London Calling (68 page)

Blitz was at 12 Great Queen Street, across the road from the Freemasons’ London HQ and surrounded by suppliers of Masonic
regalia. Though they sometimes looked askance at these fancy-dressed clubbers gazing enviously at the Masonic aprons and chains
displayed in the local shop windows, given their own penchant for fancy dress the Masons could hardly complain. At Blitz the
walls were decorated with large murals of the London blitz: bombers illuminated by searchlights in a smoke-filled sky and
St Paul’s Cathedral standing defiant surrounded by flames. Each Tuesday 350 people crammed into the club, paying £2 to become
a member and £1 to enter; there was no guest list and no free entry; everyone had to pass Steve Strange’s critical gaze to
get through the door. He could be merciless, and most Tuesdays he was threatened or spat at but he knew how to handle himself.
Even with his foot-high jet-black hair, eyeliner and whiteface, the South Wales bruiser sometimes showed through. He was also
carrying a silver-topped cane. There was a regular ‘Come as your favourite blonde’ night which emphasized the camp side of
the club.

Boy George in kabuki whiteface and kimono manned the cloakroom and Rusty Egan played the records. Soon the lines were down
the block and people like Andrew Logan, Duggie Fields, the designer Zandra Rhodes and Nicky Haslam began stopping by to check
what was happening. There was a famous occasion when Mick Jagger and his entourage were turned away, but this was because
Steve Strange had just been warned that any more overcrowding would result in the club losing its licence. Nonetheless Jagger
was not pleased and retired hurt to the Zanzibar Club a few doors down the street. Then one night in July, Bowie himself showed
up unannounced to see Bowie Night for himself. As most of the people there began as Bowie fans, dressing like him, collecting
his records, posting his picture on their bedroom wall, his arrival caused tremendous excitement. He was ushered in the back
way and given the best position upstairs to watch the scene. Extra security was hastily found to stop him being mobbed. Before
he left, he asked Steve Strange to appear in the video for his next single, ‘Ashes to Ashes’, and to choose three other extras
and a makeup artist. The bus left for the shoot location at 6 a.m. the next morning but even though the club did not close
until 3 a.m., they were all there, with their outfits. In the video Bowie walked along a beach dressed as Pierrot, followed
by Steve Strange and his gang, who were in turn followed by a large bulldozer. It was a striking image even if no-one knew
what it meant.
⁴

Soon, Blitz began to produce its own groups. First came the dance troupe Hot Gossip, who performed a toned-down version of
their Blitz dance routines on the
Kenny Everett TV Show
, but then came Spandau Ballet. It was a Blitz regular, the journalist Robert Elms, who gave them their name, which he saw
written on a wall in Germany, and the Blitz-kids, as the tabloids were now calling them, who gave them their style. The band,
school friends from Islington, had been around for several years in various incarnations, first as the Cut, then as the Makers,
moving from soul, through punk, to the smooth techno-electronic sound that characterized their first hit: ‘To Cut a Long Story
Short’. As Gary Kemp said: ‘Spandau Ballet started out in an environment which was extremely fashion-conscious with regard
to the club scene, and overall attitude.’
⁵
Spandau Ballet played their first gig outside their Islington rehearsal studio at Blitz. Chris Blackwell from Island Records
was in the audience and offered to sign them after the third number, but their manager, Steve Dagger, held out for a better
offer.

Their next gig there, in January 1980, had members of Japan, Thin Lizzy, the Skids, Magazine, Generation X, the Banshees and
Ultravox in the audience. Record labels clamoured to sign them, but they held out for the right deal and it was not until
October 1980 that they finally drew up a contract with Chrysalis which gave them complete control of everything connected
to the band, the music, their image, their stylists and their graphic representation.

The next month, Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, working as a studio band called Visage, signed with Polydor and released their
first single, ‘Fade to Grey’, which went to number two in the U K charts and number one in nine foreign countries. They had
previously released a single, ‘Tar’, on the producer Martin Rushent’s small independent label the previous September, but
the distribution company had failed, making it impossible to obtain. Polydor released their
Visage
album the same day as the single. Their keyboard player, Billy Currie, then started his own group, called Ultravox, and had
an even bigger hit with ‘Vienna’. The excitement surrounding Blitz and the New Romantic bands quickly spread out beyond London
and groups like Duran Duran from Birmingham and Depeche Mode from Basildon in Essex visited Blitz to see what was happening.
Similar clubs began opening around the country. Boy George was to be the most spectacular of the Blitz-kids when his band
Culture Club finally released ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’, which became a world-wide hit. Blitz went down in history
as an energy centre similar to the Cavern in Liverpool, the UFO Club and Soho’s 2i’s.

