It’s hard to believe that as of today Steve Strange, the focal point of the New Romantic movement, had been dead for a decade now. When he suddenly died in 2015, I was taken aback and posted a brief mention of his passing only to be stuck at home in the snow for a week. A proper PPM remembrance as we often now do, had never happened. So today is the day we will take the proper time to discuss the phenomenon of Steve Strange.

I can vividly remember the first time I ever heard of the New Romantic movement. I was watching the evening news on either CBS or ABC in 1979 and the last feature on the evening’s news was pitched as, “look at what happens after Punk!” And the Blitz Kids were introduced to my eyeballs jarringly free from any musical context. It looked like a convention of extreme exhibitionists to my untrained eye. The phrase “New Romantic” may not have even been applied back then to what was happening. I’d heard about the “Futurist” movement and I believe that term may have been bandied about on this broadcast. But the piece was more about the extreme fashion of it all, with little or none of the musical underpinnings. Which was a shame, since it was the musical underpinnings where my interests lay.

I have always been highly attracted to keyboard instrumentation. As a child in the late 60s, it was electric organs that set me off. By the mid 70s, it was synthesizers. Many of the musical touchstones of the Blitz Kids were if not records I already owned, things I should have known about! By 1979, I learned to pay attention to the phrase “Futurist.” Any Venn diagram that held Gary Numan in it was decidedly of interest to me. And by 1980, that had given way to the term “New Romantic.”

The Blitz scene were intimately connected to basically two gents who created this Cult With No Name, late of The Rich Kids: Midge Ure and Rusty Egan. Midge sang and played guitar and Rusty was the drummer. The two of them were drawn to European Art Rock and Krautrock and wanted to move Rich Kids in this direction but the other two members were having none of it. And that ended up splitting the band apart. But this freed up Egan and Ure to dive deep into this sound with no one to hold them back.

The Blitz Night was the first flowering of the scene they were building from their mutual musical interests. They started Bowie nights by playing forward looking Pop Rock and managed to build a dancefloor playlist drawing from not only established style icons like Bowie, Roxy, and Kraftwerk, but also music further on the periphery of popularity: Grace Jones, Telex, Gina X Performance. Things that had not yet filtered into the mainstream, but were part of Egan’s musical diet following his trips to Europe. Rusty’s instincts built a scene out of some very disparate musical building blocks, that nonetheless managed to coalesce into a distinct vibe that was definitely a harbinger of the coming decade.

Egan next hypothesized how great it would be if they could form a new band with the best players in their favorite bands contributing to achieve this amazing sound in their heads. So they created a hypothetical mashup of existing bands they rated very highly. With the guitar, bass, and keyboard player of Magazine and the keyboardist from the recently splintered Ultravox, whose amazing third album, was a Blitz Club favorite. With Ure as producer and Egan as drummer, they could explore European atmospheres steeped in the new synthesizers and drum machines pouring into the market.

But who would be the frontman? All of the players were already in contracts that precluded anything more than a sideman contract. The answer was close at hand when Egan’s friend and roommate Steve Strange was already the doorman to the Blitz Club. The human litmus test by which clubbers lived or died as he determined if they were worthy of entry to the rarefied scene. He might prove to be the ideal frontman.

Next: …Strange Nights