Interview – ➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ (original) (raw)
Tag Archives: Interview
1983 ➤ A True romance aboard Spandau’s triumphal Thames riverboat
Spandau over Bournemouth, 1 April 1983: Gary Kemp teases the screamers at the Good Friday show in the Pavilion Theatre. © Shapersofthe80s
40
YEARS
ON
❚ YES IT’S 30 40 YEARS SINCE Spandau Ballet scored their only No 1 chart hit single with True, coinciding with their epic “Spandau Over Britain Tour”. By May 3, True the album reached No 1, while the single remained at No 1 as well. The band’s official website is celebrating with a month of recollections from 1983 and asking UK fans to offer their own memories. Naturally Shapersofthe80s was there on the waterfront and has a few inside stories of its own.
The month-long tour ended in triumph at London’s Royal Festival Hall 30 years ago today, on Friday April 29, because True hit the top spot in the UK singles chart and the night before Spandau topped the bill on Top of the Pops – only two weeks after its release. After the London gig there followed a right old knees-up for friends and family aboard a Thames riverboat. As it cast off Shapersofthe80s was onboard and snapped a True romance as Steve “Spiny” Norman took to the dance floor with bass-player Martin Kemp, while Steve’s mum Sheila tried to muscle in. Here are our snaps, never seen before.
CLICK ANY PIC TO LAUNCH CAROUSEL
AND NAME THE FACES:
Aboard Spandau’s True riverboat: Steve Norman and Martin Kemp take to the dancefloor, while Sheila Norman asks to join in
Steve and Martin are in heaven… See anybody else you know? Of course: future Spandau biographer Paul Simper in dog-tooth suit from Robot with added Wham!
Steve’s mum Sheila joins the chorus line, and backing singer Sam Brown joins Martin
At last, mother and son get to boogey together
The band’s third album True, produced by Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, had preceded the tour and was to yield several chart hits across the world, Gold among them. The tour moved on to Europe in the summer and to North America in the autumn, when Shapersofthe80s will have some wild eye-witness scenes to report – laters…
➢ May 1 update: all five members of Spandau Ballet have agreed to an individual ‘TRUE’ Twitter Q&A session with fans, according to the official Spandau website – Q&A sessions start at 8pm (BST) on the official Spandau Twitter account, not their personal accounts, as follows: Gary May 3, Martin May 6, John May 7, Steve May 9, Tony tbc.
➢ 30th anniversary interview with Gary Kemp at UK Official Charts website
The Observer Music Monthly Oct 4, 2009
HOW IT ALL BEGAN FOR
THE ANGEL BOYS
➢ Photographer Neil Matthews, another friend of Spandau from their earliest days, has been celebrating with an exhibition of his popstar photos titled My 80s Through the Lens, at The Great British Restaurant, 14 North Audley Street, London W1K 6WE. All images can be viewed online and are for sale in limited editions printed on smart archival paper. As well as Spandau, his subjects include Bananarama, Blue Rondo, Bauhaus, Haysi Fantayzee, Malcolm McLaren, The Jam, Nick Heyward, Bow Wow Wow and more.
Posted in Clubbing, London, Pop music
Tagged Blitz Kids, Gary Kemp, George Michael, Interview, Martin Kemp, Neil Matthews, New Romantics, photography, Spandau Ballet, Steve Norman, Twitter, UK tour
➤ Escape to the Nightlifers’ Shangri-la just in time for Christmas
Cool-hunters 1985: the Animal Nightlife lineup who charted with their album Shangri-la. . . Billy Chapman, Paul Waller, Andy Polaris, Leonardo Chignoli and Steve Brown
❚ REMEMBER SNAKE-HIPPED ANDY POLARIS, frontman for Animal Nightlife, the soul/jazz/pop socialist collective who emerged from London’s cool clubbing scene and charted with Native Boy in 1983? This week their debut album Shangri-la is re-issued in a deluxe two-CD edition, having charted in summer 1985 only on vinyl.
Andy says: “It comes with a bonus disc of remixes and a great booklet with retro photos of the band in its two phases. Just in time for Christmas. The vinyl album has long been deleted and since then a very poor compilation of songs was released. The re-issue’s tracks consist of the album in its original form and a second CD containing other singles and extended remixes that were only available on 12-inch before.” Lois Wilson supplies some nicely informed sleeve notes identifying Animal Nightlife’s role as innovators when the UK’s thriving underground changed the face of nightclubbing.
