There was a time in England of dissatisfaction, deepening in the 1980s, when night culture became a disgust, an offensive weapon, a playful gesture of protest against Margaret Thatcher’s heavy hand. The birth of clubbing as we know it today takes place in those days when punk nihilism gave way to a much more flashy and colorful subversion. Ashes of glam, reaction to the American disco movement, and David Bowie’s Futurism laid the groundwork for a small London club, The Blitz, intended to serve as a nighttime haven for students against the norm of Dadaism and the art and fashion academies of the working class who raided their mothers’ boudoir. It lasted barely 18 months, between 1979 and 1980, but it marked kilometer zero for a philosophy of life that continues to this day, with these fluid gender beings clad in clothes rescued from who knows what closet and the night populate.
This is commemorated in the documentary Blitzed!, available on Netflix, with testimonials from some of its most important living protagonists, from singer Boy George to Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp, to acclaimed Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton. There they threw out their teeth at Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders), Adam Ant, Billy Idol, Siobhan Fahey (Bananarama), Sade or John Galliano.
Before Steve Strange conquered technopop with Visage, he was guarding the doors of London’s Soho club The Blitz. His biggest publicity coup: not letting Mick Jagger pass by because he didn’t live up to the look. Photograph: Photo: Mike Lloyd/Mirrorpix/Getty Images
And above all the very mannered Steve Strange, who should become number one in half of Europe with the song Fade to gray by Visage. Along with who would eventually become the group’s drummer, the extremely heterosexual Rusty Egan, he raided a bistro in the run-down district of Covent Garden, where they were emulating the atmosphere of decadent clubs in Germany in the 1930s.
In front of New York’s Studio 54, which was all about sex, cocaine and celebrity; The Blitz flaunted androgyny, amphetamines and an underground vocation. While in the booth Egan invented new dance forms from Bowie, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk; Strange guarded the door. Her mantra when someone couldn’t cope with the look: “Come home, try your best.” he gladly announced. The day Mick Jagger was about to step in, seduced by the new subculture’s siren chants, he blurted out, “I’m sorry, you’re not dressed smart enough.” It was a huge publicity stunt. Steve was great at stuff like that,” recalls Boy George in the documentary about his late friend, with whom he spent his nights fighting for the limelight.
Boy George (right) with two of his “partners in crime” in the early days of the “New Romantic” movement: Marilyn (his boyfriend at the time, who was also to have a short musical career) and the DJ and promoter, still the nocturnal Princess Julia .
In the Culture Club past tense, George worked in a fashion store (Boy, to be more precise) and was a known kleptomaniac who took an extra steal from the pockets of The Blitz wardrobe where he worked. Today’s costume designer, Michele Clapton, recalls it as something extremely competitive: “It wasn’t worth saying, ‘I’m not trying hard today,’ because you knew later you’d be at the expense of someone else’s hotness of your looks. As much as you didn’t have any money, you had to sharpen your creativity”.
Boy George shared a squat on Warren Street with Stephen Jones. As a student at St Martins, Jones found his role as the mad hatter who would end up crowning the Queen of England himself. “If it occurred to you in school to propose anything related to street culture, you would earn a zero. Logically, the opposite happened: we rebelled against academia and took to the streets,” he tells us. And he summarizes the ritual like this: “The nights began two days before. You’ve planned your look, you’ve kicked off the Oxfam used clothing stores, you’ve reinvented clothing on the fly, you’ve frantically rummaged through your closet. After dressing up for no less than two hours, you boarded the subway and hoped you didn’t get beat up along the way. Back at the club, we mercilessly judged each other’s outfits, trying to figure out what the hell we were trying to say. You asked for the cheapest drink, you tried to hold it as long as possible and you didn’t let go in case you got it. And from there it was all about posing for hours and dancing like robots. Although the real action took place in the bathrooms. Sex, drugs, drama… The trend press explosion was based on riding that wave,” he summarizes with a laugh.
Possibly the decline of The Blitz began with the visit of the hero who inspired him: Bowie stood there one night looking for protagonists for his Ashes to Ashes video clip and copied their gothic Pierrot look. The media came. The movement was christened: Blitz Kids, new dandies, the nameless cult… Richard James Burgess, Spandau Ballet’s first producer, gave them the title: the new romantics. The legendary band were the first to perform at The Blitz. His guitarist Gary Kemp remembers him: “Nobody wanted to see a band play, they just wanted to watch; They were ordinary kids who wanted to be the most important thing in the room. But we knew that every youth movement in pop culture has always had its representative band. And even though it sounds presumptuous, we said to ourselves: This is our chance.” There was Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records. He signed them that same evening. Within six months, the Spandau Ballet performed at Top of the Pops with their Space Buccaneer pints.
The fashion industry has jumped on the bandwagon. TopShop copies the new romantic essence in its collections. The alternate scene ceased to exist. Gary Kemp remembers: “Suddenly these clothes were everywhere. Lady Di wore ruffled collared tops and baggy trousers: the same thing those maniacs wore to the opening of The Blitz has now been worn by the royal family. It’s part of your success and part of your failure; because it ceases to be special and loses its mystique, but on the other hand this is what we were looking for to transcend”.
Stephen Jones credits “the collision between fashion and the rise of video clips” for the worldwide spread (and decline) of the phenomenon. It was in Do you really want to hurt me by Culture Club that Jean Paul Gaultier first saw the hatter, topped with an exquisite Turkish fez. He immediately called him and has since made him one of his most important collaborators. Just like Vivienne Westwood, Thierry Mugler or Claude Montana. Another St. Martins superstar and Blitz Baths figurehead, John Galliano, asked Jones to join him on the quest to raise the bar on extravagance when he was signed by Dior in 1996. But that’s another story far from the underground.