My first move away from a provincial punk look into something more fully formed and prescriptive was a brief dalliance with the new romantic scene. It was a look that I never managed to attain, and I never graduated above a slew of badly conceived identities that littered the subcultural landscape of late 1980 and early 1981. This ‘cult with no name’ took shape in the public eye through 1980, though it had been gestating in London clubs a year or so earlier. It emerged as a club scene, pinned down by both a fashion movement away from identikit punk and a new music scene or genre. As the writer Richard Evans shows with his recent work meticulously chronicling the electronic pop single, the music associated with new romantic began to establish itself from 1978 onwards with a new type of sound. There were post-punk records in this genre that excited me and made me want to dance, still sitting within my record collection – the first 12s from Heaven 17 released through 1981, the heart-racing synth pulse of Simple Minds ‘I Travel’ which dropped out of nowhere in October 1980. A year or so later, as I started to venture to nightclubs which catered for this non-mainstream scene, these records were still part of the playlist.
However, as something with a distinctive look and a claim to be a break with the past, there were certain moments that contoured new romantic’s rise out of the obscure underground. The scene’s self-elected house band Spandau Ballet had formed in late 1979 and featured on Janet Street Porter’s television programme 20th Century Box which showcased niche arts and music. New romantic’s move to the mainstream was staggered through 1980 with Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video in August, The Face magazine from May onwards (followed by i-D, Blitz and New Sounds, New Styles), Spandau Ballet charting in November, and Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’ following in December. Of course, Adam and the Ants were in there as the first of this scene on Top of the Pops, though being tagged with kick-starting the new romantic scene is an accolade that has never sat well with Adam. This flurry of overtly visual activity in 1980 opened the floodgates in 1981 for a heavily commercialised scene and assault on the mainstream charts. Previous incarnations such as DJ and independent label mogul Stevo’s moves to found a Futurist scene through the electronic pop of his Some Bizzare label (he provided the Futurist chart in Sounds from September 1980) were quickly accelerated into the foreground. Bands like Soft Cell and Depeche Mode shifted across from appearing on Some Bizzare, to join in the fashion chase of 1981 donning a different look each month; ski-jumpers, leather and chains biker boys, woodland elves, etc.
The new romantic movement is heavily mythologised, with documentaries seemingly in constant production and on endless repeat. It is conveniently framed as a positive potential to counter punk’s nihilism, allowing a number of key figures to trailblaze a more entrepreneurial 1980s that combines dressing up and seizing opportunities, the dream-stuff of historians like Dominic Sandbrook as they interpret the latter half of the twentieth century in Great Britain. It is not, as more critical and discursive researchers such as Matthew Worley have shown, so neatly compartmentalised into an art, politics and social structure ‘closed’ model.
The picaresque origin story and unravelling of new romantic has hardened into a reiterating script played out by a dwindling number of self-appointed and self-aggrandizing key figures. They age (inevitably) and somehow look less and less reliable or believable as storytellers. Tired eyes, balding hair, sunken and wrinkled faces, obesity – it kills the dream. The more adventurous and spontaneous storytellers, such as Steve Strange in the 2005 documentary Whatever Happened to the Gender Benders, have sadly passed away. We are left with Boy George, Marilyn, Spandau Ballet members, Robert Elms, Princess Julia on autopilot, telling a seamless story of joy with the go-to anecdotes of Boy George as the pocket-pilfering cloakroom attendant and Steve Strange as stentorian doorman turning away Mick Jagger. Dylan Jones seems to sit above them all like a playgroup leader, now speaking on their behalf but seldom adding anything to the testimony. The narrative script is akin to a theme park experience - tightly controlled and emotionally intact. The anachronism of their music and cultural statement is reversed, from being futuristic in the past, presenting something before its time, to being out of date in the present, clinging on to a redundant version of themselves from the past, a billboard or advertisement from the society of the spectacle. Does a story of the new romantic subculture rooted more in a provincial ordinariness have any historical merit? These provincial scenes were forever the butt of snidey and jokey remarks from the caption writers at i-D, laughing at ‘common people’ trying to look like Steve Strange. Here is a minoritarian perspective from the East Midlands.
