Il Blitz

A messianic event. A date that marks a watershed in the new romantic evolution of the wave epic of the Eighties. On July 1, 1980, David Bowie walked down the steps into the Covent Garden basement that housed the Blitz Club. A sort of temple in his honour, where a handful of eccentric devotees of Ziggy Stardust threw wild parties in the heart of the most glamorous London. It was, in effect, a new subculture taking root in Britain at the time among punk's degenerate offspring, irrevocably corrupted by a decadent, narcissistic taste. An aesthetic capable of marrying music and fashion in a voluptuous embrace. This was the new romantic season, which would channel the libertarian, anticonformist ideology of glam rock into a fresh intoxication of flashy looks and cultural provocations, replacing punk's bare desolation with a technicolor dream. Enter pirates with stylised make-up, effeminate dandies, kids decked out in geometric outfits, and neo-aristocrats with backcombed hair. Leading the charge was Welshman Steve Strange, cultural agitator of London nightlife and founder of Visage, one of the key groups of the new scene, alongside Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Adam & The Ants, Human League & co.

Rite of initiation

For many of them, David Bowie's appearance on Top of the Pops performing "Starman" in 1972 had been a sort of rite of initiation. An unforgettable night, that of July 5, 1972, when the television screens of Albion's subjects lit up with that eccentric red-haired rocker, squeezed into a shimmering multicoloured jumpsuit, surrounded by the Spiders from Mars as he sang the lines of his new anthem: “There’s a starman waiting in the sky/ He’d like to come and meet us/ But he thinks he’d blow our minds”. The message delivered by the Starman had struck an entire generation of young Britons like lightning: "The moment he sang 'I had to phone someone so I picked on you', Bowie pointed at the camera and we knew he was singing that line for us and for all the kids who were glued to the screen at that very moment. It was a real call to arms that set us on the path we would soon follow," the Cure would later recall. Similar words would resurface in the testimonies of the new romantic generation gathered in "Blitzed!", the definitive documentary on that intoxicating musical season.

It was precisely the White Duke's Berlin-era songs – alongside the classics of Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Roxy Music and the fledgling wave of English synth acts (Human League and The Normal chief among them) – that took centre stage during the Blitz's wild nights, blasted at full volume from the console firmly in the hands of the vigorous DJ Rusty Egan. The stylistic signature of the so-called Blitz Kids, in short, shunned sloppiness and anonymity in favour of a creative, eccentric flair, shutting the door on both British and American youth aesthetics in favour of a chic-kitsch reinterpretation of Mitteleuropa, which had come to the fore precisely thanks to Moroder, Kraftwerk and those Anglo-American exiles who had rewritten the pages of avant-garde rock from Berlin between 1977 and 1979 (the sacred triad of Bowie-Eno-Iggy, to be precise).

So when David Bowie appeared in the flesh at the Blitz – where even Mick Jagger had famously been turned away by doorman Steve Strange for being "not dressed well enough" – the collective emotion was uncontainable. "There were even people who cried," some veterans of that era would confess in the aforementioned docufilm "Blitzed!" by Bruce Ashley and Michael Donald (2020).

New romantic casting

The White Duke had come down among his followers with a precise goal: to recruit extras for the video of his new, explosive single, "Ashes To Ashes". The four lucky ones who would feature in eccentric outfits amid the solarised images of the famous short film were Steve Strange himself, designer Judith Frankland, and two of Strange's friends, stylist Darla-Jane Gilroy, a talent of British fashion through the Eighties and Nineties, and future model Elise Brazier, cast as the dressed-up dancer. That video clip would also become unforgettable, with some even calling it the forerunner of the modern concept of music video as we know it today.

Shot by trusted director David Mallet on a beach near Hastings, England, the "Ashes To Ashes" video depicts Bowie as a striking new character with huge visual impact: a hallucinated, post-atomic Pierrot, created by costume designer Natasha Korniloff, already part of Lindsay Kemp's entourage for "Pierrot in Turquoise". He is the protagonist of the famous procession captured in those acid-toned images: almost a funeral cortège, led by the clown, with three bizarre ecclesiastical figures (a priest, two nuns) and a girl in party dress, followed by a menacing digger. In a dreamlike sequence, images alternate between an astronaut suspended from a monstrous machine in a setting reminiscent of Ridley Scott's "Alien", trapped in an exploding kitchen, then in a padded room, before cutting back once more to the beach, where the Pierrot, already warned by an elderly woman who appeared at the water's edge (David's mother?), sinks into the sea as a funeral pyre burns the images and their outlines away. Ashes to ashes.

The unsettling nature of the images is underscored by the cinematography and colours, acidic and antinaturalistic, as abrasive as few other videos of the Eighties. "The editing of surreal images, with a rather disturbing subtext, the considerable budget, the experimentation with optical effects such as chromakey, and the very fact that the footage is based on a storyboard meticulously designed by the singer together with the director, make 'Ashes To Ashes' the first music video capable of going beyond the simple task of promoting a song; it effectively becomes a new medium in which it is possible to develop a distinctive visual language, and to communicate something," notes Lorenzo Salzano in the feature "Sound and vision".

After all, music and image are two inseparable components of David Bowie's art. Among all the members of rock aristocracy, the White Duke was the one most aware of the value of images and the most skilled at exploiting them, making them an integral part of his work. As early as the Seventies he had already developed a pioneering approach to the music video, one he would bring to full maturity in the following decade, the Mtv era, putting himself at the forefront (also) of the glittering age of music video.

With the catchy refrain of Chuck Hammer's guitar synth, the off-beat rhythms and synthetic strings, set against Bowie's powerful funky bassline and layered vocals, "Ashes To Ashes" bewitched audiences, shooting to the top of the UK chart. And in everyone's mind that unforgettable video clip would remain, a visionary expression of the song's complex intertextual and autobiographical layers. Starting with the return of the Major Tom character from "Space Oddity", now transformed into a "junkie", lost in endless depression.

In one stroke, with the "Ashes To Ashes" video, Bowie had placed himself at the forefront of a new way of conceiving music and image, one that would find its natural outlet in the Mtv era, and of a new strand of new wave. Thanks to that historic July night in 1980, the new romantic movement would cement its indissoluble bond with the White Duke's art, making "Ashes To Ashes" its totemic song, the manifesto of a new musical epic for the "young dudes".

(Photo by Tommy Crowley)

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16/02/2026