I’ll just admit right here at the top that this is a blog post on a book that is, shall we say, “in progress.” Hey, I’m on page 81! I just have been so terrible at updating this blog, I thought I could jumpstart my writing by commenting on something that is really fresh in my mind. So fresh, I’m still reading it!
I’m no Joe Jackson aficionado, though I liked a lot of his songs they played on KROQ back in the day. I haven’t closely followed his career, so I know very little about what he is doing currently and I know nothing about his personal life. I have, however, been thinking a lot about him in relationship to the New Wave masculinity project I’ve been (embarrassingly slow in) working on. As the project currently stands, I have Jackson and Elvis Costello grouped into the same category: Dorks Who Want Revenge. I’m not sure about that category title but I do think it characterizes a lot of Costello’s early work and though Jackson isn’t “dorky” in the same way Costello is, his early work does include an examination of masculinity that is particularly biting. They both wrote songs that featured narrators who wanted revenge: on the girls who rejected them, on the world that confused them, on themselves for being so uncertain about who and what they are.
In a paper I delivered at the last Popular Culture Association Conference, I included some thoughts on Jackson because I’d titled my paper “I’m The Man,” not thinking that profoundly about what a weird song about capitalism it actually was (“I’m the man who sold you the hula hoop!” is a truly odd and wonderful lyrical refrain). Jackson’s album I’m the Man was released in 1979 and contains several meditations on manhood including the titular song and “It’s Different for Girls.” Jackson has a marked preoccupation with investigating definitions of masculinity which go beyond reflections of heteronormative romance or a patriarchal need for control. Jackson’s “It’s Different for Girls”, is, for example, an epic instance of mansplaining captured in song. In the lyrics, a man urges a woman to rethink her desire to have a one night stand with him. She’s down for it but Jackson’s man is there to remind her that he was always told that “it’s different for girls.” She couldn’t possibly want just sex because he knows better! Women want to be in love! The woman, in turn, laments throughout the song “who said anything about love?” while the man continues to argue that sex should mean something because “it’s different for girls,” ably turning a rock cliché on its head.
Jackson’s men are, like Costello’s, often losers in the war of the sexes and also like Costello, Jackson uses a wry intellect to skewer his masculine subjects. In The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records, Jackson’s songs are described as “tough and wiry … mixed with an edgy sensibility with a self-deprecating wit that put[s] him in a class apart from his serious, serious peers” (149). Jackson frequently uses a “regular bloke” persona to create ironic portraits of modern masculinity in a state of flux. In “I’m the Man,” Jackson embodies the persona of a hustler and inventor who has graced the world with fads like the hula hoop, the skateboard, and kung fu (it’s truly a wild song). A vision of capitalism in human form, Jackson’s “man” is locked in a cycle of invention and failure; a cycle that nonetheless successfully separates the masses from their money, and perhaps also reflects how capitalism separates men from more complex and sensitive forms of masculine identity. In “I’m the Man,” Jackson’s man is framed as someone to mock and pity, a man for whom masculinity is a performance deployed to part a sucker from his money. Like any variety of disguises, dressing as a man is no more powerful than any other choice. Jackson drains traditional masculinity of its importance leaving behind an empty suit, neither useful nor fashionable.
One of the things I didn’t
know about Jackson before I started reading his autobiography is that he
identifies as bisexual. This revelation has added an interesting layer to my
thoughts about his work, particularly in a song like “Is She Really Going Out
With Him.” Suddenly, the song takes on extra depth when imagining Jackson alternately
longing for the “she” or the “him” in the title. A song which directly engages
with Jackson’s sexual identity is “Real Men,” the lead single from 1982’s Night
and Day (which also contained the hit “Steppin’ Out”). Notably, in this
song, the narrator queries his listener: what is a man?
Take your mind back, I don’t know when
Sometime when it always seemed
To be just us and them
Girls that wore pink
And boys that wore blue
Boys that always grew up better men
Than me and you
What’s a man now, what’s a man mean
Is he rough or is he rugged
Is he cultural and clean
Now it’s all change, it’s got to change more
Cause we think it’s getting better
But nobody’s really sure
The song is a ballad, sung as a mournful recounting of a lost traditional masculinity and a confusion about what a modern man might be. As the song goes on, however, Jackson twists this expected narrative of “sad man longs for the past when men were men” as his song turns to a contemplation of gay men, correcting those who call them “f*gg*t” (unless you’re a “friend,” implying Jackson has insider knowledge of how the word could be deployed within the gay community), and finally ends with a reminder to men that women are surpassing them:
Time to get scared, time to change plan
Don’t know how to treat a lady
Don’t know how to be a man
Time to admit, what you call defeat
Cause there’s women running past you now
And you just drag your feet
Though Jackson evinces an understanding for those men contemplating what it means to be a man now, he doesn’t feel sorry for them. He asks them instead to step up and move forward into modernity with women. His early work is filled with observations about a world that is just about to turn feral (just look at the lyrics for “Look Sharp”: “Big shot, thanks a lot, gotta go, it’s getting late/ I got a date with my tailor now, thanks for putting me so straight/ Tell me how they rob me blind on every street/ But check your watch and wallet now before I go and you’re too late”) and attack those of us who live in it.
His autobiography, A Cure For Gravity, was written in 1999, 15 or so years after these early cynical songs were written. Jackson narrates his life story with a wry but kind and generous eye for his past. As with most of the postpunk/New Wave autobiographies I’ve read, Jackson reflects on his working class background and how it contributed to his desire to play music. Just as his career has been punctuated by peripatetic experimentation in everything from jazz to classical music, so too was the young Jackson interested in a range of sounds. He states, “It wasn’t that I didn’t know, at seventeen, that my tastes were broader than those of my peers. I just didn’t care. After all, my musical heroes were eclectic, and I think I grasped the essential fact that in being so, they were being true to themselves” (72). It seems clear that Jackson has remained true to himself as he followed his eclectic interests throughout the albums he’s released over the years. I’m eager to read about his adventures as I progress through this book.
Some Fantastic Place: My Life In and Out of Squeeze
Chris Difford
Squeeze in 1980
One of the tropes of music writing I dislike the most is the “the first time I heard this band” story. I equally hate the “collection of moments from my life that are tied to a band’s songs” thing. These techniques are used as a way to prove not only how meaningful the band is to the writer but also how good the band is in general. If the writer felt something, then the reader understands that the band is worthy of contemplation and adoration. I get why it’s popular. Listening to music is a personal, subjective experience and falling in love with a band is a heady experience and it feels good to share it. I’ve avoided talking too much about my personal likes and dislikes on this blog as much as possible because I have just gotten tired of reading those stories on other blog posts, in books, and magazine articles. But here I am ready to betray all of my principles by posting a personal recollection about a band!
Our family vacations were always interesting because my parents liked to go places we could drive to (there were a few trips – England, Scotland, and Wales, Jamaica, Hawaii – which needed a plane ride) from our Southern California home. My parents were interested in the Southwest primarily for the history, Native American culture and art, and the scenery (my dad was a very gifted amateur photographer — see the glamorous family vacation shot below. We look like Ansel Adams went on the trip with us!). We went to investigate the most obvious of the Southwest – the Grand Canyon – but also explored sites like First, Second, and Third Mesa among many other places.
My mom and I enjoy the Grand Canyon
These trips required a lot of time in the car either driving or waiting for my dad to finish photographing something alongside the road. Once the radio stations started to give out in the more rural areas, I got to play DJ. Before we left home, I carefully selected the cassette tapes that would be played throughout the trip, looking to old favorites and new obsessions to clear away the boredom of highways that took us through miles of desert landscape. My command station was the backseat where within two plastic, pastel colored cassette boxes (one mint green, the other light pink) , I would carefully consider which cassette should brighten up a half hour or so. For more than one summer, I handed the cassette of Squeeze’s Singles: 45s and Under up to my mom to pop into the car’s cassette player. I was obsessed with Squeeze after hearing some of their songs on the local alternative station, KROQ and seeing them on Saturday Night Live (November 20, 1982). When I hear one of their famous songs like “Pulling Mussels From the Shell,” “Goodbye Girl”, or “Up the Junction”, I automatically begin to play the next song on 45s and Under in my head. Even though I eventually bought all of the Squeeze albums and I’ve heard all of those singles in the context of their respective albums, I still think of them tumbling one after the other; one fabulous single at a time.
My next major Squeeze memory is Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook (along with Keith Wilkinson, Jools Holland, and Gilson Lavis) appearing on that VH1 show Bands Reunited from 2003. I’d followed them a bit through their makeups and breakups but in pre-and-early Internet days, you had to work a little harder to keep up with music gossip unless the story was really spectacular and made Rolling Stone or Spin. But here Squeeze was right on VH1 and I settled in to watch my old favorites play together again.
I was shocked to see how much tension there was between them. Glenn makes a quip in the clip about how fans thought Glenn and Chris were like The Waltons as if they snuggled up next to each other, sweetly bidding one another goodnight. The reality was much different. Though they didn’t reunite on the show, Difford and Tilbrook are back together as Squeeze, releasing albums and touring frequently.
Chris Difford’s autobiography, Some Fantastic Place: My Life In and Out of Squeeze, was released in 2017, though my edition is from 2018 and includes a “new final chapter” in which Difford reflects on the publication of the book and his current relationship with Glenn and Squeeze. As the main lyricist for Squeeze, Difford’s writing skill is obvious and he brings his facility for word play coupled earnest emotion and wry observations in his autobiography. Difford’s book is nice. He’s nice. He’s nice about his relationship with Glenn (and largely takes the blame for the breakdown of friendship and communication between them), he’s nice about his childhood (which was so nice!), and he’s nice about other bands even when criticizing them. He’s fairly relentless, though, in condemning himself for his alcoholism and in taking stock of what it was like for friends, family, and band members to be dealing with him while he drank. He’s funny, charming, and seems both humble and aware of his songwriting talents.
Difford covers the requisite “getting the band together” story but fills it in with lots of sweet details about his friendship with Glenn. Like a lot of bands forming in the 70s, they were caught between wanting to be like Bowie or more folky, hippie bands and trying for something new. Punk became the driving force of change, though not in the “Sex Pistols were amazing!” kind of way. Difford recalls:
Suddenly, in 1977, punk happened […] but I never really liked the music. I was always looking for the lyric and I felt there was no depth to it; it was just kids trying to get a record deal. The music sounded like it was falling down the stairs. […] It was until Dot, my flatmate, played me the first Clash album that I heard a punk record that I loved. It had a depth and energy to it that was totally lacking from stuff like Sex Pistols. (77-78)
Difford wasn’t interested in writing about politics, he was rather hoping to capture simple human moments that had “depth and energy” like The Clash but which were more, well, fun. He and Tilbrook began writing songs together but eventually settled into a pattern in which he would give Tilbrook lyrics and Tilbrook would come up with the music. As their relationship disintegrated, this process would take place via the mail with each sending their part back to the other! It says something about their creative chemistry that good songs were still made in this rather remote working relationship.
