New Romantic

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New Romantic , later also referred to as New Romanticism , was a wave of music and fashion that was popular from roughly 1978 to 1982. It originated in the UK and was viewed as a predominantly British phenomenon as part of the earlier New Wave . The fashion wave was essentially limited to the external appearance, consisting of clothing, hairstyle and cosmetics. In general, New Romantic has also been associated with music. Among the most famous bands, whose band members appeared completely or partially as New Romantics, were Visage , Ultravox , Culture Club , Duran Duran , Adam & The Ants , The Human League and Spandau Ballet .

history

This started out as a pure fashion movement on the part of the art student Steve Strange , who, bored with the punk movement, regularly hosted a David Bowie and Roxy Music Night at the Billy's Club in London at the end of 1978 at the weekend . When it got too small due to the number of visitors, he switched to a club called Blitz in 1979 . He worked there as a doorman and only allowed guests with the most extreme and unusual outfits possible to enter. There was a fashionable mixture of punk , new wave and glam rock . In addition to the bands already mentioned, synth-pop (e.g. Kraftwerk , Depeche Mode , The Human League , Heaven 17 ) and funk / disco music (e.g. Chic ) were played there. The club quickly acquired the image of being an elite collection of poseurs .

In the same year Adam Ant was looking for a manager and a new look for his band Adam & The Ants. He reached out to Malcolm McLaren , whose Sex Pistols had broken up. He agreed, and McLaren's partner Vivienne Westwood created the pirate look for the band based on old Hollywood films. To give the whole thing a new touch, the band put on some kind of Indian war paint. McLaren rejected Adam Ant as a front man, however, whereupon the band separated from Ant. But he was able to secure the naming rights and in 1980 released the first single with a new band and in a pirate look. McLaren found 15-year-old Annabella Lwin as the new singer for Adam Ant's former band. This band called itself from then on Bow Wow Wow and wore a similar outfit as Adam & The Ants.

David Bowie's video Ashes to Ashes , published in 1980, gave Steve Strange an initial spark. He adopted the concept of Bowie's makeup. The video also expanded the scene already known as Blitz Kids (named after the club) to include the harlequin outfit, which is sometimes referred to as the flamboyant style . The first bands such as Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet emerged from the scene . In addition to these and other musically ambitious Blitz kids such as Boy George (later Culture Club ) or Martin Degville (later Sigue Sigue Sputnik ), the scene also included mainly fashion enthusiasts such as Dylan Jones, editor for the then new magazine iD and later for GQ , or the fashion designer Stephen Linard. But Steve Strange had also founded his band Visage in the meantime . The first publications came: Spandau Ballet reached number five in the British charts with their first single To Cut A Long Story Short and Visage achieved a hit with Fade to Gray . The press slowly became aware of the scene. However, there was no suitable name. Sex Pistols biographer John Savage wrote an article about the scene for British fashion magazine The Face , entitled The Cult With No Name . This designation should be retained temporarily. In the article, John Savage also created a connection between Adam & The Ants, Bow Wow Wow and the Blitz Kids that didn't exist before. The Blitz Kids were also named Herald Angels , Dandy Dilettantes , New Dandies and Romantic Rebels by the press , until the music magazine Sounds titled them New Romantics in a September 1980 issue .

Duran Duran released their first single Planet Earth in 1981, reaching number 12 in the UK. In a verse of the text of Planet Earth it says: ... like some new romantic looking for the tv sound . The term New Romantic was invented shortly before by Richard James Burgess , the former drummer of the band Landscape and producer of the first two albums of Spandau Ballet. Adam & The Ants also reached number one on the charts. The music press gratefully picked up the term New Romantic and had a new wave.

Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet turned their backs on the scene and became a fashionable copy of Bryan Ferry , commonly known as the "best dressed man" in Britain. Dressed in elegant suits and with the typical, oversized quiff that fell from the side parting into the face, Spandau Ballet became what was called popper in Germany , but which formed an independent movement. New bands like Haysi Fantayzee , Kajagoogoo and Culture Club joined the new romantic wave, while already established bands like OMD and Japan jumped on the bandwagon.

The music

The New Romantic movement did not have a uniform style of music. The bands assigned to this movement picked up on current trends in popular music and were chart-oriented. Artistic ambitions in musical terms were secondary. The visually striking appearance of the New Romantics worked primarily in the new medium of music videos. If David Bowie wore a new outfit for each album, Duran Duran had the right to wear a different outfit for each new single, and a corresponding video was produced for each new single.

Effect and influence

The New Romantic movement polarized enormously and the British music press found in it a new enemy. It went so far that Steve Strange was ridiculed by the English press as The Posing Donut . The movement was seen as elitist and with a lascivious tendency to decadence . Her presentation of a nostalgic-romantic pop world stood in stark contrast to the reality of life for young people in Great Britain in the 1980s, which was characterized by unemployment and the tough social and economic reform course of the Thatcher era . This deliberate turning away from reality in an imaginative, multimedia staged illusory world drew a counter-image to the harsh realism of punk. A letter to the editor from January 1, 1981 in the British music magazine Sounds was a high point in a constant dispute between punks and new romantics. In it, an avowed Crass fanatic insulted New Romantic bands as "commercial rubbish" that infiltrated everything that punk and bands like The Clash or Sham 69 stood for, and finally remarked: "They suck." Many bands like ABC , the Simple Minds , the Cure , Virgin Prunes or Depeche mode went on Distance to New Romantic or rejected as Yazoo or XTC generally anything from what it had to do with fashion. The movement was repeatedly accused of not wanting to convey anything other than outward appearances:

