The Blitz

Tuesday nights, a wine bar near Covent Garden, decorated with leftover WWII memorabilia. Steve Strange on the door with a silver-topped cane, deciding who got in. The price of admission was effort.

Strange and Rusty Egan had started with Bowie Nights in a Soho basement before moving to the Blitz. The rule was simple: dress like you meant it, or go home. Mick Jagger turned up once in jeans and trainers. Strange sent him away.

Inside, on any given Tuesday, were people who would define the decade before anyone outside knew their names: Boy George working the cloakroom (and, by his own admission, occasionally helping himself to whatever was left in the coat pockets), Marilyn, a teenage George Michael, the future members of Spandau Ballet. None of them had money. Most of the glamour was constructed from charity shop fabric and conviction.

Bowie came to look, in March 1980, and was amazed by what he found. Boy George later claimed he was the only one in the room who kept his cool that night – a claim at least one other Blitz regular disputes. If memory serves, he was less composed about not being chosen for the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video a few weeks later, when Bowie returned to cast Strange and a handful of other Blitz Kids.

A club that decided who was interesting enough to enter ended up deciding what an entire decade looked like. The 2021 documentary Blitzed! gathered the survivors to tell it themselves – Boy George, Rusty Egan, Midge Ure, Gary Kemp – still slightly disbelieving, forty years on, that any of it actually happened.

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