Blitz Kids

Boy George wearing Sue Clowes.

Being 22, my only knowledge of the early 80s New Romantic scene stems from late night adverts for compilation CDs and dodgy rural radio stations that I used to listen to during desperate, MP3 player-bereft moments in my car. One major thing I picked up from those TV adverts, however, is that the New Romantics were probably more linked to fashion than any other musical movement ever. The New Romantic scene was spawned from the Bowie nights thrown by Visage frontman Steve Strange and Rich Kids drummer Rusty Egan at Billy’s club in Soho. That night moved to the Blitz Club in Covent Garden, where shit really got popping and multiple bands got together. The one thing that really made the scene, apart from a newspaper headline calling the Blitz clubbers New Romantics, was that every single person dressed like a fucking lunatic, regardless of their band or sartorial choices, and they were all trying to move beyond the straight-jacket that a lot of people thought punk was becoming.

During the Blitz era, Dave Rimmer used to write for The Face and Smash Hits. He’s the author of New Romantics: The Look, a book detailing the scene, and Like Punk Never Happened, which is also relevant to the New Romantic scene and totally worth a read, so I spoke to him about how New Romantics never really existed.

VICE: So were people just trying to look like Bowie at the first few nights at Billy’s?
Dave Rimmer: Ha ha, I don’t know, I wasn’t at that night, I’m afraid. Punk had cut everything up, quite literally, as in cutting your jacket up and sticking it back together with safety pins, as well as in a metaphorical sense. Punk had torn up the rule book, essentially, and in the aftermath of punk no-one really knew what was going to happen. Those Billy’s nights that Steve and Rusty put on were a micro-scene and people used to come along and wear whatever, there wasn’t really a defined look. Bowie was as much of an influence as punk, but punk meant people felt like they could do whatever they wanted.

Yeah, it’s odd. On the surface, New Romanticism seems to be so radically different to punk—with the big lack of spit, chains, and leather, or whatever—but very similar in terms of ideas.
Yeah, you’re right. It was different but also very similar. On one hand, the New Romantic scene was formed out of quite a dressy nightclub look, because that 40s swing-era look had been very popular around that time, and on the other hand it took all the parts from the dressy side of punk. People forget that punk wasn’t as street as it made itself out to be, you know? A lot of punks were art school kids and fashion students.

A flyer for the “Bowie nights’” at Billy’s.

So how much of that look was carried over?
Not that much, actually, it was more the attitude. The other big influence was Bowie. Of course, Bowie had a big influence on punk as well, but the fact that he was constantly reinventing himself in terms of his look and persona was a massive influence on the New Romantics only, instead of reinventing themselves every album, they were reinventing themselves every week. In the beginning, in the classic phase between Billy’s and Blitz, it was about turning up and trying to outdo what they had worn the week before and trying to surprise everybody.

Yeah, I feel like there was never really one rigid New Romantic look, it spanned so many other sub-genres of looks, if you know what I mean? Were there any pieces of an outfit that were, like, the New Romantic thing to have?
I don’t know that there were, you know? I mean, it never really became a mass movement, it was always kind of a club thing. There came a point in about 1982 when the fashion industry was trying to create a marketable, high-street New Romantic look based on, like, frilly shirts and the sort of classic Adam Ant pirate thing, but that never really took off. I suppose it’s always going to be a lot harder to sell a frilly pirate shirt than a pair of Levi’s jeans.

Guests at Blitz, by Derek Ridgers.

Ha ha, true. So, there was no way you could classify a New Romantic, then? 
No, not really. The other thing is that nobody would ever call themselves a New Romantic. Not just that, but nobody even knew what to call it. Were they Blitz kids? Were they Bowie kids? Were they futurists? As soon as anyone was called a New Romantic in the press, they’d instantly do an interview to deny that they were New Romantic. As soon as frilly shirts were identified as being a part of the New Romantic kit, bands immediately stopped wearing them, you know? So that definitely had an effect on the style and fashion being a little stifled—there couldn’t be a “New Romantic look” because everyone would just reject it as soon as it became popular. The only settled element of the scene that you can point to now is the very unsettled nature of it all.