After the negative, self-harming nihilism of the punk era, many young
people saw the New Romantics as a breath of fresh air. Most of them had been punks, but saw it as a dead-end movement with
little constructive to say except ‘do it yourself ’ and this is what they were doing. In this sense the lasting legacy of
punk has not been the music, which was for the most part terrible, but the clothes, which were innovative and creative. It
was this aspect that the neo-romantics took up. Away went the piercings and self-mutilations, in came face paint and eyeliner.
Unfortunately for many of the bands, away went the amphetamine and in came cocaine and heroin, but mostly the New Romantics
were a positive flipside to punk, stressing the self-empowerment and do-it-yourself creativity of the movement.

At the end of 1980 the artist and gallery director David Dawson took over a huge, 16,000-square-foot floor of a tea warehouse
in Wapping Wall, a continuous wall of warehouses separating the street from the river. Warehouse B of Metropolitan Wharf was
built in 1864, an enormous solid structure standing on cast iron doric columns. The warehouses were built right on the Thames
so that goods could be unloaded straight into the storage areas by huge forged iron wall-cranes. They must have left by the
same route as nothing large could be carried up or down the two long flights of narrow stone steps that led to B2. The space
was divided into two by a corridor and was absolutely stunning. Both rooms overlooked the Thames and were filled with shimmering
river light. Tugs and barges passed the windows and a game of swans lived on the river directly below. David had reserved
part of the gallery as his living space and his chaise longues and armchairs and his large library and photographic collection
contrasted strongly with the bright, freshly painted white walls of the gallery and performance space. His assistant and collaborator,
the performance artist Roger Ely, curtained off a section of the second space as his living quarters. B2 was not just a gallery
and performance space; it was more of an arts and ideas workshop in the tradition of the Arts Lab.
⁶

The Wapping tube station stood in an almost deserted neighbourhood and closed early. Buses were a long walk away through streets
of boarded-up warehouses. This meant that the audience for events were often stranded and returned to the gallery looking
for somewhere to sleep. After one event more than a hundred people spent the night. There was plenty of room, though not enough
bedding. As Roger Ely wrote: ‘This almost live-in-home-club-like quality combined with the diversity of the presentations
made B2 special.’
⁷
This was true. The exhibitions covered a wide range of subjects from photography to performance art, poetry to painting.
B2 began with shows by Diane
Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, and more contemporary work by young British photographers. Dawson showed artworks by Vivienne
Westwood, John Maybury, Duggie Fields, Andrew Logan and Derek Jarman – Jarman also presented regular Sunday Super 8 and 16mm
film evenings. Adrian Henri, Bob Cobbing, Benjamin Zephaniah and Attila the Stockbroker all gave poetry readings; Evan Parker
played saxophone; Anne Bean and Paul Burwell performed; Roger Ely combined performance with cooking an Indian banquet for
the audience; the New York dominatrix Terence Sellers gave a talk about her dungeon; Victor Bockris’s biography of Blondie
was launched by Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, who arrived by boat. During the Final Academy conference William Burroughs used
the gallery as his headquarters and Brion Gysin stayed there. But, to many people, the most memorable event of all was the
week-long live-in by the Neo-Naturists.
⁸

One of the most interesting cabaret entertainments at the Blitz club was by the Neo-Naturists, whose ‘Easter Communion’ must
have made many of the clubbers feel overdressed when confronted by the Neo-Naturists’ nudity. The Neo-Naturists were Christine
and Jennifer Binnie, Wilma Johnson and Jennifer’s boyfriend, Grayson Perry. Christine studied pottery at Eastbourne College
of Art in the seventies, Wilma was at St Martin’s, and Jennifer and Grayson were at Portsmouth College of Art. Grayson Perry
and Jennifer arrived at Christine’s Fitzrovia squat to spend the summer of 1980. She was living in Carburton Street, on the
corner of Great Titchfield Street, in a five-floor eighteenth-century building which has since been demolished. Other occupants
included the music hall double act Robert Durrant and Robert Laws and their friend ‘Loud Mouth Tracy’. Boy George and Marilyn
lived on the ground floor and George was the squat ‘boss’. The building was in bad shape, with an outside toilet that had
no roof, and a flooded basement.

