+ 3 - 2 | § ¶Friday Night Bronski Beat
I was going to say that ‘Smalltown Boy’ was a remarkably positive gay themed song for 1984. This was back in the days when the age of consent for gay men in the UK was 21. On re-watching the video, I see that it’s not quite as positive as I remember it...Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy
Actually, while the early ‘80s weren’t a hugely ‘gay-friendly’ time (even George Michael and Boy George were not exactly ‘out’), the ‘80s were by no means as bad as the ‘70s. In spite of this record and an album called ‘Age Of Consent’, Bronski Beat weren’t the best known gay group of 1984, however. That honour went to Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
+ 2 - 5 | § ¶Retrofest '80s Festival - Tickets Still Available
Retrofest, the UK's first all-80s music festival has announced that there will be tickets on sale at the site over the weekend of September 1 and 2.Anyone who has been holding off to see what the weather will be like (current forecast: overcast but dry) can come down and buy a day, weekend or family ticket at the site's box office at Culzean Castle. However these tickets will be cash only. No credit cards will be accepted.
Note: There is the possibility of roadworks on the main road to Maybole, reducing the road to single lane for both directions and those travelling to Retrofest are advised to take that under consideration when setting off. Bear in mind there will also be extra traffic because of the 20,000 expected at Retrofest.
Some nearby B&Bs and hotels have places left - check the Retrofest website at www.retrofest.co.uk for more details.
+ 4 - 1 | § ¶Matt Bianco - How To Be A Pop Star
Here’s another bit from the Collingbourne ‘80s Archives. This comes from an interview I did with Mark Reilly of Matt Bianco. If you are a budding pop star looking for hints on how to start a career, here’s a few tips...Matt Bianco on MySpace“It’s all very well practising endlessly in your dad’s garage, annoying the neighbours, but you’ll never get yourself a wall full of gold discs until you get yourself out in public.
“I used to bash away in the garage with my friend, Tim. By this stage I’d managed to learn about three chords on the guitar and felt this was plenty to get myself into a punk band. So that’s exactly what I did.
“Of course, no new band will make an impression unless they’re original. So we wrote our own songs. They were terrible songs. But at least they were original terrible songs. We got our first gigs simply by going along to pubs and students’ unions and saying ‘Book us.’ When they said ‘No.’ We’d say, ‘We’re cheap.’ Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.”
And here’s their big hit, Get Out of Your Lazy Bed on Top Of The Pops...
+ 5 - 1 | § ¶80s Empire On MySpace
Yup, the Empire continues to grow... Come over to MySpace and join us there: http://www.myspace.com/80sempire
+ 3 - 3 | § ¶Kim Wilde on Simon Le Bon
(so to speak...)Browsing through carbon copies of my interviews from the early '80s, I chanced upon one in which Kim Wilde gave her opinions on various male pop stars of the day. She had some strong (and somewhat unusual) opinions on Simon Le Bon...
“Duran Duran have made some quite good records but I find Simon himself rather unconvincing and affected. I was with him once and he started talking to me and I’d read exactly the same words ten minutes ago in a magazine. Poor bloke. I think he needs a break. Send him on holiday, I say. As a personality, Divine is far more convincing than Simon Le Bon. Maybe Simon Le Bon should try a tight dress on!”
Kim Wilde - Kids In America...
+ 3 - 2 | § ¶YMCA in Finnish
Don’t know if this is from the ‘80s or not but it’s just to fab I had to share it....+ 1 - 5 | § ¶The 1980s Are Back Again
(or: The Times They Are A-Changin’...?)“They may have been acceptable in the Eighties, but do the likes of Bananarama, Curiosity Killed the Cat, Howard Jones and the Human League pass muster with the pop pickers of today?”asks The Times newspaper.
In an article all about the forthcoming ’80s-themed Retrofest concert (in which, perversely, none of the above performers will appear), The Times goes all nostalgic about the ‘80s music scene. But it ain’t all nostalgia...
