1984: ONLY THE EMPIRE’S NEW CLOTHES?

1984: ONLY THE EMPIRE’S NEW CLOTHES?

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Cynthia Rose

“Fashion” is such a reliably inaccurate index of what’s going on in a given site at a given time that our new 1984: The Fashion Yearbook (U.K. publisher: Zomba; available in the U.S. as Fashion ’85 from St. Martin’s) makes a perversely interesting read. Of course it contains the inevitable “style is not only what you wear but how you wear it.” But lots of other whoppers lurk beside that one—many in larger type. Like: “1984 was a sort of fastforward replay of the Swinging London phenomenon of the 1960s.” Or Annie Lennox and Boy George: “both of whom were ’77 punks.”

Strange indeed. Working day in and day out in Carnaby Street would teach anyone that this declining and repressive era is no Swinging ’60s redux. Particularly when reporting news of the Tory government’s Youth Training Scheme: a one-year program of “work and training experience” which, come spring, will be compulsory for high school leavers. (To be specific, any 16or 17-year-old who refuses a place on the Scheme—which pays a weekly allowance of under 35 bucks— becomes unable to claim for unemployment if he or she cannot find a job.)

Equally vivid, if plenty less significant to the country at large, is my memory of Annie Lennox in her first incarnation (vocalist and cofrontperson in glam-pop ensemble the Tourists). One of the subjects which made the Tourists relentlessly unpopular with the music press for their entire existence was Annie’s uncompromising habit of holding forth on the negative side of punk. Later, as a fledgling Eurythmic, she held firmly to the same perspective: “People always point to the punk era as some big example of rebellion and individuality. But we were discriminated against for not conforming to some abstract idea of what ‘punk’ had to be. I mean, how unconventional is that?”

Certainly many images of Annie as a fashion-plate from ’77 on do spring to mind. There’s Annie (then Ann) in black stilettoes, straight black skirt and elegant garnet blouse. In a fetching turquoise jumpsuit made by a local seamstress whose number she encouraged everyone to call. Even walking out to open for Roxy Music, wearing a chartreuse cire and black lace two-piece...only to discover that designer Anthony Price had picked exactly the same cloth for Ferry’s comeback suit.

I can even re-visualize Annie chatting over coffee in a London cafe, hidden beneath a Davy Crockett fur hat but dangling diamante earrings. Still—a “ ’77

punk”? Not Annie! Annie has always been as glam as her budget allowed.

Another interesting contention from the ’84 Fashion Yearbook runs thus: “Of all the influences on British street fashion, music is the most powerful...a type of music can inspire a new fashion overnight.”

Well, that’s OK if you’re willing to translate any idea of music into merchandise, a la Malcolm McLaren. But McLaren is a figure whose Phoenix-like style and pseudo-powers are these days testament to little more than the impoverishment of a media circus. This week saw him on TV’s Arena arts program—where he promptly drank too much and babbled away about opera, pop and people’s lives as perfect vehicles for haberdashery.

Two official media types (a species straighter here than on MTV, believe me) squirmed behind the prominent decanter of white wine. Even more embarrassment diffused across their features when Malcolm’s dinner chat waxed heartless about deaths among his former associates. (Casualties, it should be said, whose numbers exceed the famous Sid and Co. to include sadder, ever shorter loves like that of punk model Tracy. Tracy, a junior celeb for the duration of Malcolm and Vivienne Westwood’s Tartan Collection of haute punk, died at 17. She had been admited just six weeks before to London’s St. Stephen’s Hospital—her stomach eaten away by disease and amphetamine.)

Arena took no notice at all of the human disasters which have punctuated McClaren’s path to status as a spiv Warhol, except to exploit a few clips of Sid. But Liverpudlian Alex Cox, director of the hearty hardcore movie Repo Man, has determined to do otherwise. Cox is based in L.A., but as he returned for Repo Man’s U.K. premier he announced that the Sid and Nancy saga was going to be his next flick.

A tall and toothy guy, with a buzzsaw haircut and a Run Jesse Run badge dangling from his bomber top, Cox is a lot of things Malcolm will never be. Unpretentious, witty—and genuinely curious. Originally, he left Britain purely to look for film work. But friendship with one of the Plugz (“now Los Cruz Ados; the label made ’em change that good sexy name because they thought it was associated with ’77 and punk”) drew him into the harcore scene. “Meeting the Plugz affected my film work profoundly,” says Cox. “For one thing they’re really rooted in Hispanic stuff. So their preoccupations, like mine, are genuinely bi-cultural.”

Cox’s viewpoint may very well provide something as tough and witty as Repo Man from the story of Nancy and Sid. It won’t be anything like Ma Spungen’s tell-all book, says Cox: “that’s for sure, but it won’t be Romeo and Juliet either.”

“In ’76 and ’77,” he says more seriously, “there was this very important sense of aggressive individualism and aggressive community— and there was a kind of love in Sid and Nancy’s story. But it’s a question of love for what?

“Here in Britain, that sense of togetherness is gone—it’s all this over-produced crap and bullshit once again. In America there is a real post-punk spirit...but you find it in socalled independent and local bands.”

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Cox pauses; the guy opposite us at the bar has on a “Sid Lives” shirt. “There are people everywhere,” he says pointedly, “who are known to have struggled with alcohol or drugs. Like Dennis Hopper or Iggy Pop (of Repo Man theme tune fame)...characters who have come through that and gone on to make great art in spite of it. Those are the characters I can look up to. The other kind of ‘characters,’ the pissheads and speedfreaks and superficial greedheads—they are despised by everybody in the really alternative community. The hip kids of today despise them. And those kids, as a result, make exceptionally good films.” Cox cites his current favorites: Suburbia and My Brother’s Wedding.

But back to that fascinating theory of music inspiring new fashions “overnight” within the U.K. I have to ask myself: does this really involve music as I know it? Perambulating home over Dickens’s glittering Thames after Elvis Costello’s special solo Christmas show I gazed out from the bridge to the river. Elvis was certainly the musical monolith of the year...What would everyone be wearing in the morning after he’d packed out the prestigious Royal Festival Hall?

Sackcloth and ashes probably. For all of Costello’s time and energies were spent alternately unbraiding and depressing his audience. Except for brief moments brightened by the harmonies (and welcome superior guitar skills) of opener T-Bone Burnett, Elvis did nothing to succor, uplift, inspire, or even entertain his Christmas worshippers. He simply wallowed in ego for over three hours. At one point he did achieve a Personal Best in mixed metaphors with a chorus that claimed “If we were chrome we’d be rusted/lf we were thirst we’d be quenched.” (No, they aren’t the same things.)

Next to Costello’s self-indulgence, a tune cowritten with Burnett (“The People’s Limousine,” about the incongruity of Costellocading through Florence in a limo with a Communist driver at the wheel) provided relief of almost comic dimensions. But a short essay of Hee Haw humor as “Harlan And Henry Coward” foundered on Costello’s obvious inability to take anything lightly or, indeed, to take anything but himself seriously. And for all his grace and discretion, Burnett’s genuine curiosity about the huge, unwieldy audience exposed El’s overweening self-interest as exactly that.