In spring 1980, in the midst of my O levels, I wanted to write to a band, so I chose Modern English. Their single ‘Gathering Dust’, coming to my attention through listening to John Peel, exemplified a post-punk energy and innovation to me – chiming guitars, tribal drums, sweeping feedback effects, urgent vocals. Plus they were on the 4AD label which had released a couple of records by Bauhaus, who I admired at the time after witnessing them on one of their early tours when they had a degree of spirit and panache. It was partially a calculated decision, with me thinking that maybe not many other people would be writing to Modern English so I had more chance of eliciting a response. This worked, and I had a few letters from them. It was not, on my side, an innovative and searching dialogue, just bland questions of everyday life. With this starting point of what I though was precious raw material, I had plans to start a fanzine but (thankfully) this never got off the ground. My last memory of this is hanging around Derby Assembly Rooms to interview Gang of Four on their tour with Delta 5 and Pere Ubu, but then not thinking of any meaningful questions to ask them. Of course, Gang of Four were astute political and cultural Marxists, so my hopeless efforts probably didn’t go down too well. Asking them what their favourite clothes were paled behind their urgency to talk about how the British state was treating Irish Republican prisoners or the conflicted ethics of signing to a major label. Even though we read the NME newspaper at school, the ultra-styled poststructuralist agendas and word games of the journalists such as Paul Morley and Ian Penman went straight over our heads and became a background noise to our quest to read trivial facts and ogle cool photography. I’d argue that this high-handed and inaccessible style quite likely made us immune from more down to earth political nuances such as from Gang of Four and their Marxism, a Teflon-like imperviousness to over-intellectualising.
In May 1981 Modern English landed a support slot with Japan on their British tour. Japan were a big favourite on the early 1981 new romantic scene with their bouffant wedge haircuts, powdered faces and dandy clothes drawing from a Warholesque pop art palette. They had a background in the intelligent strand of glam – Roxy Music, Brian Eno – but this didn’t seem to go against their rise to popularity on the scene. New romantic did not exercise the tabula rasa cultural scorched earth policy of punk. Japan were just about a big enough draw to play larger venues and they were promoting their new single ‘The Art of Parties’, hoping to break into the Top 40 for the first time. Later success would soon follow with the singles ‘Life in Tokyo’ and ‘Quiet Life’, purring with the swirls of synths and funky bass that had only been glimpsed on their earlier records. The tour was scheduled to visit the Rock City venue at Nottingham and Modern English wrote to me, inviting me to attend. I was only 15, and there was no way on earth I could look the required 18 to get into the venue who were renowned for having strict doormen. Wearing my best surgeon shirt and homemade jodhpurs (Birmingham bags with a line of press-studs to cinch in the lower legs), I caught the Barton bus to undertake the 15-mile journey. I was planning in advance and had saved up for a taxi home – none of my family had a car. A taxi was an extravagance, and I think this would have been the first time I’d be using one on my own.
I recall strongly the queue, of being taken by surprise. It was full of male Japan clones but there was an absence of the otherworldliness or (possibly) softness that I anticipated and associated with the band through their press and television appearances. The soft pink lights and smoke machines of the studio mise-en-scene was obviously absent, replaced by the crepuscular gloom cut through with the bright white spots shining into the queue. Instead of the ethereality of Japan it was hastily applied make-up and stereotyped neck frills offset by beer breath, b.o. and stubble. This cultural incommensurability stuck with me, it wasn’t like the pages of a feature in The Face – an airbrushed perfection. Unsurprisingly, the doormen never let me in. The band came to the door to try and reason, but it was never going to happen. They were running on a tight schedule so they bade me farewell and I saved on taxi fare by getting the last bus back to Derby. I treated myself to a burgundy asymmetric buttoning shirt the next day with the windfall.
// Diverging momentarily, I have recently rediscovered the photographs of Siouxsie and the Banshees in early 1979, prior to the big split in the band. You can see here a nascent new romantic look – it is not punk and certainly not goth (as we would come to know it). No doubt drawing from avant-garde fashion designers such as the PX team, there are pegged trousers, cut-away shirts, black tuxedo style jackets and Kenny Morris wearing a light grey box-shouldered suit (later available from the back page ads in the music newspapers ) a double placket burgundy shirt. I guess the ones I bought from the local market were knock-offs of these designs //
Modern English were taken in by the new romantic scene and swept along with its fast current, the presence of Japan maybe rubbing off on them. A year later they toured in support of their second album – After the Snow – in April 1982, playing Derby Blue Note club as a small venue befitting their then moderately ambitious intentions. The album was more rooted in this new scene, in terms of style and packaging, and sounded a world away from the earlier single ‘Gathering Dust’. At this point in time new romantic music was still making a big impact in the UK charts, with Japan themselves enjoying their most profitable period in 1982. The dressing up that exploded in 1981 was still flourishing and diversifying. Though I felt enamoured to still have personal contact with Modern English, and to be on the guest list, I was struggling to embrace the album – the new romantic image, certainly by 1982, was showing itself as facile and contrived.