“Up until the beginning of New Romantic, New Wave music was expected to contain a statement that it was dangerous. But the New Romantics believed that it would be enough to sell people a haircut and a few clothes […] They based their ideas solely on superficialities […] They were good business people, but that was all. "

- Kristian Hoffman, 1982/83

New Romantic became synonymous with selling out the New Wave. Like the punks, the early goths rejected this commercialization. Nevertheless, according to Judith Platz, despite the small number of its protagonists, New Romantic had a great influence on the Goths. Diedrich Diederichsen describes the Gothic movement as the "dark brother" of the New Romantics and points to their common origins in Glam Rock and the Bromley Contingent . He is one of the New Romantic movement with the battlefields of Style Wars (Engl., War of styles ) that have increasingly been carried out primarily through fashions and Lebensstilismen since the early 1980s. Diederichsen saw this as the forerunners of the common orgies of differentiation and distinction between and within youth cultures that are common today .

The American anthropologist and author Ted Polhemus saw a significant influence of the New Romantic movement in the expansion of the range of British fashion magazines such as iD and The Face , which, in contrast to the classic fashion magazines, also had street style content.

However, the New Romantic wave had left a strong impression in Japan, which can still be found today in Japanese pop music - especially in so-called visual kei . Such traces cannot be overlooked in manga and anime either.

Revivals

In the mid-1990s, a revival called Romo emerged in British clubs . DJ and music journalist Simon Price and colleague Simon Parkes were the driving forces behind this wave. Both wrote for the music magazine Melody Maker , which tried to generate a new hype from Romo. It was a short-lived and unsuccessful revival that Price saw as a "revolution against the gloomy complacency of Britpop" and a "big step towards style, poise, chic, mystique and glamor". In 1995, Melody Maker announced the wave as "the future pop explosion" capable of "executing" Britpop. Musical protagonists were bands like Orlando, Plastic Fantastic, Minty, Viva, Sexus, Hollywood and Dex Dexter.

See also

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Spandau Ballet, the Blitz kids and the birth of the New Romantics. In: www.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved October 1, 2010 .
  2. ^ Marty Monroe: Duran Duran - The Book Of Words , Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation, London 1984, p. 16. ISBN 0-7119-0547-9
  3. ^ FASHION / The British supermarket of style. In: www.independent.co.uk. Retrieved December 16, 2009 .
  4. ↑ a b c d Peter Wicke, Wieland & Kai-Erik Ziegenrücker: Handbook of popular music, Schott Music GmbH & Co KG, Mainz 2007, p. 490. ISBN 978-3-7957-0571-8
  5. ↑ Kirsten Borchardt: Stop Making Sense - Supermarket of the Sublime: New Wave and Pop in the eighties. In: Kemper / Langhoff / Sonnenschein (ed.): Everything so beautifully colorful here - The history of pop culture from the fifties to today , Reclam-Verlag, Leipzig 2002, p. 212 ISBN 3-379-20040-9
  6. ^ A b Diedrich Diederichsen: The Cure - Is there life after the Restoration? . In: Sounds, Volume 13, Issue 5 / May 1981, Sounds Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1981, p. 22.
  7. ↑ a b Kid P .: The little ABC of life ( Memento of the original from November 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.societyofcontrol.com archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Sounds, Volume 14, Issue 9 / September 1982, Sounds Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1982, p. 38.
  8. ^ Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs: Unemployment in Great Britain ( Memento of September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) . In: Homepage of Dr. Hermann Adam, Other Countries' Economy, Great Britain - Slides, accessed September 4, 2009.
  9. ↑ George Gimarc: Punk Diary - The Ultimate Trainspotters Guide To Underground Rock 1970-1982. Backbeat Books, San Francisco 2005, p. 419. ISBN 0-87930-848-6
  10. ↑ Doris D'Oro: Simple Minds . In: Sounds, Volume 14, Issue 5 / April 1982, Sounds Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1982, pp. 37-38.
  11. ^ A b Judith Ammann: Who's been sleeping in my Brain - Introduction , Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1987. ISBN 3-518-11219-8
  12. ↑ A History Of Goth - Futurist Viewed August 30, 2009.
  13. ^ A History of Goth: New Romantic , accessed September 7, 2009.
  14. ↑ Axel Schmidt, Klaus Neumann-Braun, Judith Platz: Die Welt der Gothics . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 268. ISBN 3-531-14353-0
  15. ↑ Diedrich Diederichsen: The return of the nostalgia machine . In: Die Zeit - Leben , issue 44/2001
  16. ↑ Polhemus, Ted: Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk , Quoted in: A History of Goth - New Romantic , Viewed: September 12, 2009.
  17. ↑ Barney Hoskyns: Glam Rock. Bowie, Bolan, and the glitter rock revolution. Hannibal Verlag, St. Andrä-WIERT 1999, p. 132. ISBN 3-85445-167-9
  18. ↑ Dave Simpson: The scenes that time forgot In: guardian.co.uk, accessed September 12, 2009

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