No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  It was from a similar source that Duran Duran found their name. One of the worst films that Jane Fonda ever starred in was Barbarella, a failed attempt to transfer a popular cartoon strip, which featured a villain named Durand Durand, to celluloid. In 1979, it was shown on BBC television. A lot of young people in Birmingham watched because Barbarella was also the name of one of the city’s main punk venues. Among them were John Taylor, Nick Rhodes and Stephen Duffy, art students who dreamt of being rock stars, who went on to perform their first gig as Duran Duran at Birmingham Polytechnic shortly afterwards, four weeks before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. Duffy, probably the most gifted of the trio, later reckoned that ‘by far the best thing about the band’ was its name.27 He left soon afterwards, which, since the other two could neither play instruments with any skill nor write songs, might have been the end of Duran Duran, but their ambition to be rock stars remained. They had a stroke of luck when, in May 1979, Gary Numan had a sudden and unexpected hit with ‘Are Friends Electric?’, featuring heavy use of synthesizers. The sudden popularity of electronically generated sounds relieved Taylor and Rhodes of the need to play instruments well. They found a drummer, Roger Taylor, from Castle Bromwich, and acquired a management team, the brothers Michael and Paul Berrow, who ran a successful club in Birmingham. An advertisement in NME brought in a guitarist, Andy Taylor, from Newcastle upon Tyne, who had been a professional performer since his teens (the only alternative to an apprenticeship in the shipyards). None of the three Taylors were related. Finally, they recruited a singer, Simon Le Bon, from Bushey in Hertfordshire.

  In July 1981, the band released their third single, ‘Girls on Film’, which reached No. 5 even before it was complemented by a raunchy video made by Godley and Creme, which was banned by the BBC but did wonders for the band’s reputation in bars and clubs across the USA. Their album, Rio, released in May 1982, went to No. 2 in the UK. Four of its tracks went into the Top 20 singles chart. Though the sophisticated crowd at the Blitz might look down on Duran Duran as naff provincials, they had a mass appeal unmatched by any other New Romantic band. After the release of Rio, they went on tour to Australia, Japan and the USA. Their first foray into the American market faltered, because the term ‘New Romantic’ meant nothing on that side of the Atlantic, but in November 1982 Rio was re-released as a dance album, went into the charts and opened the way to the first significant British invasion of the American rock scene since the rise of the Beatles, more than twenty years earlier. British newspapers even referred to Duran Duran as the ‘Fab Five’, just as The Beatles had been known as the ‘Fab Four’.

  By now, the band was living in the extravagant rock-star style, with Le Bon and John Taylor, each of whom considered himself the leader of Duran Duran, competing to see who could bed the greater number of female fans. Boy George, whose turn as a pop phenomenon had not yet begun, thought that ‘the champagne-swilling, yacht-sailing Duran Duran touted “playboyeurism” and a new pop superficiality. Suddenly it was OK to be rich, famous and feel no shame. Some saw it as the natural consequence of Thatcherism.’28

  What made Duran Duran popular was that they were all very handsome and had good dress sense. They belonged exclusively to children entering their teens. The future novelist Andrea Ashworth was age thirteen when she had pictures of the group on the walls around her bunk bed; and enjoyed a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience when her friend’s parents gave her a ticket to a Duran Duran concert in Manchester in 1982. The ticket cost ‘almost £10’ – way beyond anything her mother and stepfather could afford:

  Duran Duran gave Hayley and me a new moon on Monday and an ocean of emotional freedom. They poured out music we could dive into and flounder extravagantly about in, gesturing at great depths, raving, not drowning. The lyrics were polished, arty crosswords, blessedly obscure, so you could ponder them as long – or as little – as you liked. The music was turbulent but buoyant, urging elation and anger, frustration, insouciance, conquest, sometimes all in the same song. It let you write words such as ‘chiaroscuro’ and ‘euphoria’, ‘epiphany’ and ‘solar plexus’ in your diary; it inspired you to slam that diary shut and dervish about, twanging air guitar, making your hair fly as if there were no tomorrow.29

