FASHION FOR DOGS

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

DEPARTMENTS

FASHION FOR DOGS

by

Penny Valentine

Looking at you kid/Looking at you/ Looking at you, but what can you do" (Sector 27)

Busy looking at each other without the paranoia Tom Robinson has on the street with his first Sector 27 outing, the stylists and the dandies are into chic.

The new chic is cheap chic, roped together on a tight budget, outdoing last week s by the addition of a new line: a kilt, ballet shoes, Edwardian frills at the throat, diamante hats perched sideways, high padded shoulders, tiny winged collar shirts. Clean, neat, freshly pressed.

7 am beautiful and very very young/To be standing in the street/To be taken by someone..."

Spandau Ballet's first single, "To Cut A Long Story Short" is in the chart. Desolation disco, white soul. David Bowie would like their haircuts: short, sleek, falling casually over one eye (just enough to flip back with the most minimal flick of the head).

Spandau are based just round the corner from me in North London. People who heard about their existence earlier in the year labeled them pretentious without sight. Few critics even clapped eyes on them: not surprisingly since they never played the recognized circuit (and few critics are in touch with the underground until it shows up into the light). Well, hell, me too. I mean living so close to it all I haven't been aware of the streets thronged with Style. Yet it exists—at Blitz, the Kilt, the Hell clubs where the under 25's (de rigeur) put together their outfits on parade to a background of more obscure soul singles. Merely an extension of their day-time ambience and Spandau (German repression being so attractive to the new musics) have come directly out of that line-up.

Yes, Bowie would like them no doubts "To Cut" is based on that slightly robotoid imperceptible hip move Bowie first showed up with in the days of Aladdin Sane. Chopping but flowing synthesizer, heavy bass and high hard drum. "To cut a long story short I lost my mind*" they sing, without a trace of punk's obligatory snarl. This is fliat, clipped, finish-off-the-end-ofwords stuff. Very proper. Very elegant.

The art school dance may go on forever. Spandau Ballet represent the commercial (in the sense of single power) tip of a culture that revolves totally around fashion, hair, dance...a lifestyle that reeks of artful artlessness but professes to owe less to unfinished canvases than Roxy used to rely on. (Not surprisingly Ferry recognizes the same dropped shoulder stance and has given it his blessing).

At its root it's the same imagination, the same oddly organic structure that occasionally takes over under the mainstream and constantly changes so that it can't be over-exploited by the media. It owes no particular allegiances. The difference appears to be unemployment. Rising among the youth as never before, the dole queue now manifests itself here, not as anti-society but simply as chic clique.

An interesting anamoly. For underneath the cheap chic, the fatigues, ballet shoes laced up the ankle and the kilts that Spandau boast (this week) is a feeling of the late 20's. The frantic indolence and extravagance of the literati between wars. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald throwing endless parties, suicidal into the dawn. The new Scotts and Zeldas are less fevered and self-destructive. They may dance all night and recover all day but then so did the Mods. This in-crowd dance on the upper deck of the Titanic even though they've only got steerage tickets.

The music press have approached all this emphasis on Style with suspicion. With Spandau the only exponents of this new form in the studios, not enough is emerging for them to get to grips with. Meanwhile the chicsters have been plastered over the glossy international mags and even a few of the alternatives. We await the arrival of German TV film crews daily.

The music press have approached Bow Wow Wow with suspicion too, sniffing around as over on the other side of the fence to -Spandau, Malcolm McLaren is sharpening up his paws. McLaren's attacks on the media generally have always included the music press; they find it hard to keep upright and in their role when rules are changed.

Bow Wow Wow are the obverse of Spandau Ballet. Even younger (their female lead singer is 14), they play it for laughs under McLaren's full frontal second assault on his arch rival—and meal ticket— the record business.

"It used to break my heart/When I went into your shop/And you said my records/ Were oi/t of stock/So I don't buy records in your shop/I tape 'em all, I'm top of the pops... "

"C-30 C-60 C-90 Go" was Bow Wow Wow's first single, extolling the virtues of "illegal" taping (the numbers being cassette tape lengths). After the Sex Pistols the media have been curious, but wary. But McLaren, like Frank Zappa, is nothing if not a maestro of packaging, an advertising agency's dream account executive. As the record industry chips and crashes under the weight of its price increases, inflation and a recession, Big Mai has come up with an outfit who sing about records only being for the rich. As London gets more crowded' with roller skaters, their heads plugged into portable radios and cassettes as they whizz by, Bow Wow Wow sing about rewinds, pause and taping off radio.

"I don't need no album rack/I carry my collection on my back."

"C-30" came up as a pressed-up, paid-up, fully vinyl single. Hastily correcting that mistake, Bow Wow Wow's "album" is a nine track cassette (phew, Big Mai, nearly blew it there for a minute!). Of course the real laugh about all this is not simply that they're signed to EMI (who started the ball rolling by chucking the Pistols out of the door), but that Bow Wow Wow are actually very good. Young, energetic, slyly unserioufe, they sound like they were taped off radio and are playing back on cassette. Best thing of all is their drum sound: totally tribal, as though a regular kit is being hit with bare hands on taut skins. Rippling, highly disciplined, it gives them a tautness that's a " real surprise coming out from a self-publicized (but did we believe it?; anarchistic entrepreneur.

Economy chic flaunts itself as the barricades burn down. At a time when Rock Against Racism had flurried itself to mass a thrust on the streets again (this time to combat young skinheads drawn to the Fascist British Movement), this is how the neutral ground, studded with clothes rails, is being occupied.