Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics

I read Dylan Jones' recent book SWEET DREAMS: THE STORY OF THE NEW ROMANTICS, which seems up the alley of several regulars here (especially Post-Punk Monk) and wrote the following on Goodreads:

What were the New Romantics? Dylan Jones' book begins before punk, in 1975, and traces a strain of British pop inspired by Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and soul for the next decade. Told as an oral history, each chapter covers one year. The first few years are fairly familiar, but most of Jones' subjects view the direction punk took as a betrayal. (The obligatory British view of the Clash as just another macho hard rock band is all over the book.) While the more underground path of post-punk has celebrated far more often as an alternative to Sham 69, the Cockney Rejects, etc., Simon Reynolds' RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN brought out the continuities between it and New Pop but stopped short of engaging with Duran Duran and Culture Club. SWEET DREAMS traces how music rooted in a genuine subculture, which was groundbreaking as an expression of queer identity just before AIDS wiped out half a generation of gay men, wound up filling arenas worldwide. The question of its artists' politics and class positioning keeps coming up, without having any real definitive answers. Did coming from a leftist working-class background but wearing a suit onstage and giving your albums names like DIAMOND LIFE indicate support for Thatcher, even on a subliminal level? Even the musicians seem perplexed by the complexities of those times. By the last few chapters, the idea of a unified scene has splintered, with any irony present in Duran Duran's early videos long since vanished, George Michael tormented by the closet and Boy George by heroin, and innovators like Gary Numan and the Human League on a sliding path away from the best and most popular music they made, and the book just seems like a history of pop music in the early '80s. (What does Madonna have in common with Sade?) But it's a relatively fresh one.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/11/2020 04:24PM by steevee.

I picked this book up three weeks ago. I hemmed and hawed for a couple weeks before purchasing. On the surface it looks like it was written just for me, covering my favorite years in music. And my local independent book store had it, so I figured win-win.

My hesitation stemmed from the format: I’m just not a huge fan of the ‘oral history’ with the chapters made up of quotes from those who were there. Legs McNeil’s ‘please kill me’ and Clinton Heylin’s ‘from the velvets to the voidoids’ are in the same style. Doesn’t make them bad books, just not ideal for me.

But because of the subject matter, ultimately there was NO WAY I wouldn’t include any of them in the Pre-punk/Punk/post punk/new wave wing of the Bip Memorial music book Library I’ve been gradually collecting in my basement...

In truth, maybe because of the format, I haven’t come close to finishing it. I may never. The one thing I’d add to Steevee’s savvy overview is the size of this thing..... it’s approaching 700 pages!

The term "New Romantic" is a personal minefield to me. Many of my favorite bands got lumped in with this extremely broad term, yet so did so many bands I hated. This should like the kind of book I would have to see in a store, thumb through, and make a decision on. Nothing I could buy blind. I still wonder what exactly terms like New Romantic or Glam Rock really mean. On one level, it was in the dandified presentation of the artists. But musically it was all over the map. Glam Rock has been said to encompass both Roxy Music …and Gary Gl*tter. Anyone else having aneurysms trying to reconcile the two beyond a slight overlap in camp couture? And even there, the gulf between High Camp and Low Camp was enormous.

Oh, I see Dylan Jones is the editor of British GQ. Well, that tells me a lot.

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/14/2020 01:01PM by Post-Punk Monk.

Jones edited i-D during the early '80s.

The sections of SWEET DREAMS about early synth-pop and the glam-disco scene around the Blitz club do describe a concrete scene and sound (although they're not the same one.) But once the bands became famous, their differences seem more and more glaring. Artists like OMD and the Human League talk about electronic music as a rebellion against the limits punk quickly developed, but they valued that spirit of rebellion. Duran Duran were always basically a boy band. I prefer New Pop as a term for this scene than New Romantics, but it's far less common, especially in the US.

Is there anything about Japan in the book? (The band, obviously.)

I was wondering this as well and came across a review on Amazon that indicates Japan/Sylvian barely gets a mention...seriously?!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/16/2020 01:37PM by the 801.