I was now a young-looking 16 so it was still hit and miss whether I’d get into the Blue Note, Derby’s principal venue since the Ajanta closed in late 1980. The Ajanta was for all ages, like a demented youth club from Dante’s circles of hell, but the Blue Note was suave and very much restricted to well-dressed over-18s. I was helped by being with a glamorous Siouxsie clone who lived in the nearby village of Draycott. This was one of my (many) early crushes but any chance of reciprocity was doomed. Earlier in the year I had plucked up the courage to speak to her and she invited me round to her house, which was a 30-minute cycle ride through the fields east of Derby. When I turned up to see her, full of nerves, she had already invited another lad round and the pair were clearly an item. What a disaster. I’m not prone to bouts of fury, but my diary reads like an outtake from a Jilted John record where I take the odd pause to assert my own musical tastes (early Simple Minds):
“mop-haired greb turned Blitz kid, liar, god she is a slag, he has been going out with her for 5 days and he’s going to get engaged!!!! He’s into Human League, Visage, Numan, Japan, Simple Minds (only the new stuff mind you) and Queen!!!”
Ousted fury aside, the Siouxsie clone had agreed to accompany me to Modern English primarily because it meant getting in free and meeting the band. Once we were inside the club I never saw her again. No surprise there. The night passed without incident, and I left clutching a signed copy of the album. Somewhere along life’s path I lost the album, without really caring. Even though I still have a clutch of original albums from those early years of buying vinyl, Modern English never stuck with me. They went on to have some success in America as the country embraced the second (or third?) British Invasion with new romantic music belatedly catching on over there. Their American success was neither significant nor longstanding, and they split up in 1987, reforming on and off over the years. They currently tour quite regularly and have a large American fan base from that nostalgia-for-new-romantic corpus. Perhaps deserved more, as they were very down to earth and considerate people. In 1983 my own life path took me briefly to Colchester where I started, but quickly abandoned, a university course. I still have my registration identity wallet where I look pale, shell-shocked and underage with spikey goth hair. I found the town drab, dispiriting, artless and hostile – the main activity seemed to be avoiding getting thumped by soldiers as Colchester served as a garrison town. In later years I realised that Modern English grew up and formed in Colchester, which partly reignited my respect for them.
I don’t recall over-investing in the new romantic look beyond this brief dalliance whilst still at school. Our school had a uniform policy, so getting dressed up (for a young teenager) was confined to your front room or the trials and tribulations of the school disco. The new romantic look was one of those things that went full-blown in 1981 and to make it work was nigh on impossible. There were purchases of surgeon-collar shirts, side-buttoning shirts and bright baggy trousers (aquamarine jumbo cords) on Derby’s ever accommodating Eagle Centre Market which had swapped second-rate punk standards like the tartan trousers and fluffy jumpers for third-rate new romantic clobber. And of course, pixie boots with trousers tucked in. No matter, when I got the clothes home and stood in front of the mirror I looked more like a premonition of Timmy Mallet than a contemporaneous David Sylvian. It was a look that was commonly ridiculed, and a deluge of copycat bands with derivative synth-pop records flooded the lower reaches of the chart. At school we all had small hessian rucksacks and we marker-penned designs, emblems and logos from our favourite bands on the flaps, sides and straps – as a joke my rucksack was briefly kidnapped and the sanctified space of the main flap violated with the name of a particularly trite new romantic band – Our Daughter’s Wedding – was written on as a joke.
New romantic flourished in the provinces, particularly in Birmingham which spawned Duran Duran and the clothing designers Kahn and Bell who were advertising in the back pages of Sounds as early as May 1980 with clothes that had started to cross over from a punk look. There was a Midlands scene, presumably encompassing those in the queue at Rock City in 1981, and a Nottingham-based newspaper Despatch briefly existed for this dressy scene. I always felt on the outside looking in, and then I either stopped looking in or stopped noticing as there was nothing left to look at.
Whilst I might have been vainly peddling a new romantic look for the Japan gig in May 1981, I have a bombproof memory of seeing an advertisement in same month for the new LP by German post-punk band Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF) which featured band member Robert Görl with a brutally cropped look. As with much of the imagery around this time, it was (for me) a hypnotic photograph – quite possibly because Görl was photographed covered in a thin veneer of glistening water to resemble a kind of magical perspiration. I ditched the new romantic ambitions and took the DAF photograph to the barbers in the village. What emerged half an hour later harmonised with most of my early experiments in trying to get the right look: “it wasn’t what I asked for”. From looking at early photographs I seemed to have persisted with this short back and sides Factory Records look for the remainder of 1981, swapping the billowing new romantic shirts for military style short-sleeved shirts, peg-leg trousers and tank-tops. As per usual, it was more factory seconds than Factory Records.