  What was much more important, from the point of view of the managers and shareholders of the companies that ran the record labels, was that the success of acts such as Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran started the tills ringing again. In 1984, the UK public spent £141.2m on albums, £78.8m on singles, and £104m on cassettes. More importantly, a growing number of people were thinking that vinyl might be on the way out and were buying the new and very expensive compact discs; that year they bought £5m worth. That came to a total of £329m, which was 27 per cent less in real terms than people had spent on records in 1974, but it was a 14 per cent increase on 1983.30 The long decline of the UK music industry had at last been turned around.

  Duran Duran’s place as Diana’s favourite group was sanctified in July 1983. By now, though none of the band had yet reached the age of twenty-five, they were tax exiles, living on the Caribbean island of Montserrat to be out of the reach of Inland Revenue. However, they flew home to perform at a Prince’s Trust concert in front of Charles and Diana. They were mobbed at the airport, posed for photographs at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane, and filled pages of the tabloid press. The Daily Mirror was so intent on recruiting readers from Duran Duran’s army of fans that the next day’s front page was dominated by a large photograph of Diana meeting members of the band, with the headline in huge type, ‘Diana’s delight’. At least, that was the first-edition headline, prepared early in the evening before the band stepped on stage. Sadly, life beyond the reach of Inland Revenue had been so demanding there had been no time to rehearse, and their stage performance was so dire that in the later editions of the Mirror ‘Diana’s delight’ became instead ‘Diana’s let-down’.31

  In the middle of the decade, just as Duran Duran were breaking up, losing their drummer and guitarist in rapid succession, the British public was treated to yet another royal wedding. On 23 July 1986, the Queen’s second son, Andrew, married Sarah Ferguson, whom he had known since childhood. The event did not quite match the Diana wedding for worldwide popularity. An estimated 500m watched on television, two-thirds of the numbers who had tuned in for Charles and Diana, but a substantial audience all the same. Minutes before the groom arrived at Westminster Abbey, his mother conferred on him the title of Duke of York. Unlike Diana, the new Duchess of York vowed to ‘obey’ her husband – though like Diana, she didn’t.

  Before this happy event, there was a taster for something that would become a regular event in the next decade – a royal scandal. In 1978, Prince Michael of Kent, grandson of George V and fifteenth in line to the throne, had married a lively German divorcée named Marie Christine Agnes Hedwig Ida von Reibnitz (who became known as Princess Michael) in a civil ceremony in Austria. Because she was Roman Catholic, he surrendered his place in the line of succession, although their two children were twentieth and twenty-first in line. In 1985, however, Princess Michael was hit by an unwelcome press revelation: the Daily Mirror discovered that her father, Baron von Reibnitz, who had died in Mozambique two years earlier, had joined the SS in 1933 and risen to the rank of major.32 The Princess went on television to say that the news had come as a ‘total shock’ and caused her ‘a deep shame’.33 Within a few days, opinion had swung decisively behind her after her mother, who lived in Australia, admitted concealing this family skeleton from her daughter and produced the verdict of a de-nazification court, sitting in 1948, which accepted that the baron had been only a nominal member of the SS.

  However, the tabloids did not give up on Princess Michael. She was a lady of spirit, known in royal circles as ‘Princess Pushy’, who did not allow public exposure to interfere with her pursuit of pleasure. In July 1985, the News of the World came out with a yet tastier story, and this time the princess could not plead innocence. She was
having an affair with John Ward Hunt, the thirty-eight-year-old heir to a vast oil fortune. When she turned up at his London apartment, disguised in a red wig, a press photographer was laying in wait, evidently tipped off by someone close to the princess. True to the aristocratic tradition that tolerated infidelity within marriage provided outward appearances were maintained, Prince Michael and his wife used the final of the Wimbledon tennis tournament to appear together in the royal box, during which she showered her husband with public shows of affection. This royal performance attracted almost as much interest as the match taking place on the centre court, in which the seventeen-year-old German, Boris Becker, became the youngest men’s singles champion in the history of the tournament.