And the Eighties revival isn’t all retro festivals. Alongside the main-stream marketing of nostalgia there’s a growing underground club scene that harks back to the age of gender-benders and electric dreams in more creative ways. Clubs such as Duckie, Horse Meat Disco and Pop-starz have been playing Eighties records for years, while others – Foreign, Nag Nag Nag and Trailer Trash – have spawned a new generation of club kids not unlike the Blitz kids of the early Eighties.
Read the article
+ 1 - 4 | § ¶Midge Ure - From Glasgow To Vienna
Midge Ure is one of the guiding figures of the whole New Romantic movement. Singing with Ultravox, he took that band out of the ‘cult’ backwaters and into the Top Ten mainstream. He was also a founding member of Visage.But before any of that he had been in a short-lived 1970s ‘boy band’ named Slik. I interviewed Midge in the early ‘80s for a feature called “Things I wish I’d known at 15”. Here’s a bit of that interview...
Even when I was seventeen or eighteen I still used to believe it when people would say ‘Wow, what a guitar player! What a star!’ So when I joined Slik and we had a successful record I thought: ‘Hey, they are right, I am a star!’ and so I started behaving the way I thought a star should behave - in other words, like a prat.
Then, six months later, when all that was whipped from under my feet, I couldn’t take it. Some musicians go to pieces when they no longer get all that adulation or have people asking them to do interviews. Luckily, I did manage to pull myself together, but it was quite a shock to my ego.
My business associates in the early years were as naive as I was. We went through some really dodgy patches and ended up owing fortunes to our management. Every time we flew from Glasgow to London to do TV or a photo-session they’d pay for it. When Slik ended we owed £100,000 to these people. That’s a hell of a lot to owe someone when you’re twenty
I’d like to have arrived at the sort of success that I have with Ultravox when I was about eighteen. Then the last ten years would have been really fun. But then, who knows, if that had happened, maybe I would have burnt myself out by the time I got to twenty-two? So perhaps things turned out for the best after all...
And here’s Vienna...
+ 6 - 0 | § ¶Flexipop! and the Cult of the Flexi Disc
Forget iPods and DVDs, for real honest-to-goodness nostalgic disposable pop records, there’s nothing to beat the flexi disc. Thin, transparent bits of plastic in a range of gaudy colours, one of these discs used to appear stuck to the cover of each month’s Flexipop! magazine back in the early ‘80s. I was a regular writer for Flexipop! in those days and I assumed that the discs, like my interviews, would be here today, gone tomorrow.Not so. It turns out that both the magazine and the discs on its cover are now collectors’ items (ah, if only I’d saved more of them....!)
Recently, Stylus Magazine published an article all about the cult of the flexi-disc and they interviewed me as part of it.
Here's a snippet...
Besides its free flexi disc, the magazine—founded by a pair of ex-Record Mirror scribes, Barry Cain and Tim Lott—was notable for its rather impetuous approach to journalism. Collingbourne remembered a while-the-cats-are-away-type incident in 1982, where he and art editor Mark Manning (later to embark on a music career under the pseudonym Zodiac Mindwarp) turned a feature-and-photo spread on the Meteors into a Mad Max style cannibal holocaust. “The trouble was, the cover of the magazine showed clean-living kids Haircut 100,” Collingbourne said, “while the flexi disc was supposed to be mums’ favorites, Bucks Fizz. When the editors got back from holiday, they quickly realized the problems Mark and I had got them into, and replaced the Bucks Fizz disc with a Marc Almond one in the hope that would stop young kids or their mums from buying it.” The ensuing backlash garnered even more attention for the publication: a grandmother claimed the spread encouraged cannibalism among readers, which led to the issue being seized by police, and Flexipop! being banned by British newspaper and stationery distributor W H Smith.
Shit-stirring ledes and provocative layouts were all certainly bewitching, but it was the flexi discs that kept readers returning. “A really good flexi would make the magazine fly off the newsstands,” Collingbourne said, citing the popularity of the February of 1981 issue, which included a flexi of Adam and the Ants cutting a version of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A” named “A.N.T.S.”
