00:00We got chased by rockabillies.
00:02One of the other things is to remember, this was still a randomly violent time.
00:06I mean, the masses took umbrage at anything that was different.
00:10And we were different, believe me.
00:12And so it was physically dangerous to be a Blitzki.
00:15You had to put in a real lot of effort, a real lot of commitment.
00:19And therefore, I think that was another thing.
00:21Because you'd gone 100%, you were going to do it.
00:23You were going to push it as far as it could go.
00:25This was not a Tuesday night out getting dressed up.
00:28This was not fancy dress.
00:30This was us.
00:31This is who we are now.
00:32Well, Taboo then showed up and really did it, right?
00:36When Taboo showed up, the music was no longer important.
00:39I remember going in there, Geoffrey Hinton, for like one minute, he was like so drunk.
00:45You're the one that I want.
00:47And then we're all dancing.
00:49But yeah, there would have been no Taboo for that Blitz.
00:51There would have been no Big Room.
00:52There would have been no Kilt, Hell.
00:54All of those clubs.
00:55I mean, the idea of club culture didn't exist.
00:58As we heard earlier on, style was something such a dubious that the French did.
01:03So, we changed all of those perceptions.
01:09People say that Cool Britannia, rather, started with sort of Blair and Blur.
01:13No, it didn't.
01:15It started in the Blitz Club on a Tuesday night with Boy George dressed as Budaseer.
01:19Robert, we went to New York, Robert.
01:21Yeah.
01:2250 of us went to New York.
01:24You know, I mean, we were hosted in New York.
01:28And George, boy, George absolutely loved New York, right?
01:31And they loved him.
01:32And suddenly we were like free drinks everywhere.
01:35The minute I said, you know, I worked for The Face.
01:38Now, I've written two articles for The Face.
01:40I went to New York.
01:41And literally, I couldn't buy a drink.
01:43Couldn't pay to get in a nightclub.
01:44No.
01:45You know, didn't need a hotel room to sleep in.
01:48I mean, it was extraordinary how internationally it became very, very good.
01:54So, I said, with pebbles thrown into a pond.
01:57But the speed at which everything moves out is profound.
02:01You said something interesting about, well, many interesting things.
02:03Taboo was not about the sound.
02:05It was about the look.
02:06Yeah.
02:06You're talking, by extension, about the kind of rave culture later,
02:10which was all about the music and the experience rather than the look.
02:13And the people who've driven them to a T-shirt.
02:14They're all crap.
02:15What we've just heard from the three of you is a kind of manifesto for postmodernism, isn't it?
02:21The Blitz Club was postmodernism.
02:22It was.
02:23How much tension in the scene of the Blitz Club was there between different art forms,
02:29and particularly between style and music?
02:30How symbiotic were they?
02:32And how much was the creative tensions and little tribes and so on?
02:35Well, the other night, I was in Helsinki, and they named the club The Anvil,
02:39which is the second album by Bizarre, and the album cover by the most amazing photographer.
02:48Shot in Paris, you know, George St.
02:51Yeah, Helmut Newton.
02:52The point was, there are people who, the album cover, the artwork, the photographer,
03:00the clothes, the clothes Anthony Price was making for Brian Ferry,
03:04then became Duran Duran, those beautiful suits on Brian Ferry.
03:08Everything was interlinked, as Robert said, and then there's, oh, those shoes.
03:13These shoes are actually called Blitz.
03:15They're actually called Blitz, because there's a range of shoes by Geoffrey West,
03:19named after all of these clubs.
03:21There's a Wag Club shoe, there's a Blitz Club shoe, there's a Happy Ender shoe.
03:24So, luckily, like, drinks in the 80s, I've got a pair of shoes out of it.
03:29The point really is, if you're a shoe designer like Dye West,
03:35you were inspired to create a range of shoes, a range of clothes.
03:40You go, oh, look, there's Brian Ferry.
03:42Who made that jacket?
03:44Oh, when Grace Jones had that bustier.
03:46Who's Jean-Paul Gould?
03:47Who did the artwork?
03:49And when that Visage video came out,
03:51Faye De Grey with Richard Scharer,
03:53which nobody in the record company wanted us to make.
03:55They wanted us to get in a van and tour some universities.
03:58I said, fuck off.
03:59We don't do that.
04:00We make videos.
04:01Yeah, but there's nowhere to show them.
04:04Well, they want us in Germany, right?
04:06Yeah?
04:07Well, just send them the video.
04:08And as you said, it spread really fast.
04:11David Bowie, ashes to ashes, just lit that fuse, and boom.
04:16Everybody's, what's the Blitz?
04:17David Bowie went to the Blitz.
04:18Look at, you know, look at that song.
04:21I mean, he was walking down a beach with a crane and four people.
04:25You know what I mean?
04:26It was just mad, really, wasn't it?
04:29Can I sing the praises of the poor, dear departed Steve Strange here?
04:35Because as important as Rusty's music was,
04:37and it was violent, it was absolutely important,
04:40Steve Strange was a human mixologist.
04:43If he was mixing the music, Steve was mixing the people.
04:46And I think one of the things that's remarkable about all this
04:49is exactly what you said, you've got it so right.
04:52It wasn't one group of people.
04:54It wasn't one look or any of those things,
04:56which is what made it so different from every youth cult that had gone before it.
05:00Mods said, you look like this.
05:01Teddy Boyd said, you look like this.
05:03We said, you better look like someone else next to you.
05:05And there were different kind of groups in there.
05:09There were ex-punks who were still quite anarchic and wild.
05:12There were kind of rather arch fashionistas.
05:15There were kind of drunken soul boys in white socks.
05:19I always thought it was the white faces of the art crowd
05:21versus the white socks of the soul crowd.
05:23And it was this mix of all of those people,
05:27some posh ones, some poor ones,
05:28some anarchist squatters,
05:30some people who lived in Knightsbridge.
05:31That mix wouldn't have happened anywhere else.
05:34And it only happened because of Steve.
05:35I was a soul boy when I was 14.
05:39And that's about how ballet wrote many years later,
05:41listening to Marvin all night long.
05:43And I used to play a song that Sade covered, you know.
05:50And I used to play a song that Monsieur covered, you know.
05:53I used to, well, you can look at my playlist.
05:57The reason why it's called Romantic
05:59is because I was playing Adagio for Strings by Gustav Mahler.
06:03I was playing entire...
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