Outlaws & Renegades
Outliers seen in establishment venues - shock
They call us punks, they call us sinners, they gossip about the wonder of queers.
In the dawn of acid-house, my bibles were style magazines. I devoured the sneering celebrations of street fashion and club culture in i-D and The Face, cover to cover. i-D was saddle-stiched (what printers call staples) and matt by the time I read it, filled with the 80s icons who are catalogued in the landmark
Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London
exhibition of the season at the Fashion + Textile Museum, Bermondsey Street.
“Oooo - it’s like walking through Kensington Market, isn’t it?” said my compatriot, Stuart McKenzie as we strolled through the opening night…introducing each other to missed chapters…
Curated by my “club life depo-daddy” Martin Green, and NJ Stevenson (London College of Fashion) with artistic director David Cabaret and creative consultant James Lawler, Duovision Arts, this catalogue of 80s iconic looks mirrors the breadcrumb trail of discovering worlds' far away from the kiddy consumer magazines of Jackie and Smash Hits, or cartoons in The Beano and Dandy. (I quite crushed on Desperate Dan and I got a letter back from Jim Davis, creator of my beloved Garfield books sent from my fake godmother in Canada).
Getting into the Martin Green hosted party was proper old school, you gotta get inside, you don’t wanna pay, you wanna be special, seen, heard, that is INSIDE, the INNER WORLD - it is Everything outside your need to belong to Unity. This is no establishment pyramid scheme of family and union.
You’re hoping your name’s down, blaggers’ psyche of belonging. Faking it. Nightclubs an open experiment in identity as assimiliation and a coping mechanism for a bland world in which we don’t fit in.
Tonight, Matthew I am going to be… *kids, this is a reference to the show Stars in their Eyes, long before Strictly or X Factor…when Matthew would host a TV karaoke.
You walk in, you walk aside. You collide with Others who are like you.
“Scarlet, you don’t know the difference between a socialist and a guest list,” said Orlando Moon in a limo in Psychomachia.
Belonging, battling who you are, the challenges: similar to walking around the Delaine de Bas at the Turner Prize preview at Tate Britain - the existential QUEST. It’s an emotional illustration of experience, akin to those by Le Gun, direct inside a painful interior world. A themed assault of a child to teen birthing chamber of a nightmare, screaming Know Thyself against the pantomime rituals of England and dances around occult pyramids. Magnificent. Said to chime with the Roma mythologies, I do not envy the judges.
The Delaine de Bas immersion sits within the wider dialogue of colonialism and identity, conceptualised in the perfectionism of Filipino he/him Pio Abad’s world of value, with control at its core. I can't stop thinking about the graphed tribal objects d'art. The room is an exhibition in its own right, and a lot to consume.
The following room by Jasleen Kaur reminds me of one of my fave documentaries, I is for India, Yearnings 2023 is a textural installation. The playful doily covered Ford Escort pings off the celebratory funeral parlour of a diaspora experience of my (first) gen.
The Turner Prize 2024 wraps with the nomination of unique painter, Claudette Johnson. A great calm and horror of a mother holding a dead teen from a knife crime, i assumed. The stylised naivety pitch perfect.
Growing up in Ealing, venturing from the sounds of shabeens on Saturdays, getting the train into Kensington Market, what I've learnt about instigators of culture is that the previous movements help define the next. The 80s grew out of the DIY of punk, and as the 90s drifted into superclubs and alcopops, or the crustie ravers leaving town in trucks to rave free in other countries, London clubs like Martin Green’s Smashing, which I was a latter attendee and one-time DJ, fill the gaps. Smashing remains one of my fave nights ever. The coloured-light disco floor was made infamous on the Pulp album cover. The leader of these events found the DJ world disappeared in lockdowns, and he moved naturally into curation over Covid, with James Lawler, creating Duovision. Championing the untold and essential artists, such as Caroline Coon, Duggie Fields, he’s tirelessly curated this landmark Outlaws exhibition at the Fashion + Textile Museum in Bermondsey Street about his 80s, and what empowered him.
Where the twixt twain.
Lost in the experience.
We all trail behind the cool kids before us.
WE ARE WHO WE FOLLOW
i-D was always very gritty, British fashion, adding glamour to skip-diving stylists like the late Judy Blame, framing and elevating British designers and models in plinths built from the underground. i-D and the cooler club culture was very art school, as art schools were then, before globalisation, when culture was more geographical, and less flattened by social media and unsophisticated by corporate marketing and clear divisions between endorsement of consumer culture, rather than being dependent upon it.
Daniel Lismore comes up the stairs to the second floor, for the speeches, behind Leigh Bowery.
Being cool was all i cared about as a kid. Unsurprising, as that was the doctrine of the magazines and music I mixtaped from the John Peel show. University was free, squatting was still a possibility, and although the welfare state closed pits, the Loadsamoneyed dominated a nouveau riche, Kardashian narrative through Youth Training Schemes and the Princes Trust initiatives. Nightclubs funded loads of club characters, and record labels to start up. The 80s clubbing characters were the influencers of their day. The dole supported entrepreneurial skills like a grime or drugs/gangs getting more hits and likes through unscrupulous unethical engineering to appear GREAT in Britain. Some raves were never as clean as others, and, as my grandfather, who owned the Wigan Grand Hotel, home of Northern Soul, used to say: where there’s muck, there’s brass.
