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archiegraves180 · 4 years ago

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New Romantic movement was a reaction, and a progression of Punk and New Wave, driven by synth dominated music.

The late 1970s and early 1980s are often remembered in the popular imagination as a period of social unrest, political upheaval, and inner-city deprivation. For many of Britain’s young people, the decade was by no means an easy one. Youth unemployment peaked at 8.5% in 1980, and jobs that had been worked by generations of the same family were no longer available to school leavers as manufacturing and traditional industry slowed.

The period was also one of shifting gender norms, radical sexual politics, rapid technological change, and was witness to a thriving youth culture and growing club scene.

The punk scene of the mid-to-late 1970s had left a far-reaching mark on the landscape of British music, fashion, and art. The emergence of the New Romantics in this era of post-punk has been seen by some as a distinct break away from the ethos of punk DIY, while others see a continuation of this in the experimentation of early synth-pop and unconventional fashions. magazines aimed at the youth market.

Meard Street, Soho, London : the location of Gossips nightclub and Rusty Egan’s Bowie Nights which started in 1978. Here the seeds of The New Romantic movement were planted.

The song that became the anthem of the club was Heroes by Bowie. "Just for one day" you could dress up and be more than what Britain had to offer you.Rusty Egan, a Blitz DJ, talking about the club

Regardless of its links to or breaks from punk, the New Romantics presented a markedly different visual aesthetic. Characterised by their distinctive clothing, theatrical hair and makeup, and association with the New Wave electronic music scene emerging around the end of the 1970s, the movement was seen as representative of the futurism and modernism of the period.

They drew inspiration from the flamboyance and androgyny of 1970s Bowie and glam rock, and were unashamedly glamorous in their appearance. The aesthetic of the New Romantics defied gender conventions, and in a period of discussion and debate about prescribed gender roles emerging in both Thatcherite discourse and press coverage of the ‘new man’, the movement was arguably part of a broader reimagining of, and challenge to, conventional ideas about gender and identity.

The emergence of the New Romantics was closely linked to the British club scene, with the early movement being connected with a number of nightclubs in London and Birmingham, including Billy’s and The Blitz.

Walking into the Blitz was like stepping out of time – you never knew what period it was set in. It was a total mish-mash of styles, full of blurred genders and make-up for girls and boys.Midge Ure, Ultravox

The movement’s focus on innovative fashion and style led to an ever-changing image, while those involved in the scene rejected the label, making it notoriously difficult to define. Fashions were worn with the night out in mind, with dandyism and glamour as central components of this.

Despite the precarious economic situation of many young people in this period, the British night time economy thrived. The spaces of youth leisure were increasingly shifting towards bars, pubs, and nightclubs by the 1960s and 1970s, and this only accelerated as more venues opened to tap into this lucrative market.

The emergence of the New Romantics into British youth culture was cemented in the media with the arrival of the ‘style press’ in 1980. Embodying a new approach to publishing, the style press focused on fashion, music, and lifestyle, and was aimed equally at men and women.

These magazines, headed by The Face, Blitz, and iD, marked a distinct break from existing publications aimed at the youth market, both in terms of content and production value. Their focus on style set them apart from existing publications, while their glossy and upmarket design separated them from traditional magazines aimed at the youth market.

Alongside these developments, British youth culture was becoming increasingly global in both outlook and impact. The introduction of MTV in the United States in 1981 heralded the ‘Second British Invasion’, with promotional videos by British New Wave and electro-pop bands such as Adam and the Ants and the Human League featuring frequently on the channel.

The New Romantics were a modern youth culture for the 1980s. With an androgynous and glamorous appearance, association with New Wave and synth-pop music, and engagement with new publication mediums, they marked a distinct break from the youth cultures of the 1970s. The visibility and international reach of the fashion and music of the New Romantic movement has arguably created one of the most iconic legacies of 1980s youth culture.

