Spandau Ballet, the Blitz kids and the birth of the New Romantics

When my phone rang in January 1980, little did I realise its message meant: "Put out the cat. You're coming to the party of your life." The voice on the other end spoke without pausing: "My name's Steve Strange and I run a club called the Blitz on Tuesdays and I'm starting a cabaret night on Thursdays with a really great new band.... they combine synthesised dance music for the future with vocals akin to Sinatra, they're called Spandau Ballet and they're going to be really big…"

How could I know that this was my invitation to the Swinging 80s, where daily life would never sound or feel the same again? Paris and New York had steered the 1970s; now London was to become the creative powerhouse as Britain rode out a recession and its youth culture leapt back into the world spotlight.

One band defined a new direction for music and shifted its driving rhythm from the guitar to the bass and drum. They also made it hip to play pop. They were Spandau Ballet, who within three years went from leaders of a cult to one of four British groups (with Duran Duran, Culture Club and Wham!) who led dozens of stylish young clubland acts into the charts. They spread the new sounds and styles of London around the globe so that designers of its street fashion, too, became the toast of world capitals. And all because, unknown to a backward record business, a vast dance underground was gagging for a revolution in club culture.

Every Tuesday for a year, Strange had been declaring a "private party" in the shabby Blitz wine bar off Covent Garden. Outrage secured entry. Inside, precocious 19-year-olds presented an eye-stopping collage, posing away in wondrous ensembles, emphatic make-up and in-flight haircuts that made you feel normality was a sin. Hammer Horror met Rank starlet. Here was Lady Ample Eyefull, there Sir Gesting Sharpfellow, lads in breeches and frilly shirts, white stockings and ballet pumps, girls as Left Bank whores or stiletto-heeled vamps dressed for cocktails in a Berlin cabaret, wicked witches, kohl-eyed ghouls, futuristic man machines.

The soundtrack at this self-styled "electro-diskow" was hard-edged European disco, synth-led, but bass-heavy: German sounds such as Kraftwerk and Gina X, Giorgio Moroder, dissonant no wave on the Ze label, and always Bowie. Plinky robot sounds inspired dances with anglepoise limbs and an unmoving chin, while an overstated yet elegant jive saw partners hold both hands and raise knees as high as their waists. This spectacle shouted newness.

"The Blitz ruled people's lives. Exactly that," says Stephen Jones, then making hats at St Martin's School of Art, this year celebrated with a retrospective at the V&A. "A nightclub inspired absolute devotion of the kind previously reserved for a pop idol. I'd find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real."

Shrouding any pleasure in ritual magnifies its intensity and the Blitz was all ritual. Everyone supped and danced on the same spot every week according to some invisible floorplan: downstairs near the bar stood the boys in the band (no make-up), their media and management by the stairs, credible punk legends such as Siouxsie Sioux along the bar, suburban wannabes beside the dancefloor. Deep within the club, around Rusty Egan's DJ booth, were the dedicated dancing feet, the white-faced shock troops, the fashionista elite – either there or near the cloakroom, ruled first by Julia Fodor (still going strong as DJ Princess Julia) and later by George O'Dowd (less strong today as ex-jailbird Boy George). Downstairs, the women's loo was hijacked, naturally, by boys who would be girls. Upstairs on the railway banquettes might be respected alumni from an earlier London: film-maker Derek Jarman, artists Brian Clarke and Kevin Whitney, designers Antony Price and Zandra Rhodes.

In those early days Spandau bassist Martin Kemp, who learned to play because his big brother asked him, used to say: "I'm not really a musician. I belong in a club dressed as sharp as a razor. That's the thrill – just being there at 3am, excited by where you are and the people sharing the night with you." When Steve Strange eyeballed you at the door of his club, your look alone did not guarantee admission. He did not want passive consumers but "people who created unique identities". By taking Bowie at his word to be "heroes just for one day", you were expected to become one of the new names to drop.

