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 PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
THE HISTORY OF SUBCULTURES
AND POPULAR MUSIC

Jon Stratton

Spectac
le, Fash
the Dan ion and
PALGRAVE
STU
HISTORY O DIES IN THE
cing
F SUBCULT
URES Experien
AND POPU
LAR MUSIC ce in Bri
1960–19 tain,
90
Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and
Popular Music

Series Editors
Keith Gildart
University of Wolverhampton
Wolverhampton, UK
Anna Gough-Yates
University of Roehampton
London, UK
Sian Lincoln
Liverpool John Moores University
Liverpool, UK
Bill Osgerby
London Metropolitan University
London, UK
Lucy Robinson
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
John Street
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK
Peter Webb
University of the West of England
Bristol, UK
Matthew Worley
University of Reading
Reading, UK
From 1940s zoot-suiters and hepcats through 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers, beat-
niks and Teddy boys; 1960s surfers, rude boys, mods, hippies and bikers;
1970s skinheads, soul boys, rastas, glam rockers, funksters and punks; on
to the heavy metal, hip-hop, casual, goth, rave and clubber styles of the
1980s, 90s, noughties and beyond, distinctive blends of fashion and music
have become a defining feature of the cultural landscape. The Subcultures
Network series is international in scope and designed to explore the social
and political implications of subcultural forms. Youth and subcultures will
be located in their historical, socio-economic and cultural context; the
motivations and meanings applied to the aesthetics, actions and manifesta-
tions of youth and subculture will be assessed. The objective is to facilitate
a genuinely cross-disciplinary and transnational outlet for a burgeoning
area of academic study.
 Jon Stratton

Spectacle, Fashion and

the Dancing
Experience in Britain,
1960–1990
Jon Stratton
UniSA Creative
University of South Australia
Adelaide, SA, Australia

ISSN 2730-9517     ISSN 2730-9525 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music
ISBN 978-3-031-09011-0    ISBN 978-3-031-09012-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09012-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Urilux

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

A big thank you goes to the members of UniSA Creative for the congenial
working environment they have created. A special thanks goes to the
members of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre for
their interest and engagement at seminars I have presented related to this
book. I particularly want to thank Professor Susan Luckman, who as
Director of the Centre has always been helpful and supportive, especially
during the time of the pandemic. Thanks to UniSA Creative and Professor
Luckman for granting me funds for the proofing and indexing of this book.
Thanks must go to Jess Taylor, who has done an extraordinary job
completing the referencing and formatting of this manuscript. Her work
is always amazing and this time more than usual. I am in her debt. Thanks
also to Mar Bucknell for his superlative proofing and indexing of this book.
My thanks go to Panizza Allmark, Professor of Visual and Cultural
Studies at Edith Cowan University, for her personal support through the
development and completion of this project. She has always had my back.
An earlier version of Chap. 4 appeared as an article in Contemporary
British History, vol. 35, no. 2, 2021. I would like to thank the journal edi-
tors for permission to republish from that article. Some material in Chaps.
3 and 4 derive from an article ‘Disco before Disco: Dancing and popular
music in the 1960s and 1970s in England’ published in Journal of Popular
Music Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, 2021.

v
 Contents

1 I ntroduction: Those Dancing Years  1

The Organisation of the Book  12
References  15

2 D
 ancing to Records in the 1960s 17
Going Dancing in the 1960s  18
Reproducing Music  25
From the Twist to the Beat  30
Conclusion  41
References  44

3 M
 usic for Dancing in the 1960s 49
Stomping Beats  53
African Drums and British Feet  57
‘Rock And Roll’ and Mike Leander  63
The End of the Beginning  68
References  76

4 G
 lam Rock and the Society of the Spectacle 81
Glam Rock, Youth Culture and Neo-tribes  82
Glam Rock and the Rise of Consumerism  84
Redefining Glam Rock  87
Glam Rock as British  91
Glam Rock, Spectacle and Television  96
Britain Becomes a Consumption-Oriented Society 100

vii
viii Contents

Conclusion 108
References 110

5 G
 lam Rock: Sexuality, Performance and Spectacle115
The Women Behind Glam Rock 122
Performance and the Gay Experience 125
Gary Glitter, David Bowie and Jean Genet 129
The Gaze and Performance 132
Androgyny, Bowie and the Society of the Spectacle 134
Gary Glitter and Glam Camp 138
Conclusion 139
References 141

