Blitz: The Club That Created The 80s
Robert Elms
★★★★
FABER
Last year, Blitz club DJ Rusty Egan released the enlightening Blitzed! compilation, his corrective to outsiders’ mangled version of history. Robert Elms takes a similar stance with this delightful book about the ur-New Romantic hangout, so rich in ostrich feathers, theatrical wigs and army surplus that you can almost smell the hairspray. Elms, then an LSE student and writer of “preposterous poetry”, was there from the start, attending Steve Strange’s first “David Bowie night” in a brothel basement in 1978 before their tiny crew of working-class dandies (Spandau Ballet, Boy George, Sade, Grayson Perry) decamped to a Second World War-themed wine bar in Covent Garden for 19 giddy, influential months. There are high-grade celebrity stories – Strange turning away Mick Jagger, David Bowie’s surprise appearance, Roland Rat’s fetish-scene links – but Elms is also good on youth culture’s tangled threads, dismal late-’70s London and the equally bleak political landscape, underlining just why Blitz was such a vital escape hatch.
Blitz: The Club That Created The 80s is available now on Faber.
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