It took a good year before the media caught up. In a ring-fenced page of cool that I edited in London's Evening Standard, I had dubbed these preening egos the Now Crowd since they lived so much for the moment. Two of the Blitz's tyro journos – Perry Haines and Robert Elms – had proclaimed them Herald Angels and Dandy Dilettantes. The national press came up with New Dandies, Romantic Rebels and the Blitz Kids, which is what stuck. Finally, in September 1980 this prompted the New Romantics headline (ouch!) in the music weekly Sounds. Everybody winced and denied membership.

No longer a weekly secret society, the Blitz became a publicity machine for the pose age. Attendance became a statement of intent – to lead a life of style seven days a week. When Bowie visited the Blitz he hauled away four of the kids to strut with his pierrot through the video for Ashes to Ashes. It earned each of them £50, helped Bowie to No 1 and launched a fad for Judi Frankland's ankle-length liturgical robes (inspired, she says, by the nuns in The Sound of Music).

It seemed inevitable that an unknown band should step out from the Blitz's sexually ambivalent ranks, eclectically garbed, crimped into wedge hair, and uplit theatrically by another art student, Simon Withers. Spandau Ballet sounded defiantly un-rocklike by playing the new synthesised electro-pop and singing about being "beautiful and clean and so very, very young". Their songsmith Gary Kemp claimed pointedly: "We are making the most contemporary statement in fashion and music."

If you've travelled this far, suspend disbelief one moment more. Earlier this year, when Spandau Ballet announced this autumn's reunion tour, Blitz Kid Dylan Jones, editor once of i-D and now of GQ, wrote unequivocally: "It is impossible to stress too highly how achingly fashionable Spandau Ballet were in the winter of 1979 and the summer of 1980."

Since Spandau's last live performance in March 1990 a perception has grown that the New Romantics were a passing fad, signifying little, and folk memory casts Spandau Ballet and their Brummie rivals, Duran Duran, as Thatcherites who sold out rock's rebel status.

In response to that, try this bold claim. When Spandau Ballet emerged, their strategy was to enlist their entourage of creative night owls not only to stage-manage the fastest launch yet of a new band but also to redefine youth culture in the working-class terms prescribed by the late George Melly, author of the essential paperback Revolt Into Style (1970). He claimed the first duty of pop is to "trap the present" and express the aspirations of society "as it is", not as others would wish. The Durannies, on the other hand, had nakedly commercial ambitions.

Spandau placed fresh emphasis on clothes and presentation, on self-respect conveyed both by the voice of Tony Hadley, and by dislocated lyrics underpinned with streetwise conviction. Spandau Ballet defined the new direction of pop by opening a debate about the credibility of "pure pop" as a celebration of the sexiness of youth, then claiming to have relegated "rock" to the album charts for good. Today in the eyes of their schoolmate turned manager, Steve Dagger, that makes them "the bravest band – we put up a flag musically and culturally".

If we recast the 80s as a subcultural timeline, the decade actually spanned six years. They began in June 1978 when David Bowie's world tour hit the UK and ended with Do They Know It's Christmas? in December 1984, when Band Aid confirmed rival groups who had risen on the same wave as a new pop establishment.

Though the May 1979 election put Margaret Thatcher in power, the term Thatcherism, describing both her political radicalism and her imperative to create "popular capitalism", did not come into general use until her second term. Amid the last spasms of the Labour government's "winter of discontent", times were hard and the future looked desperate as unemployment rose, then as now, towards 3 million. Even graduates were told they faced the prospect of no jobs – a trend at its worst in the south-east, where joblessness among school-leavers doubled in 1979 alone. "The city was broken," says Gary Kemp, talking about London, "it was a horrible place." The record industry had stalled, sales were declining, the charts were bland. Dagger, whose childhood memories are consumed by the Swinging 60s and the buzz the mods brought to Soho, right on his doorstep, says: "I badly wanted a new swinging London. There had to be a way…"

Dagger is the svengali behind the rise of the Angel Boys, as the five lads in Spandau Ballet were known, after the inner London district in which they grew up. He knew all there was to know about true mods like Steve Marriott's Small Faces who wore the sharpest skinny styles from Italy and curtained hair with centre partings.