I was skimming through The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records (published in 1983) to see what they had to say about Squeeze, and unlike so much press coverage of the band, Trouser Press was not impressed by the duo of Difford and Tilbrook. Squeeze’s entry in this encyclopedia of new wave music begins:
Squeeze’s songwriting team of Glenn Tilbrook (melody) and Chris Difford (lyrics) has been compared favorably to Lennon and McCartney that’s not only a reflection on their abilities but also an indication of how little real craftsmanship can be found in rock’n’roll these days. Like their supposed models, Tilbrook and Difford are blessed with enormous talent, which has enabled them to get by on less-than-full expense of effort. What has often passed for ingenuity in Squeeze has in fact been little more than glibness. When the competition’s weak, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference” (300).
The entry goes on to say that “Black Coffee in Bed” is one of Difford and Tilbrook’s “worst ever” efforts. Oof. Difford records his memory of “Black Coffee in Bed” (from the album Sweets From a Stranger) in his book. He notes that the song was originally:
too long but did get some plays on the radio after a brutal edit. Record companies were in the habit of playing with your art without you knowing about it. We first heard the new version of the song when a promo cassette arrived through the post. It was hilarious and very, very wrong. We were livid. Elvis [Costello] and Paul Young dropped in to sing on ‘Black Coffee in Bed’, and that was the highlight of the recording for me. […] It was a friendly afternoon filled with back-slapping banter, but I felt like I had fallen from the lyrical challenges of the previous album and had delivered some lazy writing. I was not on my game and had gone backwards into a safe but untidy mind. (127)
Difford is often hard on himself about his songwriting. What fans would deem classic songs filled with clever lyrics (I always love “I want to be good/is that not enough? from “Another Nail in My Heart” as if the desire to be good is the same as actually being good), though Chris cites that as a slight song that benefited from Tilbrook’s catchy, hook-filled music), Difford often calls a disappointment. The above memory, then, gives you a good sense of the book in whole. Elvis Costello pops up a lot! Difford is self-deprecating. And fans get a nice glimpse inside the writing and recording of favorite songs. Difford also writes about his celebrity encounters (the stuff about Bryan Ferry is WILD!), his love life, and his work with the band The Strypes (who broke up in 2018) among other topics. If you’re a fan of Squeeze, I highly recommend the book.
Not only do I love Squeeze, but I also read Difford’s book with an eye toward using it for my current project on new wave masculinities. I’m presenting a paper at a conference in the spring on the topic which I would also like to turn it into a larger endeavor. This blog is a way of keeping track of everything I’m reading and thinking about in terms of post punk music in general and New Wave and New Romanticism specifically. I’ve been gathering ideas about different categories of New Wave men – the avenging nerd, the pretty boy, the gender bender, etc. – and I believe the men of Squeeze fit into the first category. Squeeze always leaned heavily on humor in their videos and their songs are frequently written from the point of a view a smart but damaged man.
Difford reflects on the band’s image in his book, saying:
MTV was the thing to be on and we were on it all the time, along with Sting and Dire Straits, Duran Duran and the other all-male bands that wore make-up. On the screen we had none of the seriousness of some of our contemporaries – thankfully. Our childish take on life served us well and kept us apart from the pouting pencil-thin band that filled the MTV screens across the world with their well-tailored collars sticking up. (147)
Squeeze certainly wasn’t polished like Duran Duran and their lyrics reveal a world that is far less rarefied and abstract than the ones Simon Le Bon conjured up. Squeeze and Duran Duran also represent two ends of the New Wave spectrum with Squeeze more closely associated with punk and Duran Duran with pop. (See Like Punk Never Happenedfor an overview of New Pop in the 1980s). In his book Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s, Theo Cateforis clarifies that:
To the major labels, punk appeared to be virtually unmarketable. In its stead, the music industry embraced new wave groups like the Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and Squeeze, all of whom shared punk’s energy but tempered its vitriol with more accessible and novel songwriting sprinkled with liberal doses of humor, irreverence, and irony. Like their punk rock forebears, new wave musicians openly rejected the tired clichés of rock star abundance and bloated stadium extravaganzas that had come to dominate the 1970s. (10)
Difford concurs with this assessment when he reflected on the band’s first visit to America:
We became a ‘new wave’ band when we went to America, along with Blondie, Elvis Costello, The Stranglers and other great bands that had both the attitude and the musicality that punk lacked. We were comfortable with that tag. […] We were riding that new-wave wave and getting credibility on the back of it too. But Squeeze were always a pop band in my eyes. (90-91)
So is Squeeze a new wave band? A pop band? For my purposes, I’m selfishly keeping them in the new wave category. Cateforis remarks that this confusion is common:
As new wave has increasingly become equated with the nostalgically aged technological modernity of 1980s synthpop, new wave’s deeper roots in the late 1970s have become obscured. Groups and artists like the Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Squeeze, and the Knack—all of whom essentially launched new wave in the United States—are much more likely to turn up on a classic rock playlist than they are to show up listed as an influence on some new wave revivalist’s MySpace page. As we find new wave increasingly collapsed, for the sake of convenience, into a mélange of synthesizers, MTV videos, and overarching 1980s nostalgia, the earlier new wavers have drifted backward into a closer association with 1970s punk. (220-221)
This is ironic given Difford’s nearly wholesale rejection of punk in the book. His dismissal of the Sex Pistols is the first I’ve found in the autobiographical reading I’ve been doing. That fits Difford, though. In his own quiet, unassuming way he has bucked the system one song at a time.
On that note, I’ll leave you with Squeeze’s latest!
Take It Like a Man: The Autobiography of Boy George (1995)
Boy George with Spencer Bright
In the 1980s, one of the most common descriptors applied to Boy George was “gender bending”. It was a phrase meant to encapsulate a look that many found to be shocking at the time. His name was “Boy George” yet he looked like a girl! What I found while reading his autobiography, however, was that “gender bending” was not the intention behind his hair, makeup, and fashion choices. He wasn’t trying to look “like a girl” but was rather just trying to be pretty. Prettiness wasn’t something Boy George thought belonged exclusively to women and he liked the way he looked with makeup on better than he did without it. Thirty years later, we understand that gender doesn’t exist in a binary and a whole new set of terminology has developed in order to accommodate individual experiences along the gender spectrum.
We know that makeup and beauty aren’t exclusive to cisgendered women but this was a more radical idea in the 80s (I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read in the last year that mention the use of “guyliner”). As Brian Peters argues in his article, “Androgyny, Masculinities and the Re-Gendered Aesthetics of the New Wave: Duran Duran and the Second British Invasion”, eyeliner and other “feminine” fashion choices were originally seen as the purview of British bands in the Second British Invasion of the 1980s. He compares their fashion to that of the disco era: “The new man of the early 1980s [was] a far cry from his hairy-chested and moustached disco-other: a new dandy […]. Further, the first wave of British new wave bands embodied a desire to respond to the immediate past, as the various bands revealed a new agency that accompanied representation/signification, gender, desire and the aesthetics that epitomized the early 1980s” (298). There is an important distinction between the “new dandy” fashion of Duran Duran, however, and the “agency” Boy George asserted through his aesthetic fashioning beyond the gender binary.
Culture Club in Sue Clowes’ designs. The use of the Star of David as well as fabrics and patterns from other countries and cultures became a part of how Boy George played with categories of identity
Before he was in Culture Club, Boy George (and others like Marilyn and Pete Burns) used gender as one aspect of the self that could be manipulated as a fashion choice, seeing it as a way to outdo others in the same club scene. How far could one obscure one’s identity behind a veil of make up? Among the folds of kimono or beneath a Boadicea helmet? When do I stop being me and start being a character, or have I been some version of a character all along?
Marilyn winks while Boy George sports his Boadicea helmet
Boy George emphasizes throughout his autobiography that he was constantly changing his look; he always viewed his physical identity as mutable and he changed his fashion according to mood or what was inspiring him in the moment. It started — as has the fashion choices of nearly every postpunk man I’ve written about — with Bowie. A sampling of Boy George’s musings on his relationship to Bowie:
I put Mum’s makeup on, blue and green eye shadow, salmon lippy, and I pranced about signing into a hairbrush, “Metal Guru is it you. Yeh, yeh, yeh,” Mum had the minimum of makeup, she never really used it. It was there just in case someone decided to get married. I was only eleven but I wanted to dress like Marc Bolan and David Bowie (29).
Bowie was like an alien. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen. The crowd were screaming, “David, David, over here, me, me, I love you.” I was screaming too. Everyone was singing. I knew all the words, “Suffragette City,” “Jean Genie,” “Life on Mars,” “Five Years.”
I walked home singing into an empty Coke can. No concert I have seen since has had the same effect. (31)
I jumped on the bus to Beckenham. That was where Bowie lived, at Haddon Hall. I spent the day standing outside with the rest of the fans. Angie Bowie opened the window and told us to “fuck off.” I was really happy. […] I got home about nine. Richard [George’s older brother] and Mum went mad. They couldn’t understand the pleasure of hanging around outside someone’s house. I didn’t get to see Bowie. That wasn’t important. I met other people like me. I felt like I was part of something. (32)
Discussing David Bowie’s visit to the Blitz to find extras for the “Ashes to Ashes” video:
I badly wanted to meet Bowie but it just wasn’t the right moment. It was odd being so close after all the years of trying. I wondered if Bowie liked people sucking up to him. A week later he came to Hell. I said hello, and he told me I looked like Klaus Nomi, the freaky operatic singer from New York. I was insulted. I was an original. I decided Bowie was better as a concept than a reality, an ordinary bloke with crooked teeth and a funny eye who happened to change my life. […] It was true that Bowie swept into the Blitz scene and soaked up all the ideas, but he was the reason that most of us were dressing up in the first place (141)
The Blitz scene was also aided by, as I discussed in my post on Steve Strange‘s autobiography, a general malaise that had set in among many of the London punks. For some, like George, once the public had a name to call all of those “weird” kids like the Sex Pistols cursing on the TV, punk was over. He explains: “The Sex Pistols appeared on late-night TV and then on Thames Today effing and blinding at Bill Grundy. Suddenly the whole thing exploded. Before that people smiled at us benignly, thinking we were going to fancy-dress parties. Their tolerance soon turned to intolerance. Now we had a name. We were spitting, snarling punk rockers” (70). For George and his friends, punk was initially about the music and the energy of the scene as well as the possibility of upsetting the general public. Punk showed George the possibility of fashion experimentation but it wasn’t a subculture to which he felt a particular kinship as time passed. His experience of being a punk was became one of being targeted by angry teds who beat punks up for wearing draped jackets and brothel creepers, clothing that was once the exclusive domain of the teds. Adam Ant and Billy Idol also have stories of being beaten up by teds after punk shows where teds were lying in wait outside the venues. As Boy George clarifies, “The rivalry between punks and teds attracted idiots spoiling for a fight. The Kings Road was divided. Teds on one side, punks on the other, police in the middle” (71). When violence spilled out into the streets and was coupled with the knowledge that punk had now gone mainstream, it was time for George to get out.
