Fremde, etranger, stranger

Stumbled across this piece from the Pittsburgh Review, “Welcome to the Cabaret” — an excerpt from Daniel Rachel’s book This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll, on “Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich.”

This chapter looks at the weird mix of pseudo-fascist and Weimar German aesthetics that was swirling around in British New Wave and post-punk circles thanks to folks like Bowie and Lou Reed and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Rachel takes a dim view of that period, seeing some of that imagery as a prescient warning but some of it as playing with fire in an attempt to be edgy. Transgression for transgression’s sake can be a dangerous thing, after all.

Because he’s writing about New Wave in the early ’80s, much of the essay focuses on the heyday of the Blitz, the coolest club in London at that time. He touches on lots of artists associated withy that scene who became famous over here — and also a bunch that didn’t. Among the bands discussed are two of the ones my semi-retired rock-star co-worker at the Big Box played/plays in.

And so the other night while doing the usual freight-manager-and-department-supervisor thing (online order for an inactive, no-home, it says we have 6 on-hand but the puller can’t find them, etc.), I wound up hearing lots of stories about the Blitz and the swirl of bands and artists who hung out there. I’ve got my work phone in one hand, checking the date received for the product, and my cell phone in the other hand, showing him Rachel’s article. He’s got his work phone in one hand and his cell phone in the other, showing me backstage photos from Boy George’s recent concert in Atlantic City because they’ve been pals ever since George O’Dowd was the coat-check guy at the Blitz.

Wild conversation. “Yeah, it says that, but ‘exiting SKU’ doesn’t always mean what it seems like it should. But anyway, you were saying?” “Right. So then Divine shows up with whatsisname, the American director guy …”

His take on Rachel’s concerns, for what it’s worth, is that in those days it was one thing for Lou Reed to decide to do creepy Leni Riefenstahl-inspired lighting — whatever — but that if anybody seemed like they were really OK with “all that Nazi s–t” they’d have gotten blacklisted and/or beaten up.

My sense is that the Blitz Kids and the New Romantics and all of that were more Ziggy Stardust and Pierrot than any of the darker nonsense Bowie sometimes played with. The Kit Kat Club-style Weimar decadence was a reaction to the rise of Thatcherism and anyone who seemed ambivalent toward fascism would have been seen as ambivalent toward Thatcher — and therefore unwelcome.

The club’s door-screeners (and over-the-top coat-check personell) were there to set the tone — and thus, explicitly, to keep out “homophobic thugs” and those who might do “violence against anyone different.”

That’s something important and meaningful and timely that we can take from the history of that whole scene.

Browse old photos from that club  — see here and here and here — and you’ll no doubt boggle over the wild excesses of early ’80s fashion, how over-the-top and gender-bending and playfully bizarre it could all be. But those photos also illustrate a principle that counters some of Daniel Rachel’s Joel-Gray-as-the-Emcee concerns about the Blitz kids: A night club that is hospitable to drag queens cannot also be hospitable to Nazis. And vice versa. You have to pick one or the other and the Blitz made its choice quite clear.

I suspect that this principle applies not just to night clubs, but to societies as a whole.

• On a related note involving ’80s Brit-pop New Wave and/or rock ‘n’ roll: “Did Tears For Fears steal a line from The Clash for their defining hit?”

I’ll save you the click. Yes, the title of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was maybe inspired by/borrowed from a Clash lyric. The matter was settled out of court:

While the pop-rock masterpiece doesn’t bear much resemblance to ‘Charlie Don’t Surf’ aside from that one line, the similarity was enough for Joe Strummer to jokingly tell Orzabal, “You owe me a fiver” when they were once dining in the same restaurant. According to Strummer, Orzabal promptly handed him a five-pound note.

Here’s the same story as confirmed by Roland Orzabel and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears:

Orzabal: “He said to me, and this was a long time ago, ‘Hey Roland! You owe me a fiver. Because on Sandinista! I sang everybody wants to rule the world.’ So, to be honest with you, I didn’t have a fiver. I had a tenner.”

Smith: “I knew that was coming! [Laughs]”

Orzabal: “I signed the tenner.”

Smith: “And said, ‘Now I’ve signed it, that makes it a fiver.’”

I like that story because it disrupts the supposed antipathy between the artifice of the New Wave/New Romantics and the stripped-down, anti-pretention ethos of punk rock. It’s all rock ‘n’ roll, and if Joe Strummer could be friends with the guys from Tears for Fears then I think we’re allowed to listen to both.

Related to that, my still-touring punk-rock coworker was proud to see that his old Blitz Kid friend is now opening his concerts like this:

Not my favorite cover version of this song — I prefer this one — but I’m still happy to see it.