06 11 05 576 W - + 9 - 2 Blitzed Again

The way some people talk about The Blitz Club these days, anyone would think that it must have been a really glamorous place. It wasn’t. Believe me. I went there and I remember it well. It was a poky little club with a small dance floor at ground level and an eating and drinking area with tables upstairs. There was nothing special about the venue though I guess some of the clientele were a bit on the unusual side - certainly in their dress sense (or lack thereof) . The Blitz was one of the places where the New Romantic movement first began to take hold. ‘Movement’, did I say? To be honest, I’m not really sure if the wearing of too much makeup and odd-looking clothes really justifies the name of ‘movement’ but let’s be generous…

Steve Strange, who was one of the characters most closely associated with The Blitz, later went upmarket by ‘hosting’ nights at The Camden Palace. This was a much, much bigger venue than The Blitz; it dominated the Mornington Crescent end of The Camden High Street in North London. The Camden Palace was an old cinema that had been converted into a night spot by turning the downstairs area into a dance floor and putting tables into the balcony areas up above. By this time, the ‘New Romantic’ movement was no longer a minority interest, a ‘cult without a name’. It had gone mainstream and it was commonplace to see long lines of people (all dressed to the nines) queuing up to be let into the Palace. If you weren’t wearing the right gear (“Is that a Top Shop suit, sir? Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear…”) then you would be turned away.

In the early days, it wasn’t uncommon to see a few of the Spandaus, a Modern Romance or two, Steve Strange of course, and a few other fashionable chart toppers all mingling with the hoi polloi in The Camden Palace. In spite of that, I don’t think there was anything particularly glamorous about The Camden Palace. It had all the atmosphere of a Bingo Hall (which, is, I believe, precisely what it was in the intervening period between its career as a cinema and a disco).

I was re-reading Christopher Isherwood’s memoirs, ‘Mr Norris Changes Train’, ‘Goodbye To Berlin’ and ‘Christopher and His Kind’ recently. These are, to varying degrees, fictional/autobiographical accounts of Isherwood’s life in Berlin during the 1930s. Goodbye To Berlin includes some stories about an English woman named Sally Bowles who was later translated into an American woman, played by Liza Minnelli, in the film Cabaret.

Somewhere between real life and Hollywood, Bowles becomes a brassy cabaret singer in The Kit Kat Club. This club doesn’t exist in the books. The closest thing to it is a seedy little bar called Lady Windermere’s Fan. In all probability, there never was a club anything remotely like The Kit Kat Club in pre-war Berlin. But, having seen it in Cabaret, an awful lot of people want to believe that The Kit Kat Club, or something very like it, really did exist.

The same kind of mythologizing is happening with The Blitz. Maybe we should leave it that way. Forget the fact that it was a very ordinary, poky little club. Let’s just remember it as it should have been - divine decadence, darling…