The strange prescience of 80s youth cults

Things to see and do

Scenester Stephen Linard at the Blitz Club in 1980. He fashioned his lace collar and cuffs from his grandmother’s curtains (Design Museum / Robyn Beeche Foundation)

Two events about 1980s British youth cults. The first, a press preview for the Design Museum’s forthcoming exhibition Blitz: The Club That Shaped the Eighties, which promises to take us back to the start of the decade and the short-lived counter-cultural club on London’s Great Queen Street, full of self-imagined kids conjuring unearthly glamour with hairspray, face-paint and the spoils of jumble sales (no one called themselves New Romantics, the Blitz’s survivors, who are now mostly in their 60s, insist).

The second event was the opening of In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats at the Barbican. Pay £25, strap on a headset and time-travel back to 1989, when a virtual illegal rave kicks off in a virtual warehouse. I spent a happy hour with a few other journalists in this experiential documentary, driving around dark A-roads, hanging about outside a telephone box waiting for a location call, and waving virtual glow-sticks with a bunch of loved-up, wild-eyed Acid House avatars.

Outside the VR arena at the Barbican is this recreation of an 80s phone box, complete with a disintegrating A-Z map

The Blitz opened the 1980s and Rave closed the decade. On the surface, the two youth cults had little in common and aesthetically, they were antipodal. The first was a celebration of do-it-yourself individualism. The second was about love, music and drugs; no one cared what you wore.

But listening to the testimonies of the people who were at centre of each movement, what struck me was how both cults were driven by the same human instincts. And both were far from trivial. Like all youth movements they were harbingers of eras, whether their participants were conscious of it or not.

Rusty Egan, co-founder and host of the Blitz club, was on hand at the Design Museum event to reminisce (inevitably, he has a memoir coming out) with the journalist Robert Elms, another club regular. Egan, who is 67, avuncular and growly voiced, was in his late teens when the Blitz opened in 1979. He said that what set the movement apart from punk was its cultural reference point: Blitz kids were interested in Europe, not England.

Outside the Blitz in 1979, the year it opened. Egan is far right, Steve Strange, Visage frontman and his co-founder, is centre. Midge Ure is in there, too. (Design Museum / Sheila Rock)

Think of the Mittel-Europa sound of its music: the deadpan French-language monologue in Visage’s Fade to Grey; the Blitz house band Spandau Ballet. Then there were the faux-historical costumes parodying the decaying aristocracy of 18th-century France. The Blitz, said Egan was based on Le Chat Noir club in Paris and the Eldorado in Berlin. “The idea of Germany as other? That belonged to our parents’ generation.”

As did the postwar consensus and the welfare state, which were about to be dismantled by the Thatcher government in favour of self-reliance. The Blitz, with its celebration of individualism, both heralded the new spirit and acted as a kind of dress rehearsal for it. Danielle Thom, a curator at the Design Museum, calls it “the club that shaped the 80s”. That may be an overclaim, but it is no coincidence that this tiny weekly party attracted singular artists who would go on to become leading cultural figures and amass enormous personal fortunes – Sade, Boy George, assorted members of Spandau Ballet.

Boy George at the Blitz in 1979 (Sheila Rock)

If the Blitz set an agenda for the 80s, Rave closed the same decade by rejecting individualism. The point of Rave – and this was the aspect I had forgotten but is brought into sharp relief in the Barbican show – was a desire to transcend the self in mass unity with strangers, assisted by drugs and electronic music.

Unlike the licensed, exclusive, essentially conformist Blitz club with its approved denizens, Rave was mass civil disobedience for all-comers. Jeremy Deller in his 2018 documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain, links Rave to collective shock at the brutality of the Thatcher government. He describes Acid House parties held in decaying Victorian warehouses as literal death dances for the industrial age.

What did the Blitz and Rave share? An instinct to claim the future. Both intended to obliterate whatever had come before. This was not necessarily conscious: both cults were manifestations of collective understanding, the strange, supernatural prescience of young people, and the urgent need to forget the past.

Blitz: The Club That Shaped the Eighties opens on September 20

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is at the Barbican Pit until August 3

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Four more observations:

• I asked Thom why the Design Museum was staging a Blitz exhibition now. She said the early 80s is still in living memory but the era is sufficiently in the rear-view mirror to be worthy of re-examination. And the club itself is new and fascinating to young people. There are, she added, contemporary resonances: the individualism of TikTok, for example.

