“The Blitz was an absolutely beautiful way to grow up,” Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet recalls. “We didn’t talk about diversity back then because it was just part of the culture. The whole idea of new romantic was that you could be who you wanted to be: one day a soldier, the next a cowboy — or an Elizabethan cowboy — and it all made sense.”
In February 1979, on a dreary Tuesday night in Covent Garden — post punk, and amid the death rattle of disco — a new kind of club was born that fast became an incubator for a group of budding creatives. The club was the Blitz and it was to be the setting for a cultural earthquake that defined how the 1980s looked, sounded and felt. For 18 raucous months Tuesdays belonged to the flamboyant few. From 10 p.m. the pedestrian wine bar patrons were ushered out as Rusty Egan, the former Rich Kids drummer, began blasting out Teutonic electronica.
Before the Blitz there was Billy’s on Meard Street in Soho. Egan and Steve Strange first teamed up for an epic house party, and from that sprang the idea for a David Bowie‑focused club night. The crowd at Billy’s were glam and androgynous, attracting Bananarama’s Siobhan Fahey, as well as Kemp and his brother, Gary, who were brought there by their friend Steve Dagger, the Spandau manager-in-waiting. “The flyer said something like ‘Jump aboard the night train: Bowie night’,” Gary remembers. “Steve Strange was on the door dressed in the wildest thing I had ever seen — he looked like a Cossack with a quiff. He liked the look of us and we got in.” This was not a given, considering Strange’s exacting standards of style-gatekeeping and his penchant for withering put-downs.
Three months in, the promoters were forced to leave the venue after its owners demanded more money. Egan went to Berlin and Dusseldorf “in search of Kraftwerk and anything coming out of that area”. Returning to London three months later, armed with “new wave and electronic records”, he, along with Strange, opened the Blitz, tucked away at 4 Great Queen Street in what was then a ghost town at night. “All of Covent Garden was planned to be demolished, but we wanted to be in the center of town,” says the broadcaster Robert Elms, whose Blitz memoir debuts this month. “It’s where we had our clubs, shops and parties.”
A Second World War-themed wine bar, with red‑and‑white tablecloths and candles in bottles, didn’t scream cultural game-changer. Yet, for Martin Kemp, “it felt like someone in 1979 had flicked on the color switch of life”. The costume designer Michele Clapton recalls thinking: “This is the most amazing place ever, because I wasn’t the only weirdo. I had found my tribe.” The “tribe” included many who would go on to lead in art, design, music and fashion throughout the Eighties, Nineties and beyond, earning them the revered moniker the Blitz Kids. Launching three months before Thatcher became prime minister, Blitz was a lifeline for Britain’s disaffected 17 to 21‑year‑olds. Boy George — then still George O’Dowd — held cloakroom duties, where he confessed to pilfering from people’s pockets.
Before him, Princess Julia had the gig. “It was Steve’s way of making me be there weekly, but it meant a bit of extra money and you got your tea made as well.” That didn’t last long; “I got really drunk one night and vomited in there. I got fired and George took over.”
Inspired by Egan’s music selection, Dagger advised Gary Kemp to introduce a synthesizer to Spandau Ballet. Kemp rewrote many of the soon-to-be hit songs on their debut album. With this reinvention, their dream of becoming the Blitz house band was realized — and Top of the Pops came calling shortly after.
Decades on, the Blitz’s cultural impact is finally getting the museum treatment. A big exhibition opens later this month at the Design Museum, riding the crest of Eighties nostalgia fueled by Stranger Things and retrospectives of The Face and Leigh Bowery. “We’d been wrestling with how to do a good Eighties show for years, but the decade was too big to do justice to,” the museum’s director, Tim Marlow, explains. “After visiting our Amy Winehouse show, Steve Dagger came to me and pitched Blitz. It was a brilliant idea because there’s no doubt this was the cauldron for what happened in the subsequent decade, particularly in London, which enhanced its position as a global cultural center.”
