Visage

August 1980: the post-atomic Pierrot David Bowie releases the single "Ashes To Ashes", an emblematic track of the fledgling "new romantic" movement, anticipating the release of the album "Scary Monsters". After debuting at number 4 on the UK charts, propelled by David Mallet's epoch-making video, the song shoots to number 1 within two weeks, launching yet another version of the Thin White Duke into the ether, and with him the new pop of the 80s. The pop of the television era, the one in which video kills the radio star, as the Buggles had aptly foreseen just a few months earlier. To pick the extras for the clip, David trawls through the devotees who throw wild parties in his honour in London, first at Billy's and then at the Blitz Club. Among the four lucky ones you'll spot here and there in eccentric outfits amid the pricey short film's solarised visuals is Steve Strange - the man (or rather, the boy) who at the time decided the fate of many young Londoners' nights out.

Indeed, while his friend Rusty Egan is behind the console firing off Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, the new-model Roxy Music (speaking of which, take a look at the cover of "Manifesto" to get an idea of what a Blitz regular might have drawn inspiration from), naturally Berlin-era Bowie, and the fledgling new wave of English synth acts (The Human League and The Normal chief among them) onto the dancefloor, Steve - a latter-day Nero - is stationed at the club's entrance, and with a flick of his thumb decides, with unappealable authority, who gets into the party and who doesn't. Freaks, shambling punks, schoolkids, anyone in flared jeans and a t-shirt: banned. Pirates with stylised make-up, effeminate dandies, people dressed in geometric outfits, backcombed hairdos, and so on: welcome inside.

The stylistic hallmark of the so-called Blitz Kids, in short, shunned sloppiness and anonymity in favour of a creative, eccentric self-presentation, shutting the door on both British and American youth aesthetics alike, in favour of a chic-kitsch reimagining of Mitteleuropa - a vision that had risen to prominence thanks precisely to Moroder, Kraftwerk, and those Anglo-American expats who, from Berlin, rewrote the pages of avant-garde rock between 1977 and 1979 (the sacred triad of Bowie-Eno-Iggy, to put it plainly).

If you're looking for the very embodiment of being in the right place at the right time, you'll find it in the figures of Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, in London in '79-'80, Covent Garden, the Blitz Club. But also in those of Boy George and the Kemp brothers, whom we'd come to know in Spandau Ballet: and that's just sticking to music and the big names, since that club also spawned a crop of designers destined to dictate the rules of youth fashion, not only in Britain, for at least half a decade.

But let's get back to our two friends, Steve and Rusty, and their hunger for glory. Being the deus ex machina of London's new fashion scene isn't enough - something more is needed. Among the regulars at Billy's, and later the Blitz, is a certain Billy Currie, seduced and abandoned along with his band Ultravox by frontman John Foxx, and now desperately searching for a new singer. Rusty Egan, who had a past as drummer in the ill-fated post-Pistols project of Glen Matlock, the Rich Kids, introduces him to Midge Ure, who had handled guitars and vocals in that band. And that's how the two become friends.

The Blitz is also frequented by a certain someone whose offices are just upstairs, but who - in this particular case - looks like the classic answer to a game of "spot the odd one out". With his blond beard and mop of hair, pale eyes and scruffy shirts, Martin Rushent has the perfect look to be in a West Coast pop band, or at most - suitably dolled up - to replace Benny Andersson in ABBA, but certainly not to walk the floors of a dancefloor club. Let alone this one.

Only the shrewd Steve is willing to turn a blind eye, since Martin, besides having been the sound engineer for, among others, T-Rex’s Electric Warrior, is also the producer of the Stranglers and the Buzzcocks, as well as so hooked on the Blitz sound that he goes looking for Phil Oakey, who is at that very moment putting together the version of Human League destined to dominate the world shortly after with “Dare”. Rushent is so well disposed toward Steve and Rusty that he recommends to them a top-notch band, made up of none other than the runaways from Magazine (born from a Buzzcocks offshoot) – Barry Adamson, John McGeoch and Dave Formula – who are to a certain strand of new wave sound what Zoff, Gentile and Cabrini were to the 1982 World Cup.

Despite the effort poured into it, the project moves forward in fits and starts: in the summer of ’79 the first single of an embryonic, still unfocused Visage project comes out, with the stylish Steve Strange as frontman and Rusty Egan on drums and drum machine. “Tar”, as the single is called, goes almost unnoticed and leads to the partial departure from the group of Barry Adamson, lured away by the sirens of Nick Cave, and at the same time to the greater involvement of Billy Currie and Midge Ure. This is because the tracks written up to that point were few and reinforcements were needed, but above all because one fine day Billy turns up at his friend’s place (not yet the singer of the new Ultravox) and says to him: “Hey Midge, listen to this backing track… I’ve called it ‘Toot City’ and wrote it with Chris Payne during a soundcheck on Gary Numan’s tour, where we were both keyboardists with Tubeway Army. What do you think?”