  The bemused Princess Michael wondered what the tabloids thought she had done wrong. ‘Why do they attack me?’, she asked the newspaper columnist Woodrow Wyatt, a man to whom it was never a good idea to entrust with a confidence. ‘Princess Anne has had at least five affairs. Prince Philip has had lots of affairs. The Duchess of Kent has had a lot too.’ Wyatt advised her that the press did not attack royalty in the centre, so went for someone ‘on the fringe’ instead.34

  Had he reflected a bit more, he might also have made the observation that the popularity of Britain’s monarchy tends to rise and fall according to the political weather. In times of crisis, royalty plays a role as a soothing symbol of continuity amid the chaos; when things settle down, people are more likely to complain that it is an expensive pageant. The public was unimpressed by the pomp that surrounded the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969, but loved the silver jubilee in 1977. Prince Andrew’s marriage, when the political situation had stabilized a year after the miners’ strike, did almost nothing for the popularity of the monarchy, but Diana’s wedding, against the background of urban riots, was royalty’s biggest hit since the coronation. Her arrival in the story of the royals was perfectly timed. She continued to be a star because she was glamorous and photogenic, and because her neurotic search for happiness made her a dramatic character with whom people could identify. Her exit from official royalty, through her separation and divorce in the early 1990s, was also well-timed because, in those settled times, the public did not feel that they needed the comfort of an unchanging monarchy, as they had in the troubled summer of 1981.

  CHAPTER 5

  INGLAN IS A BITCH

  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s white Britons quarrelled fiercely with other whites over British attitudes to race, against a background of near silence from those most directly affected. It was not until the 1980s that Britain’s ethnic minorities found a voice that the white majority could hear. In 1980, immigration from what was termed the ‘New Commonwealth’ – India, Pakistan and the Caribbean islands – was still sufficiently recent that anyone over the age of twenty from any of those backgrounds was more likely to be an immigrant than a native-born Briton.

  A substantial section of white opinion did not want these immigrants to think that Britain was their permanent home. Enoch Powell made a household name of himself with a speech delivered one Saturday afternoon in 1968 in which he claimed to foresee a river ‘flowing with much blood’ because of the presence of too many people of a different skin colour. By 1979, Powell was no longer a Conservative MP, but was still an influential presence in the Commons, as an Ulster Unionist, and within the Conservative Party were influential people who heartily shared Powell’s view on immigration. They were organized in a pressure group called the Monday Club. No government minister belonged to the Monday Club, but it had a strong presence in the party and on the Conservative backbenches, and whatever measures the government took to restrict immigration, the Monday Club was there to demand more.

  If there had been a complete ban on anyone Asian or Afro-Caribbean entering the country, the stalwarts of the Monday Club would not have been satisfied. Like Powell, they wanted those already in the country to think about leaving. Neo-fascist organizations such as the National Front were demanding that people of the wrong skin colour should be forcibly removed from the UK, but the official Conservative line did not go that far. The Conservative manifesto of 1979 promised: ‘We will help those immigrants who genuinely wish to leave this country – but there can be no question of compulsory repatriation.’ During the 1980 Conservative Party annual conference, the MP for Beaconsfield, Sir Ronald Bell, reminded a fringe meeting of the right-wing Monday Club of this promise and pointed out, petulantly, that it was not happening;1 immigrants were not queuing up to be paid to leave the country in which they had put down roots. In 1983, minutes of the Monday Club’s Immigration and Repatriation Committee were leaked to Private Eye. They restated that the club’s policy was: ‘An end to New Commonwealth and Pakistani immigration, a properly financed scheme of voluntary repatriation, the repeal of the Race Relations Act, and the abolition of the Commission for Racial Equality; particular emphasis on repatriation.’2 The committee chairman was the Conservative MP for Billericay, Harvey Proctor, and the committee secretary in 1981–3 was a student activist from north London, John Bercow, who many years later became Speaker of the House of Commons. (Sir Ronald Bell, that articulate voice of white middle-class rectitude, was no longer there to speak for the Monday Club, having died suddenly in 1982, in his Commons office, while having sex with a woman who was not his wife.) Bercow cut his ties with the Monday Club in February 1983, when he concluded that some of its members were racist.