On display will be about 250 exhibits, including Gary Kemp’s original synthesizer, early pieces from the milliner Stephen Jones and the jeweler Dinny Hall, garments worn by Strange — who died in 2015 — and a Fiona Dealey-designed black leather backless dress worn by Sade. The designer Antony Price, known for dressing Roxy Music, believes the analog era helped the scene thrive. “It was a very inventive period: with no mobile phones, it was like getting people to unthink electricity.”
The show will also feature an immersive experience, transporting visitors to peak Blitz era. Crucially, Marlow insists: “It’s not just new romantic — it’s full of subcultures and tribes.” Also on display, for instance, will be the clerical-style robes worn by the Saint Martins student Darla-Jane Gilroy, when she and her fellow Blitz Kid Judith Frankland were handpicked by David Bowie to feature in his video for Ashes to Ashes, wearing their ecclesiastical garb. Days later Gilroy was filming with Bowie on a beach near Hastings. “Everyone thinks we only got £50, but we filmed all week and got paid a lot more than that. To this day it’s probably the thing I get approached about the most,” Gilroy says.
When Bowie appeared at the Blitz, the collective’s cool façade instantly dropped. “I’m leaning against the cloakroom counter with [Boy] George slagging everyone off and David Bowie walked in,” the nightlife legend Philip Sallon recalls. “The act dropped and all these f***ing people turned into a bunch of crawlers, shouting, ‘Bowie, Bowie’. It was unbelievable, and I said to George, ‘This is disgusting.’ Much as he was a Bowie fan, George nodded along with me.” Not everyone was starstruck, though. Spandau refused to follow Bowie upstairs; Gary Kemp shrugged: “He’s yesterday’s man. We’re today. Sometimes you have to reject your parents.”
Egan and Strange created a rare alchemy at the Blitz. Egan says that “me being a [straight] geezer and Steve being gay was the magic”. The fashion writer Iain R Webb says: “Like Steve and Rusty, the Blitz club clientele was gay and straight, but predominantly women and gay men. For once in their lives the straight men were in the minority, but it gave them permission to dress up without being bothered or beaten up.”
Strange ruled the door with imperious flair, something the Scottish fashion designer Pam Hogg discovered on her debut visit. “I was really shy and a bit lost, but I’d heard everyone dressed up in their own homemade clothes to get in, which I’d always done. Standing in line, I could hear Steve Strange destroy anyone he didn’t feel fitted his aesthetic and I got more and more nervous. As I stepped out to leave, his voice screamed, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I nearly died thinking he was going to humiliate me, but instead he said, ‘Get in.’ [Inside] I felt it was exactly where I should be, with all these incredible creatures. It was so goddamn exciting and supercharged with the music.”
Then there is the legendary tale of Mick Jagger being turned away. Many, like Boy George, were appalled at Strange’s arrogance, regardless of how on-brand it seemed. Graham Scott, however, puts the record straight. He phoned Strange when researching his book, with Chris Sullivan, We Can Be Heroes — The Blitz Club Where Style Was Born. “Steve revealed what really happened. The Blitz was absolutely rammed and health and safety told him there were too many people inside. No one else could be let in otherwise he’d be in big trouble. Lo and behold, ten minutes later Mick Jagger turns up with an entourage. He was totally pissed and asked, ‘Do you know who I am?’ Steve said, ‘Obviously I know who you are. I’d love to let you in, but I can’t because we’ll lose our license.’ There were hordes of paparazzi outside, and the headline the next day is Steve Strange doesn’t let Mick Jagger in.”
For its short run the Blitz was more than a club. It was a place where self-invention was sanctified, an exhibitionist’s love letter to the past and future, and a launchpad for a new cultural era. Perry Haines, who co-founded i-D magazine, likes to talk of the Blitz’s butterfly effect: “All those Blitz butterflies sent shock waves that went all around the world, impacting and influencing popular culture across the planet.” As for those butterflies who escaped their cocoons at the Blitz, many remain at the forefront of the creative professions, proving that once a Blitz Kid, always a Blitz Kid.
Shelley Rubenstein is a writer, broadcaster, producer, and poker player
