This vivid account of the legendary Blitz club was written by one of the key players on a scene that set the tone and style for 1980s culture — through Steve Strange, Spandau Ballet, Boy George and Marilyn — and comes off the back of a show at the Design Museum dedicated to the place. At the exhibition, there are clothes, posters, memorabilia, videos, handwritten notes — seemingly every available scrap of material which can shed any light on this Soho club, which only ran for a little over a year.
See also: Spandau Ballet on the Blitz club, Bowie and turning the world Technicolour
All of which must be of some amusement to writer Robert Elms, although not a surprise. The community of misfits and outcasts who gathered at the Blitz always believed in themselves, and certainly believed in each other, spurring on their friends to dress more outrageously, to create, to make a scene in every sense. Yet the club itself, on Great Queen Street on the edge of Covent Garden, was nothing special. Inside the exhibition is a replica of it, and you can’t imagine a less inspiring place, a Second World War-themed pub with Sir Winston Churchill staring down from the walls. But as Elms makes clear in this book, it was about the people, not the place.
It all started after Strange’s previous club night — David Bowie-themed, at Billy’s in Soho — closed down almost as soon as it had begun; but not before it had provided a bunch of dandies with a place to gather and dance and listen to the electronica records spun by Rusty Egan. Elms takes us through his first experiences of stepping into Billy’s wearing “voluminous baby-blue peg trousers, paired with kung-fu slippers… with my barnet in an exaggerated, asymmetric wedge blocking out one eye”. Inside he saw two boys dancing together, straight out of a Jean Genet play, “a girl from my council estate wrapped around a bottle-blonde beauty in fishnet tights and little else,” Boy George and other glamorous types looking on and Giorgio Moroder playing over the soundsystem. He writes: “We were home.”
Misfits and miscreants
Strange started Blitz in 1979 and it ran until the following year. The club was the basis for the New Romantic movement, which in its ambition and individualistic glamour — and simple timing — became associated with the rise of Thatcherism. While Elms does show how sudden fame and wads of cash fanned the flames of ego, the idea that the Blitz club kids (and they were kids, mostly teenagers) were cold, snobbish elitists is trashed here.
Blitz nights were on Tuesdays, when you were least likely to get your head kicked in
“Most of the regulars were working-class kids, often from rough parts of town … it was a gathering of misfits and miscreants coming together to ward off evil,” he writes. The book is at its best as he paints a picture of the context around the Blitz. This was a depressed and depressing country, with strikes and unemployment, a lack of hope and a severe lack of money. Soho was empty, devoid of life and venues, Covent Garden much the same. He describes how council planning had removed whole communities from the centre of London and sent them off into the suburbs. It meant Elms and his fellow clubbers had to travel into town in all their extravagant gear, making each journey perilous. Blitz nights were on Tuesdays, a quiet night when you were least likely to get your head kicked in.
A daring, creative spark
The bravery of these iconoclasts is what hits home here. They were working class, lost in some ways, yet stimulated by Bowie and the DIY punk movement to invent themselves as exotic figures of the future. The contrast to our times now, where self-expression is not played out on the streets but on screens, is marked. Sure, it may be a lot safer, but what is lost is group stimulus, a mutually encouraging daring that spurs on creativity.
And right now, when your “authentic” self is all-important, and your identity must be fixed in place and piously policed, to read about an era when you created yourself, liberated yourself from any expectations, transcended gender, race, class, and dreamed new selves… well, it cannot fail to be inspiring.
Blitz: The Club That Created the Eighties by Robert Elms is out now (Faber & Faber, £20)
