy and desolate settings against which extravagant fashions brought startling effect. “Declinism” and social disrepair were reflected in references to Weimar Germany, a presiding motif of the 1970s present in Bowie's work, early punk, and across cultural and sociopolitical commentary more generally.Footnote 82 In response, Blitz enabled an escape into self-created “fantasy worlds,” finding space amid deindustrialized or dilapidated shops and clubs to forge alternative cultural forms.Footnote 83 Though punk was acknowledged as a stimulus, it also marked a moment to move beyond, locating proto-new romanticism in an amorphous “post-punk” diaspora of overlapping sounds and styles. As well as various youth cultural forebears—punk, mod, soul boys/girls, glam—wider influences were applied through “looks” codified in films, books, photography, and artworks that began to push further back in time. These, in turn, were swapped and discussed around shared houses, squats, and, notably, the Ralph West Hall of Residence that served London's art schools and provided a meeting place for many of Blitz's core clientele.Footnote 84 Multi-sexuality and blurred gender boundaries were integral to Blitz's aesthetic, which adopted camp and gay cultural signifiers to inform modes and sensibilities that infused pop culture through the 1970s. This was a testament to the impact of gay liberation evident also in Bowie's casual arm around Mick Ronson's shoulder on Top of the Pops in 1972.Footnote 85 The embrace of new technologies gave a sense of (post)modernity, ensuring references to the past came with a sheen and a color palette soon to be resonant of the early 1980s. “They are hinting at pre-and post-industrial attitudes,” Savage wrote in relation to Spandau Ballet's Culloden chic and Vivienne Westwood's recent designs that evoked eighteenth-century France. “What they are saying is, our society is obsolete, and unconsciously they hint at a new world.”Footnote 86
No future they say, but must it be that way?Footnote 87
Did the “attractive ideology” Lavers hoped for develop? To an extent, perhaps. Strange held fast to the line of self-transformation through style, a way of escaping from the tedium of everyday life.Footnote 88 Though drugs and ego soon took their toll, Strange and Visage continued to reimagine their image and construct “modern dance music” that later fed into the innovations of Detroit techno.Footnote 89 On one side of new romanticism, Green Gartside of Scritti Politti ditched Karl Marx for Jacques Derrida to concoct the means to explore pop's language and surfaces in ways that both revealed and expressed modes of desire. Aiming for the charts, singles such as “The ‘Sweetest Girl’?” (1981) and “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)” (1984) offered the most sophisticated take on the “knowing” aspiration that writers such as Paul Morley ascribed to the “new pop,” which he discerned across such diverse acts as Scritti, ABC, Adam and the Ants, Haircut 100, and Heaven 17.Footnote 90 Malcolm McLaren, having briefly advised Adam Ant on his pop-centric reconfiguration of historical sounds and styles, conceived Bow Wow Wow in 1980, a group built on a situationist-inspired agenda that celebrated unemployment as an antidote to work and extolled the virtues of home-taping and teenage sexuality under the slogan “sun, sea and piracy.” Akin to the new romantics’ looting of history, Bow Wow Wow came dressed in Westwood ensembles that drew inspiration from pirates and eighteenth-century French Incroyables. Boy George was briefly a member, revealing connections between the Blitz crowd and Vivienne Westwood's shop at 430 King's Road that extended back to Strange's working there as a shop assistant.Footnote 91 A spate of short-lived “moral panics” ensued, primarily as a result of the group's singer—Annabella Lwin—being recruited aged 13, before McLaren lost interest and the band broke up.Footnote 92
Spandau Ballet, meanwhile, came closest to producing what Sounds described as a “New Romantic manifesto.”Footnote 93 Alongside Robert Elms, the band's manager Steve Dagger and guitarist Gary Kemp cultivated a sense of expectation around the group, presenting them as “the most contemporary statement that London can offer in terms of fashion and ideas.”Footnote 94 This meant much purple prose from Elms, evoking images of “oblique romance, an age when machines have lost their mystique and beauty has returned.” Spandau Ballet's sound was described as “a soaring, gothic dance music that conjures up everything except rock ‘n’ roll,” a form of “White European Dance Music” that was modern, positive, and passionate.Footnote 95 For the sleevenotes to their debut album, Journeys To Glory (1981), cased in the classicist design of Blitz-friend Graham Smith, Elms imagined “angular glimpses of sharp youth cutting strident shapes through the curling grey of 3 a.m. […] immaculate rhythms […] music for heroes […] the rousing sound on the path towards journeys to glory.”Footnote 96
Contemporaneity was stated in a variety of ways (Figure 17). First, rock culture was rejected as boring spectacle: succor rather than subversion. Spandau Ballet, like Visage, made music for clubs, embracing new technologies (synths, video, luscious production) and elongated 12-inch dance mixes of their songs. In contrast to gigs, where people stood and watched a band, clubs allowed “kids” to become “stars in their own environment.”Footnote 97 To this end, Spandau Ballet initially played invite-only performances in unusual venues (Blitz, HMS Belfast, Scala cinema, Birmingham Botanical Gardens), their presence an “applause to the audience.”Footnote 98
Spandau Ballet in The Face, January 1981.
