BC172 – Robert Elms, ‘Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s’

“Life was in grainy black and white, but we were in glorious Technicolor”

Robert Elms, Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s (New York: Faber & Faber, 2026)

Blitz is one of those clubs that I have yet to get tired of reading and learning about. It is also one that I am positive I would never step foot in. I don’t fit the profile and don’t dress to code; they wouldn’t have me. I, in turn, have no patience for anybody’s door policy—it’s why I’m a raver. Raves are for everyone. They’re a rebuke to dress codes and door policies, or should be. As with Studio 54 or Berghain, I have zero interest personally in attending something like a Blitz, even as I love it for existing.

This book is dedicated to several dozen people, but the most important is listed last: “and me.” A self-admitted ham who started his media career by walking into the NME office and demanding they print his review of a band he’d opened for by reciting awful poetry, Robert Elms has no problem tooting his horn. Maybe the funniest line in his new book—published last fall in the UK and this spring in the U.S.—is a parenthetical about Goths: “(I also felt smugly superior, but then I was a very superior young man at this stage.)” But he sounds his horn even louder for his friends.

I was skeptical of this book at first, because I’d barely made it a hundred pages into Dylan Jones’s oral history Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics (2020) before giving up—in particular, due to the Robert Elms quotes. They were heavily specific about nuances of fashion that ultimately put my eyeballs behind my head. Maybe when I learn more about fashion I’ll care more—and just FYI, I own and treasure Phaidon’s Halston and count Alicia Drake’s The Beautiful Fall among my favorite nonfiction. I may be personally indifferent to fashion, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I especially like it, as I like everything, with music.

One of the lessons of Elms’s Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s is the significant difference between talking and writing: the former allows for more spontaneity but less reflection, and since Elms tends toward the grandiose anyway, there’s something both wonderfully gossipy and unreflectively overstated when he just speaks. I should have known, of course—I’ve utilized plenty of Elms’ writing as research, and always liked his work. But plenty of writers age into something different from where they start, quality-wise, not least in the style press.

This is not a new lesson, just one worth re-learning, and same with the topic. The Blitz’s “hard core of 150 or so overdressed, undervalued youngsters” was, Elms writes, a “maelstrom of extreme emotions and haircuts.” They dressed with serious abandon and danced to a DJ playing electro-disco for a year and a half on Tuesdays before their group combustion threw sparks in every direction, up until now. That crew has only gained mass since it became a media darling one year into Blitz’s, ah yes, one-and-a-half-year lifetime. But Elms isn’t just Blitz-jiving, as he refers to the dance of choice on the floor, driven by Rusty Egan’s selections. Blitz really did kick off many of the visual and a good many audio trends that would define the eighties. It is also—although Elms considerably overstates this—a critical precursor to rave culture (see below). I’ve done my part in historicizing Blitz, of course: you’ll see some quotes here I also utilized in Can’t Slow Down, where my treatment seriously whetted my appetite to do something longer, until I began to see how many others were already there, never mind what more was to come.

The book gets better as it goes, too. Engaging and spry though his recollections are, Elms actually goes further and reaches deeper when he’s analyzing the long effect, not of his inner circle, but—with a major exception—outside of it. He grapples sharply, heroically, and unflinchingly with the life, work, towering presence (in all ways: a feature in The Word once featured the tidbit that George was “built like a linebacker”), and meltingly gorgeous voice of Boy George—the Blitz coat-checker who once called himself “the biggest handbag thief in London.”

“I’m not sure at all that George was very impressed by me, a cocksure little Cockney know-it-all,” Elms writes. “I was not his cup of tea, and we all know George likes a nice cup of tea.” Hearing George sing came as a shock to Elms, who’d only heard him tartly assess anyone in the hapless vicinity of his razor wit. When he saw Culture Club perform “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” on Top of the Pops, Elms immediately knew how far he’d go. Someone from his hipster class (to use a phrase Elms would likely recoil from) could, and did, appeal to grandmothers as well as the blazing young.

Oddly, the book stumbles hardest when Elms hitches Blitz to modern dance music—a link worth making, but one Elms takes pains to remove himself from, with some truly cloud-yelling energy. First, re: EDM, it’s “Rusty got there first.” Tim Lawrence, among many, would like a word. Then, after a bit: “This was not a rave . . . And Rusty never played the star DJ game either—there was no spurious knob-twiddling or fader-shifting . . . No one stood and watched Rusty do his job.” Everyone thinks they invented whatever came after them; Elms takes credit even for the stuff he plainly can’t stand.

(It’s not the only time, either: “Architecture, too, suddenly began to look rather like a night with Steve Strange,” he writes. “London was suddenly awash with broken pediments and pointless pillars, dressing-up-box buildings with pseudo-historic twiddly bits on.” He sounds like an NME critic talking about a Blitz band!)

What Egan did as a DJ had been going on for almost a decade already, by people with far more technical skill and much larger and broader record collections—not to mention more than one turntable, which is what Egan utilized at the Blitz. That in itself might have caused Elms to maybe pause the “We invented it, and then everybody else got it wrong” claim for this one historical instance.

