Last year’s Spandau Ballet documentary Soul Boys of the Western World spent a considerable amount of time focusing on two Soho clubs in London, Billy’s and the Blitz, where the nascent new romantic scene was born. Over footage that looks pretty remarkable – 26 years later, in an era when almost every youth cult of the past has been assimilated into the mainstream, you’d still attract a great deal of attention walking down the street dressed like certain members of its clientele – various band members list the nights’ memorable qualities. There was the music assembled by DJ Rusty Egan: Bowie, Kraftwerk and Roxy Music, Krautrock and disco, Throbbing Gristle and Ennio Morricone. There were the kind of people the club attracted, a very British, slightly wonky take on Warhol superstars, their DIY glamour held together with sticky tape and string: “Fabulous nobodies,” as one commentator put it, “who thought they were famous already.” And, perhaps most striking of all, there was “this boy called Steve on the door”. Even in the all-bets-off, anything-goes aftermath of punk, there seemed something remarkable about an 18-year-old from a small mining town near Caerphilly loftily pronouncing on who could and couldn’t come in to London’s hippest club.
More so than the records he made with Visage, Billy’s and the Blitz were Steve Strange’s moment, his real claim to legendary status. In late 1978, he and Egan were vastly ahead of the curve. Egan had recognised early on that the future of pop was going to involve the synthesiser: within two years of the club opening, high street stores would be selling vastly toned-down versions of the kind of clothes that would get you past Strange at its door. It was all terribly elitist and snotty, but the club demonstrated his real skill, which wasn’t as a musician so much as a catalyst: not just someone with the instinctive ability to gather the right people around him, but someone with the ability to spot something in others before anyone else had – and then to light a spark under them. For all they were derided as vacuous clotheshorses, the Blitz club’s clientele showed a remarkable ability to make something of themselves: in 2015, the music industry, the media and the fashion world are all still liberally sprinkled with former Blitz kids. Perhaps they realised that if Steve Harrington from Newbridge could reinvent himself as the person he wanted to be, then so could they.
Just as the early 70s glam scene was largely populated by artists who’d tried and failed to be pop stars in the 60s, so the new romantics were frequently people who’d skulked around on the fringes of punk, never quite making it: Rusty Egan had been the drummer in the Rich Kids, bassist Glen Matlock’s doomed post-Sex Pistols band; most of Spandau Ballet had played punk epicentre the Roxy under the name the Makers. Steve Strange had a more colourful time on punk’s peripheries than most.
He’d seen the famous Sex Pistols gig at Caerphilly when local Christians had picketed the venue, singing hymns. He had slept with bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel when the Stranglers came to town. He’d moved to London, inveigled his way into Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s circle, and formed a band called the Moors Murderers, with famous Pistols acolyte Soo Catwoman. It was the first demonstration of Steve Strange’s nonpareil aptitude for gathering the right people around him. No one who actually listened to the Moors Murderers seems to have thought they were very good – “I heard them once and that was enough,” said Sex Pistols producer Dave Goodman – but the cast list was pretty amazing: the lineup featured Chrissie Hynde and Topper Headon of the Clash, they were managed by Andy Czezowski, who ran the Roxy, and played their first gig at Slits vocalist Ari Up’s school. They certainly attracted attention, but it was largely because of their name – “HOW COULD THEY BE SO CRUEL?” ran the News of the World’s headline, complete with a photo of the band wearing pillow cases over their heads. Their projected single, Free Hindley, never came out.
In Visage, however, a similar approach paid off. Alongside Strange and Egan, the band featured Midge Ure and Billy Curie of Ultravox, along with Magazine’s Dave Formula, Barry Adamson and John McGeoch. Almost overburdened with post-punk talent, Strange’s actual input into Visage’s music was a matter of some debate: he received no writing credit at all on their second, best and best-known single Fade to Grey. But it was fairly obviously Strange’s image, his new-found celebrity and the unstoppable momentum of the scene he’d created at Billy’s and the Blitz that buoyed Visage into a major-label deal and on to Top of the Pops; his storylines that got used in Visage’s videos, his voice on the records. His bandmates might have baulked at the suggestion in Strange’s autobiography that he deserved a co-writing credit on Fade to Grey (he was credited as co-writer on all Visage’s other hits), but they could hardly deny his claim that he was “the focal point of the group”.
Visage were never taken terribly seriously by critics, which was unfair. Synth-driven, oddly melancholy, sometimes subtly transgressive – their second album, The Anvil, took its name from a notorious gay S&M club in New York, its title track offering a soft-focus vision of what went on behind the club’s doors – and almost always wobbling along the line that separated grand melodrama from ridiculous pretension, their music captured the new romantic era perfectly. If it occasionally seemed faintly preposterous, it was clearly in on the joke: on tracks like Night Train and Tar, Visage seemed to have their tongue firmly stuck in their cheek, even as they sucked in their cheeks and posed.
But by the time of The Anvil’s release, the era that Visage’s records defined was drawing to an end. Strange initially seemed able to shift with the changing times. Visage’s 1982 single Pleasure Boys flopped, but lurking among the mixes was a visionary six-minute dub version, which became a huge club hit on, of all things, the burgeoning hip-hop scene. His next nightclub venture, the Camden Palace, was London’s undisputed pop star hang-out of 1983, so frequently mentioned in the gossip columns of Smash Hits that eventually the magazine devoted an entire feature to it: “A CLUB BY THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE” ran the headline, the egalitarian sentiment slightly undercut by the fact that every single accompanying photo seemed to feature someone famous. But Strange’s grip on the charts and on London nightlife was slackening, a state of affairs not much helped by his increasing drug problem. By 1985, Visage had disbanded, in the face of increasing public indifference: there weren’t many takers for his subsequent band Strange Cruise, while a new club venture with Egan, the Playground, had failed.
He re-emerged in the noughties, free from heroin, his appetite for fame undiminished. He dithered between making music with a new generation of electronic artists to whom he was a mythic hero and the less edifying world of reality TV and nostalgia tours. He never succeeded in re-establishing Visage in the way he clearly hoped to. Pop music had changed a great deal since the late 70s, not least in the sense that it was more tightly controlled, its parameters more clearly defined and heavily policed: there wasn’t – and isn’t – really room any more for weird, maverick characters like Steve Strange, blessed with talents you couldn’t quite put a finger on. It’s hard not to think that this is pop music’s loss, but at least his role in pop history was already assured, his legend looming larger than Visage’s back catalogue. “He encouraged us to be characters more exciting than we imagined we were,” Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp said on Thursday, “and I’m forever grateful to him.”