When you think early 80s, ‘new romantic’ bands come to mind. What was it all about – music, fashion or both?
They say that the ‘new romantic’ look emerged from the nightclubs of London, inspired by the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who launched her ‘Pirate’ collection in 1981.
A contrast to the drab punk fashions of the late 1970s, this was a shift towards glamour, fantasy and dressing up. The new romantic look included androgynous clothes, frilly shirts, velvet, smart suits, make-up, eyeliner and quaffs. It made reference to historical dress, c1700s (pirates, tricorn hats etc). Check out Adam Ant’s ‘dandy highwayman’ clobber in this video clip.
‘Antmusic’ certainly had a different sound. To me it sounds strangely unmelodic. The backing sounds like the Glitter Band with extra tom toms.
As well as Adam Ant, the new romantic fad was associated with English bands like Visage, Duran Duran, Ultravox and Spandau Ballet. I have tried but cannot differentiate a ‘new romantic’ sound from the rest of the synth pop that ruled the charts in the early 80s. The songs were conventionally structured and performed without the anarchy and angst of punk. New romantic bands espoused no particular ideological messages and were unthreatening. Ergo, it was more about the look.
Culture Club are often cited as new romantic but the label is inadequate to describe the incredible style of Boy George. By the time they had conquered the charts, the distance between Culture Club and punk was so great that Dave Rimmer titled his 1986 book Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop. I never read it but I could understand the title.
New Romanticism, at least as seen by a Western suburbs schoolboy, was all about the look (yes, somewhere out there is at least one photo of me with dyed red hair, one of my mother’s glittery blouses and a pair of baggy grey – devenirons a gris – jeans tucked into my shoes in an attempt to turn them into harem pants, ill-advisedly heading to a school disco some time about 1982…)
Eastwood Target certainly didn’t run to Anthony Price outfits and, one suspects, it was that very social distance between the pioneers and the followers which led to the movement’s speedy demise once it spread from West End nightclubs into the pop charts of the Thatcher’s UK. Boy George, for instance, was part of Steve (Visage) Strange’s New Romantic circle in the early 1980s but had already moved on by the time Culture Club emerged.
Also, like any movement, New Romanticism was quickly adopted as THE look for emerging (and dare I suggest manufactured?) bands, e.g. Classix Nouveau, Kajagoogoo, which caused most New Romantics to run away screaming.
Musically, separating a New Romantic band from their synthpop contemporaries is an inexact science, in the same way that the artier, introspective 70s glam rock acts like David Bowie and Roxy Music sound closer to prog-rock than the good-time boogie-blues influenced Top of the Pops glam darlings like T-Rex and Slade.
However, some things to listen out for are (1) swaggering self-referential lyrics (e.g. Adam and the Ants’ Antmusic and Ant rap; Visage’s Visage); (2) esoteric, slightly introverted poetry (e.g. “freezing breath on a window pane” – Ultravox’s Vienna; “I heard you making patterns rhyme” – Duran Duran’s Planet Earth; “So very very young to be standing in the street, to be taken by sorrow” – Spoandau Ballet’s To cut a long story short; “One man on a lonely platform, one case sitting by his side [un homme dans une gare desolee, une valise a se cote]” – Visage’s Fade to grey, whose bilingual lyrics lead to…); (3) European or Asian references (e.g. Ultravox’s Vienna and New Europeans; John Foxx’s Europe after the rain; Duran Duran’s Tel Aviv; Japan’s Visions of China. None of these categories are, by any stretch of the imagination, unique to the New Romantics.
New Romanticism was larely about rejecting the hard edged masculinity of punk rock. Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribean) is inspired by the New Romantic movement.