• Deep Dive 14: New Romantic

  • Jun 17 2022
  • Length: 59 mins
  • Podcast

Deep Dive 14: New Romantic

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  • Summary

  • New Romantic: The United Kingdom of 1979 was a drab, unforgiving place in which to be young. The colourful tie dye of the sixties’ hippy era had now washed out, replaced by the oranges, yellows, browns and blacks of seventies’ clothes and soft furnishings. Something had to change, and in a small corner of British society it most definitely was doing - the ‘New Romantic’ movement was being born. Out of the nightclubs in London (The Blitz) and Birmingham (Billy’s), eccentricity was the new cool. Their key musical inspirations were Bowie, Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, and Marc Bolan, all doubtless on mid-70s TV screens throughout a new romantic’s formative years. Their fashion sense, however, looked much further back, with the romantic period of the early 19th century playing a key part in the peacock styles of both Kahn and Bell in Birmingham and PX fashion studios in London. Nothing was off bounds following the punk movement of a couple of years previous, and an outrageous mix of Far Eastern, ancient Babylonian and an eye-catching ‘English Dandy’ look, owed as much to the styles of Byron and Shelley as they did to ancient Mesopotamia. As for the music, the synthesizer now drove the music - the key exponents of this very British movement being Visage, Duran Duran, The Human League and Spandau Ballet, all paving the way for bands like A Flock of Seagulls, Thomas Dolby, Ultravox and Classix Nouveaux to make their mark. There were many others who have subsequently been sloppily labelled as ‘New Romantic’ over the years (Adam & the Ants, Gary Numan, Japan and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark being key examples of bands who despised the New Romantic moniker). As with so many other fads around the 1980s, New Romanticism was over very quickly - by early 1982, its appeal was waning as the synthesizer sound became more accessible to the masses - keyboards becoming a standard component of the 80s pop single. So, join Crispy, and visit a brief period in time when foppish was the new cool and synth was king.
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