Read the full article: Disposable Pop: A History Of The Flexi Disc.
Sadly, I can’t find a video of Adam and the Ants singing A.N.T.S. (in all probability, there isn’t one...) so here’s Kings Of The Wild Frontier instead...
Johnnie Depp, eat yer heart out!
+ 3 - 3 | § ¶Nik Kershaw, The Fashion and The Fertilizer!
Glancing through my heap of faded carbon copies (yes, these are from the far-off days before I even had a computer!), I come across an old interview with one Nicholas David Kershaw. He was born in Bristol (so he told me) and his brother, strange as it may seem, was a dolphin trainer....However, moving quickly on to the important stuff: fashion. This is what Nik Kershaw had to say over two decades ago...
“I’ve got a wardrobe full of clothes that I’ve never worn. I see them in shops and think they’re amazing, then when I get them home and have another look at them, I realise that they’re hideous. I usually end up wearing just anything that I feel comfortable in such as track suits. My least favourite clothes are some of the things I had to wear when I was in a funk group called Fusion.”
Incidentally, if you are now or ever have been Nik Kershaw’s neighbour, pay attention to the next juicy titbit. Nik revealed the following astonishing fact....
"I one phoned up a fertilizer supplier and asked them to dump a load of manure in my neighbour’s garden. Amazingly, they actually did it!”
And now for a more fragrant moment. Nik’s video of Wouldn’t It Be Good...
+ 4 - 2 | § ¶Steve Strange Goes Hell For Leather
I interviewed Mr Strange for a short-lived magazine called Kicks, back in 1982. Here are a couple of extracts from that interview....“No, I don’t think (The Blitz) was very superficial. A lot of creativity came out of it. A lot of the people who used to go to The Blitz have now become artists and designers - as well as musicians, of course. Even now there are new bands still emerging out of that scene - people like Haysi Fantayzee and Culture Club, for example.
“As for the whole fashion bit, well I think that too much emphasis has been put on that. The Blitz got so hyped up that you had to be dressed really outrageously or you weren’t going to get in. It’s true that I did vet people at the door, but it wasn’t really that heavy. The barrier was because we didn’t want people who were out to get pissed and violent, or skinheads or football supporters."
And here is the 'ultimate' New Romantic song... Fade To Grey
Visage, "We Fade to Grey"
Steve told me about his changing style - including dabbling (unsuccessfully) with clothes based on The Lord Of The Rings! At the time we spoke, he was starting to explore the highways and byways of 'sex style'....
“The next single we put out will probably be called ‘Pleasure Boys’ —and that will be quite a change for us. It’s all about sex, but it’s definitely not done in the same way as Soft Cell might do it!"
Here, to ring the changes, Steve Strange gets raunchy in black leather with The Pleasure Boys
+ 2 - 4 | § ¶Lana Pellay / Al Pillay - Pistol In My Pocket
I first met Alan Pellay when he strolled into the Flexipop! offices one sunny afternoon in 1982 (if my memory serves me well) and demanded to be interviewed. Nope, he never was exactly a shrinking violet! It didn’t take me long to realise that he was a pretty interesting guy. His showbiz career had spanned everything from drag queen (“Well, if I’m gonna be called a queen, I might as well act royal!”) to alternative comedian – and now, he told me, he was branching out as a disco diva.He had decided to branch out into pop music, he said, because “I was fed up of being a small star and I just wanted to become a much bigger star...”
He went on to have some big European disco hits in the ‘80s – probably most famously with ‘Pistol In My Pocket’ (a title that can be read in different ways bearing in mind that Alan – who was at the time known as Lana – was in the stages of preparing for what is now known as ‘gender reassignment’ – something which he subsequently changed his mind about before it was too late!). For the full lowdown on his life, times and disco hits, go to his web site (note that the surname is now spelt with an ‘i’, not an ‘e’ at: http://www.alpillay.com/). In the meantime, here’s the video for Pistol In My Pocket.
+ 6 - 0 | § ¶John Foxx Friday
You can never have too much John Foxx. So here's some more...No One Driving
He's A Liquid
And with Ultravox...
