Smash Hits 22/1/81
"I was not a Generation X roadie," Steve Strange is saying, "They saw some posters I'd done to advertise some Welsh gigs they were doing and asked me to do some artwork for them."
That's where it all started. Steve Strange was just your run-of-the-mill Newport schoolkid with orange hair and a tendency to spend the weekends thrashing around the Northern Soul circuit - until he discovered P-U-N-K.
"When I was fourteen," he casts his mind back even further,"I used to hitch up to Samantha's in Leeds on a Friday night, move to the Blackpool Mecca on Saturday until midnight, leave to hit the Wigan Casino around one, dance all night then go for a swim in the local pool and head over to the Torch in Manchester to finish the weekend off."
"The music," he recalls," was all rare '50's or '60's soul, not that new contrived crap like Wigan's Chosen Few."
He promises that Visage, the band he's in along with drummer Rusty Egan and various members of Magazine and Ultravox, won't be switching to a repertoire of Northern Soul, although he'd like to start playing it in the clubs which he and Rusty present in certain London Nightspots.
Rusty and Steve's clubs are as good a place as any to begin to explain the Steve Strange phenomenon.
They began, in late '77, by taking over a London drinking club called Billy's for a regular Friday "Bowie Night", where devotees of stylish rock and adventurous clothing could gather, be seen, dance and generally enjoy themselves. It Was a sharp, timely contrast to the grubbiness of punk.
Contrary to many people's assumptions, they weren't spoilt brats who actually had enough money behind them to own the clubs. They simply took the risk of hiring the places regularly one evening a week and taking enough money out of the receipts to keep themselves in porridge and eye-liner.
Steve would stand outside vetting the punters to sift out the trouble makers and anyone likely to destroy the sympathetic atmosphere. Rusty, formerly the Rich Kids' and later The Skids' drummer, was the DJ. His choice of music mixed Bowie and Roxy with more electronic "futurist" dance tracks from Kraftwerk and their clan. In the early days he just couldn't get enough of it.
Steve Strange gets annoyed by the jibes which often appear in print, accusing him of "drinking champagne on my father's credit card" and other such indulgences.
Apart from finding them personally upsetting - "my father died when I was thirteen and although my mother is well-off, I'd never go to her for money" - such unfounded criticisms ignore the amount of initiative and enterprise which has consistently gone into his ventures.
Now that he's a more well-known figure in the gossip-columns of the daily papers and a familiar man-about-town, people are tending to come to him with opportunities. He's pretty wary of that approach, however, having had his fingers burnt once already.
"After I left home, I went on the 'Anarchy' tour with The Pistols - as a friend of the band. Then I came to London and one particular guy - I'm naming no names - got me involved in something called The Moors Murderers."
Strange joined this outfit - tastelessly and provocatively named after two of Britain's most notorious child-murders - because "I wanted to be in a band."
The Sunday Mirror was as far as he got, pictures and all, captioned with a mouthful of his manager's words.
"I was frightened by it," he says ruefully. "It frightened me off music. I regretted it very much, but at least I learned not to trust anyone who puts me in that kind of position again."
Steve Strange retired from the public limelight after such a start to work in the Rich Kids' London office. There, in late '77, he met Rusty Egan. The Rich Kids fell apart and they began the Friday nights at Billy's.
In the beginning, Visage started out to remedy the shortage of suitable music for Rusty's disco. Midge Ure, another ex-Rich Kid, came to the club and offered Steve some free studio which he had left over from the band's deal with EMI.
They cut some demos with Steve singing and, although EMI passed them over, producer Martin Rushent - who was just beginning his own Genetic record label - heard them being played at Billy's and put up the money for more recording.
More musicians joined in: Billy Currie, who was weathering a difficult phase in Ultravox's history, and three members of Magazine - whose career sometimes seems, very unfairly, to be one long difficult phase - john McGeoch, Dave Formula and Barry Adamson.
An album was recorded at Rushent's studio in the garden of his Berkshire home, only to end up in cold storage for nearly a year when his record label collapsed through a complicated business cock-up.
Meanwhile, the club scene was blossoming. Rusty and Steve moved across Central London to the Blitz wine bar in Covent Garden, taking it over every Tuesday night. Commentators, lost for a label to describe Steve and the kids who share his tastes for costume and nightclubbing, still refer to the Blitz and him in one breath even though he hasn't been using the place for a year now.
