Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  By this point, though, the critics had a new arch-enemy. This was Duran Duran, who had been formed in Birmingham in 1978 and broke through with ‘Girls on Film’ three years later. At first they looked like just another New Romantic band, all sashes and synthesizers. But when they spoke it was as though they had been primed by some evil genius to inflame the guardians of rock and roll. Talking to The Face, their keyboardist Nick Rhodes explained that they saw themselves as ‘a cross between Kraftwerk and the Monkees’. And instead of paying the ritual homage to punk, Duran Duran virtually dismissed it. People were sick of punk, said their bass guitarist John Taylor. ‘I’d like to see a return to the quality, and by that I mean critically acclaimed quality, of Rod Stewart and Queen, for example, in the Seventies.’ Rod Stewart! Queen! It was almost as if he were doing it deliberately.

  To make matters worse, Duran Duran clearly preferred talking about their famously well-favoured appearance to discussing their sound. Asked about their forthcoming tour, their guitarist Andy Taylor said brightly: ‘It’ll be strong visual entertainment and pure showmanship. We’re going to use mood lights on the audience – subtle mauves and reds to create a happy atmosphere.’ It is hard to imagine the Clash saying anything like that. But then Rhodes made it worse. ‘Yeah, having a good time is what it’s all about today,’ he chipped in. ‘We can’t be bothered with all that political messaging. It’s time entertainers got back to entertaining instead of preaching.’47

  Right from the start, many critics saw Duran Duran, like their deadly rivals Spandau Ballet, as an embodiment of the materialism, selfishness and superficiality of the Thatcher era. For the NME’s Paul Morley, they were ‘gummed up glammed over techno-rock twits’, popular with people who were only interested in ‘looking at the pictures’. For Melody Maker, they were ‘candyfloss gods to a new generation of gullible adolescents with more money than sense’. The national press, too, gave them abysmal notices. The Times called them ‘pop’s lowest common denominator … homogenized and bland’. And even a relatively kind review in the Guardian, which recognized their huge appeal to teenage fans with ‘frilled shirts’ and ‘floppy hair’, found them insufferably ‘narcissistic … less interested in entertaining than in displaying themselves’.48

  None of this cut any ice with Duran Duran’s fans. Nor did it bother the band, who consoled themselves with their colossal earnings and apparently inexhaustible line of female admirers. ‘The sort of people we sell to do not question our relevance to society,’ said John Taylor. ‘I don’t see why we should have to satisfy what I consider to be petty semi-graduate university thinking.’ And while the semi-graduates sneered, Duran Duran reassured themselves that their forerunners had been similarly mocked and misunderstood. ‘People have often said to me, “Why don’t you write songs which are easier to understand?”’ mused their lead singer Simon Le Bon. Yet as he pointed out, songs like ‘Union of the Snake’ and ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ drew on a long literary tradition. ‘I’ve always liked poets like T. S. Eliot who are a little bit obscure,’ he explained, ‘and that’s definitely part of my style, lyrically.’49

  For the New Romantics’ critics, the really damning entry on the charge sheet was that they were so right-wing. As early as February 1981, Melody Maker’s Lynden Barber compared the sleeve notes on Spandau Ballet’s Journeys to Glory (‘Picture angular glimpses of sharp youth cutting strident shapes through the curling grey of 3 a.m … Follow the stirring vision and the rousing sound on the path towards journeys to glory’) to the lyrics of a Nazi anthem. Under the New Romantics, Barber wrote, ‘style is elevated to icon status and moral values and concerns are blown aside’. The ‘ex-Blitz glitter clique’ made ‘superficial music for superficial people with superficial concerns’, and were merely pop’s answer to the ‘upwardly mobile couples who join the Young Conservatives “for the social life”’. That reputation never went away. Almost thirty years later, the Guardian’s Michael Hann wrote that groups like Spandau Ballet embodied the ‘aspiration to do nothing more than look good in a nightclub’. ‘More than any other musical assembly with the possible exception of Stock Aitken and Waterman,’ he wrote, ‘they are Thatcherism on vinyl.’50