Hiroshima Mon Amour
+ 3 - 1 | § ¶John Foxx - From Ultravox To Underpass
Just came across this video of the superb Underpass by John Foxx...Foxx was one of the truly great innovators of the '70s and '80s. The original singer with Ultravox, he inspired Gary Numan and who knows how many of the electro-groups of the early '80s. Strangely he never achieved huge stardom himself. He really should have. Wonderful stuff...
+ 4 - 4 | § ¶Wham! Breaks The Sound Barrier
Thanks to the BBC for this story..."A Wham! fan who infuriated neighbours by blasting out their hit Last Christmas all night has been prosecuted by council officials. Brian Turner, of Doncaster Road, Newcastle, repeatedly played the festive favourite at full volume one night in May. Now he has become the first noise nuisance to be prosecuted by Newcastle City Council's Night Watch team. Magistrates fined Turner £200 and ordered him to pay £215 costs."
Could have been worse, I guess. I mean, he might have been a Joe Dolce fan...
+ 3 - 2 | § ¶Marilyn Goes Off His Face
Here’s a bit more from the interview I did with Marilyn back in the early ‘80s. It continues the story of ‘A Day in His Life’...“I walked down Carnaby Street for a while to see if I could find any clothes I fancied in the shops, but I couldn’t, so I went to have a facial treatment instead.
“For anyone who’s never had a facial, I’ll try to give you some idea of what happens. The first thing they do is to cleanse the skin, then they put a kind of thick wax over your face and scrape it off. Then they start squeezing and pinching your skin to clean out every pore. There are some other processes too but I’m not exactly sure what they involve because I usually fall asleep half way through.
“By the time they’ve finished with you, you end up looking like a pig. It takes at least three days for your skin to recover, so I was really furious when I discovered this evening that I was supposed to be doing a TV recording tomorrow. I’ll look absolutely dreadful. I’m sure I’ll have big red lumps all over my face and I won’t be able to hide them because you’re not supposed to wear any makeup after having a treatment.”
And here’s part One of an interesting TV documentary (featuring Marilyn, Boy George, Steve Strange and others)...
Here’s Part Two...
And links to the rest of the documentary...
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
+ 1 - 5 | § ¶Marilyn, Colin Wild and Carnaby Street
One of the last remnants (in the 1980s) of the heady days of Carnaby Street (which was at its peak in the ‘60s) was a showbiz tailor by the name of Colin Wild. I can’t recall how I first heard of him. All I know is that I wanted a certain special something to wear to The Blitz that evening and my wardrobe was bare. Someone told me that if I wanted an outfit made in a hurry, Wild was the man to do it.He had a shop – well, it was more a sort of upstairs/downstairs set of rooms, really - at the end of Carnaby Street. I went and told him what I wanted (‘a sort of ballet dancer’s shirt, white but shimmery, big puff sleeves and a laced-up collar’) – he said ‘Come back in an hour’, I did and there it was. While I was there I met the TV comedian Russ Abbot who was also being kitted up for something to wear that evening (but not at The Blitz – or, anyway, I didn’t see him there
).I was reminded of Colin Wild when I was browsing through the carbon copies of some of my old interviews earlier today. Right at the top of the bundle is an interview with Marilyn which I did for ‘My Guy’ (OK, so it’s not The Times but, heck, a chap has to live, you know..) and purports to be Marilyn’s first hand account of ‘A Day In My Life’. Here’s a quick snippet...
“This morning I got up at 11 o’clock, which is quite early for me... the first thing I do after dragging myself out of bed is to go into the bathroom to try to make myself more presentable. that usually means scraping off the remains off yesterday’s makeup and putting on today’s.
“After lunch I went to see Colin Wild, who is quite a famous tailor who makes lots of things for people in show business. The last time I visited him I left a jacket that I wanted him to copy for me, but now I want to wear the jacket so I called in to pick it up.”
There’s a lot more to that interview which I may get around to putting online soon. In the meantime, here’s a site with the history of Colin Wild and The Carnaby Cavern.