Punk had become a parody of itself, an anti-Establishment uniform, attracting hordes of dickheads who wanted to gob, punch, and stamp on flowers. I got beer thrown on me at punk gigs and called a poser because I wore makeup and frills. It was sad because I loved the energy and music of punk. In the beginning it was screaming at us to reject conformity but it had become a joke, right down to the £80 Anarchy T-shirts on sale at Seditionaries.
Punk was safe, we were spinning forward in a whirl of eyeliner and ruffles. Getting a reaction was the ultimate goal. (118)
Boy George as a punk
Though George was drawn into punk in order to explore his interest in disruption via personal fashion choices, he didn’t ascribe to all of their ideology: “Punks wanted to destroy the past, they jeered at nostalgia and called Elvis a fat pig. I loved Elvis, he was the world’s most beautiful rock and roll hero” (71). In considering his soon-to-come transition into the New Romantic scene, this rejection of the punks’ hatred for the past is important. The New Romantics, as I’ve written about before, rummaged through the past for sartorial inspiration and in doing so, broke free from the class bifurcations that besieged England in the 70s and 80s. By donning historical clothing that the working class would not have worn in the era in which it originated, the primarily working class New Romantics overcame the flimsiness of class divisions and exposed them as artificial and problematic.
Reflecting the New Romantic interest in the past, George described the scene as eclectic and competitive:
Like sheep we rushed to gigs to check out the next big thing, bands like Spandau Ballet, Blue Rondo a la Turk, Funkapolitan. They hired out boats and discussed cinemas to turn their gigs into happenings.
The fashions were nostalgic and theatrical: showgirls, Dior girls, top hats and tails, kilts and cassocks. […] Everyone had their own idea where fashion was going. Spandau Ballet were sporting a romantic Highlands look designed by Simon Withers. Blue Rondo a la Turk were decked out like Latin gangsters with zoot suits and goatee beards. The real stars of the scene took notes but always added their own touch (147-148).
Other bands like Hayzee Fantayzee and the JoBoxers also used the fashions of the past to make a statement about the future. This experimentation with looks as well as the dissimilarity of the bands which sprung from the scene caused the New Romantic movement to founder. Once Boy George was “discovered” by Malcolm McLaren, who was looking for a singer for Bow Wow Wow before deciding Annbella Lwin was a better fit, he was off on his own adventure. Culture Club would not have happened without the New Romantics but the band quickly joined the ranks of New Pop as detailed in Dave Rimmer’s book, Like Punk Never Happened.
I recently read an article about the newly relaunched version of Queer Eye called “The Queer Art of Failing Better” by Laurie Penny which ends with this amazing sentence: “Give a man a makeover and you fix him for a day; teach a man that masculinity under late capitalism is a toxic pyramid scheme that is slowly killing him just like it’s killing the world, and you might just fix a sucking hole in the future”. The article uses Jack Halberstam’s book The Queer Art of Failing as a device through which to read Queer Eye’s makeover focus as a vehicle in which straight men are gently told that it is okay to be a failure.
The queer art of failure, as Jack Halberstam writes in his book of the same name, “turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable.” Halberstam imagines queerness itself as an alternative to the punishing model of success imposed by the straight world. Instead of striving relentlessly for the brutal, homogenous perfection, the queer art of failure “quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art.
I’m drawn to the idea of imagining “other goals for life, for love, for art”. This question of failure or losing has been hovering at the edges of my thoughts as I’ve been contemplating what distinguishes postpunk from other genres of music. More specifically, given my interest in the New Romantics, I have been contemplating how they altered themselves in order to say something about the culture they lived in. This thought came to me after reading an article on queer pop music in the 1980s. In this article {“‘Luring Disco Dollies to a Life of Vice’: Queer Pop Music’s Moment” by Lucas Hilderbrand), the author offers the following thoughts on the New Romantics:
A short-lived postglam new wave movement called the new romantics featured mostly straight men dragging it up in heavy eyeliner, pale foundation, and tribal- retro clothing. Even in the gay press, however, they were not taken particularly seriously. Although Adam and the Ants would be the leading figures of the new romantics movement, the band would soon be outdone in popularity and androgyny by Boy George of Culture Club and Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, as well as outsexed by Soft Cell. The new romantics would fade just as synthpop exploded. (426-427)
I take issue with a number of points made here (tribal-retro?!?) but I do agree with Hilderbrand about the New Romantic movement being a failure. This is a common argument about the New Romantics given that there was no real organizing feature embedded in the movements. Everyone dressed crazy but in different ways. Lots of people were in bands but they were all doing something different. There was nothing other than outrageousness and a general dislike for the uptight, conservative rich to unite everyone together.
Take It Like a Man, is equally about success and failure, as was George’s career beyond the book.[1] As with many rock autobiographies, George’s story is one of redemption after a battle with drugs. The book jacket emphasizes that he was on an “unfinished journey” and in 1995, he truly was. Though clean at the time the book was written, George continued to struggle with drugs until 2009 or so. As Ake Oksanen explains in the article, “To Hell and Back: Excessive Drug Use, Addiction, and the Process of Recovery in Mainstream Rock Autobiographies”:
Drug-orientated rock bands and artists often start their autobiographies with drug-related statements; for example, Steven Tyler, the singer of Aerosmith begins Walk This Way (2003, 1) saying: “Hey, man, you wanna know how I got sober after twenty-five years—gacked to the nines?” After the introduction story, the books usually describe: (1) childhood, (2) youth and struggle for fame, (3) commercial breakthrough, (4) problems caused by fame and constant touring, and (5) recovery or survival. In the autobiographies, the artist has to hit rock bottom or a crisis point before survival begins. This is often the important middle part of their story. This nadir is when concepts such as “addiction” or “alcoholism” come into play. (149)
This format is common in celebrity autobiographies even if they do not deal with addiction. The celebrity must confront a waning career or comes to the realization that there is something “more” they want from their lives. The loss of fame or the desire for something fulfilling beyond it allows the celebrity to heal from the damaging effects of Hollywood or the music industry. Excess – whether in the form of sex, drugs, or money – proves to be the road to ruin and it must be healed through a reckoning with the “true” self.
Oksanen notes that rock autobiographies discuss recovery in a set number of ways, though the most popular mode was the “cycle narrative”. In this narrative, the narrator is caught in loop between addiction and recovery: “The identity of the narrator is so much tied to the role of the rebellious decadent rock star that it is almost impossible to let go. The journey […] becomes a labyrinthine circle. The self is portrayed as being lost or confused. It is an identity that has never been truly free of addiction” (152). The evocation of the labyrinth resonates with me in thinking about Boy George’s autobiography not because of a return to addiction but because of the complicated identity he presented to the world. In George’s labyrinth, he isn’t “lost or confused” but his identity is one that cannot be truly free from the addictive qualities of gossip, bon mots, and an assertion that there is a real self beneath the inventively decorated exterior. Though he does bounce back and forth between addiction and sobriety, this labyrinth is also indicative of the variety of things he found himself addicted to and unable to shake free from: whether from his tumultuous affair with Jon Moss, his love/hate friendship with Marilyn (nee Peter Robinson), or his burgeoning belief in Eastern religions.
The labyrinth of the self also returns me to the idea of failure (and to capitalism but that’s a topic for another post!), though I am not suggesting that Boy George was in anyway a failure. It was his willingness to risk failing that positioned him to be the gender/identity disrupter that he became … and remains!
[1] Boy George’s second autobiography, Straight, was published in 2007. It covers his life after the end of the first book but is arranged in thematic chapters rather than following a strictly chronological timeline.
Blitzed! The Autobiography of Steve Strange (2002)
Steve Strange
(Or Notes on New Romantic/New Wave Masculinity)
For all the talk about Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran as New Romantic bands, it’s really Steve Strange who was the first New Romantic. Spandau might’ve supplied the soundtrack to the scene, but Steve Strange provide the venue: the Blitz. The Blitz was essential not just as a place for the New Romantics to gather but it was also a state of mind. Strange and business partner/club DJ Rusty Egan created an oasis where artists in various genres and levels of development were able to express themselves and their world view through their fashion and through the music to which they liked to dance. Strange’s clubs were staging grounds for self-discovery and artistic development and the Blitz was also vital to the revitalization of dance club culture in England in the late 70s and early 1980s. Disco obviously made people want to gather together and boogie, but the Blitz represented a true “club culture” in that its reach of influence extended beyond the dance floor. It was a place to dance, be seen, and to draw inspiration. For the New Romantics, dancing in a club replaced or bettered seeing a live band. In a club, the dancers were the show and the music existed to support their performance. Gary Kemp even argued that Spandau Ballet was “a mirror to [their] audience. An applause, if you like” (I Know This Much, 122).
New Romantic makeup was way beyond guyliner. Strange set the bar for experimentation high!
Strange was also the singer for the band Visage whose song, “Fade to Grey” is a cornerstone of the New Romantic sound. Midge Ure and Billy Currie of Ultravox, Rusty Egan, and John McGeoch, Dave Formula, and Barry Adamson of Magazine rounded out Visage’s early lineup. Strange’s extreme fashion and makeup inspired many of the other New Romantics who went to the Blitz. Strange had style, panache, and, well, balls. Not only did he not let Mick Jagger into the Blitz one night, he regularly excluded the “little people” by turning a hand mirror to them and saying, “Would you let yourself in?” (51). He was a creative, funny man who never quite got enough credit for helping so many people launch their careers. He died far too young in 2015.
I thought I would approach this post differently than the others I’ve written so far. My goal for this summer was to write a journal article that back in June I thought might be about Adam Ant. Or Liberace. Or both? Maybe something about celebrity autobiographies since last summer I wrote a chapter on gay celebrity autobiography for a book about gay autobiography edited by a former colleague. It took awhile for all of those kinda-related-but-not-really ideas to percolate and turn into a drinkable brew, but I do think I have some idea of what I want to do now. In order to pursue more solid thoughts about the whole thing – and to give me more to work from when it comes to researching – I’m going to use this post on Strange’s autobiography to track/record what I’ve already identified as recurring themes and to maybe discover a few more.