New Pop was something hot on the heels of the New Romantic movement. NewRo was '79-81. New Pop was '82-83. There's overlap, but basically New Pop was practiced by New Romantics with a college degree who understood semiotics.

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®

My personal definition of ‘new romantic’ is probably WAY more stringent than it should be. Debut album-era Duran and Spandau, Steve Strange, images of Blitz kids at the trendy club.... that’s it. Everything else is just fringe influence or involvement. (crikey, Bowie’s ‘ashes to ashes’ video was a harbinger, no? Yet it’s NOT new romantic in my skewed view).

So the book, at 600plus pages, was never going to be about JUST what it’s title portends. I’d say the title is indeed misleading. I think the book is trying to capture that general era... which is tough (would be difficult to do it better than Simon Reynolds in my opinion).

But I love that era. And the quotes and people quoted are generally interesting to read. Quick thumb through: Marco pirroni, midge ure, martyn ware, Phil oakey, rusty Egan, etc etc... all names of people that were integral to young Bip’s musical development.

I can’t get too worked up about exclusions. It’d be like complaining to 801 or Delvin “how could you not play blah blah blah...!” I guess to me, I’m thankful anyone bothers to write about or play interesting music at all!

Seems like this discussion throws a spotlight on the subjectivity and, ultimately, inadequacy of genre designations.

I’ve not read Mr. Jones’ book, which certainly sounds interesting. I have a tremendous fondness for the New Romantic era, and frankly miss those days. People were better-looking then, and (at least to this old fogey’s ears) they sounded better. My definition for the style is more expansive, and heavily influenced by Kurt Loder’s classic 1981 Rolling Stone article on the scene, “Dress Right!” Loder uses the term “Blitz” (“as in Zap! Pow! Look at us!”) and writes:

“This latest British subcultural sprawl defies concise designation. What musical tag, for instance, could adequately encompass the tribal drums and pirate drag of Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Ants; the gilded rockabilly revivalism of the Stray Cats, Polecats and Shakin’ Pyramids; the semiridiculous preening of the music-for-clothes crew – Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Classix Nouveaux, Depeche Mode; the beatnik flash of Blue Rondo à la Turk; and the vivid electronic impressionism of such veteran Cold Wave synthesizer bands as Ultravox, Landscape, even the arid Gary Numan? For purposes of pigeonholing all of this, ‘Blitz’…will have to serve.”

I believe that Loder nailed it. People automatically think of fancy synthesizer bands when they remember the movement, but there was an equivalent flamboyant energy in the style of sun-sea-and-piracy Spaghetti Surf, Nu Funk/Salsa, and Fifties retroactivity. (The Polecats were what Duran Duran would have looked and sounded like if they were into rockabilly rather than Roxy, and in general neo-rockabilly was—visually, and occasionally sonically—quite Glam.) The Blitz mixtapes I made for myself and others back in those halcyon days contained music from all those artists that Loder mentioned. “Dress Right!” and Keith Richmond’s delightful “This Year’s Model” article on the scene in the August 1981 number of TP constituted my Bible for New Romanticism.

Loder also observes that “Whereas the punks raged against the undignified decline of once-mighty Britain, these new kids see only possibilities. In a trendy and imperfect way, Blitz is about optimism.” Jean Sauvage, in an essay on the great actor/memoirist/novelist Dirk Bogarde, has described New Romanticism as “a reaction to the spaced-out slovenliness of the late Sixties and early Seventies, and also to the slashing shambles of punk.”

It’s worth noting, too, that the records spun by Rusty Egan in his various club residencies included not only such obvious artists as Bowie, Eno, and Roxy, but also Blondie, Television, Talking Heads, Alice Cooper, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Velvet Underground, the Psychedelic Furs, Ennio Morricone, and even the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 (from the Death in Venice soundtrack, natch; Bogarde was a style icon to the New Romantics). Egan had immaculate taste!

A lot of New Pop comes across as music that Dirk Bogarde would've made were he a singer in his 20s, especially ABC's LEXICON OF LOVE.