6  he New Romantics: Dancing in the Society

T
of the Spectacle147
The New Romantics Were Not a Youth Culture 148
Naming and Clubbing 154
New Romantic Style 157
The Fashion Industry 161
Music Videos 167
Mirrors Become Screens 172
Conclusion 180
References 181

7 L
 earning to Rave: The Construction of Rave in the UK in
the 1980s187
The Historicity of the Temporary Autonomous Zone 188
The New York Clubs 193
The New Dancing Experience 197
The Ibiza Myth 201
Dance Music 206
Ecstasy 210
The Mainstreaming of Dance Music 215
Conclusion 217
References 218

References225

Index249
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Those Dancing Years

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution

Attributed to Emma Goldman (c. 1934)

Between the 1960s and the 1980s popular music consumption in Britain
changed in fundamental ways. What gave it continuity was dancing,
though the context for this and even the dancing itself also changed radi-
cally. From young people dancing to groups like the Dave Clark Five to
DJs like Paul Oakenfold playing techno and trance tracks (electronic dance
music) in lengthy sequences to which young people, sometimes on Ecstasy,
would dance until exhausted, there is seemingly an unbridgeable gulf.
This is not the case. The pounding bass drum offered by the Dave Clark
Five and other beat groups provided a clear, stomping beat to which
young British, for which also read white, people could move their feet.
There is a lineage from this to the minimal feet movement of punks, who
in the late 1970s would move vertically to a rapid drum and bass beat, a
dance known as the pogo, and on to the increasingly freestyle, individual-
ised dancing at raves, which nevertheless focused on the feet as the source
of connection to the beat. The bass drum stomp itself carried through into
the 1990s in the pounding beats of artists like the Chemical Brothers,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Stratton, Spectacle, Fashion and the Dancing Experience in Britain,
1960–1990, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and
Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09012-7_1
2 J. STRATTON

Fatboy Slim and the Prodigy, who are sometimes known generically, in
America at least, as part of the Big Beat (Coleman 2016).
At the same time, the means of transmission of music for dancing
changed from live groups, often utilising the PA sound systems of ball-
rooms or church halls or similar venues, to records played on record play-
ers at parties, and to the use of increasingly sophisticated amplification
systems through which records would be played in the new custom-built
clubs, alternatively called discos. These clubs employed DJs to play
recorded music for young people to dance to. It wasn’t until the late
1960s that it became generally accepted to dance to records and at this
time this practice ceased to be thought of as a cheap and unsatisfactory
alternative to dancing to live music. It was around the same time that
some strains of rock music morphed into what came to be called prog rock
(prog standing for progressive), which included artists like Genesis
(founded 1967), Caravan (founded 1968) and Yes (founded 1968). With
its varying time signatures and uneven beats, and often played on instru-
ments not usually found in the make-up of mainstream groups, this music
was designed for listening to rather than dancing to. It became common
to sit down at live music gigs in order to appreciate critically what was
being played rather than finding the beat and communing with the group
in the joint experience of the music. The people who appreciated this
music, mostly middle-class youth, often students, tended to look down on
dance music and those who danced to it.
The changes that were occurring in dancing to popular music in the
late 1960s coincided with a fundamental transformation in British society.
This is best captured in Guy Debord’s theorisation of the society of the
spectacle in his book, published in French in 1967 as La societe du spectacle
and in English in 1970 as The society of the spectacle. The French theorist
was a leading member of the social revolutionary group, the Situationist
International, whose critique of the social order was founded in libertarian
Marxism and avant-garde movements like Dada and Surrealism (see Plant
1992; Wark 2015). The Situationist International played a large part in
fomenting the uprising against the French state in 1968. Some of the slo-
gans graffitied on walls in Paris at this time came from Debord’s book.
Debord elaborated the concept of the society of the spectacle as a critique
of what he understood to be happening in France.
France was transforming from a society based on production capitalism
to one based on consumption. This was compounded by the spread of
mass media, in particular television, which, with the concurrent
 1 INTRODUCTION: THOSE DANCING YEARS 3

deployment of the advertising industry and the impact of American cul-

tural imperialism in the form of television programmes, music and con-
sumer goods, was altering the experience of life in French society to
interactions mediated by spectacle. Richard Kuisel (1997, pp. 180–181)
provides this historical background:

The new abundance brought a flood of novel American products to France

during the 1950s and 1960s. … For decades America had influenced French
popular music, dance, film, and, to a lesser extent, literature; in the post-war
era radio and television programs, science fiction, and language itself joined
the list of American exports. … The first American dramatic series appeared
on French television in 1964 and films from across the Atlantic quickly
dominated foreign films shown on French television.