What’s the big idea? I would like to write about New Romantics/New Wave masculinity: how do men who participated in a certain genre(s) of music in the early 1980s write about themselves as men? How do they talk about their identity and what is different about it for them and for us, the readers? What can we learn from looking at musicians who participated in creating culture at a certain period of time and in a particular place? The other issue I need to wrestle with is how a musician’s autobiography might be different from celebrities in other fields.
Musical inspirations (Bowie, Roxy Music, Sex Pistols):
Bowie was the gateway drug for both punks and the New Romantics who followed them. Every single man I’ve read about: Marc Almond, Pete Burns, Adam Ant, Boy George, Gary Kemp, Tony Hadley, Andy Taylor, John Taylor, and Billy Idol were all obsessed with Bowie.
“I liked Marc Bolan and Bryan Ferry, but Bowie was the best. By the summer of 1973 he was at his commercial peak, having already topped the album charts with Aladdin Sane earlier in the year. I had his posters all over my wall. He seemed to be perfect. He had a great look and made great music. I admired the way he was able to reinvent himself with a new look for each album” (17).
And the inevitable slide from Bowie into punk:
“It was places like this [clothing stores in London] that I first saw the punk thing happening long before the press picked up on it. People like Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol would be hanging around and I’d see how they were being creative and not just wearing clothes they had bought in the high street chain stores […] Back in Wales I started putting my own outfits together, wearing plastic bin bags and ripping up clothes and safety pinning them back together. I dyed my hair jet black and made it stand up in spikes. Word soon got around about my appearance. The Western Mail ran an article with the headline ‘Hey punks, meet the chain gang’ and said I was the first punk in Wales. There was a photo of me in my black plastic jumpsuit with my eyes heavily made up, my nose pierced and three chains from my nose to my left ear. The feature talked about this outrageous new cult and quoted me as saying that the only thing that worried my mum ‘is the neighbours’” (25-26).
Strange saw the Sex Pistols at the Stowaway Club in Newport, Wales in September, 1976.
“The Sex Pistols had the biggest effect on me. I saw those four lads and thought that anyone could get up onstage and be in a band. Seeing them made me decide I wanted to have another go at being in a band. They were saying ‘we can’t play’ and neither could I, but now it didn’t matter” (27).
There’s also a great story about Strange’s first gay sexual experience being with Jean-Jacques Burnel, the bassist of The Stranglers. They hooked up after a Stranglers show. Strange took Burnel back to his mom’s house! That’s not part of the autobiographical study or anything, it’s just good gossip!
In returning to Bowie, Strange and a few other New Romantics were featured in Bowie’s video for “Ashes to Ashes” after Bowie took in the scene at the Blitz one night, was impressed with what he saw, and asked Strange to turn up with some friends the next day to make a video. Strange, Judith Franklin, Darla Jane Gilroy all dressed “as gothic ecclesiastical priests, in black and white, topped off with beads and crucifixes” (52) and walked along the beach with Bowie followed by a bulldozer.
In these examples, Strange reflects what many post-punk/new wave/New Romantic men articulate in their autobiographies. Bowie sets the example for outrageous fashion as an outward expression an internally complex (non-traditional male) self. Additionally, fashion and music become twinned and equitable modes of exploration, and finally, the Sex Pistols give the writer courage to explore fashion’s furthest reaches and/or to start a band.
This reliance on fashion is an important clue to new wave masculinity. It isn’t all that different from Mods or Teds or any other British teen subculture, but there is one essential difference: an expressed desire to be a new kind of man, one not bound by society’s definitions of traditional masculinity. This desire to be something other than a traditional man was explored via punk but through New Romanticism, it become san embrace of more feminine clothing and makeup. Punks weren’t traditionally masculine but they were tough and toughness doesn’t necessarily transfer over into post-punk sensibilities.
Experimentation/invention of self
Strange has a pretty amazing tale of leaving Wales to live with various punk luminaries he met after shows. He was friendly with Glen Matlock and lived in a squat with Billy Idol. He was also in a punk band called the Moors Murderers with Chrissie Hynde, though the band dissolved before they could actually record anything. Punk, however, stopped being interesting for Strange.
Strange, Billy Idol, and Perry Lister
“I’d go to a Siouxsie and the Banshees gig in a Vivienne Westwood outfit, and the bottom of bill would be a skinhead band or a band like UK Subs. It got so the stage where in your blood you thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here or I’m gonna get my head kicked in.’ Punk, which was supposed to bring people together was now dividing them again. An overtone of violence was in the air when these band were on the bill. All the original rebellious force of punk, and creating your own style, was gone. The Daily Mirror was telling you how to rip your clothes and pretend you had a pierced nose. Unbeknown to me at the time, I was getting bored with the scene and I was getting read to move on” (37).
Strange attributes his inspiration to move on to the violence that permeated the scene which leeched the fun from it, while also acknowledging the queer culture that provided another impetus to exit punk. Without queer participants (like Strange himself), New Romanticism wouldn’t have happened, and the straight, cis male members of the scene would’ve most likely not have had the courage to push boundaries as far as they did.
“I was disillusioned by punk and felt it would be nice to be in a band or even kick-start something myself. I had already met some of the colourful characters that felt the same way. I was walking across Piccadilly Circus one day when I heard a camp voice shout out, ‘Look at her in her Vivienne Westwood suit. Where are you going?’ It was Philip Sallon, who had been a bit of a face on the London scene for years. He was with Boy George, then just plain George O’Dowd […] After a while, and a few drinks, George and I got talking and we both agreed that we were bored with punk and wished something else would happen” (38).
Boy George writes a great deal about Sallon in his autobiography. What a fascinating man! He was a Quentin Crisp for the punk set. Unabashedly out and unafraid of public reaction to his bizarre outfits, Sallon stalked the edges of the New Romantic scene, providing inspiration, starting fights, and just generally being a diva. This queer connection is important because it also extends backward to punk with Club Louise, the lesbian club that allowed punks to hang out and drink when most other pubs and clubs were ejecting them. Sexual identity, then, plays a role not only for New Romantics like Strange and Boy George but also in the creation of marginalized albeit safe spaces in which outsiders of various stripes can gather. Sexual identity also connects to the non-gay musicians in this “study” (keeping the quotation marks around that so it doesn’t seem too pretentious!) who regularly were beaten up and taunted with homophobic slurs because of their fashion and makeup.
Strange and Boy George at the Blitz
Obviously, Bowie is also a queer connection. In his autobiography, Gary Kemp reflects on his first Bowie sighting while watching Top of the Pops at a friend’s house: “A Mephistophelean messenger for the Space Age, expounding a manifesto that was almost spiritual in its meaninglessness, he spoke his words through a grinning confidence that had me signing up to whatever he was selling for the rest of my life. Pointing his long fingers down the barrel of the lens he sang: ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you,’ and I felt that he had. And oh, but oh, when that guitar solo clawed and choked its way out of the Gold Top Les Paul, brandished like a musical laser gun, the Starman Bowie threw his arm around his golden-suited buddy and I wanted to go to that planet” (53-54). Kemp’s memory of a moment of camaraderie between Bowie and Ronson is also charged with the same sexual frisson the two exuded in the performance.
Strange’s desire for something else to happen after punk manifested in club culture. Strange met Rusty Egan (who was in the Rich Kids with Glen Matlock) and the two discussed how tired of punk they were. They shared an interest in European music like Kraftwerk and Nina Hagen and a desire to bring something akin to Studio 54 to the London club scene (43). Though Strange differs from the other new wave men I’ve read about in that he was less motivated by music and more into the scene that surround the music, all of the men were at some point convinced that their particular interest in music was a way to express a mode of being that was no longer fulfilled through punk.
“We were young and had balls to do anything, so we looked for a venue where we could set up our own club. We were very shrewd. We went to Billy’s, a club at 69 Dean Street, on a Tuesday, and saw that it was empty […] The people hanging out there were mostly Soho’s sex workers, grabbing a breather. Two weeks later we went back to the owner and said we could pack the club […] We printed up flyers with the tantalizing line, ‘Fame Fame Jump Aboard the Night Train/Fame, Fame, Fame. What’s Your Name?’ We opened in Autumn 1978 and very quickly we were successful. All the punks who were closet Davie Bowie fans turned up. Soon it was a regular event known as Bowie Night” (43).
Strange and Visage outside of the Blitz
“The people who turned up were a bit of a mish-mash, but what they all had in common was that they were fed up with punk, and had a love of David Bowie. Rusty, who DJ’d tried not to play much punk music, so there was a lot of Bowie on the turntables, along with futuristic German music, “Being Boiled” by The Human League, “Warm Leatherette” by The Normal, the theme from Stingray and torch songs from Marlene Dietrich” (44-45).
This mash up of past and present in the music the club kids listened to also reflected in the clothing they wore. Strange and others wore a mix of styles and time periods which reflected a futurism that gazed backward to the past for inspiration and guidance. In opposition to punk’s torn and tattered fashion, the New Romantics put on more: more fabric, more makeup, more hairspray. Their mix of eras and their disregard for class barriers (all of those working class kids wearing the clothes of their historical “betters”!) allowed the New Romantics to protest class barriers like the punks did, but simply in a more beautiful way.
New Romantic fashion as a reaction against punk’s masculinity/non-acceptance of gayness
The New Romantics weren’t always called the New Romantics. Betty Page (nee Beverly Glick) writing for Sounds magazine was the one, it seems, to give the scene this name. In her interview with Gary Kemp – Spandau Ballet’s first interview in September, 1980 – Kemp discussed the political importance of fashion for the working class. Taking this information and combining it with her observations of the clothes many in the scene were wearing, Page wrote the headline for her article: “The New Romantics – a manifesto for the Eighties”.
“There was drinking all the time. We never needed much of an excuse for a party. It was ironic that England was about to sink into an economic recession, but then they say you party the hardest when the ship is sinking” (49).
“Everything was going well at the Blitz. [Boy] George and I were being seen at parties, and a day later it would be in the gossip column as the national newspapers tried to give a name to the movement. The Face and i-D had started and they were reporting on the scene as well, dubbing it the Cult With No Name, the Blitz Kids and the Now Crowd. Pick up the Evening Standard, and there was my stark, white face, scarlet lipstick, jet black, spiky hair 12 inches high, steamed and crimped with steel steamers, staring out at you” (49).
I think of this inability to find a name to accurately call the scene a way in which Strange and the others queered their subculture. Countering class and economic troubles with fashion was the New Romantics way of asserting an alternative identity that transcended labels whether they were personal, political, or sexual. The men and women tended to look alike as makeup and hairstyles were so extreme they quickly destroyed gendered distinctions. The new masculinity of post-punk was androgynous and men sought to be unusual, beautiful, and distinct without concern for appearing “manly” in a conventional sense.