Nice post Middle C!! You knocked off the cobwebs and sent me scurrying to the attic to find my copy of Rolling Stone with that article. I remembered it well. Had never put its author together with the guy who did all the ‘serious news commentary’ on MTV.

Just reading that paragraph of Loder’s gave me goosebumps. There were SCENES... MOVEMENTS... back then. Just reading his rundown of bands makes me wistful.

I love scenes. I really do try to keep up with what’s happening now musically...and there are indeed interesting new artists all the time... but NO SCENES!! (I never was part of a scene, but I LOVED reading about them).

And an interesting aside.... both articles you mentioned: TP and Rolling Stone from summer of ‘81... had Tom Petty on the cover. I clearly remember he had just released ‘hard promises’ and had pressured his record label NOT to raise the price of his album.

Nice post Middle C!! You knocked off the cobwebs and sent me scurrying to the attic to find my copy of Rolling Stone with that article. I remembered it well. Had never put its author together with the guy who did all the ‘serious news commentary’ on MTV.

Just reading that paragraph of Loder’s gave me goosebumps. There were SCENES... MOVEMENTS... back then. Just reading his rundown of bands makes me wistful.

I love scenes. I really do try to keep up with what’s happening now musically...and there are indeed interesting new artists all the time... but NO SCENES!! (I never was part of a scene, but I LOVED reading about them).

And an interesting aside.... both articles you mentioned: TP and Rolling Stone from summer of ‘81... had Tom Petty on the cover. I clearly remember he had just released ‘hard promises’ and had pressured his record label NOT to raise the price of his album.

Thanks, Bip! You’re right about those magazine covers. Petty also appeared on the cover of the July 1981 Musician. He’d strenuously objected to MCA’s $9.98 “superstar pricing” of Hard Promises, and at one point had even threatened to call the album Eight Ninety-Eight. He fought the good fight, and the label finally relented. Petty will always be New Wave to me, and I’d love to see him get back into the TP Reviews section. (He appeared in the First Edition.)

Like you, I was never part of any scene, but they’ve always fascinated me, from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire and Andy Warhol’s Factory to CBGB and the Blitz Kids.

I had really wanted to love this book. I'd heard Jones interviewed on the Volume channel on Sirius, and he was talking about how his goal was to try to elevate the New Romantics and other early 80s English music to the level of cultural and historic importance he thinks it deserves. Given that I've railed on this site God knows how many times about how irritating it is that, in America at least, the bands of that period are viewed as lightweight and kitschy due to their association with MTV and John Hughes movies. They're dismissed as goofy cultural artifacts, not to be taken too seriously. So I was definitely onboard with Jones' stated goals. Unfortunately, I think in the end all he did was just follow the exact same course that mainstream culture did - in the beginning, he makes a good artistic case for the New Romantics, showing their roots in Glitter and Punk. By the end of the book, he's spending more time with magazine editors reminiscing about how they chose who to feature on the cover any given week. Any sense of what any of the bands he lassoes into the book were doing at the time gets lost. I found myself skipping a dozen pages at a time of some editor or photographer blowing on about whatever the hell, just to get to a couple of paragraphs of Boy George or Paul Humphreys or ANYBODY connected with the actual music getting a word in.

The oral history format doesn't do it any favors. I've gotten very skeptical of that whole approach over the last few years, as it's gotten more prevalent. More often than not, it just seems to be the "author" saying "Golly, I sure don't want to do the hard work of converting all these interviews I conducted to any sort of narrative prose. That takes too much effort!!!" It just seems like too many authors have decided to crowdsource the writing of their books. Sometimes it works fine, such as Jon Savage's recent Joy Division oral history - but Savage has proved his bonafides as an author on plenty of occasions. Even if he's publishing interviews verbatim, he still knows how to shape and edit them into a compelling narrative. Jones, not so much. There were plenty of occasions in this book where I just thought "Holy crap, are they STILL going on about this????", only to have him go to another narrator (usually someone having nothing to do with the music) and let them go on about the same thing, but from the point of view of THEIR particular magazine.

