The cult Soho club The Blitz - shaped, pioneered and invented the 1980s and beyond with outrageous fashion, futuristic music and more. An exhibition about the Blitz club and the New Romantic movement opens at the Design Museum in September and charts the rise and influence of the coolest club on the planet and a time when British nightlife created cultural explosions.
Rusty and Robert also spoke at another Soho landmark, The Groucho Club.
Rusty and Robert also spoke at another Soho landmark, The Groucho Club.
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00:00When you were doing it, did it feel important at the time, or not?
00:05Yes.
00:07How so?
00:10Well, we weren't welcome anywhere else, really, were we?
00:13We had to have our own place.
00:16And we didn't want to go anywhere else because we didn't want to hear that music.
00:21We didn't want to be beaten up.
00:23We didn't want to be part of the punk scene.
00:25We didn't want to be part of the AMA rock scene.
00:28And the fashion scene, as you expressed quite rightly, was way out of our financial reach.
00:36And it was all very, very New York, Paris, and all that stuff.
00:41And some people were on the dog, you know.
00:44And the reason we left Billy's was because they wanted to increase the prices
00:50to capitalise on 100 kids coming on a Tuesday night
00:54in what you described the winter of discontent.
00:57So it was a very miserable time.
01:02It was also really miserable to be not sure if you're a boy or a girl,
01:07but hey man, let's go out tonight.
01:09And as a DJ, I played songs which said, you know, she was a she,
01:17and then hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.
01:20And vicious, you hit me with your flowers.
01:23First DJ to sing his own song.
01:25The lyrics were very important, as they were very important when no Elvis Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977.
01:33The lyrics were very important.
01:35And disco was get up, stand up, boogie, oogie, you know, and we wanted lyrics, you know.
01:40And as George Moroder's record was pioneering, I feel love,
01:47it was really just some girl warbling over what became the soundtrack of the future,
01:52the electronic dance music.
01:54A band called Space in France made Magic Fly and Telex in Belgium and Kraftwerk in Dusseldorf.
02:05And this music that I was loving was being ignored everywhere by DJs, by radio.
02:11And to me, it was like another form of punk.
02:14It was like, well, nobody wanted to know punk, did they?
02:16You know, just did it.
02:19So as you express, DIY, Steve Strange took a heterosexual punk male, me, to a load of gay clubs.
02:26And it was like, you know, just turn around now, you're not welcome anymore.
02:31In every single club.
02:32But I did hear Sylvester, You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.
02:36Wow, that's a great record, you know.
02:39And they nearly all had...
02:42Which is New Order, 1983, I think.
02:50How does it feel?
02:52So what I'm saying is there was a sound I was hearing in gay clubs,
02:58which later became High Energy, Your Love Is Listing Me.
03:02And as a drummer, I thought, my career's over.
03:06Just playing in a drum machine, you know.
03:08And in Liverpool, and in Sheffield, and Birmingham,
03:15there were other people who felt the same, and they were starting bands.
03:19Duran Duran, OMD, New Order, well, Joy Division became New Order.
03:23And Daniel Miller made warm leatherette.
03:30So I just found all this music, and the Blitzkliks didn't say, what's this crap?
03:38Which I still get today.
03:41From Sharon.
03:42You know, everybody knows the person that goes up to the DJ, you know,
03:49and wants to hear the number one record shut up in your face or something.
03:53You're trying to play Vienna, you know.
03:57DJ's nightmare.
03:58So the point was, there was a sound, there were people,
04:03and you went out in the daytime,
04:05and you went to Smile Hairdressers,
04:07or you went to the King's Road, or Appley Attractions,
04:10or Sex on the King's Road,
04:11and you met people, and you said,
04:13there's this place on Tuesday,
04:16and the music's great, and you're going to love it.
04:18It was like a little secret.
04:20I love the idea of the Klexism and the Outsider.
04:23Bob, you were saying earlier, though,
04:24it didn't last that long.
04:25And the clubs that followed it had much longer lifespans.
04:29Why was Blitz relatively short?
04:3216, 17 months?
04:33I think that's actually rather long for the Blitz.
04:36Because the whole ethos was that a look lasts one night.
04:40Even a sound, you move on constantly.
04:42Rusty was playing new records every single week.
04:45And the whole point about this was
04:46that it came from that Bowie, shape-shifting concept.
04:49You can be a hero just for one day.
04:51Well, we did live by day.
04:52We lived by night.
04:54And the look was extraordinary,
04:56because it really was perpetually moving on.
04:59If you were wearing what someone else was wearing last week,
05:01you know, you try walking past Steve Strangely,
05:04or putting your coat in with George as the cloakroom girl.
05:08I mean, you'd soon get let known.
05:10It was an amazing display of teenage.
05:14And one of the things about it is
05:15they were called Blitzkies,
05:16because we were kids.
05:17There was almost no-one over the age of 21.
05:19This is teenagers.
05:21Some of them 16, 17.
05:22Philip Salon was 84 when he first looked at it.
05:27But most of us were really young,
05:29really creative,
05:30but also really mischievous.
05:32I think one of the things about the Blitzkies,
05:34it sometimes portrayed as a bit po-faced.
05:37All these people posing,
05:38and we were certainly doing that.
05:39But it was anything but po-faced.
05:41It was scurrilous.
05:43It was dangerous.
05:44It was naughty.
05:45It was sexy.
05:46It was all of those kind of things.
05:48So Rusty's providing this wonderful backdrop.
05:51And one of the things about Rusty is,
05:53you never played too loud.
05:55So people could dance,
05:56but at the front end,
05:57you could still talk.
05:58I could still get Steve Dagger in my ears.
06:00We're going to take over the world.
06:02We're going to start playing.
06:03We're going to start shots.
06:05And so it was a club in the best sense of the world.
06:09It wasn't a disco.
06:10It was a club of like-minded individuals
06:12who wanted to go out there
06:14and have a great time at a terrible time.
06:181979 is about as low as it gets
06:20in the kind of panty of modern British history.
06:23You know, you could smell the streets, literally.
06:26And so we thought, bollocks to that.
06:29We're going to have fun.
06:30And not only are we going to have fun,
06:32we're going to try and make something out of this.
06:34And so that question,
06:36did we know at the time?
06:37Yeah.
06:38It's one I pondered a lot in my book.
06:39I thought about it.
06:40Because on the one hand,
06:42you're going out and it's hedonistic
06:43and you're getting dressed up
06:44and you're falling over
06:45and you're snogging someone into the dogs' toilets
06:46and all of that stuff is going on.
06:49But at the same time,
06:50I think very quickly,
06:52we all started to know
06:53we're part of something here.
06:54And this is something a bit bigger
06:56than any one of us individually.
06:58It's really interesting.
06:58When most conversations...