• What else did Blitz kids and Rave kids have in common? Transience. In Great Queen Street, clothes were scavenged from jumble sales and charity shops then pulled apart and re-adapted. The whole point, said Elms, was that the look “only lasted for one night. It was perpetual movement, an energising display of teenage.” A warehouse rave, too, was ephemeral. A party could only happen once in one place; the police could arrive any moment and close it down. In today’s hyper-documented digital-media age, nothing is transient.

• Egan is a little unreconstructed. Talking about his disillusionment with disco in 1979, he described Donna Summer’s transcendent vocals on I Feel Love, the 1977 extended electro-disco track she recorded with Giorgio Moroder, as ‘some girl warbling over what became the future’. His comment was an odd combination of regressive and incisive. I Feel Love was the future, of course, in that it was a precursor to Acid House.

• But Egan and Thom were right about the Blitz and its aftershocks bleeding into mainstream popular culture. Two years after its closure in 1980, American vocalist Kim Carnes recreated an ersatz Blitz, complete with kids wearing lace collars and cuffs, in her video for the sublime Bette Davis Eyes.

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V&A East Storehouse, a museum turned inside out, opens in the former Olympic Park in Stratford on Saturday. I wrote about its Order an Object service for the Telegraph this week (there’s a link to my story here). Choose up to five items from the online catalogue, make an appointment, then visit them in the study rooms. The photo on the link is me clutching a wet-look Kansai Yamamoto platform boot, made in 1971.

Yamamoto platform boots, 1971, from the Kansai in London collection

I also asked to see a couture Vivienne Westwood corset.

The corset: well-worn

Here’s what I wrote about it:

Part of the British designer’s “Cut, Slash and Pull” collection of 1990. I, too, once owned a Westwood corset (albeit from her cheaper ready-to-wear collection, black and gold with painted cherubs cavorting on the bodice), but I lent it to an acquaintance and it was never returned. Now cult items, these corsets sell for thousands of pounds.

I’m struck by the ivory silk garment’s diminutive size. Though it is labelled a 12, as was mine, it looks as if it would fit an actual 12-year-old. And while the corset is exquisitely cut, it was clearly worn a lot in the hedonistic 1990s – the silk is sweat-stained and its former owner’s hairs are still caught in the zip.

This is the joy of Order an Object. All kinds of connections and associations are revealed when vitrines are removed and the grime is visible to the naked eye.

I also talked to Elizabeth Diller, the American architect behind the kaleidoscopic V&A Storehouse building. She is adept at public spaces, her practice Diller Scofidio + Renfro is best known for the smash-hit the High Line park in Manhattan.

Some of Diller’s best quotes didn’t make it into the Telegraph story, so I’ve included an edited version of our conversation here. I found it helpful in thinking about the intention behind the building.

I thought a lot about the V&A and its eclectic collection, everything from architectural fragments to thimbles to silverware to pottery, stage sets, fashion, oh, everything! Rather than try to organise by taxonomies in some way, I thought we would lean into the delirium of it. The thing that came to mind was the cabinet of curiosities as the model, a piece of furniture filled with everything and the precursor to the museum.

But because the collection is so vast, we wanted to make an immersive cabinet, so you see things all around and below you, but to also to carry that feeling of the sublime. Once you land in the middle of this collection you understand it’s vastness. It is finite but we hoped it would be perceived that you can’t really fathom the collection.

So you come from the street, you come up the stairs through the glass floor, and you enter this immersive cabinet of curiosities. You are surrounded by artefacts and this eclectic mix of everything, this crazy heterogeneity of the collection is exposed to you right there. That effect is intended, and if it has that I’m really happy. It’s a radical welcome, and in that sense gives people more of an energy to explore.

Museums don’t [get rid of] things they collect at the speed. In a traditional museum you have that small percentage of things on view. But V&A East Storehouse is a thought about a way forward, without having to build continuous new wings, to take what you have of your storage and make it come alive.

Inside V&A East Storehouse

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Other things I’m working on:

A long-form piece about secret culinary lives

A story about restoring modern art

A story about what makes urban places successful

More book reviews

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My website, where you can find a selection of my work, is here.