Mediated by American practices of consumption, French society was

becoming a society of the spectacle.
In the United States, Daniel Boorstin had made a similar, though less
trenchant, argument to Debord’s, without the Marxian apparatus he had
utilised and extended, in his book, published in 1962, The image: A guide
to pseudo-events in America. Boorstin’s key concepts were the pseudo-­
event and the image. The pseudo-event is a construction which takes on a
reality as a consequence of its distribution through the media. As Boorstin
(1992 [1962], p. 13) writes:

Vivid image came to overshadow pale reality. Sound motion pictures in

color led a whole generation of pioneering American movie-goers to
think of Benjamin Disraeli as an earlier imitation of George Arliss [Arliss
played Disraeli in the 1929 film of that name and won an Academy Award
for his performance], just as television has led a later generation of televi-
sion watchers to see the Western cowboy as an inferior replica of John
Wayne. The Grand Canyon itself became a disappointing replica of the
Kodachrome original.

It is significant that Boorstin mentions the importance of colour. As we

will see, while the impact of television was important, when colour was
introduced television became a much more powerful medium in the devel-
opment of the society of the spectacle.
Boorstin’s more general point is concerned with how the image has
become more real than that which it represents. Megan Garber (2016)
glosses Boorstin’s argument:
4 J. STRATTON

The image, strictly speaking, is a replica of reality, be it a news report or a

poster of Monet’s water lilies, that manages to be more interesting and dra-
matic and seductive than anything reality could hope to be. The image is the
spectacle that is most spectacular when it is watched on TV.

Garber does not mention Debord, so the connection with his ideas in her
discussion of Boorstin’s book is implicit. Boorstin’s image, which has a
greater reality than the world it represents, is closely analogous to Debord’s
spectacle in this regard.
Boorstin’s book describes a key element of the American society of the
spectacle which had been evolving over the previous decade. A revised edi-
tion of Debord’s book was published in English in 1977. It was certainly
known to Malcolm McLaren, as were many other works of the Situationist
International. McLaren used Debord’s ideas during his time as manager of
the Sex Pistols, though it is unclear the extent to which he wanted to cri-
tique the British society of the spectacle or use Debord’s ideas to take
advantage of it. Perhaps the distinction is not relevant. McLaren had been
introduced to Situationist ideas by Jamie Reid when they were both stu-
dents at Croydon College of Art in 1968. Reid went on to design the
covers of the Sex Pistols’ singles as well as the cover of their only album,
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. In Manchester, the club that
was central to that city’s rave scene, The Hacienda, opened in 1982,
funded largely by Factory Records and the financial success of New Order.
The club’s name came from the title of the Situationist work on architec-
ture by Ivan Chtcheglov, ‘The Hacienda Must Be Built’. Tony Wilson,
who ran Factory Records and was one of the instigators of the club, found
Chtcheglov’s article in a collection of translated writings by members of
the Situationist International that had been published in 1974. Edited by
Christopher Gray, it was Leaving the 20th century: The incomplete work of
the Situationist International.1 Reid had designed the cover and the book
also included illustrations by him. Referring to Rob Gretton, the manager
of New Order, and Tony Wilson, Peter Hook, the bassist in New Order
and author of a personal history of the club, notes: ‘Situationism was their
thing, not mine, although some of the concepts stuck with me and the
people around us’ (Hook 2010, p. 21). As is discussed in Chap. 7, the
work of Hakim Bey (2003 [1991]) on temporary autonomous zones
(commonly abbreviated to TAZs), which lifts off in part from the work of
the Situationists, became a way that the proponents of rave culture came
to understand the practice of raving in the mid-1980s. The continuing
 1 INTRODUCTION: THOSE DANCING YEARS 5

interest in Situationist theory from McLaren and Reid to Gretton and

Wilson, and rave culture, suggests the extent to which the culture of pop-
ular music in the United Kingdom (UK) was imbricated in a critique of
the developing society of the spectacle.2
Writing about the continuity in their thinking about carnival between
the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Situationists, Gavin Grindon (2004,
p. 149) suggests:

Qualities usually attributed to the realm of aesthetic appreciation were real-

ized in everyday life, and the divisions between life and art, performer and
spectator, collapsed. The anarchistic implications of such a world are obvi-
ous, but the key to this abolition of boundaries of class and ideology is that
joy, festivity, laughter and desire are understood as the revolutionary impe-
tus that brings such a world about.

