When I first took over the podcast series Moonage Daydream it received a helpful leg-up thanks to the
tweeting of Gary Kemp, Bob Harris, John Robb and others. The biggest help came
from 1980s pop star and massive Bowie fan Steve Strange, who not only tweeted
the link a few times, also got in touch to ask me about it and say how much he
enjoyed it. He said he would look out for me at the press launch for David
Bowie Is at the V&A but I didn’t really expect him to, besides it was very
busy. I will of course always be grateful for taking the time to talk to me
though.
I suppose we all thought that Boy George or
Marilyn would die first, but it was reported last night that Steve Strange has
sadly passed away at the age of 55 from a heart attack. At the time of writing
this blog the news report are only slowly filtering in, and was until an hour
ago thought to be a hoax.
It is only from reading his autobiography Blitzed a few years ago that I know what happened to Steve
Strange after Visage. However it is the pre-pop years that fascinate me the
most when it comes to this particular branch of music history. The time between
punk and the New Romantic heyday would appear to have been the final great days
of Soho, a place that is gradually losing its essence thanks to gentrification.
The last time we were there I was shocked and appalled at the cafes and posh
bars, nothing frightening about that at all.
Steve Strange was a promoter of Blitz, a club
night with a stringent dress code that Strange himself would police; I can’t
imagine such a concept happening now as people are too serious. A venue that
gets mentioned in these New Romantic history lessons is Wag on Wardour Street,
somewhere I often went in its final days and at last look was a branch of O’Neill’s
Irish bars. This tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with
the place now.
When I lived in Soho there was something
exciting about the danger of the place, especially when you walked around at
night. Although it was dangerously populated by criminals and prostitutes, I
never felt under any threat. The place came alive at night and its pubs and
bars were lively affairs that went on until morning at a time when we still had
quite draconian licensing laws. It intrigued me that although Soho was in the
heart of London’s West End, it was like a little village with a proper
community. It was a community of sex traders and gangsters but it was a village
nonetheless. I was fascinated by the fact that people lived there, they even
had butchers shops and things that catered for the residents, there was also a
school – to my memory it was next to a sex shop.
The Coach and Horses pub was famously
frequented by Jeffrey Bernard and was the scene for raucous media lunches that
went on for several hours. Nobody does that sort of thing anymore, and as a result
the pub is nothing more than a hipster hangout full of Nathan Barley types who
say they work in the media but in reality just sit around pubs coming up with
stupid ideas.
Small pockets of the sexual side of the
district do still exist, but they are in danger of being closed down. Even
worse than being closed down will be if the few remaining sex shops and strip
clubs become a tourist cliché, much like Carnaby Street’s transformation from
epicentre of cool to tacky gift shop ghetto trading on past glories.
Listen to The Sunday Alternative Saturday Bonus Podcast here.
Listen to this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative here.
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February housekeeping
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