39. ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...NEW ROMANTICS

The absolute very first time I saw a new romantic was the first party I went to after Visage had been on TOTP with Fade to Grey and my mate Stumpy turned up in full make-up, a frilly shirt, baggy trousers and more scarves than M&S. Just a few days before, he’d been wearing bondage trousers and a T-Shirt which advised us to have a holiday in Cambodia (it sounded very exotic) so this was quite a transformation.

His spiky hair had gone too, to be replaced by a long fringe (and when I say long I mean down to his chin) which completely covered half of his face and one of his eyes. Later in life, he claimed that the experience permanently damaged his sight but, boy, he got a lot of attention that night so it was clearly a sacrifice worth making. Phil Oakey of the Human League sported the same look a year later but he was a little older than us and lived 100 miles away in Sheffield so it's unlikely, but not inconceivable, he stole it from Stumpy.

Within weeks, every music-loving member of the boys or girls schools in my home town had neatly cut out posters of Duran Duran & Spandau Ballet from Smash Hits and blu-tacked them over the top of The Clash & Siouxsie Sioux on their bedroom wall. Pixie boots & winklepickers began deforming adolescent feet and Middle Eastern scarves made our middle-England home town look like an outpost of the Gaza Strip. In the early 80s, cultural appropriation was yet to be made a criminal offence but that didn’t stop one of the boys in our school, as he marched down the High St like Yasser Arafat, being accosted by a very large Jewish lady who rightly suspected that he had no idea what he was wearing and why. He defended himself saying it was ‘just the fashion’ although he had his scarf over his school uniform at the time which rather undermined his argument.

Talking of shameless peacocks, I bumped into Gary Kemp, the song-writing talent behind Spandau Ballet, at a private work party in the early 90s in a London club. I don't think he was in the Finance or HR department but had blagged his way in and was propping up the bar on his own (I'm not sure if he'd had his bust-up with lead singer Tony Hadley by then but he certainly looked like Norman No-Friends). I plucked up the courage to ask him what the lyrics to The Freeze were because they sounded a lot like ‘blue sing la lune, sing lagoon’ which seemed as likely as Adam Ant singing ‘da diddley qua qua’. He was quite dismissive, saying he had no idea before turning his back on me, so I told him it was my fault for asking the keyboardist and I should try to track down Tony Hadley because he was obviously the one who wrote all the songs. I may have had a couple of drinks by then.

New Romanticism was seen as a counter-movement to punk’s aggressive masculinity and anti-fashion philosophy. Spandau Ballet sang that they were beautiful and clean and so very, very young – all 3 of which are just a distant memory to me nowadays, if they ever applied at all. The epicentre was London's Blitz club, run by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan (who went on to form Visage with Midge Ure). Boy George was in charge of the cloakroom which was like putting a kid in charge of the sweet shop because he dipped his fingers into every wallet and handbag he was asked to look after. Steve Strange had a strict door policy which almost certainly would have excluded me from getting in, even if I’d managed to make the long journey down to London (“what do you mean you don’t like my tank top, Steve, it’s from the East Anglian branch of Fosters Menswear I'll have you know”). He famously barred Mick Jagger from entry so I would’ve been in good company.

In my defence and in the absence of social media (the only things digital in those days were our watches), any new musical or fashion movement took months to catch on….and, if you’re were in my home town in the sticks, it took twice as long as that. The Blitz Club regulars probably hated that uncool kids in uncool towns like mine would dress up like them several months after they’d moved on to their new look. It may have seemed SO passé to them but, to us, it was an exciting adventure which we all got to share together in our local community and feel like we were part of something bigger. Let us have that moment surely?

By 1984, New Romanticism was finally brought to a close by Band Aid which proved to all of us, no matter where we lived in the UK, that these fresh, edgy bands were mainstream now and even our parents would sing along to them (one of their biggest fans even married into royalty to make sure she got a good seat at Live Aid the following year). It was a signal for the nation's youth to move onto something new…..and that ended up being Stock Aitken & Waterman and the same formulaic sound for the next 5 years so be careful what you wish for.

I’ve only put on 2 parties of my own since I left college – one soon afterwards and the other to mark my 50th birthday some 25 years later – and both of them had the theme of ‘come as your favourite musical era’ (if it works – and it obviously did from a straw poll of the 5 people who turned up to the first one – why change it?). This was an undisguised excuse for me to dig out my old winklepickers & scarves and combine them with my Dad’s army beret and my first suit trousers which, fortunately for me, were fashionably baggy in the 80s and so not only fitted me but looked the part too. Second time round though, the legs finished halfway up my calves and made me look like MC ‘You can’t touch this’ Hammer. I assume they’d either shrunk or I’d had an unlikely growth spurt in my 30s & 40s. The only other possibility is that my arse had doubled in size in the intervening years which is so far-fetched that I refuse to consider it as an option.

For the second party, I did without the Adam Ant white stripe across the bridge of my nose because I’d been reminded (by Adam) that 'Ant Music was for Sex People' and, having turned 50, I’d clearly left that community behind many years earlier. Originally, I’d played the Durannies, Spandau, Visage, Human League, Thompson Twins, Soft Cell, Ultravox & Blancmange. 25 years later, I’d moved on to….well, it was basically the same playlist but off an iPhone rather than a mix tape recorded off the radio which meant I could dispense with the Peter Powell and Dave Lee Travis intros.

I met Tony Hadley after the more recent party (not straight afterwards that is - he didn't actually get invited....or, if he did, he certainly didn't bother showing up). We had both chosen to go on holiday to Rhodes at the same time, although we'd made our way there separately. My wife and I were sitting near him on the beach and I was on the verge of asking him my standard Spandau chat-up line about the lyrics of The Freeze when I overheard him telling his wife how sad he was that he’d fallen out with Gary and that Spandau Ballet had split up, apparently putting the blame for this bust-up on some drunken fan who’d accosted Gary when he was minding his own business at a private function he’d been asked to attend and wound him up about his role in the band.

Forget about Band Aid, I lay the death of the New Romantic movement squarely at the door of that thoughtless, inebriated idiot who managed to cut what could have been a long story short and deprive us of future gold. I know this much is true so why do I find it hard to write the next line?

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Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...PLAY SCHOOL

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