These are the characteristics linked with the club culture that emerged
with the New Romantics and they were central to the experience of the
culture that evolved into rave. At the core of this experience was dancing,
and its connections with ecstasy.
Dancing is a basic aspect of the experience of the utopian world liber-
ated from capitalist domination overdetermined by spectacle and identi-
fied by terms such as carnival and temporary autonomous zone. As such,
during the 1980s ecstatic dancing was becoming politicised: ‘The 1994
Criminal Justice Bill made carnivalesque pleasure in the form of rave cul-
ture illegal in the UK’ (Grindon 2004, p. 152). Aimed at open air raves,
the bill did not mention dancing but referred specifically to music charac-
terised by ‘a succession of repetitive beats’ (see Mullins 2014). It is the
only parliamentary bill in the UK to identify a particular form of music. By
singling out such music the bill also attacked the liberatory dancing it
engendered. If we compare this dancing with the highly rule-governed
forms of the ballroom dancing of the first half of the twentieth century we
can describe it as unruly, indeed as carnivalesque. It is from this point of
view that rave dancing appears as a threat to public order and morality.
The transformation in the dancing experience, discussed most directly in
the final chapter, was a consequence of the development of the society of
the spectacle.
Parallel with the development of the society of the spectacle, and fun-
damentally involved with it, there were the cultures of Glam Rock and the
6 J. STRATTON

New Romantics. I am deliberately avoiding calling them youth cultures.

As we shall see, they bore little resemblance to the spectacular working-­
class youth cultures of the post-war era, Teddy Boys, mods, rockers, skin-
heads and even less to the middle-class hippies. Glam Rock and New
Romanticism were extrusions of the society of the spectacle as this was
evolving in the UK. They were themselves spectacular within the spectacu-
lar society. Glam Rock evolved as an expression of English, and perhaps
British, society’s entry into the society of the spectacle and the New
Romantics, a club culture formed by mostly art school students, was an
expression of the recognition that the new social order, founded in spec-
tacle, was increasingly seamless. It is no coincidence that so many of the
young people who went to the clubs identified with New Romanticism
continued on to careers in the areas central to the society of the spectacle,
television, photography, film, fashion, journalism and advertising. Later,
many of these careers were reconstructed, as not just British society but
society globally was renovated by the internet and the enabling structure
for the new networked system, the World Wide Web.
Few, if any, of the discussions of Glam Rock talk about the importance
of dancing. Yet, the majority of Glam Rock acts made dance records.
Sweet, Slade, Gary Glitter, Mud, T. Rex, Suzi Quatro and even David
Bowie made music that people could dance to. Increasingly, people danced
to the records of these artists rather than to their live performances. Glam
Rock was the pivotal moment in the acceptance of recorded music for
dancing. The new establishments for dancing were called either clubs, the
old term that looked backwards to a tradition of nightclubs that put on
entertainment such as cabaret for patrons and had a licence for selling
alcohol that was more liberal than the limited hours pubs were allowed to
open, or discos, the new term that came from the French discothèque and
signalled an elite tradition that dated back to the post-war era. Régine
Zylberberg, known later in her celebrity years as just Régine, is credited
with opening the first discotheque, the Whiskey-a-Gogo, in Paris in 1953:

I laid down a linoleum dance-floor – like in a kitchen – put in coloured

lights, and removed the juke-box. The trouble with the juke-box was that
when the music stopped you could hear snogging in the corners. It killed
the atmosphere. … Instead I installed two turntables so there was no gap in
the music. … It was the first ever discotheque and I was the first ever club
disc-jockey. (Schofield 2005)
 1 INTRODUCTION: THOSE DANCING YEARS 7

