A New Generation Rediscovers the Blitz Spirit in London

The Blitz Club, immortalized in modern British cultural history, was a short-lived nightclub situated in London’s Covent Garden which had long-term consequences for global pop music. Every Tuesday night, between February 1979 and October 1980, budding musicians, artists and filmmakers would gather at the World War II-themed club, replete with a framed picture by the bar of Winston Churchill, and set the “New Romantic” musical scene in motion. The likes of Culture Club, Sade and Spandau Ballet, who would later spearhead the second musical British invasion in the 1980s, were Blitz regulars, all dressed up with somewhere to go.Appropriately therefore an exhibition devoted to the Blitz Club at the Design Museum in Kensington, London, which closes this weekend, has seemingly left its own significant mark on many of today’s British young creatives. It may be dedicated to chronicling innovative style trends but “Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s,” is merely the latest in a succession of 1980s style-themed exhibitions to have opened in London in the past 18 months. These have included an exhibition devoted to “The Face” magazine at the National Portrait Gallery; a retrospective of the pioneering Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery at Tate Modern; and “Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London” at the Fashion and Textile Museum that focused on Bowery’s nightclub Taboo (and which proved more successful than the ill-fated 2004 Boy George Broadway musical “Taboo.”)You might not have heard of the Blitz Club, but there’s a good chance you’ll hear the “New Romantic” music, that was shaped in the venue, playing in your local drugstore. The slew of revival tours and cruises point to the enduring popularity of 1980s music, yet while it’s the pop songs that remain the Blitz Club’s most tangible legacy, it’s the club’s style that resonates most with Gen Z.“There’s something in the zeitgeist,” the manager of the pop group Spandau Ballet, Steve Dagger, who was instrumental in the conception and formation of the Design Museum’s exhibition, told the Sun. “It was an exciting period — the people that weren’t there want to find out about it and be inspired by it, and for people that were there, it’s a chance to go back and look at it.”Mr. Dagger said among those who left creatively enthused by their visit to the exhibition was a London artistic regeneration company called Lost, run by Fabien Riggall, the founder of the entertainment group Secret Cinema, which was sold to the TodayTix group for $100 million in 2022.“I’ve been to the exhibition over ten times and it’s a mixed crowd,” Mr. Dagger said. “Some are people in their fifties or sixties, but at the other end of the spectrum, there are alot of young people from art and fashion colleges. On the opening night my kids brought their friends and they’re very much part of the influencer world — some very successful. They all said the same thing: ‘It makes us feel such ‘wusses’ that we never do anything exciting like this.’ People are rediscovering a period where you took initiative because there was no alternative.”The exhibition immersively recreates the club as well as including public telephone booths used by clubbers to make plans to meet up. “‘The ‘Blitz Kids’ did talk to each other during the week, but largely speaking their interaction was when they were in this physical space, swapping creative ideas, working together, sometimes trying to kiss one another,” Mr. Dagger said. “Then you had to meet up to get your ideas across.”Opening before Margaret Thatcher got elected prime minister and closing when Thatcherism was just getting going, the Blitz night was the brainchild of DJ and musician Rusty Egan and Welsh boulevardier Steve Strange who would both later form the synth-pop band Visage which had a 1980 smash hit with “Fade to Grey.” Strange, who died in 2015 aged 55, masterfully marketed the club, encouraging patrons to dress flamboyantly and operating a strict door policy. (Mick Jagger was turned away from the Blitz for dressing too conventionally, or bringing too large an entourage, or for arriving when it was over capacity, depending on whom you ask.)Mr. Egan, who is still a renowned musician and DJ, curated the sound of the club. He said the motto of the Blitz — “Everybody here is a star, you just haven’t been discovered yet” — chimed with the younger generations. “I was making electronic disco and then trying it out in the midde of the set,” he told the Sun, “and people would come to me and say, ‘That was great- who was that?’ I would say, ‘It’s just something I was working on.'”Blitz regulars outside the club.Often given the title of “Blitz house band,” Spandau Ballet play a large part in the Design Museum’s show. “Spandau played at the Blitz Christmas party,” Mr. Dagger said. “Had people not liked it, I’m not quite sure what we would have done. It had an immediate effect on the band’s career.”The Blitz would shape the sound and vision of the decade, starting from when David Bowie enlisted Strange and three other “Blitz” regulars to appear in his 1980 music video for “Ashes to Ashes,” which in turn regenerated his own career. “One by one everyone in the Blitz started their own club night, or their own band which was great and inspirational and which we were happy about,” Mr. Egan, who recently published his own autobiography, said. Rusty Egan at the Design Museum’s exhibition. Jack Hall/PA Media AssignmentsYounger generations can be forgiven for hankering for a time when it was a less complicated, more direct, route to musical stardom. “The kids now can’t believe there were these small clubs where everyone did something in music or fashion,” the musician and DJ Mark Moore, who reached the top of the UK singles chart in 1988 with “Theme from S-Express” told the Sun. “They’re like, ‘How did this happen?’ There was no internet, you had to go out and find your space. It’s inspiring to them because social media is not much of a scene. You need a place where people congregate in the flesh.”People certainly have been congregating to the Blitz exhibition — it’s among the Design Museum’s most successful shows ever. “At the moment there are disccusions about taking the exhibition overseas and there’s the possibility of New York,” Mr. Dagger said. That would be fitting since as the writer Robert Elms, recounts in his new book, “Blitz; The Club That Created the Eighties”, a group of “Blitz Kids,” led by Spandau Ballet, visited New York to play a concert, and host a fashion show — where the models included Sade — which promptly landed on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily.Spandau Ballet performing in 1980. The Design MuseumThe Design Museum exhibit features contemporary US press coverage of Blitz, including an article by Nikki Finke — later to found the film website Deadline Hollywood. She wrote of the “Blitz Kids” in the Los Angeles Times: “Their far-out, anything goes behavior and dress are setting the newest trend in a town that has seen it all.”“There was a parallel scene in New York at the time,” Mr. Dagger said. “But I remember Jim Fouratt [co-founder of the Danceteria nightclub] saying to me, ‘I don’t want to bring just bring over the band, I want to bring over the subculture.'” The late 1970s/ early 1980s timeframe is also popular in the New York exhibition space but, with the exception of the Museum of the City of New York’s “New York, New Music: 1980-1986” exhibition in 2021, the emphasis has been on the “art” rather than the “pop.” Art shows themed around the decade have included “Downtown/ Uptown” New York in the Eighties”, at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery on the Upper East Side, which attracted over 40,000 visitors last fall, and the ongoing Keith Haring show at the Brant Foundation in the East Village.But museums are paying scant attention to the history of New York 1980s nightclubs such as the Limelight, Area, Palladium and Danceteria, even though they played pivotal roles in the rise of performers such as Madonna and Grace Jones. “America seems more into the 1990s now, given the JFK Jr. TV series [“Love Story”] and the renewed interest in Calvin Klein designs,” said society photographer Patrick McMullan, whose photobooks include “So80s: A Photographic Diary of a Decade.” “But there’s alot of material from 1980s discotheques that you could show in a club environment and make into a real experience.”For all the current attention being paid to the Blitz Club, Mr. Dagger first sensed he had been part of social history when Mr. Egan and Mr. Strange opened their next club, the Camden Palace in 1982 (where Madonna would make her UK musical debut the next year.) “The first time I went there I saw around 2,000 people in this club — it was the Blitz, but on a much bigger scale,” Mr. Dagger said. “I thought, ‘We’ve won.'”

A New Generation Rediscovers the Blitz Spirit in London

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