“Just listen to the Pink Panther style
saxophone of instrumental Basic Ingredients
and try not to lose yourself momentarily
in another world, a better world even”
– First review (7/10) by Loz Etheridge
Managed by Steve Lewis, London’s coolest club deejay in the Beat Route’s heyday, Nightlife’s swing sound with an electronic twist enjoyed its moment as the hippest trend in music while Polaris penned his own brand of torch song and the band wore head-to-foot styles from Bolshevik bolshieness to Johnson’s jazz-age retro. Rabid clubbers must remember how Nightlife’s crazy animalettes and animalads went through about 35 line-up changes during their eight years on the scene, sadly scoring only four chart singles. For some band members, good times tended to take precedence over naked ambition in those highly competitive years when British acts were storming international pop charts.
“The must have re-issue CD of 2016.
A perfect Xmas stocking filler”
– deejay Mark Moore
By 1985 the band had slimmed down to the five-piece pictured on the CD cover. They consisted of Andy Polaris (vocals), Leonardo Chignoli (bass), Paul Waller (drums), Steve Brown (guitar) and Billy Chapman (playing a thrilling saxophone). After switching from the finger-snappy Innervision label to supercool Island Records, they were all packed off to Philadelphia where the first album was recorded at the legendary home of Philly World Records.
“The label wanted a bit more discipline from us,” Andy says, “and they sent us to America to get us out of our element and into the hands of those seasoned veterans who’d created the fabled Philly sound. We five working-class boys from London were wide-eyed and just did everything they told us. It paid off, because after our sojourn at Philly World our urban jazzy feel translated into a more sophisticated British club sound.”
❑ Standout track on the second Shangri-la CD of lost mixes is reggae producer Dennis Bovell’s version of Native Boy. Whoever’s on vibes – “mm, nice”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCYA7Jpv7gY
➢ Shangri-la is cheaper direct from Cherry Red records (plus quick delivery)
➢ Andy Polaris recalls his impressions of recording with the Philadelphia greats
➢ Definitive yet unofficial Animal Nightlife band history created online by Mike Albiston, a fan who remembers their last gig. Last updated 2010 and viewable since then thanks to the Wayback Machine
➢ Catch Andy Polaris’s reminiscences in the recent BBC doc Boy George’s 1970s: Save Me From Suburbia
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: Animal Nightlife as part of the UK’s second wave of 80s image bands
Posted in Clubbing, jazz, London, Pop music, soul music, Youth culture
Tagged Andy Polaris, Animal Nightlife, CD, Interview, Lois Wilson, Mike Albiston, Philadelphia, Philly World Records, Shangri-la, Steve Lewis
➤ “How it should be” bombshell from Hadley to Spandau
Spandau Ballet singer Tony Hadley talking to Lorraine today. (Picture: Rex Shutterstock/ITV)
◼ METRO REPORTS TONY HADLEY talking to Lorraine Kelly today on ITV: “Spandau’s on hold, that’s kind of one of the reasons I did the jungle [_TV show_],” Tony said of the 80s chart-toppers. With the 2015 world tour ending only recently, he admitted that a future reunion shouldn’t be ruled out. “We’re really great friends and we’ll get back together every three or four years – which is how it should be.”
“ Which is how it should be ” !!!
➢ Lorraine Kelly full interview at ITV with video clip from Shake Up the Happiness
➢ Tone’s solo Christmas Album features 16 festive classics with that suave Hadley flavour, priced from £8.99 through the retailer of your choice
➢ Spandau fans have been here before. Read Tony’s equivalent bombshell from 2011
➤ Thanks to Neil McCormick for the only Bowie Blackstar review we need to read
Late-life melancholy with jazzy modulations: Bowie in messianic mode in the video for the album’s title track Blackstar
“ For his 27th studio album, has Bowie gone jazz? On first listens to Blackstar, released on 8 January, Bowie’s 69th birthday, it certainly sounds like rock’s oldest futurist has dusted down his saxophone. They are tooting, parping, wailing and gusting all over the place, occupying rhythmic, atmospheric and lead parts, with guitars and keyboards intermingling in a weave of supporting roles.
Donny McCaslin: Bowie’s new-found friend
The saxophone was Bowie’s first instrument, which he started learning in his pre-teens inspired by a bohemian, jazz-loving elder half-brother, Terry Burns. Bowie once said that, aged 14, he couldn’t decide if he wanted “to be a rock’n’roll singer or John Coltrane”. Even in his rise to rock fame, Bowie remained a creature of the jazz age, at least in the sense of the boundary-crashing freedom that characterises his work.