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parkerbombshell · 5 years ago

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The Electronic Family Tree Radio Show w/ Rusty Egan 11/23/2019

Join Us! Saturdays 1pm-3pm EST 6pm-8pm BST 10am-12pm PDT bombshellradio.com #Synthwave #Electropop #Alternative #Chill #electro #electronica #MobileAppn#TheElectronicFamilyTree #RustyEgan #BombshellRadio — with Rusty Egan. bleeding - Fire Sign bleeding - Fire Sign Breaking Dub - Rusty Egan Presents ft Shimmer Johnson Obedience - Neon Lines Voices In The Dark - Intellivision Blind Dogs for the Guides - Cult With No Name Rebellation - Fashion Invasion Our Spaceboy (Remodel) - Eurotix Murder She Spoke - Holy Braille Welcome to Synthtopia - Eric C. Powell, Andrea Powell After The Fire - Der Kommissar Her Smile - DepthCruiser West End Girls Leon & Toky Aka Superhero Remix) - Dino Lenny Strangelove (Razormaid Mix) - Depeche Mode BREAK *** Burning the heather (radio edit) - Pet Shop Boys Always Suited Blue - Fader The Blitz (Victory Mix) - Neuropa Repetition Rusty Egan Radio Mix 136 bpm - B-Movie No-One Driving - John Foxx Utopia - Ekkoes Echoes -Theater Kids Welcome to Synthtopia Eric C. Powell, Andrea Powell To Hell (Part of the Art - Extended Mix) - Scarlet Fantastic Watch Them Drown (Summer Lake Remix) - Tactile Frequency Lullaby - Shook Lucretia My Reflection - Parralox E4 Tomorrow (Take Control) - Analogue Electronic Whatever Movin_Special Extended Club Mi - 400 Blows bleeding - Fire Sign Read the full article

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dower · 7 years ago

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“Out of the blue”: Forty years of musical influence

Musical youth

I think it's fair to say that the generation you were born in generally dicatates your musical tastes. Of course there are exceptions to this, some individuals seem to be born too late and some variations of music are truly timeless.

But. for most folks the musical taste is formed in their youth and then develops or dies depending on how engaged they remain during the ups and downs of life.

This is my journey, my life so far in sounds.

The summer of '77

I turned 12 in August 1977, and my Dad bought a good quality radio and a cassette tape recorder. No more listening to Radio Luxembourg on a tinny transistor radio late into the night in bed. I had found music. Real music.

And the journey starts

Coincidentally, it was the year NASA launched the Voyager mission on its Grand Tour across the solar system, and it carried a golden record embossed with the sounds and music from our earth. Amongst all the classical crap, Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry stood out as an excellent “message in a bottle” to toss out into the cosmic ocean. It said something very hopeful about our future. My future.

It was the start of my second year at “big” school, and I recall recording ELOs “Turn to stone” from “Out of the Blue” ... directly from AM radio onto a cassette tape using a proper AUX connection, cables and everything. While not entirely replicating the creation of the golden disc carried on Voyager 1, recording my first music was the start of my journey across the cosmos of music - kickstarting a lifelong deep connection to music. My music.

I was too young to understand punk, which had started a year before, and I quickly developed a love of heavy music: Status Quo were still anti-establishment, AC/DC was “just a racket”, and “Motörhead can’t sing”. I loved them all, plus a side-order of Queen and Meatloaf. It was fast, rocky and it spoke to me with heavy guitar riffs and ballad-style lyrics.

Sadly, the late seventies popular music scene was dominated by Radio 1 playlists; ABBA, Showwaddywaddy, The Wurzels, and The Bay City Rollers - and quite a lot of disco. It was mostly terrible. If we had the internet back then, or I had the money to buy independent label stuff then I’d be spending my time with the Stranglers, The Damned and Ducks Deluxe.

It took until 1979, and my parents splitting, to get a proper record player and the freedom to buy vinyl. My first single was Lucky Numbers by Lene Lovich. A poppy-post-punk track that, till this day, I have no idea why I bought it.

The Eighties

The end of the seventies saw the end of punk, fragmenting into New Wave (think Blondie, Talking Heads, The Cars, and The Police) and Post-Punk (Joy Division, Magazine, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Public Image). Peer and “sheep” thinking meant following one, and I went New Wave until that quickly went soft-in-the-head and became mainstream New Romantic (think Duran Duran, Ultravox, Culture Club, and everything else that came out of Rusty Egan’s Blitz Club).

I’d deepened my love of Heavy Metal, getting into Whitesnake and Deep Purple. It was my “style” if you could call it that. I wore jeans, long hair, cut-off jackets and was a “metal head” from 12 through 16 years old, up to 1982 when I moved into the sixth form and peer-grouped with post-punks and moved to a more affluent area.

It’s also when I properly discovered girls, so I smartened how I looked, got into the disruptive intelligentsia punk scene. But fuck knows why - but it was better than dressing like the gender-confused New Romantics.