How invested can a reader be in someone else’s fabulousness, anyway? It’s all in the writing, and in the main, Elms sings. On football hooliganism: “Middle- and upper-class British society didn’t care if oiks in designer labels kicked lumps out of each other on crumbling terraces.” Getting ready: “Melissa was damaging the ozone with hairspray.” Scene-setting: “A party night in Warren Street was like Withnail and I in drag times ten, with a script in Polari.” “Life was in grainy black and white, but we were in glorious Technicolor.” Building a career: “I became the nation’s de facto hosiery and silly hair correspondent almost overnight.” Best of all, this footnote on page 154: “Why is everybody in this story called Steve?”

I mentioned an exception above, and it won’t surprise anyone who knows Elms’ history even a little bit: his partner during the mid-eighties was none other than Sade—or, as he scrupulously refers to her much of the time, Sade Adu. She was on the outskirts of the Blitz crowd until a trip to New York that involved a fashion show—by this point, Elms was writing for The Face and hosting television, and Adu was both a designer and occasional model—brought them together. Ultimately, though Elms is courteous enough not to mention it, they would constitute a power couple once Sade’s first album took off in 1984 UK/1985 U.S.

Elms does not get terribly personal about his time with her, except—and this is really interesting—in terms of class. They were poor; everyone involved with Blitz was, pretty much. The increased suburbanization of London post-war led to the fact that, Elms writes, “so many of the kids who gathered at the Blitz were from the outer suburbs.” They often moved to the city with nothing and lived in squalor, drawing their new looks from whatever castoffs they could buy by the bag. Elms and Adu lived in a squat, pretty much, right up until Diamond Life. Elms draws Thatcher’s Britain as a hellhole that got worse by the year. He aims a specifically measured and righteous blast against the parts of the UK press that criticized Sade’s success vis-à-vis her music’s alignment with the sudden influx of wine bars into London—a spurious link, and completely nonexistent in the singer’s case, to Thatcherism in those writers’ eyes.

In fact, Elms devotes a whole chapter to refuting that Blitz was a secret den of Thatcherites. I applaud his aim and his reasoning and his righteousness, but I have to point out his omissions, both of which are critical. Granted, one is secondary: Jon Moss of Culture Club was not part of the Blitz crowd. He was a punk drummer who’d walked out on the Clash for being too left-wing, and praised Maggie’s greatness while steering Culture Club onstage as a drummer and backstage as their manager, not to mention carrying on a quickly-apparent sexual affair with Boy George. He isn’t mentioned.

But the other one is right at the center of the book’s second half: Tony Hadley, the singer for Spandau Ballet, the band who allegedly formed at Blitz but had already started before their manager, himself a regular, decided to use the club surreptitiously as a proving ground for its eventual international success. Their early gigs—at first for invite-only crowds of club regulars—and tours become Blitz’s increasing focus. Late in the book, Elms writes: “Being in a group gives you an immediate support system, and so much of what was achieved by various Blitz kids was done collectively. That certainly is not Thatcherite.” He’s right about that—but when the lead singer of their signature band is a vocal Conservative, it’s going to send specific signals. Avoiding this does not make Elms look shrewd.

Spandau’s image-heavy approach paid dividends—the aforementioned success, sure, as well as Elms’ charming recollections of their larval stages. (Elms remains friends with Spandau songwriter-guitarist Gary Kemp, who blurbed the book.) But to me, in aesthetic terms and beyond the Blitz story, Spandau begins and ends as the subject of Soul Boys of the Western World (UK: George Hencken, 2014), which may be, full stop, my favorite music documentary. You’ve gathered that I greatly enjoyed Elms’ book, but if you decide to pick only one, see the movie.

Soul Boys of the Western World is, in essence, a history of eighties pop culture through the lens of one band, meant literally. Every stitch of the film comes from the group’s personal archives and/or TV-appearance file. There are no talking heads, just occasional voiceovers; it’s hugely immersive, and it goes over the sun with the Blitz footage. This club took place in a Soho dive bar, and when the camera sails through it in this film, the walls pulse. It’s the most alluring thing I’ve ever seen in above-board filmmaking. I wanted to enter it and not leave. Within seconds, everything I’d ever read, or written, about the place came suddenly to life.

Elms has practically written a guidebook here—how to start a scene, how to make yourself and your friends happen, how to thrust yourself and your friends into the spotlight. The genuine fondness that Elms has for his younger self and cohort goes past nostalgia. He’s grateful for how he and they took chances, made moves, asserted themselves, pushed through, followed their ambitions. It wasn’t mere status seeking. A hothouse of willing, interested people egging each other on gets results. Encouragement is key.

I see that sort of thing sometimes in my own various milieux, but I stand outside of it a lot. I say it’s my role as a critic, journalist, observer, but it’s really just my nature. I did have a version of this, though: the ILX message-board. I spent a decade on there sharpening my opinions in concert with others doing the same—a number of whom remain my closest friends, and a few that I’ve routinely blocked for decades. That’s a scene, right? Maybe someday I will get to where Elms is: proud of my misspent youth.

P.S. If you liked this review, you might also like BC090, where I keyed a mixtape by Wolfgang Voigt (sophistipop: it is real, and it is gorgeous)—

—with a bunch of goodies that didn’t make it into the third chapter of Can’t Slow Down referenced above. It’s for paying subscribers, FYI.