New moves at JazzFM: Tony Minvielle and Robbie Vincent
❚ GREAT NEWS FOR FANS of deejay legend Robbie Vincent who helped establish a UK audience for soul and jazz in the 1980s. After recent guest appearances on the nationwide music station JazzFM, he has been given a weekly show from Easter Sunday 4 April. Robbie was “pleased to confirm” the news via Twitter at 8:10am today.
“ Jazz FM is to introduce a new look to Sundays that sees an exciting new daytime slot for broadcaster Tony Minvielle and the return of Robbie Vincent to a regular show.
Having previously hosted the late-night Sunday show Foldedspace on the station, Tony Minvielle will take on 10am until 1pm with a relaxed soulful selection of UK and west coast US jazz and soul. Expect conversations with some of today’s hottest acts.
Radio legend Robbie Vincent will make a return to weekly broadcasting on Jazz FM following a series of specials in May last year. He’ll present a two-hour Sunday afternoon show 1-3pm which promises to be full of ‘soulful jazzy vibes’.
Robbie Vincent says: ‘After my trial runs last year on Jazz FM, I’m really pleased to be back at home and more specifically back in the music garden on a Sunday. The new show will have some smashing mature tunes and super fresh rhythms…” / Continued at planetradio.co.uk
Duran Duran in 1980: Birmingham’s fluffiest New Romantics
40
YEARS
ON
◼ 40 YEARS AGO TODAY the Birmingham club-band Duran Duran released their debut single Planet Earth, less than two months after signing to EMI. It charted in mid-March, peaked at No 12, and bagged the band a spot on Top of the Pops, Britain’s premier music TV show. They were the first New Romantic band from outside London to make good, and the writer Steve Jansen claims that “inside of three short years, Duran were officially the biggest band on the planet”.
He celebrated Duran’s birthpangs with a thorough survey of their origins titled Switch It On! – Planet Earth & The Launch of Duran Duran, on the blog gimmeawristband.com which though sadly defunct today, is preserved at the Wayback Machine. As a shorter alternative, Shapersofthe80s documented a few key excerpts from his epic account, where Jansen talked to all the key players involved during the run-up to the band’s chart debut. They are published here with his permission…
Good times in the Eighties: Olly Alexander fronts the It’s A Sin gang. (Channel 4)
As It’s a Sin is premiered on Channel 4 amid great expectations, Eighties singer Andy Polaris reviews the exuberant five-part TV series. Here’s an extract…
“ ❚ The much-feted writer Russell T Davies broke barriers with the pioneering British TV series Queer As Folk in 1999 and more recently with Cucumber, both lively depictions of gay life in contemporary Britain. Now comes It’s A Sin which focuses on a diverse group of gay friends mostly escaping from the familiar claustrophobia of suburban life (mostly closeted) and attracted to that well-trodden lure of big-city life. We are off to see the wizard, but this time we’re thrown back to 1981, the year of the first recorded British death from Aids at Brompton Hospital in London.
Ritchie (popstar Olly Alexander) is a gauche, attractive, closeted twink leaving home to study law in London, and his send-off from the Isle of Wight is a multi-pack of condoms from his bigoted dad (Shaun Dooley) as they both stress “It’s different on the mainland”. Roscoe (Omari Douglas) is a flamboyant young Nigerian whose strict religious parents are so fraught over his sexual orientation that he bolts defiantly before an intervention. Colin (Callum Scott Howells) leaves the Welsh valleys to lodge with a family and start his apprenticeship with a Savile Row tailor.
It’s A Sin: Lydia West as Jill emerges as the anchor for her hedonistic friends. (Channel 4)
Soon the group become fast friends with Ash (Nathaniel Curtis) becoming Ritchie’s first lover. We follow the group with Ritchie as lynchpin while his horizons broaden along with the thriving bar scene. Casual sex becomes addictive and flashes past in a blaze of encounters against a soundtrack of the hideous but popular Hooked on Classics.
A scene where Ritchie’s pals party at Heaven, the biggest, brand new gay club, was a baptism by sexual freedom for gay men in a pre-internet landscape including myself and friends. (My group Animal Nightlife played early concerts there along with Culture Club, Spandau Ballet and Musical Youth). The scene was blossoming through a whole network of bars and clubs. Safe sex had not yet been advocated, neither had the government’s “Don’t Die of Ignorance” leaflet campaign. It seemed to be abstain or die. Aids awareness was bad for business. As the Eighties proceed in the TV drama each gay character has to deal with the possibility of an early and lonely death if the dreaded health-test proved positive… ” / Continued at Apolarisview
Gay activist as Aids casts its shadow: Olly Alexander as Ritchie in It’s A Sin
GAY TIMES has teamed up with Channel 4 for a series of video conversations between cast members from tonight’s new series It’s A Sin and artists and activists who lived through the decade, offering social and political context to the themes explored in this LGBTQ+ drama from Russell T Davies. . .