The empty shop next door had been a Lewis Leathers shop, the favourite leather jacket of the Teddy boys. Christine, Jennifer
and Grayson broke into the building, which Christine had decided she wanted to open as a café. There were no leather jackets
left, but Grayson, who was a biker, was delighted to find some dome-top fifties crash helmets, one of which he kept for years.
They also found plaster models of christening fonts, which they used as ashtrays. Jennifer painted a large mural of a horse
on the wall, they installed a record deck and some Abba records, and then they opened for business. There was an old typewriter
which the guests like Boy George, Marilyn, Philip Sallon, and Cerith Wyn Evans used to write poems, often in the form of concrete
poetry; visual shapes on the page. Christine called it the Coffee Spoon, after
the line in the T. S. Eliot poem,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
. The water had been disconnected so she organized a water patrol, with a group of friends filling empty cider bottles and
carrying them round. Cider, at 10p a cup, was a popular drink. She named all the dishes on the menu after poets: there was
toast Robert Burns and tea T. S. Eliot, and coffee was a Cavafy. The Coffee Spoon was quickly adopted by all the New Romantic
squatters in the area of Warren Street, Carburton Street and Great Titchfield Street, as well as by all the people they’d
met in nightclubs or had arranged to meet. It was a better place to hang out than most of the squatted rooms.

Christine was the star of the show. Boy George wrote: ‘Miss Binnie, as she was known, truly had her lid off and everyone loved
her. She held poetry readings where her film student friends John Maybury and Cerith Wyn Evans would project their latest
works over her naked body.’
⁹
One evening John Maybury screened two films, one of his boyfriend dancing, shot in a cracked mirror in Andrew Logan’s studio,
and the other of Christine running towards the camera. Just as she reached it, Christine herself burst through the paper screen,
dressed in the same clothes. It was at one of these prototype Neo-Naturist cabarets that Grayson Perry first appeared in public
dressed in women’s clothes. Watching him get ready one of the girls remarked: ‘Oh, you’ve done
that
before!’ as he skillfully pulled on his tights. Before the show, Jennifer had been crying and Marilyn came up to her and
asked solicitously: ‘Is it because your boyfriend’s a trannie, Jen?’ causing her to burst out laughing. Grayson and Jennifer
appeared as the television cooks Fanny and Johnny Cradock. Grayson played Fanny, the bossy one, and Jennifer wore biker gear
posing as her cowed husband Johnny. They made a dramatic entrance. There was a storm that night, and just as the lightning
cracked, the door of the café was flung open and they roared in on Grayson’s Suzuki 125. The crowd exclaimed appreciatively
as they skidded to a halt in the middle of the café, revving furiously. They dismounted and made their way to a Baby Belling,
where they cooked a banana flambé. Grayson: ‘I passed the flambé round for the audience to taste. The whole time I was achingly
embarrassed.’
¹⁰
Fanny and Johnny Cradock remained an influence on the Neo-Naturists’ repertoire, and cookery demonstrations were often included
in their cabarets. This was the result of Christine’s interest in tribal rituals. Christine:

Any props we had to bring onstage we would bring on in carrier bags because they are like the modern hunter-gatherer’s gathering
bag, really. When people said how do you want the lighting on stage? They thought we wanted be moody and things. I’d always
say like a kitchen with fluorescent light, please.
¹¹

Grayson’s next outing as Fanny occurred that Christmas, when Christine had managed to hire Notre Dame Hall, off Leicester
Square, for an evening performance of Hans Christian Andersen’s
The Snow Queen
, a Neo-Naturist Christmas pantomime. Christine’s mother had been a Girl Guide leader and when Jennifer and Christine were
in the Guides they had to do
The Snow Queen
as a panto. Christine: ‘I had to be the back end of the reindeer, and I never quite got over it. So we redid it. I was Kai
[ the little boy ] and Jen was Gerda.’
¹²
It played to a packed house of Blitz-kids and their friends and was a triumph.