With no money, my record collection centred around birthday presents, occasional trades and purchases. But I taped everything on the radio and bootlegged albums from friends on “borrowed” C90 tapes. I had been given a second-hand music centre and became my mums worst late-night-loud-music-nightmare.

I was still a kid, I hadn’t developed my own musical identity and very much led by school-related peer groups. I started to break free from the norms, but that was more of a reaction to the rise of manufactured new romance and the cultural backwater that living in rural East Yorkshire meant.

Last train to London

This would all change in 1984 when as a still-wet teenager I moved to London after landing a “cool job” in the city. I was rich, sort of (£7,500 a year), so bought a wicked stereo and went on a bender buying vinyl. Commuting from my flat in Kilburn to Farringdon every day meant recording “best of” tapes to play on my Walkman clone. I was as cool as a cucumber.

At the same time, I discovered the London club scene; I was a regular visitor to the clubs and bars of Londons West End; the Hippodrome in Charing Cross Road and Samantha’s off Regent Street were my regular haunts. Club music at the time was high-energy, so Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Hazel Dean - it wasn’t, to be honest, great music but played so very loud it went through you, you felt it.

I would get home at 3 am and create my club sound by winding the little stereo up until it could take no more. My neighbours, who I mostly never saw, hated my late-nights music blasts.

All grown up

It would stay that way until the release in 1986 (I was now 21) of Dire Strait’s Brother in Arms on CD. Overnight my collection of 300 vinyl records just seemed antiquated. CD quality was mind-bending to hear for the first time. I went mad and spent over £1,000 on a brand new stereo component system (which I mostly still possess) .

Mostly, my musical taste had gone mainstream, but the late 80’s saw the underground rise of House and Acid. By this time I had a car, with a sound system that included CD, so bass-laden house music was where I was at until the early 90s. But, like most folks, my first influences in music stayed with me - and have remained to this day.

The grim 1990s

By 1990, the Voyager 1 probe was now 4,000,000,000 miles away having flown past all the outer planets; it’s mission over. There was nothing new to record, much like my musical taste - not very much new stuff, not really. And then, for no scientific reason, Voyager flipped around and took the famous “pale blue dot” picture - a selfie of planet earth before slipping off into the featureless, quiet outer solar system.

By 1995 I didn’t play vinyl anymore - my decade-old deck got consigned to deep storage and would not see the light of day for another a decade - and vinyl wouldn’t re-appear back in my lounge until 2016. New music had become a little dull and formulaic, yes, The Strokes, Oasis, Blur and Pulp saved the world from totalitarian purgatory but nothing new was firing me up.

I discovered Jamiroquai and Faithless must be listened to at mental volumes, and when high on dope. More free money meant more music, louder rigs, a flirtation with MiniDisc and eventually a massive (at the time) CD jukebox for 300 CDs. I reached “peak sound” in the late 90s, with a pair of fridge-sized Cerwin Vega speakers powered by a massively powerful domestic rig. It would rattle windows and keep several postcodes awake late into the evening.

The iPod revolution

In early 2002 I visited New York and brought back a new invention called the iPod. It held a thousand songs, lasted for hours on a single charge and fitted in your pocket. It was almost unbelievable at the time. Overnight (again) my music collection was out of date - I spent weeks converting my existing CDs into MP3 and illegally acquiring a whole load more music.

Suddenly every track that ever existed was available free of charge, forever. When YouTube appeared, I now had every music video ever filmed available, too. I now had too much music, and with easy skipping, I had, in fact, reduced the range of music I was listening to.

Too much choice is not always a good thing, and when music moved onto my iPhone in 2008, I started to fall out of love with music. I had no stereo in my lounge anymore, and phone battery life was not conducive to mixing calls and music during a typical working day.

Streaming eveything

A year later in 2009 Spotify launched in the U.K. and I was pretty much straight in. My previous collection of music was made redundant for the third time - I probably had 10,000 MP3 tracks stored when I switched over to using a streaming service.

But I still didn’t listen to music at home, not really. I had a small sound dock for events, summer listening outside and occasional dinners but mostly music only existed on my iPhone.

But, on the road, on the train, on the tube, on planes I was back in love with music. And with Spotify I went back and re-explored my early choices and this time I discovered, for the first time, post-punk. Spotify had most of the smaller labels from day one, while big bands such as AC/DC stayed off the streaming platforms.