  The ‘immigration’ issue was not actually about immigration but about race. Although people would complain that the British Isles were overcrowded and could not take in any more arrivals, it was not a genuine problem. More people emigrated during the 1970s and 1980s than were permitted to enter, so that even with a rising birth rate, the population was almost static. It was 55.9m in 1971, 56.4m in 1981 and 57.8m in 1991.

  That it was entirely a matter of race is shown up in unpublished documents about the first major humanitarian crisis on which the incoming Conservative government had to take a stand. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were fleeing Vietnam by boat and arriving, destitute, in whatever port would take them. The UN appealed to the developed world to help, and asked Britain to take in 10,000 of the ‘boat people’ in 1979. Politically, there was no reason for a Conservative government to object. These were mostly ethnic Chinese families who had formed Vietnam’s entrepreneurial class, which was why a communist regime was driving them out. Once settled, they could be expected to look after themselves, contribute to the economy and be staunchly anti-communist. Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington was keen to comply, partly for the sake of the UK’s international reputation, but principally because refugees were pouring into Hong Kong, which was then a British colony, and whose government was pleading for help. Home Secretary William Whitelaw was conscious that public opinion had been aroused by the television pictures of desperate families in overcrowded boats. The Home Office had a fat postbag of letters from the public who believed that the government should offer help. None of this impressed Mrs Thatcher. ‘All those who wrote letters in this sense should be invited to accept (a refugee) in their homes,’ she said, when she discussed the matter privately with Carrington and Whitelaw in July 1979. If Britain was going to take refugees from Vietnam, she argued, they should compensate by refusing entry visas to a corresponding number of children and other dependant relatives from other parts of Asia. Nor was she impressed that the Conservative-led Greater London Council had offered 400 homes for Vietnamese families. It was ‘quite wrong that immigrants should be given council housing whereas white citizens were not,’ she said. On the other hand, she added, she had ‘less objections to refugees such as Rhodesians, Poles and Hungarians since they could more easily be assimilated into British society.’3

  Many of the people who argued like this would have been offended to have been called racist. What was at stake, in some people’s minds, was national identity, which they believed to be under threat from the arrival of hundreds of thousands of black and
Asian immigrants. A few months before Margaret Thatcher came to power, she made a much quoted remark that white people were being ‘rather swamped by people with a different culture’.4

  In this atmosphere, the opportunities for people from ethnic minorities to find work and get on in the world were limited. A few children of the Caribbean islands had achieved national prominence, including the young comic Lenny Henry, the ITN journalists Trevor McDonald and Moira Stewart, and Viv Anderson, the first black footballer to play for England. A few were taking their first step into local politics. There were a number of Asians who were prospering in business, but they kept out of the public eye. No matter how wealthy they had become, almost all supported the Labour Party, because they saw the Conservatives as the party of Enoch Powell, although Powell had left it years earlier. But generally, to be black meant to be consigned to a low-paid job or no job at all, to live in substandard housing in an inner-city ghetto and to have your children go to one of the worst of the state schools. In a recession, the ethnic minorities were hit first. In the year to February 1981 unemployment among the population as a whole rose by two-thirds, while among black people, whose chances of finding work were already low, it went up 82 per cent.5 To be young, black and out on the streets meant risking arrest and, old or young, there was the insulting and sometimes frightening spectre of white racism. In 1981, a Home Office study concluded that Afro-Caribbeans were thirty-six times more likely to suffer racially motivated attacks than whites, Asians were fifty times more likely and that ‘the police failed to pursue the aggression with energy’.6 Yet the ethnic minorities seemed to bear all these disadvantages in resigned silence.