For about eighteen months, as 1979 segued into a startling new decade, a small, musty, Second World War-themed wine bar in Covent Garden became the centre of the universe.
The door to No. 4, Great Queen Street was the most important portal in London. If you could make it through there on a Tuesday night, you found yourself at the thrilling epicentre of a youth culture explosion of a kind this city had not seen since the Swinging Sixties; a nightclub which would come to define an era and whose influence is still reverberating today.
The 1980s, and all that they became, began a year early in the Blitz club, with Steve Strange deciding who would make it through the door and Rusty Egan spinning tunes to jive and flirt and pose and preen to. It was the hardcore of 150 or so overdressed, undervalued youngsters inside – those vain, arrogant, remarkably creative teenage misfits and macaronis* – who would go on to shape the decade and define so many aspects of the world we live in today.
‘The list of Blitz alumni covers just about every aspect of British cultural life, a remarkable number of them now sporting honours from OBEs to knighthoods, still more of them notorious and glamorous – stars of every kind.’
I would guess that at least two-thirds of those Blitz kids – and they were indeed all kids, almost nobody over the age of twenty-one, almost all from working-class backgrounds, none of them privileged or monied – went on to become very successful in their chosen fields. Many became internationally prominent and plenty of them are still famous today. Nearly half a century later, I’m returning to the club’s heyday in the pages of this book to reflect on how it happened.
Like a petri dish fizzing with alchemical reactions, or a pressure cooker of perpetual creativity, the realms of music, nightlife, fashion, design, art, dance and journalism were all ripped up and reshaped by this coterie of do-it-yourself dandy urchins dancing to a selection of epic electronic tunes and plotting to take over the world. Downstairs in the toilets, meanwhile, our collective sexual and gender mores were being tested to destruction. Boys will be girls and girls will be boys. Gender fluidity and bodily fluids.
The list of Blitz alumni covers just about every aspect of British cultural life, a remarkable number of them now sporting honours from OBEs to knighthoods, still more of them notorious and glamorous – stars of every kind. It is an incredible legacy and I regularly bump into hugely successful people who I first saw dancing to ‘Moskow Diskow’ by Telex or applying eyeliner in the ladies’ cubicle. Those days were so long ago that I’ve now also started going to their funerals.
But I still remember it vividly. What it felt like and smelled like to be there in that pulsating room after midnight pretty much every Tuesday for a year and a half. I was there with a truly remarkable cast of characters, writing the future as we went along. But I also recall what it was like outside that magical enclave in our grim and bitter land, torn by strife and riven by division.
All this has stayed with me because it was a truly defining period of my life. It formed who I was and who I would become. George O’Dowd and Gary Kemp, Siobhan Fahey and Sade Adu, Grayson Perry and Peter Doig, Dinny Hall, Dylan Jones, Chris Sullivan, Michele Clapton, Michael Clark and John Galliano . . . They shaped and styled our world.
Once I set to writing this book, the memories came whooshing back. I think they are fairly reliable; they are certainly visceral, though time may have played tricks and hindsight will undoubtedly have played a part. Others will definitely remember things differently. The Blitz was full of giant egos (mine very much included), all of whom assumed that the room rotated around them. They will have their own Blitz memories, their own version of events, their own analysis of what happened. This is mine.
* Pejorative 18th century term for a fashionable, androgynous, overdressed fellow.
A history of the club that set the ‘80s alight, by much-loved presenter and Blitz attendee Robert Elms.