Second, the “cult with no name” was committed to fashion: style came first, with the music following as a “soundtrack to the look” (to quote Smash Hits’ Mark Ellen).Footnote 99 This, in turn, highlighted style and design as modes of communication beyond language and politics; it allowed for perpetual change and evolution. Paradoxically, it also tied new romantic styles and sensibilities to a youth cultural vanguard of working-class mods and “soul boy freaks.”Footnote 100 Unlike Strange, whose Visage stood for visual/image (vis), travel (visa), and modernity (age),Footnote 101 Elms and Spandau Ballet regularly placed themselves in a subcultural lineage of grassroots youth cults, constructing aristocracies of style that eschewed class hierarchies.
Third, pride and ambition were extolled as an antidote to the negativity of punk's no future. People were encouraged to “make the most of themselves rather than the least of themselves.”Footnote 102 Elms and Dagger went to the London School of Economics. Nevertheless, they and Kemp were keen to underline the working-class and non-art school credentials of Spandau Ballet. “[There] is a different working-class stereotype to your dustman, punk type,” Dagger said, “we threaten that.”Footnote 103 Thus, Kemp presented himself as the “anti” Jimmy Pursey, referencing the lead singer of Sham 69 as the epitome of lumpen punk rock.Footnote 104 Herein, too, came an apparent break from the 1970s, with correlations to Thatcherism being later registered in a shift of discourse. Youthful ingenuity and agency now found articulation as entrepreneurship; creativity became a business venture; autonomy signaled aspiration or self-centered individualism; internecine squabbles powered “healthy competition.”Footnote 105
Such schtick led to criticism. Most troublingly, references to classicism and “White European Dance Music” raised the specter of fascist flirtation, paving the way for positive reviews in National Front publications and censure from the left and the music press.Footnote 106 Alternatively, as youth unemployment rose and riots raged across Britain's inner cities over the summer of 1981, new romantics were seen as frivolous and detached: “let them eat smoked salmon,” Paul Morley quipped as he watched Duran Duran perform on the same night as Birmingham burned.Footnote 107 Homophobic asides were not uncommon, typically as a launchpad to belittling or mocking new romantic fashion. Musically, attention centered on the relative ordinariness of the records released, as if the product rarely met the promise (or stayed too close to their Bowie, Roxy, John Foxx, Kraftwerk precursors).Footnote 108 Come late 1981, therefore, Spandau Ballet and others associated with new romantism were being dismissed for their narcissism and elitism, presaging the aforementioned associations with Tory-esque aspiration. So, for Ian Penman writing in the NME's end-of-year round-up, “what had started as a jolting reassessment of the value of looking good” had since turned “formal and inflexible.” In attempting to mythologize their “Nightclub life” and conceptualize their borrowed styles, the new romantics were left looking as if they “lack[ed] the assurance of anything to call their own.”Footnote 109
The most astute analysis came from Jon Savage, who was quick to recognize how far new romanticism and new pop more generally were both a response to and a continuation of punk's cultural intervention. Each reacted to what punk had seemingly become, be it the “boy's club socialism” of earnest politicos, the cardboard cutout of yobbo caricature, or the post-punk experimentation that pertained to offer an alternative to mainstream pop.Footnote 110 In reply, the new romantics and new pop acts inverted punk's supposed motifs: “Glamour replaces grubbiness, naked elitism [replaces] inverse elitism,” escape replaces commitment, “dance [replaces] thought, gold [replaces] grey.”Footnote 111 Punk's techniques were thereby used not to “change the world, but to change their world.”Footnote 112 As such, both new romanticism and new pop learned from punk's critique of the music industry to ostensibly work through it toward creative expression, wealth, or recognition. This often shed the controversy