  Some New Romantics were indeed Conservatives. Culture Club’s drummer Jon Moss was a ‘staunch Tory’ who thought Mrs Thatcher ‘bloody brilliant’, while Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley even considered standing as a Conservative MP. But there is no evidence that the pop stars of the early 1980s were any more likely to vote Conservative than their predecessors. Infuriated by the charge even in 1981, Gary Kemp told The Face that he had joined the Labour Party in his teens and was active in his school’s ‘socialist group’. ‘However much money I get,’ he added, ‘I could never vote Conservative.’ His brother Martin said much the same. People accused them of being ‘middle-class’ because they liked drinking champagne, he said, ‘but we’re a very working-class band’. Even The Face, often seen as an advertisement for Thatcherite values, never hid its left-wing instincts. Among the ‘dodgy concepts’ of 1980, according to its end-of-year round-up, were ‘Thatcher’s independent deterrent’, ‘Keith Joseph’s policies’ and ‘Recession, Depression, Unemployment’. And the broader atmosphere of early-1980s pop culture was very obviously anti-Thatcherite, from the Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ and UB40’s ‘One in Ten’ to the Beat’s ‘Stand Down Margaret’ and Heaven 17’s ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’.51

  Yet it is easy to see why so many critics thought the New Romantics were borrowing from the Grantham hymnbook. Ten years earlier, pop stars had talked about ending war and changing the world. Now they talked about moving up and getting on. ‘We’re saying, “make the best of yourself. Even if you can’t write or play you can look good, and that’s a form of expression,”’ Gary Kemp explained to the Guardian. This, he said, was what set the Blitz Kids apart from their predecessors: they were ‘people who want to develop, who want to achieve something, in any direction, whether it’s art or whether it’s money. It’s ambition.’ And while some readers might have seen this as the voice of a materialistic new generation rebelling against the collectivist values of their parents, Kemp did not see it that way at all. As he told The Face, his father had been just as interested in getting on and having fun. ‘We were a working-class family, but we had a colour telly and a stereo,’ he said. ‘The difference between my dad and a more middle-class person is that if he won £10,000 tomorrow he’d go out and spend it, whereas a more middle-class person would invest it.’52

  Of course pop stars had often talked about getting on. Even the supposedly anti-materialistic John Lennon had said repeatedly that his ambition was ‘to be rich’. What was unusual about the cohort of the early 1980s, though, was how vocal they were about it. ‘I want success,’ Adam Ant told his early biographers, adding that the word ‘cult’ just meant ‘loser’. ‘With the punk thing, everyone was making impractical attacks on being rich or having money,’ Boy George told the NME. But deep down, ‘they all wanted to be rich. You have to be … I just want money so that I can be really irresponsible.’ Duran Duran’s ambition, agreed Simon Le Bon, was to become ‘artistically satisfied and stinking rich’. (No doubt T. S. Eliot would have said exactly the same.) Even UB40, widely celebrated for their social conscience, were not ashamed of making money. ‘Of course, we earn as much money as we can,’ their saxophonist Brian Travers told Sounds in 1982. ‘We tend to get slagged off for making a bit of money, being the type of band we are – but that’s a totally middle-class idea.’53

  Behind the caricatures, many of the pop stars of the early 1980s were more thoughtful than their critics recognized. Gary Kemp, for example, found it hard ‘to justify the kind of money a pop star can make while his mother and father still live frugally in a council house’. He and his brother tried to help, ‘but here I’d get it wrong too’: for example, buying his parents a Wiener Werkstätte vase or a William Morris tile, which looked absurd on the mantelpiece and ‘left me appearing like a snob�
�. After he and Martin parked their ‘matching Porsches side by side outside our parents’ home in a street full of rusting Fords’, he worried that they might be rubbing salt into ‘the wounds of a beleaguered working-class neighbourhood’. Even when Gary bought his first flat at the end of 1982, becoming the first person in his family to own his own home, he felt torn. ‘As I placed art and books on the wall, church candles and interior magazines on the black enamelled coffee table,’ he remembered, ‘I felt a strong sense of denying everything my family was.’ And as he sat on his William Morris chair, ‘with a glass of claret in my hand and something light and choral on the stereo, I realised I’d become middle class’. Mrs Thatcher would have been proud of him. But he still felt guilty about it.54

  To people who liked their idols to be suffering artists, Kemp’s coffee table struck entirely the wrong note. But by the early 1980s suffering artists were no longer in vogue. Instead, the New Romantics liked to see themselves as successful businessmen. ABC’s lead singer Martin Fry said they had changed their name from Vice Versa to give them a ‘new brand name’. The Human League’s Phil Oakey said there was ‘only a point in putting out records if people are going to buy them’, while Adam Ant boasted that he ‘put a lot of thought into the product’. ‘These days’, reflected Smash Hits in 1982, ‘your modern young musician wouldn’t look out of place in the head office of Shell International. The corporate image – executive-style suits, ties and briefcases – is in!’

