SYMPTOMS OF ROMANCE
'I want a bit of New Romantic!” (Highly unstable 20-year-old boy falls on nearest person at a Blurt appearance—Moonlight Club, London 1981) The cry is not so much a demand as some belief that he’s getting it. Yet he’s wrong. Blurt are most definitely not part of the New Romantics.
SYMPTOMS OF ROMANCE
LETTER FROM BRITAIN
by
Penny Valentine
'I want a bit of New Romantic!” (Highly unstable 20-year-old boy falls on nearest person at a Blurt appearance—Moonlight Club, London 1981)
The cry is not so much a demand as some belief that he’s getting it. Yet he’s wrong. Blurt are most definitely not part of the New Romantics. Ornette Coleman crossed with James Brown crossed with new music’s intelligent anguish and humor, they owe as much to improvised jazz as Nutbush, City Limits. This is not the arena of pose but of highly defined protest.
It’s hard now to remember if the media came up with it or they did it themselves; the Blitz crowd, the Spandau Ballet-tomanes, the Steve Strange aficionados, the cabaret crowd frilled and kilted and blowing kisses back to the 18th century novel against computer rock...but the New Romantics they have become. Only a few months in and it’s the New Movement but... going where? It’s art school without being revolutionary, style without political awareness. They’ve been compared with the Dadaists but they’ve hardly budged the status quo. Swashbuckling combined with minimalism.