Outside the Blitz club in 1979.
credit: Sheila Rock
Between the demise of punk in the late 1970s and the synthpop explosion of the early 1980s, the New Romantic era made a substantial mark on London’s musical and cultural scene. It was a period when young people flocked every Tuesday night to a venue called the Blitz in Covent Garden wearing makeup and dressing in non-conformist post-punk fashions. In its heyday, the Blitz was a nightly haven for restless and creative youth known as the Blitz Kids — who were inspired by David Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and Weimar-era Germany — during the early period of Margaret Thatcher’s administration.
Hosted by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, the Blitz was where an emerging Spandau Ballet performed and a young Boy George served as a cloakroom attendant. “Blitz was a wine bar in Great Queen Street decorated with thirties memorabilia,” wrote Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp in his 2009 memoir I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau. ”It suited our theme of dancing while Rome burned. Strange wore his hair and heels high, and tottered at the door with a silver-topped cane, while hundreds, desperate to burn brightly in these dark times, blocked the street outside.”
More than 40 years after the Blitz shuttered, its partons, among them aspiring musicians, artists, fashion designers and scenesters went on to revolutionize and pave the way for ‘80s culture; the club launched the music careers of Spandau Ballet, Boy George and Midge Ure along with renowned hatmaker Stephen Jones, Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, DJ Princess Julia, and BBC broadcaster Robert Elms. The club, and the New Romantic period in general, is being celebrated with a major exhibition, titled Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s, at London’s Design Museum starting Saturday, Sept. 20.
Vivienne Lynn, Boy George, Chris Sullivan, Kim Bowen, Theresa Thurmer, and a Blitz attendee, 1980.
credit: © Derek Ridgers c/o Unravel Productions
According to the Design Museum’s press release, the exhibit boasts over 250 items mostly from the former Blitz Kids’ personal collections — including clothing and accessories, musical instruments, flyers, and film footage. Among the objects on display are a 1970s synthesizer from Spandau Ballet that was used on their 1981 debut album Journeys to Glory; leather garments owned by Steve Strange; and the original first issues of The Face and i-D magazines, which documented the style and culture scenes of the period.
“It’s remarkable that so much of 1980s pop culture can be traced back to the Blitz scene,” said Danielle Thom, the exhibit’s curator, in the news release. “That the club night only ran for little over a year but shaped a whole decade is really astonishing, and so forty-five years on feels like the right time to explore the club’s enduring legacy in a major exhibition, as well as its continued impact today.”
An exhibit highlighting Blitz opens at the Design Museum in London.
credit: Luke Hayes
Along with Rusty Egan’s role as resident DJ, the Blitz’s aesthetic was defined by the late Steve Strange, who manned the venue’s door and selectively determined who got in. Bowie, the patron saint of the Blitz Kids, once visited the Blitz and enlisted Strange and other patrons to appear in his 1980 video for “Ashes to Ashes.”
“It was such an avant-garde café society,” Strange, who would find fame as the lead singer of Visage, told Rolling Stone in 2013 about the scene. “I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that people got disillusioned with punk and they were looking for somewhere different. Once they’re inside that club, I wanted them to feel like they were in their own front room and they weren’t going to be stared at like goldfish in a goldfish bowl. And that’s why I adopted the very strict door policy, and that’s why I got known as the biggest door-whore in clubland.”
Spandau Ballet’s debut photo shoot at the Warren Street squat, 1980.
credit: Graham Smith
“One of the most interesting things about the New Romantics–and the people who started to go into nightclubs like Billy’s and Blitz in London–is that they were fanatical about being individuals and they didn’t want to belong to an army,” Dylan Jones, author of the book Sweet Dreams, once said in 2020.
Though in existence very briefly, the Blitz, and the New Romantic era in general, prefigured the British pop music and cultural scenes of the early 1980s, dominated by synthpop, glamorous fashions and photogenic music acts such as Spandau Ballet, Boy George’s band Culture Club, and Duran Duran.
Four of the original Blitz Kids (left to right) DJ and Blitz co-founder Rusty Egan, Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, costume designer Fiona Dealey, and BBC broadcaster Robert Elms at the Design Museum for the launch of a new exhibition, on the history of the Blitz Club.
credit: Jack Hall/PA Media Assignments
“Just as Malcolm [McLaren] and Vivienne [Westwood] had said with Punk Rock,” Egan said in the exhibit’s press release, “do it yourself, start a band, start a fanzine, do something you love and they will follow. With that and an attitude (and my record collection) we had some parties and that was the start…the rest, as they say, was history.”
Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s runs through March 29, 2026 at the Design Museum in London.
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