Some New Romantic Looking

For a brief moment in 1980, the most radical thing in British pop was a face.

Steve Strange couldn’t sing particularly well and didn’t play an instrument. None of that mattered. He became one of the era’s defining figures because he understood something the music industry hadn’t caught up with yet: an audience could fall for an image before they heard a single note.

He wasn’t alone. Spandau Ballet built their early identity on the stage show Cabaret before they had a sound to match it. Duran Duran took their visual cues from Barbarella and borrowed the keyboard atmosphere of Japan’s Quiet Life for their debut single – which also happened to name the movement itself. Simon Le Bon had seen the phrase “New Romantic” in NME and dropped it into ‘Planet Earth’, half ironically, not yet sure if the term would stick.

Adam Ant built an entire persona from a military hussar jacket and pirate makeup. Michael Jackson called him twice – once to ask about the drum sound on ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, once to ask where the jacket came from.

Photo: THE ANTZONE

Vivienne Westwood arrived a year later and gave the wider movement its definitive wardrobe. Her 1981 Pirate collection – ruffled shirts, sashes, swagger borrowed from three centuries of costume drama – confirmed what the Blitz had already been doing since 1979 with charity shop fabric.

The scene looted history indiscriminately – pirates, hussars, dandies, Native American patterns, and somewhere in the mix, Pierrot, the sad clown of French pantomime, lending a few faces their particular blend of glamour and melancholy.

For a few years, the styling was the innovation. The music had to catch up.

This week’s newsletter tells the story of the song where it all came together.