The second half of the book felt interminable to me - people I had no interest in blathering on about things that I didn't care about up to the point where it torpedoed Jones' stated intention for the book. In the end, it turned out to do the exact thing that Jones said he was trying not to do - focused on everything except the music.

I know he wanted to position the decade from Bowie/Roxy to Wham/Sade as a major cultural phenomenon on par with the oh s0 beloved 60s, with Live Aid slotting into the Woodstock position in that particular myth. But it doesn't really work. While I'm 100% certain that Woodstock has been overmythologized and romanticized to an unbelievable extent, I do think that it was still a culmination of the social factors that were at play during that decade - the earlier events of the 60s and in the lives of the bands involved and their audience did leade to it. Live Aid, on the other hand, was something that happened coincidentally while the New Romantics et al were popular. It wasn't something that New Romantic ideals led to. There's a big difference. So that particular narrative conceit doesn't really work.

At the end of the day, I think the simplest measure of a book purportedly about music is "Did this book make me want to rush back and listen to the artists involved with fresh ears?" Jon Savage's book about Joy Division did that. Any of Peter Guralnick's books do that. Jim DeRogatis' Kaleidoscope Eyes did that. Rip It Up did that. Robert Forster's memoir did that. Hell, even Fargo Rock City did that. This book mainly just made me say "Thank God I finally finished that brick" when I was done. I've not voluntarily listened to a note of Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet or Adam and the Ants or Sade or whoever since I finished it. If a music book doesn't make you immediately want to listen to the musicians involved, it's a failure in my opinion.

Reno, thank you for "finishing that brick" and posting your assessment. Mostly, thank you for the books you mentioned in the last paragraph. You've given me some good recommendations on books to read in 2021.

I would add Joe Jackson's A Cure for Gravity to that thumbs-up list, along with Keith Richards' Life. Eric Clapton's and Pete Townshend's autobiographies fell more into the brick category for me.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2020 03:32PM by Delvin.

Delvin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
Eric Clapton's and
> Pete Townshend's autobiographies fell more into
> the brick category for me.

Oi. Does Crapton mention his proto-Trump rascist live rant? Does Pete talk about his run-ins with kiddie-porn? Now's the time to set the records straight, boys! I await Gary Glitter's revisionist tell-all.

I feel bad about piling on Pete Townshend since he is a massive figure, a huge talent. But he really got off the hook. So...does he mention it?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2020 07:12PM by MrFab.

I read the Townshend book. What a brick is about right. He seemed insufferable and barely interested in music. It had a distracted tone that made me feel that he was treating the book as a perfunctory exercise. Which I would definitely agree with that assessment. I think there were references to his porn controversies in there…hard to remember any details.

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®

There's a minor but laughable historical gaffe in Sweet Dreams when Jones identifies Pamela Anderson as being a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the mid-80s. I believe he meant Pamela Stephenson. Anderson would've been a teenager at the time and years away from being made famous by Playboy, Home Improvement and Baywatch. As I said, it's minor but it jumped out at me.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/30/2020 06:34PM by breno.

Townshend does mention the porn-related controversies in his life, but mostly to express his contempt for the ones who investigated him and his anger over having those issues brought into the public eye. At several points in the book, he alludes toward the sexual abuse he might have experienced in his childhood, and suggests that his venture into child porn might have been part of "researching" how he might have been victimized as a child. But he never gives any further specifics (not that I need or want a lot of detail).

I do understand that such memories often get deeply suppressed and/0r fragmented. I only can imagine how hard they must be to talk about with a person who can be trusted, let alone published for the world to read about. And I haven't walked even around the block in Pete's shoes. Still, the vague way Townshend writes about those past experiences (and his more recent responses to them) inevitably is off-putting. He seems to want the reader to understand & accept his reasons for what he'd done, without having to give one word more of explanation for his actions than is absolutely necessary.

I'd bet that consultation with lawyers contributed, at the very least, to the vagueness of Townsend's memoir.