“The more coverage our clubs got, the more the media tried to pin a label on us. But we changed so fast it was impossible. Every week the clothes would be different, as people constantly tried to outdo each other. One week I’d turn up in a bishop’s outfit, the next week I’d be working on the door dressed as an adult version of Little Lord Fauntleroy.
Somehow though the term New Romantic seemed to stick and I could really argue with it. Without trying, or even knowing what we were doing at first, Rusty and I had kick-started a whole new movement, the first original subculture to come out of England since punk” (62).
Strange by the fireside
What fascinated me the most about the New Romantics is how short, strange, and hard-to-define the movement was. Because “every week the clothes would be different”, it was impossible for the New Romantics to establish a singular identity around which a more stable subculture would really exist. As James Truman mused in a 1981 article in The Face, the New Romantics confused everyone: “The real event of the season hasn’t been the music, the clothes or the attitudes; it’s been the way in which the media has steamed ahead in search of the right context, the real significance. There’s been Blitz as right wing conspiracy, Blitz as the final step in rock’s evolution and plenty of stuff too clever to understand”.
Those ruffles, however, did really take over the 80s.
Recovery
For Strange, recovery from an addiction to pills and heroin is coupled with his sexuality as his mother was only able to accept his being gay once she attended counseling sessions when he was in treatment (177-178).
Love
There is no romantic partnership as there is in the concluding chapters of most gay autobiographies. Strange, though, does highlight a peaceful resolution to a previously tumultuous relationship: his friendship with Boy George. The end of Strange’s autobiography describes Boy George reaching out to him to ask for permission to use Visage’s song “Fade to Grey” in the musical Taboo. Strange describes meeting Drew Jaymson who plays Strange in the musical as being a surreal encounter with himself.
“I couldn’t really imagine anyone impersonating me, but when I met Drew I could immediately see what George was getting at. I can just picture him, standing outside the real-life Billy’s in his – or rather my – French Revolutionary garb, silver-topped cane in hand, behind the gold rope, vetting the potential clientele […] Drew wanted to capture my personality but also capture the bitchiness of the era, when it was all about being seen wearing the right designer labels and drinking the right champagne. Here I was in 2002 telling myself how to be me 20 years after it all began” (187).
This doubling of self is a fascinating way to end an autobiography. I will have to deal with this more effectively at another point in time, but I do think it points to a construction of a remembered self that reflects on the autobiographical process. Meeting the man who playing him onstage causes Strange to remember himself in the present tense (telling himself how to be himself) which says something about memory but perhaps also about the nature of subcultures.
Death of parent
Strange was very close to his mother but like many of the other men I’ve read about, had a strained relationship with his father. Even KROQ DJ Richard Blade writes about the death of his father in his book. There are obvious observations to make about the connection between masculine identity and one’s father but I’ll leave that for another post.
Respectability – appealing to teen girls as being a mark against them
This wasn’t an issue for Visage because they weren’t a typical “heartthrob” band, but Strange does say that the New Romantic scene as a whole didn’t receive respect from the NME or Melody Maker (49) because it was perceived to be too insular.
Conclusions
I have a number of points to explore and others to knit together into a more cohesive view of this subculture. Strange’s book as really helped me to think about the issues present when exploring a subculture in general. As opposed to someone like Adam Ant who disavowed his connection the scene, Strange places himself at the center of it. He takes the fashion aspect of it seriously, queers aspects of the scene, and gives something other than just a musician’s point of view. Now I need to kick myself out of research phase and really get to writing!
I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau (2009)
Gary Kemp
After seeing the documentary on Spandau Ballet, Soul Boys of the Western World, I was struck by a wave of Spandau obsession. I’d always been a Duranie, though Spandau’s presence was inescapable, of course, as “True” was a huge hit at the same time Duran Duran fever had a hold on me. What Soul Boys of the Western World did for me, though, is to show me the depth and artistry of Spandau’s career that went far beyond “True”. I was really struck by the emphasis on their working class origins and their participation in the New Romantic movement inspired me to look more deeply into a subculture that many don’t know even existed.
Spandau Ballet during their first trip to NYC, 1981
If you are a fan of Spandau, are English, or frequent British based music sites, you might be aware that after reuniting in 2009, Spandau went through a tumultuous period that resulted in Tony Hadley leaving the band (before the reunion, the band had last played together in 1990 and were only to meet in a courtroom in a battle over residuals by the end of that decade). Spandau now has a new singer and recently played a couple of sold out shows in London. The response from hardcore Spandau fans has been … mixed. Some have readily accepted Ross William Wild as the new singer, or are at least willing to give him a chance. Some have declared that the band is nothing without Tony’s voice. Some blame guitarist/songwriter Gary Kemp for destroying the band. Some think Tony let Spandau and the fans down. I lurk in several Spandau fan groups on Facebook and the arguments continue as to who is at fault and if the band is renewed or doomed. Hardcore fans are very, very upset about the whole thing.
In his autobiography, Kemp reflects on what began to go wrong within a band that had been formed through genuine friendships and artistic desire:
Where did the end start? Certainly it would have gone unnoticed in 1986, so much good stuff was happening. We were famously ‘five mates’, ‘the Angel Boys’, closer than any other band, drinking pals on a permanent world bender and having the time of our lives. But at some time, something must have started imperceptibly to alter things, a mutation of a single cell, unnoticed at first, but with our fate contained within it. Where can I find the first fissure, the first footfall of the trouble that was to arrive? (243)
Kemp sees the beginning of the end as accepting the starring role – along with his brother Martin – in the 1990 movie, The Krays. In truth, though, his autobiography as a whole is an examination of the many little cuts that led to the death of the band.
Death is the organizing force of the book as Kemp begins his story as a ghost looking back at his own life and ends with the death of his parents. In between there is the death of class divisions, of the band’s names and musical genres, of Spandau Ballet itself, and in the court case which finally severs Kemp’s songwriting from the rest of the band, of friendships that had lasted 20 years. It is a book largely about loss, though it isn’t joyless or without humor. Kemp is, however, interested in dissecting/illustrating the ins and outs of band life but also the role his own attitudes played in the decisions Spandau Ballet made along the way.
Kemp repeatedly returns to class and the role it played in his life and career. He prides himself on coming from a working class family but recognizes the complications of continuing to identify as working class when one becomes a successful musician. Before success in Spandau, however, Kemp and the others who made up the band – brother and bassist Martin Kemp, saxophonist and percussionist Steve Norman, singer Tony Hadley, and drummer John Keeble – would all use their working class backgrounds to their advantage in the emerging club scene in London in the late 70s and early 80s.
Kemp’s discussion of the Blitz club, fashion, working class politics and identity was my favorite part of the book. Unlike Hadley who seemed a bit embarrassed and bemused about his fashion from the time, Kemp embraces it, really seeing it as a political statement as much as an artistic one. He also discusses the scene which lead to the New Romantic moniker with great detail:
Blitz was a wine bar in Great Queen Street decorated with thirties memorabilia. It suited our theme of dancing while Rome burned. [Steve] Strange wore his hair and heels high, and tottered at the door with a silver-topped cane, while hundreds, desperate to burn brightly in these dark times, block the street outside. (93)
Kemp goes on to name Stephen Jones, Stephen Linard, Melissa Caplan, Fiona Dealey, Sade, John Galliano, Boy George, Princess Julia, Jeremy Healy, Marilyn, Rusty Egan, and Mige Ure among many others as Blitz regulars who all went on to find fame in fashion, film, and music. The New Romantic scene relied heavily on the creativity of young people who wanted to look incredible but had no funds to make it happen. The Kemp brothers were fortunate to have a mother who was willing to make her hot-on-the-club-scene sons a couple of zoot suits, while the others found would they could at Oxfam or stores with lax security measures. This working class ingenuity resulted in a glorious mix of fashion from a huge range of time periods and styles. These inventive fashions allowed the kids wearing them to transcend time and place, but most importantly they transcended class as well. Kemp and others like him became fantastical peacocks, indeterminate of gender, class strata, and any other social or cultural markers. They were inspired by punk but were most interested in surpassing it in terms of social disruption. What better way to stealthily bomb the mainstream than to infiltrate them with style and pop music? Kemp and his band of gorgeous outsiders were determined to become the soundtrack to this movement.
An example of Spandau’s adventurous fashion in the early days of the band
Spandau didn’t immediately infiltrate the Top 40. Kemp traces the many permutations of sound and style of the band but the book is most concentrated on Spandau’s glory years which naturally reflect the excesses of top-earning rock stars. Kemp thoughtfully unravels the complex tapestry that is class and money when he discusses the band first making big money. Moving into his own place, he muses:
It was more than a physical move away from home. Those aspirational yearnings that I’d been nurturing […] all those years before were now fully fledged and allowed free flight. But as I placed art and books on the wall, church candles and interior magazines on the black enameled coffee table, I felt a strong sense of denying everything my family was. I sat on my William Morris chair – designed by the esteemed architect Philip Webb, I hasten to add – and, with a glass of claret in my hand and something light and choral on the stereo, I realised I’d become middle class […] My desire for higher things left me appearing like a snob. Or maybe I just was. Waves of pride and shame would alternately crash against me, especially when Martin and I parked our matching Porsches side by side outside our parents’ home in a street full of rusting Fords. Were the locals proud of their prodigal sons or were we rubbing salt (Malvern, of course) into the wounds of a beleaguered working-class neighbourhood? Money left me a mass of neurotic contradictions, and, as much as I wanted a more cultured lifestyle and aspired to the other side of the Essex Road, I was still riven with guilt about it and the fear that I might be deserting my roots. (178-179)
Although class issues have come up a lot in the books I’ve read so far, Kemp writes about his conflicted feelings in a touching and profound way. As an American, I don’t relate to class in the same way as the English do (or at least English musicians do). Though the American press is quick to latch onto success stories that include a performer coming up from a humble background, there isn’t as much emphasis on the loss of culture and self once that class status has changed. Most American celebrities, including musicians, don’t speak a great deal about the meaning class has had in their lives, unless it is a discussion of “authenticity” as it pertains to a performance of toughness or street credibility. But class is an issue for English musicians (and a continuing one at that – for example, check out this article in Pop Matters) and Kemp writes about it in what seems to me an honest and complicated way.