Pirate Adam Ant worked for Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren, didn’t he? 
Well, yeah, one of the shops that definitely influenced us was Vivienne’s, which is the thing that Adam Ant picked up on. He wasn’t really a part of the London New Romantic scene whatsoever but he was definitely tapping into that same historical look to the masses, I guess. Bits of that echoed into street fashion, but your average kid in Newcastle was never going to wander around dressed like an 18th Century fop, you know? It just wasn’t gonna happen. So, that look never really appeared out of high-clubbing-wear or the sort of thing you’d see on Top Of The Pops.

What about the other bands? Were they embraced by other designers trying to pick up on the New Romantic thing?
There were various designers associated with different bands, yeah. Spandau Ballet were the group that were associated most clearly with the New Romantic scene because they were all Blitz regulars and the photographer Graham Smith and writer Robert Elms were part of their particular clique. Oh, and when Culture Club first appeared, their clothes were made by a woman called Sue Clowes, but with a lot of input from George.

It sounds a bit like they all had personal tailors, effectively?
Adam was wearing Vivienne’s clothes, for sure. He was copying Vivienne or maybe Vivienne was copying him, but I don’t think it was all that simple, really. Nor was it as simple as them all having individual fashion designers that made clothes for them. I mean, everybody was creating their own look, but when it came to being on stage, people like George needed a bit of help because he needed to dress a band as well as himself.

Guests at Blitz, by Derek Ridgers.

And they created that look from all sorts of things that they were into personally, right?
Yeah, completely. The influence wasn’t just fashion, as such, it was also the tradition of individual eccentrics, going back to Quentin Crisp, the 40s dandy wandering around London with his hair dyed red and his fingernails painted, long before David Bowie or anyone else like that appeared. Then, in 1975 there was a documentary about Crisp on the BBC called The Naked Civil Servant, and I think that had a big influence on everybody—the fact that someone was being that flamboyant and challenging everything way back in 1945. People like George and Philip Salon were as much influenced by him as they were by particular fashion designers, or whatever.

So it was as much about creating a persona of eccentricity as looking good?
A lot of it was about finding a look that had some kind of resonance and reminded you a bit of whoever you wanted to remind people of, you know? In the late 70s and early 80s that was the main impetus and not just for the New Romantics. If you look at the whole ska thing, which started around the same time, it was a kind of mix and match of what skins and mods had been with references to all sorts of other stuff thrown in. Everybody was trying to combine the past in new and exciting ways.

More Blitz revellers, by Derek Ridgers.

Were there any club icons who were particularly good at creating their own thing?
I mean, there were, but icon might be the wrong word for them because icons are influential and these people had no influence because everybody else would purposefully not copy them, so whatever look they had that week would never become a trend, you know? But yeah, George was always pretty outrageous. It was hard for people not to take notice of what he was wearing, mainly because he’d probably spent the better part of a week trying to put it together. The promoter Philip Salon was very influential as well in terms of character, as a pioneering, devil-may-care eccentric. I mean, he used to go out dressed in the most ridiculous things—like he made a coat out of Maltesers wrappers one time—that kind of lunacy. But yeah, there weren’t really icons, as such, more like every person in the club trying very hard to become famous in their own right.

How do you mean?
Well, in previous eras it had been like, “get your shit together, become a pop star, and you might find yourself in the papers”. But the New Romantics turned that round and basically started the whole “let’s get ourselves in the papers and see if we can build some kind of lasting career and fame out of that” thing and it actually worked for George. The day after “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” was on Top Of The Pops, George was an instant scandal. Every Daily Mail correspondent was writing, “What the fuck was that on the TV last night?” George looked like an alien at that first performance. He’s a huge guy, George, and for him to look so girly was extraordinary. I grew up with David Bowie and we all dyed our hair red and wore make-up to school and stuff like that, but that was nowhere near as extreme as what Boy George did.

Right on, Dave.