The direct heirs of mod were plastic-sandalled soul boys like Dagger and Withers, then on a foundation course at St Martin's. Their paths soon crossed those of two lads from Barnet, graphics student Graham Smith and history student Robert Elms, plus a tall obsessive Welshman, Chris Sullivan, a northern soul dance fiend, whose mantra was "one look lasts a day". This little gang were the dynamos who set 80s music spinning.

Heading toward the same intersection in 1979 were Gary Kemp's moptop band who had given thrash and power pop a go, first as the Makers and then the Gentry. Dagger recognised that what they needed was a scene with which to align themselves.

Life before personal computers is hard to imagine but the words quaint and naff will do. In the 70s new technology ran to Space Invaders, ghetto‑blasters and digital watches. Mass media amounted to three channels of TV offering two weekly pop shows, plus the grown-up newspapers and four music weeklies. In 1980, the Daily Telegraph described discos as a "dehumanising threat to civilisation". No kidding.

It wasn't only the music scene that was dull. Before Blitz culture, there were no "style gurus" to propose what to wear. You dressed either as a Top Rank disco kid, a new waver in black drains and narrow tie, or one of those mutants like mohican punk or skinhead. That's why dressing up at the Blitz became an act of affirmation. The Blitz Kids were the first children of the television age, wise in the ways of the popular media, and they set out to subvert the realms the young know best, music and fashion. Gary Kemp said then: "A cultural identity is a great outlet for people's frustrations. Kids have always spent what little they have on records and haircuts. They've never spent it on books by Karl Marx."

The crucible for their ambitions has since become the nightlife norm: the one-off club night as pioneered in 1978 by Rich Kids drummer Rusty Egan. He printed a flyer declaring "fame fame fame" to lure Bowie outcasts to the un-punk safety of a tacky gay dive called Billy's, in Soho. In common with London's posher clubs, Tuesdays there were a dead zone. "I'll fill it for you," said Egan, establishing the principle of bar profits to the club owner, door profits to the hosts, who soon included Egan's flatmate vetting the door: pop wannabe Steve Strange, another Welsh graduate of the UK soul circuit who worked at the flouncy clothes shop PX which came to fix the New Romantic look.

By February 1979, the axis of Strange as greeter and Egan as DJ had graduated to the Blitz, a bar decorated with Second World War austerity that was thought to echo the down‑at‑heel 70s: bare floorboards, gingham tablecloths, hanging lights with dusty enamel shades, framed pictures of Churchill. Its manager, Brendan Connolly, had been struggling to promote intimate cabaret, and the Billy's crowd were cabaret incarnate.

The Blitz creed distrusted anyone over 25. Chris Sullivan, by then a St Martin's fashion student busy reinventing the zoot suit, said at the time: "Young people are no longer prepared to be sold clothes they don't like or go to clubs playing records they don't want to hear, being run by grunters three times their age, and having to pay for the privilege. When the Blitz opened, for a start it was cheap, but it was also extraordinary to have someone aged 19 vetting the door."

Spandau were the vital extra ingredient that pushed the Blitz into its critical phase. Their mission: to return pop to what Gary Kemp called a "visual extravaganza" in the spirit of Ziggy Stardust. Dagger determined to outwit the moribund A&R men ("There wasn't one that I rated") and change the way bands were signed. Kemp, who despised the racism of the anti-soul music press, determined to outflank these self-regarding gatekeepers. Their selectivity was an insult to the age-old two-way traffic between the UK and US and our gift for "enwhitening" their black beats.

The wind-up exploited two assets unique to 1980. First was the pent-up demand from Britain's vast and social soul scene, a grapevine ready-made for spreading the word. Second, the Angel Boys' entourage of otherwise unemployed Blitz Kids suddenly found careers in the tax-free world of what Whitehall started calling "the economically active" by dressing, photographing, staging and promoting the band. What united this collision, in Elms's words, of white face with white sock? Dagger was clear: "We were all in it together to cause a revolution."

