Download: Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight – The Rezillos (mp3)

I’ve had mates who were Punks, Mods, Soul Boys, Skinheads and Rude Boys but I’ve never known anyone who called themselves a New Romantic, and not because I have anything against blokes in frilly shirts and eyeliner either. I used to work with a girl who was a regular at Blitz and knew Boy George before he was famous but she’d laugh if you applied that label to her, the scene was far too individualistic to be pigeonholed in that way which is why for a while they were called The Cult With No Name.

Yes, New Romantics looked a bit ridiculous at times (Exhibit A above) and were often better at dressing up than they were at making records, but given the choice between their flamboyant silliness and the plodding denim rockism of an Oasis I think I know who I prefer, especially when they made such cracking 12″ mixes as these.

Download: Night Train (Dance Mix) – Visage (mp3)
Download: Planet Earth (Night Mix) – Duran Duran (mp3)
Download: The Art of Parties (12″ version) – Japan (mp3)

Read: Spandau Ballet, the Blitz kids and the birth of the New Romantics (excellent article)

Download: London Boys – T.Rex (mp3)

Download: Oh! Bondage Up Yours! – X-Ray Spex (mp3)

Download: Tiger Feet – Mud (mp3)

The 1980s were sometimes known as “The Designer Decade” when the “D” word was often used as a rather snide label for anything that was trendy, superficial, made-over, expensive, exclusive (I was a designer in the late 1980s and got bloody annoyed that my job title was used as an insult.) People drank designer beer and designer water, men sported designer stubble on their faces and we even had designer banks and designer socialism. So it’s no wonder the decade also brought us designer political protest.

One of the iconic fashion items of the era was the baggy white t-shirt with a big slogan on it, though popularized and ripped-off by Wham! and Frankie Goes To Hollywood the original slogan shirts were created with a serious political purpose by British fashion designer Katherine Hamnett in 1983 and had messages like WORLDWIDE NUCLEAR BAN NOW, STOP KILLING WHALES, and EDUCATION NOT MISSILES. A portion of the profits from them went to charity and their simple bold type was designed to be easily copied by others so that the messages on them would become more widespread. While all the FRANKIE SAY RELAX t-shirts may have diluted her original intent somewhat it’s easy to snigger at the idealistic notion of a mere t-shirt having any political effect whatsoever, and that fact that some were made out of expensive silk makes them look like just another silly example of Radical Chic. I went on quite a few demos back then and don’t remember too many people wearing them, the fashion there being mostly Oxfam and Dr. Marten.

Naive fashionista she might have been but I’ll give Hamnett this, she did have the balls to wear this t-shirt when she met Maggie Thatcher at a Downing Street reception in 1984.

(Pershing is the American nuclear missile system that was being deployed in Germany at the time)

I started writing about all this because I actually had a hand in producing Hamnett’s original t-shirts. Between leaving school and going to art college I worked for a couple of years at a silkscreen printers in Fulham who mostly did the sort of rock and pop t-shirts you saw on sale down the King’s Road and in Kensington Market. Then one day in walks this woman Katherine Hamnett with some typeset artwork of slogans in heavy black letters she wanted us to print on some baggy t-shirts she had designed herself, some were cotton and some silk (which were a real bugger to print and dry). I can’t remember how many different slogans there were but she came back several times with new ones. My job was on the pre-press side, photographing the artwork onto film (the original type for those shirts was tiny, only about 2″ high) and making the screens for printing, so I helped produce the very t-shirt she is wearing above. It’s not much I know but it’s the closest I ever got to Maggie Thatcher, pity Hamnett didn’t have a design that said FUCK OFF AND DIE, YOU BITCH.

Download: Two Tribes (Annihilation Mix) – Frankie Goes To Hollywood (mp3)

Download: Glow Girl – The Who (mp3)

Image from the Skingirls gallery.

I’m feeling lazy, time to get out the cardboard guitar.

We used to call blokes like this a Grebo which is mangled slang for a greasy biker type (though its meaning seems to have expanded since I were a lad). I don’t know if there was a slang term for a female Grebo though, a Grebette maybe?

Download: The Rocker – Thin Lizzy (mp3)

Looking at this school photo of myself from 1973 it occurred to me that this was taken around the same time that Simone Palmey asked me out which makes me wonder what was it that attracted her. Do you think it was my long, flowing Donny Osmond locks? If I’d had that gap in my teeth fixed I could have been on the cover of Disco 45.

Not everyone was a fan of my hair though, I still remember my teacher Mr. Grant handing me the prints of that photo and shaking his head in old fogey disdain at my girly look. My Grandmother hated it too, I was staying with her one day back then and she took me to an old fashioned barbershop in Shepherd’s Bush Market to get it chopped off without telling my parents. The barber jokingly said “we don’t do girls!” when we walked in and then gave me a very severe short back and sides with the clippers. When my Dad came to pick me up later that day he screamed at my Grandmother “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIS HAIR!!!!”

The other thing about the photo that occurred to me is that horrible t-shirt I’m wearing, it may have been the height of children’s fashion in 1973 but no amount of retro cool nostalgia could make it look good today — my sister had one exactly the same in pink too. I would have hoped that on school photo day my Mum would have put me in something a little less groovy, didn’t she know I’d be looking at this picture 35 years later?

If you’d like a soundtrack to this photo, this romantic little number was top of the charts about when it was taken.

Download: Skweeze Me Pleeze Me – Slade (mp3)

Download: Teenage Archangel – Be Bop Deluxe (mp3)