Before phones, the individual could own the night. Finding the right club to hang with equally hip people and have the best times. It wasn’t very LinkedIn back when we started. Instead, we depended on Time Out or the back pages of the cardboard covers of i-D to show us the way. Those covers inspired my first edition of Cold Lips with designer Kedge (who, Ernesto Leal explained to me as he commissioned us to first collaborate on the Red Gallery book in 2014, worked with Tomato and Underworld, the band). Ever the former informing the latter.
There was a chaos to the Meta takeover through the teens. Previous systems of initiation to Culture exploded. Media became a third party, rather than a gatekeeper to wine and dine. i-D and The Face both kicked off in 1980, although The Face was glossier, more sparse, and more Mondrian by the time I picked it up. It was more Hollywood star system. Later it was a honour to get a byline there, like Sky, which I wrote confessionals for by the mid-90s, a youth version, edited by Mark Frith, who started on Smash Hits. Writing for i-D would be like meeting Patti Smith, probably best not to… so it’s one place I never did. But it’s a high honour to gain a quote from there on my novel:
“Psychomachia is exhilarating, brazen, devastating and brilliant” Sarah Hay, i-D magazine.
I didn’t differentiate between the ‘style’ magazines, or crews, I idolised both and all. I was a kid, looking to learn. I always did this in whatever I wrote about as a journalist. They were the published. The experienced. I had reverence because the experience was less attainable without these intermediaries. In some ways, Gen Z have this to thank for their attitude.
As the 90s kicked into my teenage schooling, with the rising optimism of ecstasy, I was also cutting out black and white pictures from NME & Melody Maker to my wall, like a Pinterest board. Again, I would later decide to write for NME, rather than the far nicer people on Melody Maker, which only lasted a further 6 months. I was learning to play guitar, carrying a dog-eared copy of Electric Kool Aid Acid Test like it was a captured Pokémon as i quested thru Ad Hoc, Sign of the Times and the more intimidating Hyper Hyper, alongside charity shops and jumble sales, as labyrinths leading towards self-actualisation. Watching Def II youth programming on BBC2, which hailed 90s shows like the Big Breakfast and The Word, I also made collages of flyers picked up around the stalls of Ken Market, shops in Covent Garden, Portobello Market, and Camden, where I first set up a stall, selling my dad’s old jeans.
We don't own culture, our acts create it. What we choose to participate in, and how we own ourselves resonates as rocks into the pools.
What this landmark retrospective expresses more than anything about the 80s is the world of Leigh Bowery wasn't about the money, it was about the imagination.
What i write about in Psychomachia is the 90s and an ever increasing sophistication and mechanisation of the youth industry. Little of that occult/subcultural/underground world would have existed had it not been for the 80s icons who are celebrated in Renegades. Nightclubs inhabited and led by 80s cultural pioneers who were inspired by The Sex Pistols, punk & Vivienne Westwood before them.
At the private view, I see people I love and have patterned through my working life, which rarely differentiated between night and day nor inner and outer worlds - or private and the personal.
Hail the new romantic futurists.
I see so many cool kids in London, talking about exhibitions, like this one. Playing cards rather than the constant fill of the Meta experiential club.
It leads me to think we're ripe for another youth explosion where unity vs self, and the interconnectedness of community and the individual build out of past Pleasuredomes and Haciendas. Gone are the days when we all inhabit youth culture, Covid busted us. Youth culture is its own being, once more.
The medium is the message. So where Blitz kids created product-based pop music and stars of fashion, the 90s accelerated into the more conscious outlying heroin chic and Britpop, although it was still very naive, Loaded was a complete surprise. No one expected the mainstream adoption of laddism. Certainly not me, walking into the office to pick up a picture of myself printed at the Heavenly Social Club. But like Smashing, it filled a gap. It was about being in the right place at the right time. Engineered by those who had experienced the cutting edge of culture before it.
What will takeover next? Is Meta the one and only God? Or Google?
Social Media can be quite rando, as clubs could be, messed up kids magnetising together. Raves were random - which is why i liked them, everyone coming together in unity with One Love as the goal. Of course identity politics developed through a power struggle to help us navigate the system. Dopamine-charged data is an enemy to creativity, but it’s also the church we find ourselves united in.
It would be wonderful to gas the platforms with love. And god knows we try. For likes. But to believe it’s not a culture war that we are uninformed we are participating in would be terribly naive. Like a biddable Lolita, waiting to be groomed.
Tik Tok’s algo is random. It’s engineered to have some level of equality, so we all get gaslit with the possibility of an easier life, beyond the main news stories presenting a passifying Holy War which we have no power to change.
Bring on the third summer of love.
The kids dream of unity once more. Where we fantasised of the same gender holding hands and snogging in public, as a step up from Oscar Wilde being imprisoned, or all the suicides caused by the rules against sodomy, we now operate in fields of metadata. Lacan, aside, I’m going through a holistic phase of acceptance currently. We are all under the command of General Compost.