A light bulb goes off for the mustachioed Scot, he embroiders something on top of it and… and so our heroes are catapulted into Rushent’s studios in Berkshire to put together, with the rest of the crew, “Toot City”, which later became “Fade To Grey” – namely what would turn out to be the perfect sequel to the neo-romantic aesthetic dictated by “Ashes to Ashes”.

Let me now dispel the commonplace idea that 80s new pop was a crossroads of colour, joyous superficiality and carefree lightness. Well, it wasn’t like that, at least not at first. The first stirrings of neo-romanticism in music were peppered with shadowy lyrics, dark melodies, leaden and decadent atmospheres, all with the blessing of an enthusiastic public that flocked to buy crates of records of that kind. And the planet-wide hit “Fade To Grey” is no exception, slotting in exactly halfway between the anxieties of the young Numan of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and the dramatic melancholy of “Ashes To Ashes”. If the glassy-eyed Gary declaimed “⟦Q1⟧”, and if David answered with “⟦Q2⟧”, then the hieratic Strange (fed his lines by Midge, let’s not forget, especially when we get to the successful, and for many “terribly commercial”, “Vienna“) comes out with “⟦Q3⟧”. Asked to comment on the meaning of the lyrics, Strange later said: “Some time ago I was in Berlin, and through the wall I got a look at East Berlin […]; everything looked gloomy and grey to me, strange, threatening. Right after that I saw an old man walking wearily with a cane. Yes, tired and disillusioned with life. It was at that moment that the idea for ‘Fade To Grey’ took shape: entering old age, entering darkness, sinking into nothing. That’s what the song is about.”

“Fade To Grey” is also the first great hit in pop history to owe some of its sound to the extremely expensive Fairlight CMI, whose setup was entrusted to one of the few people at the time capable of doing it: Richard James Burgess, producer of Spandau Ballet’s smash hit “To Cut A Long Story Short”, leader of the synth-cult band Landscape (do at least check out their “Einstein A Go-Go”), and already a programmer on the very first album ever to make use of the Fairlight, Kate Bush’s “Never For Ever”. As for the benefits – but also the damage – that this instrument instilled into that decade’s pop, that would deserve an article of its own. The bassline and the melodic solo belong to Billy Currie’s glorious Arp Odyssey (sold on eBay in May 2017 for the “modest” sum of £8,500!), while the rhythmic backbone comes from Simmons SDS5 pads and the Roland CompuRhythm CR-78 drum machine.

Making the song’s crepuscular, decadent atmosphere even denser – indeed, its keystone – is the idea, apparently Strange’s own, of adding a female voice that echoes in French the lyrics sung in English by Steve (hardly an accomplished singer, and for that reason skilfully double-tracked here and there by Midge Ure). The seductive, impersonal vocal belongs to the Belgian Brigitte Arens, a native French speaker and Rusty Egan’s girlfriend, who does not appear to have had any further artistic ventures afterwards.

The video for “Fade To Grey”, meanwhile, marks the directorial debut of the celebrated duo Godley & Creme, destined to brand the 1980s with cuts that literally shaped popular taste for almost the entire decade. The pair, already accomplished musicians who had left 10cc in 1976, having done their dress rehearsals behind the camera on two tracks of their own, inaugurate with the Visage song a run of commissioned videos that would continue with Duran Duran’s “Girls On Film”, passing through other must-sees such as Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, the Police’s “Every Breath You Take”, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Two Tribes”, to name just the most striking.

A song of original, singular catchiness, among the symbols of an individualist and transgressive generation, an evergreen that has crossed three decades unscathed and still today gets plenty of radio play and turns up at themed dance parties, “Fade To Grey” also remains the only piece of music truly credited to Steve Strange. More a phenomenal promoter than an all-round musician, thanks to the contribution of exceptional artists he manages to put out a pair of thoroughly respectable albums, though without major critical impact or sales (after the 1980 debut comes the excellent “The Anvil” in 1982), before gradually sliding into the grey foreshadowed by the song, while still keeping a deserved cult aura until the end of his days. Steve, in fact, died suddenly at 55, on 12 February 2015 in Sharm el-Sheikh, right while his friends Spandau Ballet – promoting their reunion tour – were on stage at Sanremo, from where they duly, publicly remembered him.

Devenir gris

Aaah, we fade to grey (fade to grey).

Ride the wave of great music

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19/03/2026