A new single, Lazarus, released today, may kick off in the vague realm of contemporary music, with spectral guitar and stuttering rhythms calling to mind the young British trio the xx, but it is not long before those saxophones are sighing and the beat is fragmenting. Just about holding it together are the familiar tones of Bowie’s teeth-gritted, tight-chested whisper of a vocal, proclaiming it is This way or no way / You know I’ll be free / Just like that bluebird / Now ain’t that just like me? Sure sounds like jazz to me. . .
What Bowie has created with this hardcore jazz crew, though, is not something any jazz fan would recognise and is all the better for it. At its best, free jazz is amongst the most technically advanced and audacious music ever heard but it can be uncompromisingly difficult to listen to for the non-aficionado. The improvisational elements that make it so gladiatorial and hypnotic live can make it over complex and inaccessible on record. Bowie’s intriguing experiment has been to take this wild, abstract form and try to turn it into songs. Blackstar is an album on which words and melody gradually rise from a sonic swamp to sink their hooks in. It is probably as close as free jazz has ever got to pop. . . ” / Read the full review at Telegraph online
◼ IN AN UNNERVING SIMULATION OF BOWIE’S VOICE, the star of Bowie’s new musical Lazarus, Michael C. Hall, sings its title track for the CBS Late Show (below) the day it is released as a single. The maestro himself is watching the show at home in his armchair. How meta-modern is that?!
➢ Bowie fulfills his jazz dream – Listen to an NPR Music interview with the two main characters who accompany Bowie on this new adventure in music – his longtime friend and producer Tony Visconti and his new-found friend/saxophonist and band leader Donny McCaslin.
➢ Nov 23, more background revelations in Rolling Stone – “We were listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar,” says producer Tony Visconti. “The goal was to avoid rock & roll”
➢ PLUS: The Blackstar album reviewed track by track by Neil McCormick
Posted in North America, Pop music, TV, Youth culture
Tagged album, Blackstar, David Bowie, Donny McCaslin, Interview, jazz, Lazarus, Michael C. Hall, Neil McCormick, NPR, pop music, Reviews, Tony Visconti, Video
➤ Spicy new survey from Derek Ridgers celebrates the wild hours between dusk and sunrise
Clubbers at the Astoria in 2000 photographed by Derek Ridgers
◼ HERE’S A PROMO VIDEO FEATURING some preposterous talking heads who include photographer Yasmine Akim and dancer Constantine Flowerz, describing a new large-format book of spicy photographs from Derek Ridgers’ travels through London clubland… The Dark Carnival: Portraits from the Endless Night is being published next week by Carpet Bombing Culture.
If you’re in it, you’ll be on the list for the launch party on Friday 27th from 5pm at the Lights of Soho gallery, followed on by a free Soho Swag night from 9.30pm at the 68 and Boston bar at the top end of Greek Street, hosted by 80s shapers Christos Tolera and Chris Sullivan.
The Dark Carnival is Derek’s second book published this month. He modestly calls it “my 40-year wander through nightclubs” but this delicous cornucopia selected by Derek himself proves much more of an adult shocker where anything goes on the themes of sexuality, seduction and shame (lack of), with eye-poppers shot at Anarchy, Smack, Submission, Wacko, Wicked, Rubber Ball and coming right up to date at Torture Garden.
➢ Buy The Dark Carnival direct from Carpet Bombing Culture, 216 huge pages for £30
Anonymous clubber in Brixton 2011 photographed by Derek Ridgers
AUDIO UPDATE: ROBERT ELMS INTERVIEWS DEREK ON BBC RADIO LONDON 9 dec 2015
http://www.zen19954.zen.co.uk/Shapers/RL15-Ridgers-Elms-int9dec.m4a
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Q: Does this kind of nightlife still exist?
“Yes it does. It’s not quite so focussed today and readily categorisable. Hardly any of the little basement clubs are left in Soho. I think the St Moritz is the only one” – Derek Ridgers on BBC Radio London
Posted in books, Clubbing, History, London, photography, Youth culture
Tagged Carpet Bombing Culture, Christos Tolera, Constantine Flowerz, Dark Carnival, Derek Ridgers, Interview, Lights of Soho, New Romantics, nightlife, Robert Elms, Soho Swag, street style, Swinging 80s, UK, Yasmine Akim, youth culture