And here is a fab video f Marilyn singing Calling Your Name...
+ 2 - 4 | § ¶Sal Solo, Classix Nouveaux and me...
Classix Nouveaux are one of the great ‘forgotten’ New Romantic bands. When I say ‘forgotten’, I don’t mean to be rude. But it’s a simple fact that, these days, many people who could name all the hits of Duran Duran and come up with half a dozen of Boy George’s most memorable quotes, haven’t even heard of Classix Nouveaux...
To be honest, even back in their heyday, they never really hit the really big ‘Big Time’. In fact they never even had a top ten record. The closest they came was number 11 with ‘Is It A Dream?’ in 1982. I just checked that in my dog-eared old copy of The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles – and I must say, it surprised me. I felt sure they’d had a top five hit at some time. In fact, ‘Is It A Dream’ was their only Top 20 hit ever. Even their great 1981 single, ‘Guilty’ only made it to 43.
The funny thing is, in spite of being relatively minor celebrities, Classix were regulars in the teen magazines in the UK. Well, they looked so darn’ great in photos. And, what’s more Sal Solo was a pleasure to work with. Unlike some stars of the period, he didn’t take himself seriously. In one issue of Flexipop!, for example, he played Lex Luther in a photo story while Buster Bloodvessel played Superman! (I still have a copy of that somewhere. I really must put it online one day).
The photo at the top of this article, by the way, is one that I took to illustrate an interview I did with him for ‘Jackie’ magazine. The theme of the interview was ‘My Hobby’ and Sal (bless him) claimed that his hobby was psychiatry...! Incidentally, in case you are wondering why he’s covering up his famous bald head, apparently (or so he told me) it was because he had a cut on it after hitting his bonce on the chimney. No, I’ve no idea what his head was doing that close to the chimney – he wasn’t saying... (you can get a full-size version of that pic for your Windows desktop on the Dark Neon Back To The '80s Site).
Anyway, as a reminder of what a great band Classix were and what a wonderful frontman Sal was, here is a tasty clip of one of their songs that really should have been a big hit but wasn’t - Guilty...
+ 5 - 1 | § ¶Adam And The Ants - Two Of The Best
A couple of Adam and the Ants videos (for no reason other than that I like them)...First, the wonderful Prince Charming (ah, how I love Diana Dors!)....
....and then the (arguably) even more wonderful Stand And Deliver...
Incidentally, did you spot Limahl in the vid’ for Stand And Deliver? I must say that I didn’t. He is there somewhere, apparently (at least, he told me he is...).
+ 6 - 2 | § ¶Whatever Happened to Zola Budd...?
Today in 1984...“The South African-born British athlete, Zola Budd, is again the centre of controversy following a disastrous accident during the women's 3,000m final at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. During the race she appears to have tangled with top American runner Mary Decker, putting Decker out of the race. The crowd's hostile reaction so unnerved the 18-year-old runner that she could only finish seventh.”According to the BBC, “Zola Budd has now largely given up running competitively, although she still runs for pleasure near her home in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where she lives with her husband and three children.”
+ 0 - 5 | § ¶Spit The Dog, Custard Pies and Tiswas
Tiswas (“Saturday, Saturday, Saturday is Tiswas, never a day to miss ‘cos, Saturday is Tiswas day...”) a bizarrely anarchic show that was shown on Saturday mornings in Britain in the ‘80s. Here’s a brief reminder...Elsewhere on The 80s Empire, our ‘80s correspondent has made passing mention of Spit The Dog. For the benefit of those people who don’t remember Spit (or were too young or living in far distant lands beyond the shores of this sceptred isle), here is a lovely little video of the mangy mutt on Tiswas with his owner, Bob Carlogees.
Supposedly for children, Tiswas gained a dedicated audience among somewhat older folk too (as you may deduce from the ages of the not-so-young youngsters in the Spit The Dog video who queue up in order to be physically assaulted by a glove puppet before being shoved into a cage...)
Now that’s what I call entertainment!