Disco was also the term used for one-off dance sessions in venues more
usually used for other purposes, village halls, youth club rooms, university
or holiday camp refectories and similar large spaces that could be bor-
rowed or rented and repurposed for a period of time when records could
be played for people to dance to. Some pubs held discos. Sometimes the
venues might have PA systems into which a turntable could be plugged.
These same PA systems had often been used by touring beat groups. Other
times, as sound systems evolved and became more portable with the intro-
duction of transistors, a sound system would be set-up for the evening.
These more or less impromptu sessions were called discos. This distinction
meant that it was possible to hold a disco in a club.
Discos were made possible by improvements in sound reproduction
technology, which in turn made dancing to records more acceptable. With
the advent of discos, the disc jockey, DJ, became a necessary profession.
Somebody was needed who knew what records people liked to dance to
and understood when to play records with a faster beat or a slower beat so
that boys would have the opportunity to ask girls to dance and a couple
might spend a few minutes in a close embrace shuffling around the floor,
possibly smooching. By the time of Glam Rock, clubs and discos had
become an everyday part of young people’s lives. Glam Rock offered the
records, singles not LPs, to play in these places. As it did so, the artists
who made these dance records played less and less in dance venues and
more often in halls with seating.
Glam Rock artists were also more visible on television music pro-
grammes like Top of the Pops. With television a key medium in the develop-
ing society of the spectacle, Glam Rock artists on television, especially in
colour, were spectacular. Top of the Pops was first broadcast in January
1964 and it is no coincidence that the first presenter was the pioneer DJ
Jimmy Savile. Top of the Pops was a chart show and its interest was in singles
and the music rather than the artists themselves. As Simon Frith et al.
(2016, p. 158) comment about Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go!:
‘These shows were not only important for breaking new artists, they also
helped move records to the centre of British popular musical culture.’
However, we do need to distinguish between the two shows. Ready
Steady Go!—which started in August 1963 on commercial television—
was much more oriented towards youth culture and the performing artist.
While for the show’s first year or so performers mimed, ‘by late 1964 some
performed live and the show switched to all live performances in April
1965’ (Wikipedia 2021). Ready Steady Go! ended its run in December
8 J. STRATTON

1966. It was closely associated with the mod youth culture but also with
the burgeoning rock culture. Top of the Pops, with its emphasis on miming
and on the popular music in the singles chart, was more an expression of
the society of the spectacle and better prepared for the forthcoming Glam
Rock culture. It finally ended its run on BBC One in 2005.
This does not mean that the artists were unimportant on Top of the Pops
but their importance was always as a spectacular accompaniment to the
music. The two key moments in the development of Glam Rock style,
Bolan wearing glitter under his eyes for a performance of ‘Hot Love’ in
March 1971, the second time he had performed the track on the show,
and Bowie dressed in a one-piece jump suit as Ziggy gesturing to the tele-
vision audience and draping his arm round Mick Ronson’s shoulders dur-
ing the performance of ‘Starman’ in July 1972, both took place on Top of
the Pops. Because the show privileged records, it makes sense that from the
beginning all the music was mimed,

the Musicians Union fought against mimed performance on TV and in July

1966 (after the show moved from Manchester to London) miming on
TOTP was banned. Live studio performances, however, could not do justice
to the records supposedly being celebrated, hence the Musicians Union
compromise [where] bands mimed to specially recorded backing tracks (all
the musicians on the original track had to be present in the studio). (Frith
et al. 2016, p. 158)

Many artists did not adhere to this and used the actual record. Other art-
ists, those with a rock aesthetic of authenticity, sometimes exhibited their
disdain for miming by making it blatantly obvious they were not playing
their instruments. Rod Stewart had the DJ John Peel on his performance
of ‘Maggie May’ in December 1971 apparently playing a mandolin flat on
his knees.
It was becoming more and more obvious that recorded music on
records was a different entity to live music. When Gary Glitter was invited
onto Top of the Pops to perform ‘Rock And Roll, Part 2’ in December
1972, a backing group had to be rapidly assembled because Mike Leander,
the producer, had generated almost all the music in the studio. As Simon
Reynolds (2016, pp. 218–219) recounts:

Glitter had to hastily pull together a fictitious backing group and give a
slightly chaotic rendition of ‘Part 2’, miming the title chants and the
‘HEY!’s, punching the air and doing an odd swaying dance, as if steadying
himself after being jolted by the blows of his own music.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THOSE DANCING YEARS 9