Hello again

And then randomly in 2015, I decided to fix my vinyl urge. I had lost most of my LPs over the years, but my wife had quite a few records, and we’d occasionally had a vinyl session on a Heath Robinson setup since 2008, but now I wanted to bring vinyl back into the lounge. I bought a modern turntable deck and a retro-looking Marshall speaker. Oh, and an original 1980s graphic equaliser for that authentic look.

I went on to purchase a few Amazon Echo devices, all attached to various music outlets around the house so now it’s just a case of “Alexa, play Ceremony by New Order”. Simple, and brought music into every room of the house. Nor does it require any technical knowledge ... anyone can ask for anything. Perfect.

My technology habits have gone full cycle and more; tranny->tape->vinyl->CD->Minidisc->MP3->Streaming->Vinyl. I still listen to the music from my formative years - 1978 thru to about 1987. In the last few years, I’ve also picked-up the live music bug again, nicely timed as punk turned 40 and all the old bands came out of the woodwork. But mostly my real musical taste is frozen in time, and space.

And Voyager’s Grand Tour of the solar system is complete, travelling at 10 miles per second, it is now over 13,000,000,000 miles away in interstellar space. Long after we’re dead, long after our sun dies, Voyager 1 will still be trucking along - still carrying Johnny B. Goode. I can relate to that; Voyager still carries the music of its formative years.

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parkerbombshell · 6 years ago

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The Electronic Family Tree Radio Show hosted by DJ Rusty Egan

Join Us! Saturdays 1pm-3pm EST 6pm-8pm BST 10am-12pm PDT bombshellradio.com #Synthwave #Electropop #Alternative #Chill #electro #electronica #MobileApp #TheElectronicFamilyTree #RustyEgan #BombshellRadio — with Rusty Egan. Rusty Egan is a drummer ‘The Rich Kids’ – Visage – The Skids – Phil Lynott TOTP Theme Yellow Pearl And a DJ Producer. He was DJ at The Blitz Club introducing ambient and electronic music in his sets 2013 2016 WRITING AND RECORDING IN IBIZA and hosting a weekly radio show with new releases planned for 2017. However, Egan did not return to Visage when they reformed with a new line-up in 2004. He has been a DJ since 1978 and was the DJ at Blitz, the influential New Romantic nightclub in London where he worked with Steve Strange from 1979 until 1981. Whilst there, he introduced German (Kraftwerk), Japanese (Yellow Magic Orchestra) and British (Eno, Ultravox, Landscape) electronic/synthpop to the British club scene, almost single-handedly putting together the soundtrack for the New Romantic movement. Egan also owned The Cage, a New Romantic-era record store on London’s King’s Road. As the club grew in popularity, Egan began to be recognised as a central figure in London’s nightlife. Also Egan has chanpioned electronic synth pop since Kraftwerk via his dj sets.

electronic family tree Pic by GEMRAY In 1982, he and Strange opened up the Camden Palacenightclub in London, where he continued to spread and influence the development of electronica in the UK. For a time, he switched to producing records for many of the bands he used to DJ, including Spear of Destiny, Shock, Visage and The Senate. Egan was later brought back into his career as a disc jockey by the allure of the internet as a medium for sharing music. Presently, he works as a DJ playing and promoting 1980s style synthpop and electronic music. On 13 June 2008, Egan appeared DJing at the ‘Big Top’ as part of the Isle of Wight Festival. Egan appeared alongside former Visage bandmate Steve Strange on makeover show Pop Goes the Band in early 2009 on Living TV. He had his teeth drastically reconstructed as part of his makeover. Egan won the category for lifetime achievement at the 2009 London Club and Bar Awards. Previous winners have included Richard Branson, Mark Fuller and Nick House.

In January 2011, Egan and Steve Strange reopened the Blitz Club for one night, with performances from Roman Kemp’s band Paradise Point and electro punk artist Quilla Constance plus DJ sets from Egan himself. In 2017 Rusty Egan Presents released Welcome to the dancefloor to great critical acclaim . Rusty is writing producing and and hosting a weekly radio show The Electronic Family Tree Radio Show on http://artefaktorradio.com/ and http://bombshellradio.com/ with new releases planned for 2017.

He has participated at Electric City Conference in Dusseldorf and nowadays his album Welcome To The Dancefloor has been very succesful on different radio stations around the world. Read the full article

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