Class intersects with band’s stylization of itself, too, as Spandau left behind the more experimental clothing of their past to embrace a more traditional “pop star” look including Anthony Price suits just like Duran Duran wore. They pursued hits and reflected a sense of success in their upscale looks as well as in their slickly produced singles, their most famous of which, “True”, made them seem like romantic softies instead of the arty upstarts they were originally. The movement from their earlier songs like “To Cut A Long Story Short” to the more polished sounds of “I’ll Fly For You” felt to the band like they were moving into more serious (and radio friendly) territory, but the press was more concentrated on who the band played to and how they looked while doing it:
During our fall from grace with Diamond the common judgement from the serious rock press was that we were fashion-obsessed dandies who couldn’t play and that we’d had our run on the fickle train of youth culture and been swiftly forced to alight. There was a certain amount of glee and told-you-so in their statements. Now they saw our new, successful, smiling version as irrefutable evidence that we were interested only in financial rewards and not musical credibility. (188)
Not being thought of as serious musicians is a recurring theme in the autobiographies of 80s pop stars I’ve read so far. Though each musician/singer embraced their teen appeal with degrees of bemusement, they all also felt the hard graft they’d put into their musicianship or songwriting was being overlooked. This idea of respectability is something I want to delve into in the journal article I am planning on writing on what I’m (tentatively) calling “New Wave masculinity”. What hinders getting the respect of the press is primarily the band’s fanbase, not the actual musical product. And that fan base? Teen girls. They are the kiss of death. A recent article in Pitchforkclarifies:
When fame is girded by a swelling teenage, female fanbase immediately, that celebrity becomes false, temporary, and unearned. We’re always grappling for a reason to disregard the value of a popular—and populist—product because blindly embracing it means the market research and Simon Cowell-eque figures behind it have duped us again. The presence of teen girls offers up a handy barometer: if they like something you can be rest assured it’s not worth a serious listener’s ear [,,,] female fans are seen as less legitimate, so their adoration is an instant credibility-killer. The crux of teen-girl illegitimacy is the assumption that they are incapable of the critical thinking their older, male counterparts display when it comes to their favourite bands.
Even Kemp describes an encounter with teen girl fans as having witnessed a flock of “Hitchcockian birds” as the girls screamed, cried, and threw themselves against a plate glass door while watching the band walking into a radio station.
Are there any other kind?
Spandau, of course, soldiered on in their career, making more albums while the in-fighting between them increased. Kemp writes a great deal about how controlling he was, from writing all of the songs to dictating how Tony Hadley should sing a particular line. This control is what lead to the court case Hadley, Keeble, and Norman brought against Gary in the 1990s. Kemp characterizes it as a decision to have his personal publishing company to stop contributing to the costs of running the band (since he was the lone songwriter in the band). He says that long-time manager Steve Dagger “told the others” and that “there was no confrontation about it, but it was a decision that would have a very slow-burning fuse indeed, and more destructive firepower than anything [he] could possibly imagine” (259). Well, yeah! It seems a little naïve to say that you couldn’t know that making a decision to stop sharing monies with the band would result in such anger. I think the court case, though, wasn’t just about the money but about the idea that somehow Kemp was the only important member of the band. But as Kemp says, by the time Heart Like a Sky was being recorded, it was obvious the band was falling apart. He wanted to hurt the band for taking him for granted and to prove to them that he was the real center of Spandau Ballet.
In photos, however, Tony was usually posed as the center of the band because he was the tallest (sorry, Gary!)
Kemp concludes the book with the band’s reunion a decade after the court case in which he was triumphant. The story of their getting back together is interwoven with the story of his parents’ death. Kemp’s father practically died right in front of him and he along with his brother Martin was tasked with telling their mother of her husband’s death while she was hospitalized during a battle with cancer. After they’d told her, Kemp says that, “the second or third thing my mother said through her tears after she’d hear what had happened was this: ‘And he was so looking forward to [the reunion of] Spandau Ballet’ (310). Four days later she, too, died. These profound deaths make the whole “let’s get the band together!” ending of the book pretty melancholy to read. Knowing that the band wouldn’t stay together in their original form also makes this ending a bit sad. But it’s an excellent book in which Kemp is honest about his flaws and he’s willing to laugh at himself in the process of exposing them. There’s also stuff about his acting career, his love life, and lots of tales of excess while on the road. An overall good read, whether you are a fan or not.
In terms of my New Romantic research, this book is indispensable. I really admire Kemp and I’m grateful for his continuing triumphing of the importance of New Romanticism. (He also also liked a few of my tweets which was, like, the greatest thing ever!)
Please enjoy a few of the following selections from the Spandau Ballet oeuvre:
Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (1985)
Dave Rimmer
This book has a provocative title, one that I read for the first time in an article I’d come across by a former professor, Neil Nehring. The phrase “like punk never happened” was used as a jab against Duran Duran and how their existence belied the disruptive presence of punk just a few years before. What was the point of punk if it begat Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet? While making this point, Nehring cited Dave Rimmer’s book. I knew I had to track it down, particularly because I took the charge against Duran Duran and Spandau very, very seriously!
Like Punk Never Happened was published in 1985 and is a mash up of Rimmer tracing the development of the genre known as New Pop and a tour diary written while he was in Japan with Culture Club during their 1984 tour. Rimmer’s bio on the back of the book notes that he was a “freelance writer” for Smash Hits magazine and he thanks Neil Tennant (yes, from the Pet Shop Boys) for being his “agent, editor, and collaborator” on this book. A the editor of Smash Hits, Tennant undoubtedly has a ton of amazing pre-Pet Shop Boys stories and thus I declare that he needs to write his autobiography!
As I discussed in my post on Adam Ant’s autobiography, Rimmer traces the beginning of New Pop to Ant, declaring him a “monomaniacal success robot” with some affection, actually (11). Rimmer stresses that the point of the book is to explore New Pop, not to judge it, and so he writes about Adam’s arc toward stardom with an anthropological curiosity, using Ant as the ur-popstar on which all other 80s popstars are built. Adam’s roots were in punk and as most people already know, he was mentored by and then stolen from by Malcom McClaren (who lured Adam’s original Ants away to form Bow Wow Wow), a figure Rimmer sees as another harbinger of New Pop. McClaren always wanted to be a success and he always wanted the Sex Pistols to be famous. Their look and attitude was punk but McClaren’s desire was pure “imaginative entrepreneur” who wanted “to make the most of an easily manipulable music industry” (14). Rimmer, like Simon Reynolds, sees punk as germinating from pop music, destroying the boundary between the radio friendly hit and the sneering, tuneless punk song. Both pop and punk are used as delineating lines between those “in” and those “out”, and once punk blew itself up, pop merely shuffled back in to fill in the void. Rimmer argues:
The irony of the situation is this: to those who cling on to the spirit of punk, everything about the New Pop is utterly abhorrent and devoid of heir precious ‘credibility’. The New Pop isn’t rebellious. It embraces the star system. It conflates art, business and entertainment. It cares more about sales and royalties and the strength of the dollar than anything else and to make matters worse, it isn’t the least bit guilty about it. (13)
Beyond Adam Ant, Rimmer sees the New Romantics as ushering in the age of New Pop. He says in the first chapter of the book that Culture Club “were the perfect New Pop” group: “Colour by Numbers was the nearest thing to a perfect pop album the decade has produced. ‘Karma Chameleon” was the nearest thing to a perfect pop single: pretty and sickly, complex and singalong, meaningless and meaningful all at the same time” (5). After he theorizes about the transformation of punk into New Pop, Rimmer spends the rest of the book detailing Culture Club’s 1984 tour. The tour tales are interesting, though they mostly focus on Boy George and Jon Moss constantly fighting, breaking up, and making back up. Boy George discusses their relationship in his autobiography if you’re interested in the details of their volatile love affair. It’s quite a story!
Something I found really helpful in Rimmer’s book is his discussion of money and New Popstars’ desire for success. Money and success comes up frequently when writers attempt to define what New Pop was. The music that came after punk was a lot of things: Postpunk, New Wave, New Romantic, and New Pop. It’s difficult to define what exactly makes each one of those categories because there are overlaps, slips, splits, and fissures among all of them. In a 2005 Pitchfork article, “Now That’s What I Call New Pop” by Jess Harvell provides a useful definition of New Pop which focuses both on sound and desire:
New pop, the UK post-post-punk movement, is too porous to be rigidly defined. It contains everything from ABC’s Arcadian soul-disco, to Orange Juice’s Byrds/Buzzcocks jangle, to the Human League’s supersonic Abba update. Much of it could also be called post-punk or synth-pop or leftover glam. There was no shared manifesto; many of the bands couldn’t be more different.
If anything defined it, it was a strange mix of DIY (spurred by punk) and ambition– to make the charts, make TV appearances, make newspaper headlines. Sometimes this was for money; sometimes just to see if it could be done; sometimes simply to reach as many people as possible. But clearly, for many bands, merely selling a few 7″s was no longer an option.
Rimmer reflects Harvell’s emphasis on ambition when he critiques the charge that New Pop was “Thatcherite” or “Falklands Pop”. He continues, “In some was that’s a profoundly stupid description. Culture Club aside, the consensus among today’s pop musicians is broadly left of centre. Even Andy Taylor of Duran Duran – the group most usually lumbered with the ‘Thatcherite’ tag – was recently heard remarking that it made him ‘sick to watch what she’s doing to the country.’” In other ways, however, Rimmer confirms the connection between New Pop and Thatcher in that New Pop’s orientation toward success mirrors “the Thatcherite ideal of how to revitalize the economy” (76). The connection to Thatcher always sits uncomfortably with me, particularly given the working class background of almost all of the New Romantics as well as a large swath of New Popstars. I loved this quote from Jon Moss in the book: “Duran Duran reflect what people can’t have in life. We reflect what they can have” (121). What can they have, though? Not Culture Club’s money but perhaps an audience could have their multicultural, gender bending approach to life? Along with how to define New Pop via success, Rimmer clarifies New Pop’s connection to Black dance music and he investigates the issue of sex, seemingly important because of Boy George’s (at times unexpressed) sexuality.
Like Punk Never Happened ends with Rimmer arguing that 1985 is year New Pop’s bubble burst. With increased fame, New Popstars had steadily increased the space between themselves and their fans. Additionally, fame obliterated the original philosophy that underpinned bands like Spandau Ballet or Culture Club. Along with Band Aid and general chart success, Rimmer also pins the blame on Wham! who “aimed to be nothing more than they seemed to be: two nice middle-class boys busy making a fortune. After their first couple of singles, their songs didn’t even seem to spring from their own experiences. It was all just George Michael playing with imaginary emotions and situations. Scratch the suburban surface of Wham! and you’d find nothing beneath but nagging delusion” (185). Poor Wham!! I do remember, though, in Graham Smith’s book on the New Romantics, We Can Be Heroes, that several New Romantics lamented that Wham! stole their fashion (seen in “Wham Rap”, “Young Guns” and “Bad Boys”) from the “Hard Times” look (as the New Romantics called it) after visiting the Blitz one night and seeing patrons sporting rolled jeans and greased-up pompadours. It seems even in a movement that eventually jettisoned credibility, the illusion of cred was still important!
