Blitzed!

The weekly night then moved to a more suitable venue: the Blitz Club in Covent Garden, where Tuesday nights became the fixed appointment for all of London's outsiders, who competed over who could dress in the most outlandish way. There were even proper factions, from the Welsh contingent led by Steve, to the Bromley crowd that included Siouxsie Sioux, as well as the group from the St. Martin's art and fashion school. The dress code, set by the self-appointed arbiter elegantiarium Strange, aimed to favour “only the weird and the wonderful”, as effectively described by Marco Bercella in his review of the anthem of that era, Visage's “Fade To Grey”: “While his friend Rusty Egan is at the decks blasting out Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, the new-era Roxy Music, naturally Berlin-era Bowie, and the newborn breed of English synth acts, Steve – a modern-day Nero – stands at the entrance of the club, and with a flick of his thumb decides, unappealably, who gets into the party and who doesn't. Away with the freaks, the shambling punks, the schoolkids, those in flared jeans and t-shirts; in with the stylised-makeup pirates (the press of the time dubbed Spandau Ballet “stripper pirates”, ed.), the effeminate chic ones, those dressed in geometric outfits, the backcombed hairstyles and so on. In short, the style of the so-called Blitz Kids rejects sloppiness and anonymity in favour of a creative, eccentric identity, shunning both British and American youth aesthetics in favour of a chic-kitsch reinterpretation of Mitteleuropa, which had come to the fore thanks to Moroder, Kraftwerk and those Anglo-American exiles who rewrote the pages of avant-garde rock from Berlin during the 1977-79 period (the sacred triad of Bowie–Eno–Iggy, to be precise)”.

The Blitz Club thus became a symbol of resistance and experimentation, where the “freak” was celebrated and normality was rejected – with a few paradoxical twists, such as when even Mick Jagger was famously turned away. “You're not dressed well enough,” Steve Strange dismissed him at the door, to everyone's disbelief. “It was a punk gesture,” jokes a still-amused Boy George. But what might look elitist actually expressed a sense of protection for that small community: “The kids who come here put so much effort into how they dress, and when they walk through that door, they want to feel safe,” Strange himself explains in archival footage. “I used to get dressed up even to go and buy milk, I didn't do it to be accepted by Steve Strange,” a blunt Marilyn adds, also pointing out the difference with the poseurs who would come along later. Boy George, on the other hand, recalls his fraught relationship with Spandau Ballet, portrayed as “bourgeois” compared to the more provocative aesthetic of the Blitz – a sign that even that micro-community was crossed by its own divisions.

In the corridors and dance halls of the Blitz, amid chandeliers and aristocratic furnishings, key artists of the 1980s blossomed, such as Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, Ultravox, Visage, Adam Ant and Sade. And an aesthetic took shape that would go on to influence not just the music scene but European fashion as a whole, with top designers destined to dictate youth trends for at least five years. As Robert Elms recalls in an old article for the Independent: “There was an intoxicating air in that stifling basement, a fervent, overpowering wave of adolescent desire, mixing with the tensions of Roxy and Kraftwerk to carry you far away, out of that miserable England. But it wasn't just about escapism; the teenagers striking these outlandish poses were shaping the road ahead, tough kids with ideas and ambitions as big as their hair. But it was much more than that; it was a blinding flash of the future, a premonition of everything to come: from MTV to designer labels, from gay liberation to style supplements, from celebrity culture to rave culture.”

The appearance of the Thin White Duke

In this mythology of nightclubbing – recounted by “Blitzed!” with a rich array of moving period images and video clips – there is one date to circle in red: 1 July 1980. The night when his majesty David Bowie descended into the Covent Garden basement to recruit extras for his “Ashes To Ashes” video, choosing them from among the very devotees who threw wild parties in his honour – and who, in the documentary, recall that messianic event with undimmed emotion. Good old Steve Strange also appears in David Mallet's famous video, alongside Bowie in the clown costume designed by Natasha Korniloff, and “Ashes To Ashes” remains the cornerstone of the entire new romantic era. Forty-one years later, the outfit worn by the Thin White Duke during that incursion into the Blitz, tailor-made by his trusted designer Issey Miyake, would be auctioned off for fifteen thousand pounds.

Naturally, “Blitzed!” also rests on a superb soundtrack, which doesn't just accompany the story but becomes a protagonist in its own right. Through sonic snapshots of David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, Visage, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and co., we're catapulted into a world where decadent glamour met a sense of urban alienation, reflected in the icy synth sounds, the deep basslines and the mechanical rhythms that evoked the bleak mood of post-industrial disillusionment. The task of highlighting the musical and technological developments brought about by the new romantic era falls to the man described in the closing credits as an “electronic pioneer”: Midge Ure, frontman of Ultravox, who recalls the almost childlike enthusiasm with which he discovered the creative potential of the new synthesizers, particularly the Polymoog, used to create the futuristic, atmospheric sound that became the trademark of songs like “Vienna”. A sonic imprint that would go on to shape countless musical acts to come, including Daft Punk, who are explicitly namechecked at the end of the film.

A precious little document of a scene that remains eternally underrated (even now, when the '80s have been exhumed and reinterpreted every which way), on a par with the recent – and excellent – “Wham!”, “Blitzed!” condenses into 90 minutes the misunderstood revolution of an entire decade, when hedonism and sexual freedom were seen merely as escapism rather than as a revolt against the hypocrisy of the ideologically rigid, conformist society of the time. And if punk – as Elms puts it – “was like a firework,” destined by its very nature to burn out quickly, the same could be said of the epic tale of the Covent Garden club. But those 18 months were enough to mark an entire generation.

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