and subversive intent associated with punk, but nevertheless took from the “lessons” outlined in McLaren's Sex Pistols’ film, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980).Footnote 113 The initial presentation of Spandau Ballet, for example, undoubtedly drew inspiration from the McLaren handbook. Finally, new romanticism—like Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant—continued the cut-up and assimilated stylings that defined punk's beginnings, now leaving the twentieth century to escape time and place altogether. Extending his analysis from the 1970s “Me Decade” described by the American cultural commentor Tom Wolfe, Savage felt “self is now turned into an Art Object, while relations with the outside world are carried out from within a self-constructed cocoon. Self finally retreats into a fantasy vacuum, with its micro-cassette, video tapes, and replacement of ‘nine-to-five’ by the micro-chip and, of course, the dole queue.”Footnote 114
Here, then, Savage further developed a “postmodern” reading of new romantic form and style. Akin to Peter York's prediction of “mush,” and following Penman's observation that new romantic “desires and designs” were rarely “harnessed to an innovative edge, but left to float heavily on the surface of things, like oil on water,” Savage traced new romanticism through an “age of plunder.”Footnote 115 Plunder, that is, “not merely [of] post-war fashion but the whole of history,” reassembled and recycled endlessly until style replaced meaning and all substance was lost to the empty gestures of “misapplied semiotics.”Footnote 116 As examples, he pointed to the John Flaxman lithographs used by Graham Smith to suggest Spandau Ballet's classicism and Chris Sullivan's Pablo Picasso pastiches for Blue Rondo á la Turk: record covers where historical artworks were used to “tart up product that has increasingly less meaning” once produced solely for aesthetic purposes and “cut loose” from the “subcultural beginning” that gave pertinence to Bowie, Roxy Music, and the Sex Pistols.Footnote 117
In effect, Savage adopted the situationist theories of Guy Debord to reveal culture as a commodity to be endlessly recycled. Crucially, however, he did so by locating pop's postmodern turn next to broader technological changes and shifts in media. He reasserted pop's perennial relationship with money and marketing.Footnote 118 He celebrated pop's implicit politics: its ability to resonate with the times; to sometimes transcend “mere entertainment”; to express aspects of youthful “consciousness”; to encourage agency and comment on “the relationship between the dominant (what we are told) and the subconscious (how we feel).”Footnote 119 But he recognized too the limits of “overt rebellion” within the context of the media spectacle and a music industry reasserting dominancy in the wake of punk.Footnote 120
Savage also considered pop music and style in relation to the range of new groups and “street styles” circulating by 1981. A confusion of pop modes reigned, he suggested, pointing to the surfeit of subcultural identities revived or reimagined in the form of ted, mod, skinhead, punk, rockabilly, and “Bowie” looks compiled in i-D but also sold “off-the-peg” via clothing ads at the back of the music press. New romanticism, with its constantly changing and reassembled looks, represented a tipping point—the opening of what Polhemus later described as a “supermarket of style.”Footnote 121 Pop culture was entering a period of “dissolution,” Savage predicted. What had once felt liberating in 1978–80, as style constructed new identities and challenged prescribed meanings, now felt meaningless as pop fragmented “into myriad markets.”Footnote 122
The facilitators of such change were found in the technological innovations transforming a media that expanded and diversified into the 1980s: cheaper production and advanced equipment, deregulation and globalization, video and MTV, color and gloss. “Just walk through Soho and figure out where the money is coming from,” Savage wrote later in 1985 as he pondered the increased coverage (and recycling) of pop music on television and in daily newspapers.Footnote 123 Across the interlocking interests of new media industries owned by a gaggle of multinationals, pop culture was key to servicing the multiple vistas of an ever-more vibrant leisure economy.Footnote 124