High among Angel Boy priorities was the class war. Raised among Islington's tough council estates, most declared their paid-up Labour party credentials (possibly with the exception of Hadley). Gary Kemp's eloquent and frank new autobiography, I Know This Much, paints an affecting picture of his own humble upbringing in the 1960s, when, in contrast to the swinging going on in Chelsea, his family life included a shared outside WC, a "good wash" weekly at the kitchen sink, and parents well skilled in subsistence and thrift.

He believed in the traditional desire for a better life through your own endeavours. He would insist that there were more important incentives for change than money, while admitting, "OK, I'm acquisitive, but my moral viewpoint has always been left wing." One of Kemp's incentives was to best the NME. Mere mention of the paper and its "stereotyped class attitudes" had him fuming.

Kemp argued: "They don't understand style in working-class terms: they think it means money. Well, it doesn't. One of the most difficult things is explaining what style is to middle-class journalists because they always connect style with being bourgeois and they spend their whole lives trying to escape it. I don't feel guilty because I've made enough money to own my own home. It's only the middle classes who feel that kind of guilt."

Such perceived antipathy is the reason why Dagger refused to let most rock writers near his group throughout Spandau's first year, because he knew so few had ever been inside a nightclub. "What's more, they can't dance," he'd snort.

In his view this Jets v Sharks divide is the reason the music press has missed the start of every major trend since rock'n'roll, "and they've never liked soul", so before winning access to Spandau, he subjected all interviewers to discreet vetting. Applicants wearing denim or Doc Martens never reached the shortlist.

Such was the rigour that Spandau's coalition of 20-year-old talents brought to executing the whirlwind wind-up that it became a template for every New Romantics "rumour band":

(1) They staged secret "tease dates", never "gigs", at clubs and venues calculated to annoy the rockists, such as the Blitz, an art-house cinema, or a warship on the Thames. The audience got in only by looking good – which applied to critics, too.

(2) They refused to send demo tapes or invite inviting record companies to shows, so few insiders actually knew how the band sounded.

(3) Seemingly a band with no past, Spandau crafted an artful creation myth around the Blitz's postmodern themes: Bowie's "just for one day" notion of disposable identities, and of bricolage in which the band's baffling name was supposedly plucked arbitrarily by Elms from some graffiti in Berlin. The Blitz's motormouths and myth-makers were a gift to the media.

Concerts were put together with loving care. The most OTT secret date they played was in March 1980, the first of two at the arty Scala cinema. Following two surrealist Buñuel films, Elms stepped up to declaim some toe-curling blank verse, then Spandau were revealed casting stark expressionist shadows on the screen, fully romanticised with blousy shirts and wing collars and an insouciant cigarette in the raised hand of their tall, striking singer. Gary Kemp stabbed out Spandau's signature chords on the synth, guitarists Norman and Kemp junior held their instruments high against the chest in an arch anti-rock stance, while John Keeble hit his bass drum four-to-the-floor. Instantly, incandescent Blitz Kids swarmed into the aisles to demonstrate their oh-so photogenic dances and all the forces behind a cultural revolution worked overtime for their column inches.

To ensure favourable publicity, Dagger commissioned Spandau's first review, from Elms, and marched him down to NME to hand it in. I commissioned another for a national paper whose pop pages I quietly edited on the side, and the same writer Barry Cain returned to his desk at Record Mirror to relay the Angel Boys' romanticised vision of the class struggle through "working-class elitism" and Kemp's claim that the "funny clothes" spoke for "a whole attitude to life".

The fallout from this flurry of press included a TV documentary built around this group of obsessive dressers for 20th Century Box on London Weekend. The Scala spectacle was restaged, and after its transmission in mid-July the music bizzy-bodies set Dagger's phone jangling.

Spandau Ballet had played only eight live dates before signing an unrivalled contract worth £300,000 in today's money. In the end only two record companies "got" what Spandau were about, CBS and Chrysalis, and the second won by agreeing to greater creative freedom. The band secured an unprecedented package: 14% against the norm of 8%, their own record label, Reformation, to manage publishing rights and merchandising; a promotional video and a 12-inch club mix with each single, which were firsts for a British band. And they agreed in the spirit of democracy to a six-way split of the proceeds, Dagger being de facto a member of the band.