  The most obvious example was Heaven 17, who had splintered from the Human League in 1980. Pop musicians were not ‘tortured artists’, the band’s co-founder Martyn Ware told the NME, but people trying ‘to make a living … The best and least hypocritical way of doing that is to act as a business.’ So Heaven 17 was merely a ‘subsidiary’ of the British Electric Foundation (BEF), which Ware and his friend Ian Craig Marsh had set up after leaving the Human League. Its first album, Penthouse and Pavement (1981), carried the BEF logo with the corporate slogan ‘The New Partnership – That’s opening doors all over the world’. The cover showed the band with slicked-back hair and pinstriped suits, answering telephones and shaking hands against a background of Dallas-style office blocks. The point, Ware told Simon Reynolds, was to ‘get rid of all this hypocrisy of “We’re artists, we don’t care about the money.” Let’s strip the façade bare and have a look at what’s underneath – handshakes, signing contracts, busy-ness.’ Ironically, Ware was on the left and had warm words for Tony Benn. But to the casual observer, Penthouse and Pavement looked less like a parody of busy-ness than an endorsement of business. And Ware and his colleagues did not look like radicals. They looked like yuppies.55

  But it was Duran Duran who most aggressively seized the commercial possibilities of the 1980s. For their first global tour, which began in late 1983, Le Bon and his colleagues secured a sponsorship deal with Sony, which wanted to promote its new range of video cassettes. Not only were all their programmes, posters and tickets emblazoned with the Sony logo, but concert venues were dressed with Sony banners, while a ‘girl merchandising force’ handed out cassettes to anybody who bought a concert programme. And although abuse rained down, Duran Duran were not alone. Levi’s had already sponsored Roxy Music and David Bowie, while two other video-cassette firms, TDK and Maxell, struck deals with the Rolling Stones and Japan (the band, not the country). ‘This’, said a spokesman for the ‘music sponsorship consultants’ West Nally, ‘is just the tip of the iceberg.’56

  The fact that three different groups were advertising video cassettes was no coincidence. Pop videos were not entirely new: many groups had recorded promotional clips in the 1960s, while Queen had made their ground-breaking ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ video as far back as 1975. But with the success of the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video, which cost a then-record £250,000, every New Romantic group wanted an expensive video of its own, preferably with a generous costume budget and a lot of dry ice. For all the talk of individualism, they often looked exactly the same, at once whimsical, bombastic and very obviously influenced by advertising. One celebrated example was Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s ‘Souvenir’, filmed at Blenheim Palace, where Andy McCluskey drives around in a classic red sports car, and at Stowe School, where Paul Humphreys ponders the meaning of life on the Palladian Bridge. It looks like a parody of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited, though it was actually made beforehand. But the video that really defined the age was Duran Duran’s infamously luxurious ‘Rio’ (1982), the band resplendent in their baggy suits as their yacht cuts through the sun-kissed waters of the Caribbean. A casual viewer would hardly guess that they came from Birmingham. But perhaps it was because they came from Birmingham that they were so keen to do it.

  To the New Romantics’ critics, their videos proved beyond doubt that they had thrown in their lot with Mrs Thatcher’s gospel of materialism. What did it say about pop music, lamented the Guardian, that with so many people unemployed, they were making ‘expensive holiday films in exotic locations’? But making a glossy video made commercial sense, especially if you wanted to be successful across the Atlantic. Few American bands bothered making videos, so when the cable channel MTV was launched on 1 August 1981, it relied heavily on British acts, giving them a huge advantage in the battle for hearts and minds. Even MTV’s very first video was British. Appropriately enough, it was the Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’.