Finally, Savage considered new romanticism with regard to a period framed politically by the social conservatism and free market economics of Margaret Thatcher's government, wondering if youth cultural style served merely as a means to act out the power politics of a particular government or epoch: punk's proletarian chic under Labour, new romantic's aristocratic ostentation under the Tories.Footnote 125 This was less convincing. Indeed, Savage himself recognized such analogy to be more structural than actual. An extended analysis might therefore consider a Foucauldian reading of new romanticism, suggesting that the Blitz kids’ adopted styles and sensibilities displayed evolving cultural logics and discourses already in the process of reshaping identities and subjectivities into the late twentieth century. Certainly, Savage's assessments appear most astute when considered through a range of metanarratives mediating broader cultural change and crisscrossing though processes of deindustrialization, globalization, and ever-expanding media spectacle. If seen as an emergent culture, the semiotics, discourse, and performance of new romanticism suggest structures of feeling both resonating with and challenging prevailing sociocultural and political mores. A cultural variant of “popular individualism” perhaps, revealing how a growing postwar desire for autonomy and agency was performed and creatively imagined in ways that realized shared modes of understanding, experience, and sensibility?Footnote 126 In 1973, David Bowie declared: “Once upon a time, your father, my father, everybody's father I presume, wanted a good job, with a good income, or reasonable income [and] some chance of promotion to secure their family life […] and that's where it ended. But now people want a role in society, they want to feel they have a position, they want to be an individual. And I think there is a lot of searching to find the individual within ourselves.”Footnote 127 In a post-Bowie sanctioned context of spectacular self-reinvention, the urge toward greater autonomy and self-determination was thereby directed at expressing the extraordinary as well as the “ordinary.”Footnote 128
Savage himself now considers the new romantic period “fantastically important,” particularly with regard to gender fluidity and the evidently gay elements coming to the fore.Footnote 129 As a response to both the perceived grimness of the late-1970s/early-1980s and the negation of punk, extravagant style and the lure of the dance floor offered what the BBC's Newsnight recognized in early 1981 as a “positive reaction to a difficult world.”Footnote 130 As it was, new romantic attempts to avoid definition allowed commentators of the time to apply their own logic and interpretation. Once named, moreover, new romanticism proved set to diffuse into the 1980s, its pose too bold to ever quite fade to grey (Figure 18).
Blitz Kids. Photograph: Derek Ridgers.
Boys, now the times are changing, the going could get roughFootnote 131
Accounts of new romanticism and early 1980s pop tend always to look for the end or start of something: the break from punk; the advent of Thatcherism; the onset of club- or style-culture; the arrival of a new decade. Writing retrospectively in the mid-1990s, Peter York could only see the sounds, styles, and sensibilities of the Blitz kids as Thatcherite in all but name, a culture “driven by entrepreneurial zeal.” Blitz was, he maintained, akin to the Centre for Policy Studies founded in 1974 to break the supposed postwar “consensus” and develop ideas to reshape Conservative priorities through and beyond the 1980s: “two [elitist] clubs with a door policy.”Footnote 132 History was thereby edited, the lens refocused, and the script revised to fit the predominant cultural and political narrative of the period. “Were we Thatcher's children?,” Stephen Jones similarly asked much later: “In a way we were […] that entrepreneurial spirit was encouraged by her because it was somehow a fresh start.”Footnote 133 It's like the 1970s never happened (to paraphrase Dave Rimmer).