Two weeks after release, their first single, To Cut a Long Story Short, entered the charts and reached No 5. It was danceable, melodic and the vocalist could sing. As cult sounds went, this was unique. They called their new genre "White European Dance Music".

Within weeks of Spandau's hit, Britain's clubbing grapevine put yet more clubland bands into the charts, many unveiled by sharp young managers the same age as the talent. In the Blitz slipstream, a dynasty of 35 new-look acts charted during 1981 alone, including Visage, Ultravox, Duran Duran, the Human League, Heaven 17, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Toyah, Blue Rondo, ABC. That this was one of the most fertile years for British pop since the 60s was visible in the Top of the Pops Christmas shows a year apart. As 1980 closed, the Angel Boys leapt from the screen as the only act playing new music. By Christmas 1981, TOTP was given a sparkling neon-tech setting and a demented dance troupe called Zoo. That year Spandau were but one among a phalanx of visual shockers from the Human League to Soft Cell.

In the next three years a second wave of image-led acts refreshed the pop charts to become household names: Bananarama, Yazoo, Blancmange, Culture Club, Wham!, Thompson Twins, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Insolence and narcissism lit a torch that led a generation through what might have been a dark age, for by 1983 one-third of Britain's jobless were under 25. The blitzkrieg took a giant leap for everyone on the right side of 40, especially in TV and publishing, which had lost touch with the young, just as the politicians had. Crucial magazines lit the way: in 1980 The Face, where Elms became chief chronicler of the scene and I brought photo-reportage from New Romantic clubs across the land; also in 1980, Terry Jones launched i-D which spread attitude and irony through its "straight-up" style of street photography; then, in 1981, came the glossy New Sounds New Styles, which was the main platform for four of us known as the Rebel Writers who swore death to rock.

The Face was the accelerator that drove mainstream journalism to adopt "style" pages. Television launched edgy "yoof" programmes that broke taboos so every clubber who wasn't "putting a band together" was "submitting a treatment to Channel 4", which had decided close to its 1982 launch to target a 15-30s audience. Marketing and retail, too, had to have "one of those kids with blue hair".

As clubs became workplaces and nightlife the essential engine of cultural evolution, they liberated music, design and, especially, ambition. In 1978, London offered only one hip club a week; by 1984 Time Out magazine was listing 50, while the British Tourist Authority reported that dancing was a serious reason visitors gave for visiting the UK. London Transport rolled out a whole network of night buses.

To be young in that dawn was very heaven. British youth is what the world's pop fans wanted – in America, especially, twentysomethings craved groups of their own age. Britain's visual kaleidoscope of cults was exactly what fed MTV from its launch in 1982 and loosened the stranglehold music radio once held. During Spandau's US tour in November 1983, alongside their hit True in the Billboard Top 40 there were 17 other British bands – more than the Swinging 60s ever knew.

Staying one step ahead of current style was one key to Spandau's rise, and it meant reinventing their sound every year. For their 2009 Reformation tour they have recorded a bravely acoustic, unplugged album by which sceptics will be able to measure their worth. It gives their greatest hits a 21st-century flavour, according to sax player Steve Norman, taking them to some "very dark, different place". For only the second time, Norman enjoys a songwriting credit for the likely new single, Once More. This, however, is "a stomping power ballad back in the epic mould" to keep the core fans sweet. A taste of yesteryear, but another step forward, too.

In 1983, Margaret Thatcher was re-elected and presided over a consumer boom until 1985. Then along came Stock Aitken and Waterman to make more than 100 UK top 40 hits and a return to the blandness of corporate brands; the rest is not very interesting history.

The Swinging 80s had been a tumultuous period of transition from a nation of makers into one of servants, when a seismic shift of attitudes wrenched many levers of power away from the over-40s who decided the nation's fate. Gary Kemp is satisfied with his band's contribution: "The rockists had been guarding their futures. We found a way through and made it easier for others to follow. We helped make the future the country of the young. And we dance differently there."