Boy George hated the video for “Karma Chameleon” so I decided to post a live version of it (complete with a dig at Siouxsie Sioux at the beginning!)
Here’s Wham in all of their stolen Hard Times glory:
Though this blog is primarily dedicated to the reading I’m doing to satisfy my post-punk itch, I do have other musical obsessions: mainly Britpop and Cool Cymru which are two sides of the same 1990s coin. My devotion to the Manic Street Preachers not only lead me to read every book published about them (more on those in another post) but to also read about Super Furry Animals (Ric Rawlins’ excellent bio) as well as Gruff Rhys’ American Interior, and assorted other books on the Welsh music scene commonly called Cool Cymru (there aren’t really any directly on Cool Cymru but there is one book called ‘Blerwytirhwng?’ The Place of Welsh Pop Music by Sarah Hill that covers a vast amount of bands included in the movement and there is an excellent chapter about the scene in Wales Since 1939 by Martin Johnes). Once I’d exhausted the Welsh scene, I turned to Britpop and books on Blur, Oasis, the genre in general (Britpop!: Cool Britannia And The Spectacular Demise Of English Rock by John Harris is a great one), and Suede (fabulous bio by David Barnett). I was thrilled, then, to discover that Suede’s lead singer, Brett Anderson, has recently undertaken the task of writing his autobiography. The story of Suede’s place in Britpop is fascinating, especially since they are often attributed with starting the scene in the first place although as with most declarations about who started what in music, that declaration is also keenly argued about. It was, however, Suede who made it to the cover of the NME before Blur and they made it before they’d officially released their first single!
Anderson looking a bit moody in front of his Bowie poster
Coal Black Mornings wasn’t quite what I expected it to be. In the Foreword, Anderson clarifies that “the last thing I wanted to write was the usual ‘coke and gold discs’ memoir” and so he “limited [the book] strictly to the early years, before anyone really knew or really cared” about the band. He did this in order to “achieve [a] sense of tone […] to stray beyond [the early days of Suede] and to keep my voice fresh and void of cliché would have been impossible, and right now I have no desire to rake over those days again” (ix-x). Anderson dubs the book a “prehistory” and indeed, most of the book is about his childhood and college days with the book ending just as Suede gelled as band, creating a ruckus in London and in the music press. He discusses his relationship with Elastica’s Justine Frischmann and he is very complimentary to her. Though he notes that their relationship eventually ended because she became involved with another man, he never says it’s Blur frontman Damon Albarn. For a truly juicy going-over of that love triangle, I recommend Barnett’s authorized biography of Suede. There are tons of good stories about how much Brett and Damon hated each other. One can only surmise that Anderson continues to hate Albarn given the digs he makes at Britpop bands who sing in false accents about lives they know nothing about (ahem, “Parklife”).
Anderson’s lyrics betray an obvious interest in class, in elevating the unseen experiences of the working class and the marginalized to art. His autobiography does the same as he carefully and poetically evokes a vision of his childhood that is pocked with disappointment, poverty, and an angry father but also punctuated by that same father’s love of classical music and a mother who supported her artistic children. Unlike a lot of biographies and autobiographies, I found the portion of the book about Anderson’s childhood to be fascinating reading. He is an excellent writer with a good sense of how to season brutality and sadness with humor.
The part about becoming Suede is lighter and captures the humor, vanity, and earnestness involved in starting a band. There are a lot of great stories about playing to empty rooms and wry digs at the clothes the band initially wore on stage. Importantly, Anderson discusses what emerged as one the press’s repeated critiques of Anderson’s lyrics and onstage persona: that it was all a put-on. Over the years, music writers have opined that Anderson “played gay” to garner attention for the band, that his coy ducking of questions about his own sexuality was designed to fuel gossip. Anderson speaks somewhat to this charge while discussing the writing of the song, “My Insatiable One” after breaking up with Frischmann (link to song at end of essay):
Like everything I was writing at that time it was massively coloured by heartbreak, but this time I was writing about myself in the third person and from Justine’s point of view; fictionalising a situation where she was regretting her choices and where the ‘he’ in the lyrics was actually me. I found this shift in perspective really thrilling as a writer and it suddenly opened up enormous vistas, which I began to explore through other songs in that early period, looking at the world through the eyes of housewives and gay men and lonely dads […] Sadly, a year or so later, when we had become shrouded in notoriety and success, some would choose to see it as a social tourism. Given the levels of real, cynical, social tourism during that decade, when groups of patronising middle-class boys were making money by aping the accents and culture of the working classes, the irony was exquisite. (191)
Suede’s early songs always felt exploratory to me. Anderson was merely tiptoeing in and out of viewpoints in order to expose the panorama of British life to his listeners. Of course Suede often sounds pompous and bombastic! When one is trying to hew a portrait of a nation to compete with the cheerful tunes of Blur and Oasis, one errs on the side of going big. This book feels to be both honest and crafted, as if Anderson is taking on another persona: that of a man named Brett Anderson who is writing an autobiography. I mean that as a compliment, actually. The refrain of “coal black mornings” that recurs through the book could feel gimmicky but in Anderson’s hands, the recurrence feels natural and necessary. It elevates the grubby struggle of his early life to something worthy of art. The whole book feels self-consciously shaped but necessarily so as Anderson is trying not only through his stories, but also through the writing itself to evoke a mood or tone that enraptures the reader. He wants you to feel this story, not to merely read it.
The book is quite short at only 209 pages but the length felt right. A sort of short, sharp shock to the system before Anderson recedes into the shadows again.
Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews (2009)
Simon Reynolds
“’Everyone’s Given Up and Just Wants to Go Dancing’: From Punk to Rave in the Thatcher Era” (2007)
Neil Nehring (Popular Music and Society, Vol. 30 No. 1)
Warning: The following is more a collection of thoughts than an actual essay or formal post!
I’ve been thinking about how to tackle Adam Ant’s rejection of his place in New Romanticism. I locate him in that subculture because of his preoccupation with class, looking flash, creating new tribes of belonging, as well as a desire to take inspiration from punk and to make it into something just as subversive but more glamorous. He didn’t like the New Romantics because he thought they were obsessed with class … in a bad way. But as I argued in my post on Ant’s autobiography, this is a misreading of what bands like Spandau Ballet and Visage thought about class. They weren’t worshiping the upper class but were rather interested in how they could use the earmarks of being upper class as a tool for disruption. Boy George and others saw being in the Top 40 as the ultimate infiltration of the establishment.
Ant sees the New Romantics as frivolous, as being involved in something self-centered and self-important that is less about entertainment and more about self-aggrandizement. Surely Ant’s evolving fashion looks track alongside of the style evolution of Spandau Ballet and others? Why would their desire to look good be different from his? I think in part because Ant saw his look as facing outward to the fans rather than facing inward toward the self. This would track with his desire to entertain and please his audience.
As Simon Reynolds clarifies below, entertainment and success were part of the postpunk genre, no matter how spare or synthy or fashion-driven the bands were. What marks the movement for Reynolds is an “open-endedness” that would allow for the kind of variations in approach that Ant rejects.
The way I loosely defined [postpunk] was: groups that had been catalyzed by punk but didn’t sound ‘punk rock’ in the classic Pistols/Clash sense. They wouldn’t have existed without the spur of punk giving them the confidence to do it themselves, but they interpreted punk as an imperative to keep changing.
[…]
Perhaps the best way to think of post-punk is not as a genre but as a space of possibility, out of which a range of new genres emerged – Goth, industrial, synthpop, mutant disco, et al. Because it’s a space – or maybe a discourse about music, rather than a style of music – what unites all this activity is a set of open-ended imperatives: innovation, willful oddness the jettisoning of all things precedented or ‘rock ‘n’ roll’. This open-endedness encouraged diversity and divergence, such that by the end of the period the book [Rip It Up and Start Again] covers the distance between all the post-punk fragments has become vast: From Goth to New Pop to the Big Music of Echo and the Bunnymen/U2 to the second wave of industrial outfits … Everything has scattered and followed its own path, often completely antithetical to the other directions taken. But the shared point of origin – the mythic site of lost unity – is punk. That’s the ignition point. The Big Bang. (404-405)
I really love the idea of “a space of possibility”. This perfectly defines the diversity within postpunk. What is also interesting in Reynolds analysis of postpunk is his comparison between New Romanticism and showbiz, particularly in light of Ant’s use of the term “showbiz/show business” in his autobiography. Reynolds argues that, “Unlike showbiz, which really was an authoritarian monologue from start to audience, New Romanticism was a community, a sort of egalitarian elite where anybody could be a face on the scene if they made an effort” (400). In a way, Ant was interested in dictating the terms to audience as he saw his role as guiding them through an experience rather than allowing the audience to have whatever kind of response they wanted. His reliance on thinking of himself as participating in show business would then preclude his ability to see himself as part of an egalitarian elite. In another way, though, he did create a “new royal family/a wild nobility” which invited the audience into his world in whatever guise they chose, as long as they left the non-Ant world behind. This would connect quite clearly with the New Romantic reliance on community.
Ant’s “Ant music for sex people” motto also runs counter to the humorlessness commonly assigned to postpunk. People often think of bands like Joy Division when they encounter the phrase “postpunk” and there is some truth to the idea that darkness was the focus of the genre. The same can be said for the New Romantics, as Michael Bracewell points out in his book, England is Mine. He explains that for the New Romantics, “grey was the colour and alienation was the game” (207). In their pursuit of class confusion and other insurrections, the New Romantics often weren’t cracking a lot of jokes or viewing things with a fun, irreverent eye, at least on the surface. Ant’s music, conversely, is layered with informal impudence and a comedic point of view. His videos show him having fun while bands like Visage and Spandu Ballet retain as Bracewell sees it, a stoic greyness (I’ve posted Visage’s video for “Fade to Grey” below). In considering, then, Ant’s rejection of the New Romantics, this lack of humor surely plays a role.
(Visage’s Steve Strange evincing a stoic greyness)
Finally, I’ve added the following thoughts from Neil Nehring because his article was the first time I’d encountered a reference to Dave Rimmer’s Like Punk Never Happened and because Nehring helped to clarify the connection between New Pop and punk for me. I should also note that when I was working on my M.A. at U. of Texas, Austin, Nehring was one of my professors. He was so, so cool and I wrote a terribly subpar paper on Courtney Love for his class on pop culture theory. I’m grateful for the fact that I made no impression on him whatsoever and so he would never recognize me or remember my intellectual noodlings about why the press wrote about Courtney Love as they did.