The entire performance was mimed and the guitarists appear to have little
idea what they are supposed to be doing. When Glitter went out on tour
he needed two drummers to reproduce the sound Leander had created.
On the Top of the Pops performance there is only one. Leander’s produc-
tion work for Gary Glitter was an important step on the road to 1980s
dance music.
There is a fundamental similarity between Glam Rock and the New
Romantics which has tended to get obscured by the circumstance of punk
in between. Both Glam Rock and the New Romantics were based on spec-
tacle within the evolving world of spectacle. For example, fashion was
foundational to both cultures, though for Glam Rock the fashion was
more imitative of the stars. The increasing importance of fashion can be
read as an index of the development of the society of the spectacle. More
broadly, we could say image was a central concern to members of both
groups, though again, for Glam Rockers image was invested in imitation.
Indeed, showing the continuity between the two cultures, Roxy Music
and, especially, Bowie, were important to both. Here we can remember
Boorstin’s analysis of the image. The image becomes more important than
what it represents. Of course, this is the basis of spectacle. For Glam Rock
fans, as Britain entered the society of the spectacle, there was a striving for
the image epitomised in the fantasy of moving through the colour televi-
sion to be in the world of the Glam Rock stars, Bolan and Bowie in par-
ticular. For the New Romantics there was a more direct struggle to be the
image, to live in the society of the spectacle within which they were
increasingly immersed.
Central to both groups, though more obvious for the New Romantics,
was dancing. For the Glam Rock fans, dancing took place in the evolving
club and disco culture. With the new sound systems the Sweet’s
‘Blockbuster’, their sixth top 20 hit and their first number 1, released in
1972, and Bowie’s ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, number 12 in 1972, the
audience could hear the stomping, driving beats that encouraged those in
the club, male as well as female, to get up, move their feet and dance.
Large numbers of young people, not just Glam Rockers, danced to these
tracks. In an important sense the Glam Rock fans merged with the mun-
dane club goers on the dance floor. There, there was little to distinguish
Glam Rockers. There were no clubs catering specifically for Glam Rock
fans either of particular artists or more generally as fans of Glam Rock
dancing music. After all, the music that Glam Rockers danced to was com-
posed of the same chart tracks as everybody else danced to.
10 J. STRATTON

The New Romantics had their own club nights. Not their own clubs,
but nights in clubs that were specifically for them. Here, the distinction
made earlier between clubs and discos becomes important. Up until
around the mid-1970s there was no difference between a club and a night
when records were played for dancing. Round about this time people
started hiring clubs for, say, one night a week to play a particular kind of
music for a particular audience. This became a possibility when young
people started to enjoy dancing to records rather than seeing it as a poor,
cheap substitute for dancing to live music. Once this shift had taken place,
it became possible for somebody to see that it was worthwhile, either
financially, or for a subcultural group like those people who enjoyed danc-
ing to what became known as Northern Soul, or for some other reason, to
hire a club and play music of a particular kind for an appreciative audience.
This is what Steve Strange and Rusty Egan did at the club called Billy’s
when they put on Bowie nights in 1976. These ran every Tuesday and
were described on the membership cards as taking place at Billy’s Disco
Night Club (The Blitz Kids n.d.). Egan didn’t just play Bowie, but tracks
that were generically similar to Bowie’s recordings at that time:

The DJ at Billy’s would be either Rusty Egan or a girl who was the house
DJ. When it was Rusty the music would be Kraftwerk, the Normal, Bowie,
Roxy Music, Giorgio Moroder soundtracks, all sorts. Bowie was a strong
influence—even during punk. (Tyson, cited in Lewis 2013)

Bowie Nights at Billy’s was a rendezvous for like-minded people to go

along, dress up, dance and enjoy each other’s company. Nicola Tyson,
who took the photos used in the article on Bowie Nights, which is quoted
previously, was a student at Chelsea School of Art. Like many of her peers
in the New Romantics she went on to a successful career in the arts, in her
case as a well-respected painter working in New York. When it is described,
as it is in the title of that article, as the birth of the London club scene, this
is what is meant. These new club nights differed radically from the usual
club experience, which, while including dancing, also involved drinking
and possibly picking up a partner.
Clubs became increasingly important as places for young people to go.
The New Romantic scene gave way to clubs playing house music and
techno, and a widening variety of music made for dancing, which enabled
clubbers to decide which clubs they wanted to go to depending on what
music they enjoyed and what DJ they knew was playing tracks. The new
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