Heart beating as one.
I didn't go out in the 80s but I wanted to. Maybe that’s the same as my niece wanting a phone. The contemporary need to be seen. Expressing oneself.
By 1989 there was the odd sneaky trip out to the William Morris Club in Wimbledon, pretending to be at art school, puking pink snakebite and black - and a fateful Reading festival. I didn’t realise how cool we were before we even got as far as the teen-rave of Rush on Sundays, or Sunday daytime Whirl-y-gigs, after we’d been at 60s-style studio parties next to what was Ealing Art School, attended by Derek Ridgers and Queen frontman, Freddie Mercury. It came a poly, and later Thames Valley Uni (by the time I attended in the early 00s).
Being part of dance culture, DJing in the music industry, I was in awe of the clubs of 1989 - the Junior Boys Own need to belong and own the narrative evolved from zines and club nights and a brilliant record label. What’s great about the Outlaws/Renegades exhibition is it’s about the clubs before Schoom or Spectrum, where acid-house is alleged to have begun the second summers of love in London (something I got an award for making for BBC R2). Cultural ownership really affected what went after. Where the rave movement expanded, and ecstasy took control of multiple generations. Headlines broke of Sunrise and Energy happening in aircraft hangars which older brothers had been at at school. It was a wonderfully optimistic era. The movement felt imperative to be a part of, being the largest scene to bring together an ideology of peace and love, and everything the hippies had failed at.
Does youth always feel like that?
I’m unsure of the years we first went to Telepathy and Raindance, but maybe I was a little younger than I was pretending to be.
As I moved towards starting my own career in magazine and broadcast journalism in the mid-90s, more towards the more polished and "grown-up" Elle, Marie Claire, Vogue, with bigger budgets and more ability to sell fashion as its own entity and all the intimidatory fear of not fitting in or living up to supermodel standards of perfection which in a stifling feedback loop i've found shocking on my return to London, with the hypernormalisation of injectables and avatar faces, breathe, it seems pretty irrelevant as white p👹hos👹phorus blooms, but i am no judge, and the beauty industry is a movement of its own. But where movements and money are intertwined like never before, as Terence McKenna said: Culture is your enemy. When there’s nothing to challenge, we’re dead. Buddhists can be very noisy as the philosophy aims for peace. But why artists, who in my book generally aim for the same things, should have to wrinkle in poverty is beyond me. The underground gets called that by establishment, and I am not underground. I am not dead. No darlings, not yet!
Where we place ourselves is imperative. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are everything.
We are our own culture, but you gotta know our history to understand the past, to be in the Now... cos the future is always far away.
I can’t strategise my own future currently, I just need to Do. I write this to get my head straight, before going into fiction.
I’m back up the mountain for a week. It is fast becoming clear it is the opposite to what I knew before, that has been its beauty. Within cultures of Batcave for goths, Blitz for the Kings Road, Taboo for the cool kids, or mountain retreats in Andalusia, we always require Pleasuredomes and Haciendas as safe spaces away from the conformity and mainstream ideals. These are the worlds I intend to create with future books.
Whether it’s Covid or HIV, nightclub culture is there to re-negotiate the progressive. It’s hard to leave what has formed us. Festivals may now be mainstream family escapes yet as a critic i was always excited to be a part of something greater than the individual, as they fund the more peripheral ideas. Hence the glory of creating magazines - and documenting the wonder of life. Our social feeds are authored and edited like personal zines. The 80s grew out of the DIY of punk. The 90s sleeked on that, the 00s negotiated the digital as indie sleaze, and the teens were a negotiation of the real and digital. Previous movements help define the next. The Renegades exhibition is exactly like that journey, and I urge you to drop in, if you’re slightly curious.
The timeline is written by those that do know what went on, which doesn't always happen in curation. The 80s were a maze of expression thru various uniforms and identities and most importantly, invention. By the time everything in this show hit me, it had become more Thatcherite and product-based: goth/ rockabilly/ Flip 50s throwback/ hippy / raver. We were tribal because our music tastes were more channelled, and it was about belonging and finding one’s tribes in a very simple way, through tastes and clothes. You had to make a choice about which type of music you wanted to dance to, we couldn’t find anything on YouTube or Spotify. We homogenised in rave, before Britpop expanded the party again.
There were a lot of people not at the opening, people like Keith Martin who passed away recently, a face of The Don't Die Of Ignorance HIV campaigns which freaked me out at 14 to make some dubious relationship choices - but i cut his hair in the 90s, and he grew out of exactly the interconnectivity of fashion and club culture that the Renegades exhibition supports. I loved all the secret stories from friends about their prized possessions on show.
Celebrate the survivors. The pioneers. The fabulous.
It was brilliant to wrap up a five week stint with a suitcase in London and the UK at this show of the season.
Listen back to an interview I likely find to cringe to tune into myself.
Poxy nightlife - Poncey clubs
You cough as the Medici Medusa Woman from Marbs
Polishes the seat next to yours
White jeans on Easyjet
The pride of Versace
Airs through the port
Cork holiday bags swinging with the hemp trousers.
LOVE ONESELF, you both agree
Never go full hippy