Anyway, Nehring ably ties punk impulses to the desire to make top-selling singles in the following:
The term ‘New Pop,’ first of all, is a shortened form of the original coinage ‘New Pop Entryist’ which stressed a continuity with punk and the do-it-yourself (or DIY) ethos, a democratization of music by rejecting virtuosity. New Pop performers gained ‘entry’ to the music business not by limiting guitar playing to barre chords as punk did, on the model of the Ramones, but by minimizing even that scintilla of musicianship even further, to noodling on synthesizers. (4)
Nehring also notes that bands like Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Soft Cell “made sense as an outgrowth of punk, particularly after the Young Marble Giants’ truly spare pop on the Rough Trade release Colossal Youth (1980). The drum machines, minimalist keyboard playing, and lower-register voices resembling a less morbid Bryan Ferry all suggested musicians making something out of very modest talent, like the best of punk” (5).
Although the bands Nehring mentions aren’t New Romantics (though Marc Almond does talk about “experimenting” with New Romanticism in the very early days of Soft Cell and he has a great story about being glared at during a gig by Spandau Ballet), they share some qualities with them. What’s more punk than just deciding you’re going to do something, even if you have no idea how to do it?
In September, I’m heading to Reading, England to participate in a conference on music subcultures. Participants will present papers on how one writes, investigates, thinks of, and defines what subcultures are and who participates in them. Here’s my abstract:
Though his ruffled shirts, working class background, and appeal to “wild nobility” would seemingly mark him as a New Romantic, Adam Ant rejects that he was ever was one. In his autobiography, Ant adamantly states, in fact, “I really did not want anything to do with them” (151). Considering Spandau Ballet and others as elitist and obsessed with celebrating the upper class, Ant saw himself as part of a wholly separate tribe, even if his songs referenced kings and looking flash, and his style evinced a historically rich, cash poor aesthetic favored by the New Romantics. If Adam Ant rejects his membership, is he still part of the subculture? Moving away from the generative core of Visage and Spandau Ballet, writing about New Romanticism becomes a complicated game of “who belongs?” as Blitz kids become bands and outliers like Duran Duran claim to have been New Romantics only long enough to make fun of them. Ant’s autobiographical rejection of membership is accompanied by Steve Strange, Boy George, Gary Kemp and others alternately placing themselves or others within or outside of New Romantic boundaries. Nearly anything can move those boundaries: belonging to the wrong social class, visiting the Blitz and failing the fashion standards, or more generally not being “authentic”. Ant’s rejection of membership, then, reads more like an admission of being part of a fast moving, complicated, highly stratified scene which saw fashion as an agent of political change and beauty as a destroyer of class and social differences. Using autobiographies, songs, photos, music videos, and interviews, this paper will consider who makes the New Romantic cut and who doesn’t (spoiler alert: “[he] may not like the things [I] say”, but Adam Ant is decidedly in).
Ant’s autobiography is interesting because he clearly anticipates what people want from it: a discussion of his mental health issues. Since it was published in 2006, the book doesn’t include his most recent struggles, though within the last few years he’s stabilized and done a series of successful revival tours. Throughout the book, Ant looks back at behavior like his hyper-busy work ethic and his obsessive need to control every facet of the visual aspects of his performance and ascribes it to his not-yet-diagnosed mental illness. He is frank about his behavior and the way it affected others, including friends, lovers, and family.
I read this book, however, for Ant’s take on his career and his potential role in the New Romantic movement. I say “potential” because as I’ve began to piece together who and what is/was this thing called “New Romantic”, Ant presents a particularly difficult case. He, like, Billy Idol was thought to be a sellout, someone who hungered for fame and abandoned a series of subcultures in his pursuit of money and recognition. Admittedly, “Puss ‘n Boots” is a long way from “Stand and Deliver” (Though Ant’s fashion in each is similar – that lip gloss remains on point, too! Check out the videos for these songs at the end of the post) but Spandau Ballet traveled a long distance between “Chant No. 1” and “Highly Strung” as well. Adam and the Ants (to distinguish the band from his later solo output), Spandau, Duran Duran, and Culture Club all were bands that started deep within a subculture and who moved out into making what was dubbed by Dave Rimmer in his book Like Punk Never Happened, “New Pop”. Rimmer’s book (I’ll do a post on it soon) is invaluable in understanding the movement from punk to New Romantic to New Pop. Published in 1984, the book represents one of the earliest meditations on the movement of the alternative music scene to the mainstream in the 1980s. Rimmer targets Ant as the one who truly began the trend:
In his rapid rise to the status of first teen idol of the 1980s, he mapped out all the moves for those who came after. Though the Human League and the Thompson Twins would later pull it off too, he was the first to engineer a self-conscious move from margins to mainstream, from cult to conqueror. He didn’t seem to have even the tiniest prick of conscience about ‘selling out’ (an old hippie concept which the punks had adopted), he just made damn sure someone was buying. (8-9)
Ant readily admits his willingness to move from “margins to mainstream” in his book as he sees all of his incarnations as just “show business”, whether he was a punk singing “Plastic Surgery” or a dreamboat being taunted by the moniker “Goody Two Shoes”. It was all the same to Adam Ant.
Midway through his autobiography, Ant reflects on his decision to go solo by noting:
I started a promo tour of personal appearance I Manchester, and the next day Friend or Foe the LP made number 5 in the charts, which was a good beginning, I thought. Unfortunately, that was the best it would do. Interviewers were asking me if I thought that it was all over for me, if my bubble had burst, and shouldn’t I have kept the Ants? Fuck you all, I thought. I will succeed. (203)
The desire for fame and fortune is what sets Ant within the New Romantics, not outside of the subculture. They, too, were using their fashion, beauty, and music as a way to pry open the Top 40. They made being “upper class” a performative event, one in which they mocked the very class they were seemingly trying to join. Ant misreads this desire as wanting to be upper class, while he was firmly entrenching himself in the working class status he was born into. Ant, however, used fashion in the same way the New Romantics did: as a way to create disorder within the class system and as a way to reflect what it might look like to be a working class kid who disrupts history.
Throughout his book, Ant discusses his fashion choices, describing his thought processes behind the feathers, makeup, and leather pants. Though he wore some Vivienne Westwood fashion early in his career, he insists that by the time he was wearing his “Apache/gypsy warrior look” (he’s sporting the “dandy highwayman” in the photo above) he was creating the looks on his own (146). This doesn’t, however, set him apart from the New Romantics as much as he thinks it does. Those earliest in the scene were famous for cobbling together looks from a number of sources, bypassing designer clothing because of the price and because they preferred to do things on their own.
I think that Ant rejects the possibility of being part of the New Romantics because he didn’t really hang out at The Blitz or pal around with others on the scene. He also isn’t one much for labels as he sees himself simply responding to what he likes and acting accordingly. So, if someone refuses to see themselves as part of a subculture, could they still be considered part of that subculture? I say yes! Ant was a punk, a New Romantic, and a New Popper. (He also uses the phrase “making love” far too often in his book but I suppose that’s a different point altogether. Also: he dated Jamie Lee Curtis and Heather Graham!) Rimmer argues that,
With a single-mindedness bordering on obsession – in itself as characteristic of the New Pop as anything else Adam got up to – he became the first artist since the Sex Pistols successfully to sell, not just an unmistakable ‘look’ (as he always put it’) and an unmistakable ‘sound’ (ditto) but also a half-baked set of theories and attitudes that pinned the two together […] Adam was the punk who grew up wanting to own or control everything he did [… His] explanation: ‘That’s business.’ And so it was. (9-10)
Ant’s book is a good look into the way he approached the business of himself, whether he was playing a punk in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee or singing with Diana Ross at Motown’s 25th Birthday Concert. It has most helpfully aided me in thinking about what to do with someone who stubbornly refuses to agree with my point of view on musical subcultures.
In case you’re interested in Ant’s fashion evolution, below you’ll find “Stand & Deliver” from 1981 and “Puss ‘n Boots” from 1983. The latter of which involves a little joke about his earlier look in the form of a sexy video vixen.
The Bromley Contingent continued to make the scene with a series of wild parties, including one memorable bash at Bertie Berlin’s house, with Siouxsie, Steve Severin, Simon Barker, a bunch of workers from Malcom’s Sex shop, and Johnny Rotten. Those were the fun times. We were fine young cannibals, ready to conquer the universe, poised to become stars in our own right. (54)
I read this book primarily because of Idol’s involvement in the “Bromley Contingent” which was a group of punks who were basically Sex Pistols fans. Aside from Idol, the Bromley Contingent included punk luminaries like Siouxsie Sioux and Jordan (more on Jordan when I get to Adam Ant’s autobiography) and they were known for their risky fashion choices – enabled by their relationship to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood – as much as they were for their disruptive behavior at Pistol shows and TV appearances. Idol was also famous in the burgeoning New Romantic clubs in 1979/1980 for being a great beauty who drew admirers like Boy George to him, even if the New Romantics had declared those still wearing punk clothes to be dirty and unfashionable. Sometimes a great face can conquer one’s aversion to torn t-shirts and tattered jeans! Idol had, in fact, lived in a squat with Steve Strange (singer of Visage and owner of The Blitz club, among many other important New Romantic clubs of the time) when both were in the early days of the punk scene. The punk section of this book is rich with information and filled with Idol’s encounters with heavy hitters like The Clash.
The book loses some of its punch once he becomes famous, though there is a great story about him appearing on the TV show Solid Gold to perform “Mony Mony” in 1981. I’ll let Billy tell it:
I was asked to do some promotion, and I agreed to go to L.A. to perform on Solid Gold, the U.S. chart TV show hosted by Marilyn McCoo and Andy Gibb […] We flew out for the show, on which I was to lip-synch the words to the recorded track. After doing so much TV in the UK, I was up for it.
When we arrived for the rehearsal, a choreographer had worked out all of these ‘60s steps for me to perform with the Solid Gold Dancers, but I told him, ‘I sing, they dance,’ so he got them to perform their routine around me. My long, hard stare into the future at the end of my performance let everyone know, ‘I’m a punk rock ‘n’ roller’” (147).
There truly is nothing more punk than acting tough on Solid Gold. Good for you, Billy! I believe the camera didn’t actually capture that long, hard stare but you can look for it here:
There are the usual stories of excess here and one explicit encounter with a fan that is the first thing I think of when I tell people I’ve read Billy Idol’s autobiography. If you’re interested, pick up the book and leaf through it. I guarantee you’ll know which fan encounter I’m talking about when you find it.
In terms of postpunk research, this book provides a glimpse into how punk became 80s and then finally became New Pop. Good stuff about the early punk scene. Idol is a real name-dropper and I mean that as a compliment!
(Visage’s Steve Strange evincing a stoic greyness)
The Post-Punk Professor 