March 30, 2023 |
Is there a British subculture that Derek Ridgers hasn’t documented? The legendary photographer’s portraits of punks, New Romantics, goths, skinheads, metalheads and emo kids are so vivid that you can almost smell the sweat and fag smoke. In the 50 years since he first took his camera on a nightlife safari, his pictures have become important cultural touchstones. Rare is the designer who hasn’t pinned one to a moodboard. The history of British youth culture is in his archive.
His MO hasn’t changed in all that time. “I’m always looking for great faces. People who have some sort of story to tell, which will almost always be written on their face. Or maybe just amazing-looking people who, for that one night, are living their best life,” he says.
For this issue, Ridgers, 72, who was born in Chiswick, West London, has delved into his Blitz portfolio, featuring pictures of the era-defining New Romantic club night. The Blitz club was founded in 1979 by host Steve Strange, who later turned himself into a pop star, fronting new wave synth group Visage, and the DJ Rusty Egan. The Tuesday night event colonised a Covent Garden wine bar on Great Queen Street and quickly became famous for its dressed-to-the-10s crowd and Strange’s savage door policy. Only the most outrageously dressed, chosen ones were granted entry, with Strange holding up a mirror to those in the queue and asking, “Would you let yourself in?” Explaining its legendary reputation, Ridgers says, “It had to do with an extremely talented generation of art and fashion students from [Central] Saint Martins, which was then situated in Charing Cross Road, only about two minutes’ walk away. You can’t really study what happened then without mentioning the role of Saint Martins.”
Many of the Blitz Kids, as those who went were nicknamed, went on to make their mark on the 1980s, from musicians Spandau Ballet, Boy George and Marilyn to designers Stephen Jones and Bodymap’s David Holah and DJs Jeremy Healy and Princess Julia.
At the time, Ridgers, who was a bit older than the clubbers he photographed, was working as an art director at an advertising agency during the day and describes himself as a committed outsider. “I was just an interested observer with a camera. I was never one of the cool kids,” he says. “If I’d never had a camera, I’d never have set foot in a nightclub.” Here, he puts the Blitz club into a cultural context.
What are your memories of that time when the New Romantic scene emerged?
Punk had never really waned and the New Romantics, at least in the beginning, were just a few dozen people in a small basement club in Soho called Billy’s. The Bowie Night at Billy’s was really the beginning of the whole thing. This was the nascent scene that gave birth to the New Romantics. That was in 1978, the year after punk went mainstream. But punk never died, it just got quickly absorbed into the mainstream and eventually went global. I think it’s unarguable that the punk ethos has influenced every generation since.
The New Romantics were mostly art students and ex-punks who’d quickly got bored with the punk look and probably also the music. Plus, there were a few others who were never much into punk in the first place.
What stands out to you about this time in club and pop culture?
I suppose, looking back, it was really the last time that there were clearly identifiable youth tribes. Or perhaps I should say, clearly identifiable to outsiders. I’m sure similar tribes still exist but they are now much harder to hang a label on.
What was the atmosphere like at these clubs?
Billy’s, Blitz and all the New Romantic clubs that came along afterwards were far more genteel than the punk clubs. They weren’t usually so dark, sweaty or loud and they weren’t so crushed. Plus, there were often proper fistfights in punk clubs – the spirit of punk was quite aggressive, after all. I don’t think I saw a single fistfight in any New Romantic club.
The Blitz has a legendary reputation. Was it as good as they say?
Not really, no. Very few clubs from the past are ever quite as good as people who went there say they were. They’ll remember everything good about the place and none of the bad. The Blitz was really a small, slightly scruffy, World War Two-themed wine bar.
The way we remember things like that is partly to do with nostalgia affecting the memory. And partly it’s down to the photographers of the time, like me, shooting all the great- looking people and the great-looking clothes but never shooting all the tourists and all the more normally dressed hangers-on. The Blitz represented a seminal moment in popular culture but it wasn’t a particularly great club.
Do you have a favourite memory from the Blitz club?
Apart from taking photos, I suppose my favourite memory was the music played by Rusty Egan. His DJing was persistently inventive and he was the first person I ever heard play two of the same 12″ vinyl records, side by side, mixing between the two. He’d also occasionally play two completely different records at the same time. It might sound crazy but it worked. Sometimes I used to just stand next to him and watch in fascination. I know now that he wasn’t the first DJ to ever do that sort of thing, but I think he was the first one to do it in the UK.
How decadent was it?
Compared to lots of other clubs from that era, it wasn’t really decadent at all. The wine bar location didn’t really lend itself. And there wasn’t as much canoodling as there generally was in some other contemporaneous places like Le Beat Route [another Soho nightclub], which had comfy bench seats and lots of dark corners. Also, if I remember correctly, Blitz closed at 2am, whereas some of the other clubs went on to 5 or 6am. In terms of sheer unrestrained hedonism, Blitz wouldn’t bear any comparison to Heaven or Taboo or some European clubs like Ku [in Ibiza].