  It is a shame, though, that MTV never showed the greatest New Romantic video of all, first broadcast on BBC2 the following February. A man in a beret drives up to a country house; a Nazi goose-steps on the stairs; a bearded Cavalier brandishes his sword; a group of androgynous youngsters cavort in the grounds; a strange, vampiric figure wades through a burning lake. Every detail is impeccably judged, from the floppy hair and lurid make-up to the distorted graphics and impenetrable lyrics:

  Let’s spend our honeymoon in East Berlin

  And though, like lemmings, we will never swim …

  By the river of blood, the children cry

  Their egos ruined by an alibi

  The cruel sea of a heartless earth, oh

  This must mean something to me …

  The band’s name, perfectly chosen, was Lufthansa Terminal. The song, meanwhile, was called ‘Nice Video, Shame about the Song’. It was one of the best things the sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News ever did. And actually, the song is not that bad.57

  The story of the New Romantics was many things. It was a story about the aftershocks of punk, but it looked back to the founding spirit of pop. It was a story of working-class aspiration, but it was also one about entrepreneurship, consumerism and celebrity. It began in the back streets of Soho, but many of its most celebrated bands came from struggling industrial cities further north. It was dominated almost entirely by men, but men who wore mascara and eyeliner, frills and ruffs. It became identified with the spirit of Thatcherism, but many of its leading characters voted Labour. And although the outlandish costumes dominated the press coverage, it was at heart a story about technological change. It was the cheap new synthesizers of the late 1970s that gave the music of the New Romantics its distinctive timbre. And like the voice of Margaret Thatcher, the hiss of the home video and the flicker of the computer screen, the sound of the synthesizer became an indelible part of the cultural texture of the 1980s.

  It was another technological innovation, though, that really pointed to music’s future. In May 1980 the Daily Express reported that Sony were about to launch a ‘revolutionary new cassette player’, which had been on sale in Japan since the previous summer. ‘The Japanese call it the Walkman,’ the paper explained, ‘presumably because the gadget enables you to listen to your favourite music while walking, jogging, travelling on the tube – anywhere … Before long the streets will be full of wired-up fans!’58

  Even in a market awash with new technology, the Walkman was a stunning success. In July 1981 the Mirror reported that Sony had already sold 100,000 sets in Britain an
d some 2 million worldwide. ‘The demand is fantastic,’ said a spokesman for the Laskys hi-fi chain. ‘Our shops just can’t get enough.’ They were not cheap, with costs ranging from £50 to £125, the equivalent of perhaps £200 to £500 today. But already it was common to see people wandering the streets ‘wired up to [their] earphones … They’ve been seen being worn by bicycling barristers and by art gallery and museum browsers. Some teenagers even take them to discos – preferring their own music to that of the DJ.’59

  By the summer of 1982, the Walkman’s place in British life was firmly established. Sony’s total sales in Britain had now hit 750,000, while rival firms had sold at least 600,000 cheaper models. Cassette sales were surging, up from a fifth to a third of all record sales within just two years. Yet, as always, new technology brought new anxieties. In September a conference of environmental health officers heard that perhaps a thousand people a year were being deafened by their new gadgets, which produced sound levels ‘well above the safety limits applied in factories’. Teachers, bus conductors and ‘irate drivers’ found them infuriating, while the British Cycling Federation warned that wearing headphones on a bike was ‘terribly dangerous’. But there was no denying that the Walkman was cool: ‘the first gadget’, said the Observer, ‘to combine hi-fi and high fashion’. Even Princess Diana had one. The Daily Mail claimed that while staying at Balmoral she had become ‘so engrossed in the music that she failed to notice the Queen when they passed in the corridor’.

  What did it all mean? Even at this early stage, the radio presenter Annie Nightingale thought the Walkman marked the onset of a ‘musical revolution’, which ‘could mean the disappearance of the conventional long-playing disc by the end of the eighties’. And like so many cultural developments of the early 1980s, the Walkman struck some observers as a lamentable retreat from collective solidarity. The rock critic Tim de Lisle, who loved his Walkman, recognized that its detractors saw it as ‘something anti-social and sinister’, a way of ‘rejecting everyday life, dropping out’, another ‘unwanted invention of the Me Decade’. The radical magazine City Limits, meanwhile, took a very dim view not just of the Walkman but of those who had them. ‘The Invasion of the Walkman People seems to have created a true post-punk blank generation, passing through without contributing, escaping into an aural oblivion ominous in its alienation,’ wrote Cynthia Rose.