Yesterday I took a trip in a time machine with the dial set to 1980. I had been told by Gunta that I would enjoy the Blitz Club exhibition currently on at the Design Museum in London (she had visited a few weeks back), so Mo and I set off early doors yesterday morning to take a look.
Being perhaps five years too young for punk, my musical awakening, if you could call it that, coincided with the height of the ‘Blitz Kids’ era and the club that gave them their name. Even then at the tender age I was I felt that there was something a bit preposterous about it all, a feeling that was pretty well captured by ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’ (itself now a classic televisual mirror of that time) with their ‘Nice Video, Shame About The Song’ take off of the whole New Romantic Scene (a parody that actually features in the exhibition). On the other hand there was/is something magical about it all. A comic tragedy perhaps for those that came out of the nihilism of punk thinking fuck it, times are bad let’s forget about it (at least on a Tuesday night) and make the best of it. It just so happened that dressing like Rob Roy or as a Weimar actress was the way in which they chose to do it!
Design was a winner here. True, the outlandish outfits were never intended to last, and for sure anyone trying to gain entry to the club wearing last week’s garments would never pass muster and worse still would earn the would be clubber the scorn of couture arbiter, Steve Strange. But the focus on flamboyant style set the stage for a group of designers and frequenters of the club to work with others of the Blitz clientele who went on to be the faces of the New Romantic scene.
Never a dedicated follower of fashion myself, Rusty Eagan’s contribution to the scene is what counts more for me. Rich Kid and a founder member of Visage he was also the resident Blitz DJ serving up some very letfield post punk electronica from the likes of The Normal, early Human League, post Ultravox John Foxx and Magazine.
The exhibition is very well put together, not least with an immersive Blitz experience thrown in. I learned a couple of thinks too, such as just how small the Blitz Club was (capacity 100-200... depending on the scale of the millinery on show in any given week perhaps!) and the fact that on days other than Tuesdays, the venue operated as a WWII themed wine bar. This second fact explained the abundance of 1940’s propaganda posters adorning the walls of the club mock-up.
Pay the exhibition a visit… you don’t even have to dress up these days!
In the evening we saw Gary Numan in Cambridge marking the 45th anniversary of his 1980 album ‘Telekon’. Numan, famously, or infamously in his view, failed to gain entry to the Blitz Club. This snub unsurprisingly rankled with Numan since ‘Fade To Grey’, the song that brought Steve Strange to international fame, was penned by Billy Currie and Chris Payne, with contributions from Ced Sharpley (all part of Numan’s band at the time) whilst on the road with the ‘Touring Principle’ in ‘79/’80. Gary still mentions it today!
And so the day came to an end and returned us to the present day, 2025, with many of the same issues but without the great music (or clothes…. if dandyism is your thing)!
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