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...
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