It was a place to dress up and go and pose and get seen. It was sometimes jam-packed but not always. And it was never as hot and sweaty as a nightclub [usually is] and the music was never so loud that people couldn’t easily chat. There was usually a bit of dancing but not so much. The Blitz was quite a small venue and I think if there were more than about 150 people there, no one would have been able to move.
The Blitz was famously hard to get into. How did you get past the door police?
The door police were basically just one man: Steve Strange. If you could get past him, you were in. The legend has it that one night he turned Mick Jagger away. How true that is, I don’t know. But if your face fit and you knew Steve, you were in. To begin with, my face definitely did not fit. The first time I tried to go there, Steve wouldn’t let me in. “It’s a private party tonight, mate,” was his initial counter. After which, since I was persistent, he told me that I wasn’t dressed right anyway.
He was perfectly correct in that regard. I sometimes used to go to clubs straight from my West End office job, wearing a cardigan and jeans. But I’m the kind of person, or at least I was back then, who will try to never take no for an answer. So I eventually I wore him down.
What are your tips for getting into a club?
I think it’s important to always be very polite and respectful. Usually, the person on the door is just doing their job. And taking a high handed, don’t-you-know-who-I-am attitude is not classy. Obviously, it helps if you dress to impress.
Tell us about how you worked during this time?
My process is the same now as it was then. As soon as I arrive, I go and get a drink – even now, I need to get a little Dutch courage – then stand in a corner and just watch. I often won’t start taking photographs until I’ve been there a while and often not until all the other photographers have left. I spend 98 per cent of the time watching and only about two per cent of the time taking photographs. I’m very picky. In the best nightclubs, I find the key photo opportunities happen at the end of the night, when the place starts to thin out a bit and people get properly relaxed.
Of course, when I started photographing the New Romantics, I wasn’t really a photographer at all. I still had an office job during the day. And I only owned one camera, a Nikkormat, and one standard lens. But I quickly had to buy a wide-angle lens because, in most of the clubs, they were so packed that one couldn’t really stand back far enough for a standard lens.
Did you get into any scrapes?
Not shooting New Romantics or punks, no. Shooting skinheads, certainly. But I was also naive and incredibly lucky. If I’d knew then what I know now about some of the skinheads, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near them.
When you look back at that time, do you think there are any parallels to post-Brexit Britain?
Back then there was the distinct feeling that the country was going to the dogs and young, working-class people had few prospects and not very much to look forward to. It’s exactly the same now, except much worse. But, on the plus side, the mood of the time is also perfect for creativity to flourish, just as it did back then. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
How do club crowds compare today?
Overall, there’s far more going on in clubs around the world these days. But it has much less of a specific focus. The culture is too diverse now. In the 30-year period between the mid-’50s and the mid-’80s you had the beatniks, teds, hippies, punks, mods, rockers, skinheads, goths, grebos, New Romantics, emos, metalheads and the beginnings of rave, dance culture and hip hop. Nowadays you could have elements of all those tribesin one place at one time. It’s become what [anthropologist and writer] Ted Polhemus once described as a vast “supermarket of style”.
But it’s not just a few like-minded souls getting together in seedy little basement clubs anymore. For a start, most of those seedy little basement clubs don’t exist these days. Gentrification, rent rises and the [economic] downturn have seen to that.
And young people don’t need brick-and-mortar locations anyway. They can meet up, dress up and show off from the comfort of their own home now on Instagram or TikTok. They no longer have to run the gamut, like Leigh Bowery did, of going out to clubs virtually naked on the night bus.
Do they behave differently?
Two things that don’t really get discussed so much about those times are the sexual mores and the drugs. Back then, the New Romantic clubs were leading the way on androgyny, gender identity and overt expressions of sexuality. You could go to into one of those clubs and see young men walking around with their bums hanging out where, only a couple of years previously, it would have seemed quite shocking. These days, one doesn’t bat an eye. And drugs are far more ubiquitous and easy to get hold of now than they were in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s obviously all still illegal but it doesn’t feel quite so illicit as it did then.
What makes a great club?
I’m not the best person to ask because, although I’ve been to a lot of great clubs over the last 50 years, never as a participant. Essentially, young people go to clubs to dance, get wrecked and hook up. Even when I was young, I wasn’t really into that. If I’d never had a camera, I’d never have set foot in a nightclub.
What makes a great picture and why do you think your images continue to fascinate us?
I think a great photograph is one that communicates something of value but which can’t always be put into words. My aim is to take photographs that say something about other people’s lives and other experiences. As to their exact value, that’s for others to judge. But for me it’s more of a journey than a destination.
My photographs, and those of contemporaries like Homer Sykes, Daniel Meadows and Dafydd Jones, continue to fascinate, I suppose, because they’re a window into another, very different era. The photographs of those times are rather beguiling now. It all seems so very close, like it was only yesterday. Whereas, in reality, those days are now gone forever.
Archival prints are available from Derek Ridgers Editions.
Top Image: Myra and Clare at Planets, 1981. Photography by Derek Ridgers. Taken from issue 70 of 10 Magazine – ROMANCE, REBEL, RESISTANCE – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