Since then there's been Hell, where everyone dressed in gloomy black "ecclesiastical" garments. That was closed down somewhat abruptly by the police. More recently they've been using London's big soulless rock showcase, The Venue, on Thursday nights.
That hasn't worked out; Steve is dissatisfied " because half the people were dressing up and the half that weren't were just there to laugh at the rest; I can't handle that, it ruins the atmosphere."
Next they're moving on to a very expensive upmarket Mayfair club, Legends, though they've got the owners to drop the entrance fee to ?2.00 and halve the price of drinks. Legends will tide them over until their new, specially kitted-out club, The People's Palace, is ready.
They keep at it, says Steve, because "London's so absolutely dead. The only places you can go are gay clubs or very expensive places like the Embassy - what else is going on?"
Since Steve and Rusty began their clubs, there has been an explosion of small venues in Central London, not just discos, but places like the Comedy Store where budding comedians can try their hand, and the new clubs associated with Spandau Ballet and their followers, Le Kilt and Le Beetroot.
"The Ballet", as Steve likes to call them, are the first band to have emerged into the public eye - and the singles chart - from the audience at Steve's clubs. It's taken some time, as Steve explains:
" Originally there were no new bands, but I think that Visage and The Ballet putting out vinyl has pushed them on quite a bit.
" The bands are just starting to come through: we used our nights at The Venue as an opportunity to put on ones like Depeche Mode from Croc's clubs in Rayleigh near Southend and Duran Duran from the Rum Runner in Birmingham. We even put The Stray Cats on when they first came over.
" Now I get sent tapes all the time from kids at Croc's and places, asking if Rusty and I will put them on. It's great that they just get on with it and don't feel that they have to be in some bloody supergroup!"
Steve Strange also provides inspiration for another, totally different group of young people, a new generation of clothes designers. He's well known for the endless changes of image and clothing he's been through: clown, toy soldier, puritan, through to the indescribably weird outfits such as he wore when he appeared in the Face.
His huge teased-out quiff of hair used to be a major distinguishing mark, though it has gone in favor of a light-coloured thatch of strands which flop over one side of his face. This is part of the stranded-on-the-beach-for-days Robinson Crusoe look, which was recently featured in none other than The Sunday Times.
It consists of a large yellow blouse with huge billowing sleeves, a
brown leather breeches 'n' waistcoat suit and, lurking beneath a half-grown beard, what looks like a suntanned complexion. Steve laughs at this observation: "It's all out of a bottle, this tan."
The Strange look has been fashioned by "people who left art college, kicked it in the arse. They were told the things they were designing couldn't be done, so they just got on with it. Now there's even a shop, Axiom, in the same King's Road market where Rusty has his record stall, selling clothes by the people who've left college, like Melissa Kaplan (who designs a lot of Toyah's gear). And the turnover is amazing."
Asked to explain the dressing-up, Steve Strange explains it as "Self-expression; I often look at girls or whatever on the Tube and think 'You could easily be a model or something'. I'm just saying that people should do what they want to do, with clothes or whatever you're into."
Such an outrageous appearance can bring on heaviness from other people in public, but there's always a suspicion about anybody who dresses so provocatively that they're somehow asking to be abused. Steve denies that:
"I don't go out to get aggravation; half the time if you confront someone who's shouting at you, it just reveals their own ignorance. I can't get upset by people knocking me like that, only by the more personal sneers."
He recounts, in a mildly amused fashion, how one of the music papers recently printed a letter from a Scottish objector, saying that if Steve Strange so much as set foot North of the Border, he would personally give him a kicking. To Steve's delight, it provoked a flood of letter the following week defending his right to look how he likes.
Just now, the Robinson Crusoe look is going to have to do for a few days more, as there's a bundle of Visage commitments to get through. As he's the only member not signed to another record label already, Strange is the only one to appear in the current video of the band's first single "Fade To Grey".
So, as it's just notched up record of the week status on radio stations in Holland, Germany and France, he's off to Europe to promote it, along with his co-star in the video, Julia, his former girlfriend who's well known as the bouffanted assistant in PX - the Strange-style clothes shop.
Then it's back into the studio to remix "Mind Of A Toy" from the album as the next British single. And then there's America; Rusty and he have been asked to take their "electronic disco" over to New York where, again, the Visage single is already exciting a lot of interest (the U.S. arm of Polydor Records signed the band many months before the British).
Steve Strange speaks about this, as he does all his other activities, in a tone of genuine enthusiasm. His only worry, he says half petulantly, half joking, is his appearance:"I don't know what to do for New York".