Yet, we could equally understand the new romantics as heralding the twilight of a particular political moment. Informed by various postwar youth cultures (mod, soul, glam, punk) and certain artistic and gay milieus, proto-new romantics occupied and repurposed spaces made available through longer processes of deindustrialization and socioeconomic change. They took over backroom clubs, bars, and disused warehouses; they found cheap accommodation in depopulating cities; they forged looks and styles out of cultural images circulating within an expanding but relatively concentrated media spectacle; they signified key aspects of the “popular individualism” redolent of the 1970s, asserting self-defined identities and perspectives that rejected social shibboleths and hierarchies. In constructing and reimagining their image and selves, new romantics embodied key aspects of the sociocultural liberalization apparent from at least the 1960s, most obviously with regard to gender and sexual fluidity. Before AIDS and the conservative push-back of the 1980s, the new romantics signaled a moment of sexual possibility, wherein genders and sexualities blurred or emerged bravely and defiantly to seek new modes of expression.Footnote 134 That all this was captured and accelerated by technological innovation was less the result of 1980s economic policy and more the product of new media processes developing over the preceding period, particularly with regard to digital electronics, video, synthesized sounds, printing techniques, and design practice.Footnote 135 What was captured, moreover, tended to relate far more to imagery and sensibilities evocative of the years preceding the 1980s. Initially, at least, new romantics suggested louche glamour not hard-nosed business; decadence not healthy efficiency; pop culture as an escape route rather than a career; street or haute couture not “designer” style; stylized or dystopian futurism not capitalist realism; modernist bricolage poised to collapse into a postmodern sea of signs. More to the point, much of what enabled new romanticism as an emergent culture would soon be challenged over the course of the 1980s.Footnote 136 Changes to education policy and funding saw university and art school provision realign; the drive toward urban regeneration cut off grassroots affordability and access to creative and habitable spaces; the media and music industries adapted to reassert the control tested by punk (reaffirming their London-centricity as a result); hip hop then house, techno, and rave delivered a very different “1980s” to that seemingly apparent at the start of the decade (albeit with synth-pop claiming some influence on the latter and various erstwhile futurists and new romantics continuing to DJ an array of dance music). New romantic ingenuity was funded and facilitated in large part by a welfare state that saw benefits and student grants slowly eroded or made more circumscribed from 1980. Many came from working-class backgrounds, finding space through creativity, and sometimes also education, to inform wider aspects of British culture from the “bottom-up” or margins.Footnote 137 If this particular “groundswell of entrepreneurism” started in the 1970s, as Dylan Jones admits, then it might therefore be said to have rescinded over the 1980s as Thatcherism took hold.Footnote 138
It is wrong, then, to suggest the Blitz club and new romanticism led seamlessly to a world of Groucho clubs and Soho brasseries.Footnote 139 Even in 1983, the blue-eyed soul of Spandau Ballet's “True” seemed some way from the disco-throb of their first single, “To Cut A Long Story Short” (1980), let alone the futuristic polysexual playgrounds of Billy's and Blitz. Better, perhaps, to recognize new romanticism neither as a “start” nor an “end” but as a moment of coalescence en route to dissipation. If, as Williams suggests, emergent cultures contain both “new” and “residual” elements, then the poses, sounds, and sensibilities of the Blitz kids and their equivalents across the UK necessarily bore traces of the past and portents of the future. Be it consciously or unconsciously, new romantics—and the wider new pop and style-based cultures of which they formed part—sought to establish new practices and relationships, reordering and repositioning elements from the past and present to reflect and embody structures of feeling both dissolving and emerging. These, in turn, would be shaped and channeled by ongoing processes of socioeconomic change, ensuring the recognizable signifiers of new romanticism were reframed and reinterpreted as priorities, language, and polity shifted.
Once determined, new romanticism disaggregated and dispersed through various cultural strands, permeating into clubs, fashion, pop music, dance music, film, photography, and design. In many ways, therefore, what became known as new romanticism ceased to exist as soon as it was named, the post-Blitz parade of clubs, sounds, and styles denying the culture a focal point. For a moment, however, spectacular selves were created and consciously (re)invented through an amalgam of visual culture and inspired consumption. Across the UK, worlds of possibility were envisaged and constructed by young people in liminal spaces soundtracked by a fusion of glam, punk, disco, and electronics. In living their dreamlife through their nightlife, (proto)new romantics sought to transcend the mundane and embrace the past, future, in extreme.
Matthew Worley is Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading. His books include No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–84 (2017) and Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines, 1976–88 (2024). Associated articles may be found in such journals as Contemporary British History, History Workshop, and Twentieth Century British History. He is a co-founder of the Subcultures Network. Very special thanks to Natalie Thomlinson for her insight and encouragement; and to Camilla Schofield for planting the seed of the idea. Thanks, also, to Russ Bestley, Jon Bell, Ben Bland, Shaun Cole, Katy Pettit, Steven Proctor, Derek Ridgers, Lucy Robinson, John Street, Ian Trowell, Mark Wardel, David Wilkinson, and Rosa Worley for their thoughts, comments, and expertise.
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