Comparing notes: Omari Douglas and Andy Polaris in conversation for Gay Times
❏ “People forget how homophobic and racist it was in the 80s. People would actually say to you bluntly ‘You’re going to die of Aids – this is going to happen to you.” So says Andy Polaris – Eighties pop-singer with Animal Nightlife – to Omari Douglas, star of It’s A Sin. Omari plays a character called Roscoe who is forced to leave home when he’s 17 and his family finds out he is gay. The character quickly finds his tribe and a new group of friends who support each other during the decade that revealed the horrors of a new deadly virus. ➢ Click to watch Omari and Andy’s conversation at Gay Times
Hedonism in Heaven: Olly Alexander on the dancefloor in It’s A Sin
Russell T Davies has given us iconic television shows such as Queer As Folk, Years & Years, Banana, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, and more. Set during the 80s, his new queer drama It’s A Sin has a soundtrack (guided inevitably by Murray Gold) that evokes the youth, vibrancy and gay sensibility of the era – big electronic anthems that have stood the test of time and changed the musical landscape.
Asked for an iconic tune that he loved, singer-actor Olly Alexander chose for his ambitious and complex character who leads the show Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran. Omari chose Respectable by Mel and Kim, saying: “I just went through a phase of being completely obsessed with them.”
❚ It’s A Sin starts today 22 January at 9pm on Channel 4, with all episodes available immediately after on All 4.
TRAILER PLUS DISCUSSION
❏ At YouTube, the BFI organised a 40-minute panel discussion on It’s A Sin, hosted by comedian Matt Lucas with guests Russell T Davies, exec producer Nicola Shindler, director Peter Hoar, Channel 4 head of drama Caroline Hollick, and from the cast Olly Alexander, Keeley Hawes, Omari Douglas, Callum Scott Howells, Lydia West and Nathaniel Curtis. The trailer for the series precedes the discussion.
➢ A dance in the face of death – Euan Ferguson in The Observer: “Russell T Davies depicts with wisdom how so many, shunned and ‘othered’ for most of their lives, might have chosen to adopt a defiant mood towards yet another orthodoxy, that of scientific reason.”
Gaz himself as his Thursday Rockin’ Blues rocketed to success in the 80s – today his is the longest running one-nighter in London. (Photo: Sheila Rock)
40
YEARS
ON
❚ TODAY IS THE DAY Gaz Mayall launched Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues in 1980 at the legendary Billy’s nightspot in Soho. Astonishingly, this remains London clubland’s longest running one-nighter.
Tonight Gaz celebrates 40 years with a live stream party from a secret location, from 8pm-midnight Friday 3 July. With deejays Gaz Mayall & The Cumbia Kid plus Rockabilly crew Red Hot Riot!
Tonight’s live stream as at 9:30pm: Gaz Mayall’s 40th anniversary musical party in the back garden, with one of his acts unnamed at right. Sound a bit shonky, vision slightly cranky
Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues, 40 years later – Celebrating with a live stream party tonight
Gaz Mayall then and again: As Gaz Vincent in 1980 snapped by Shapersofthe80s for the Evening Standard, and painted by the British realist Lucian Freud in 1997
MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapersofthe80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
“The (velvet) goldmine that is Shapers of the 80s” – Verdict of Chris O’Leary, respected author and blogger who analyses Bowie song by song at Pushing Ahead of the Dame
A UNIQUE HISTORY
➢ WELCOME to the Swinging 80s ➢ THE BLOG POSTS on this front page report topical updates ➢ ROLL OVER THE MENU at page top to go deeper into the past ➢ FOR NEWS & MONTH BY MONTH SEARCH scroll down this sidebar
❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
VINCENT FROM EASTER 2021
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent returns to JazzFM Sundays 1-3pm from Easter 2021… Catch up on Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
REWIND GOES AHEAD
✱ Rewind Festival 2021 confirms favourite 80s icons for Scotland, North and South during July and August. Book now
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
SEARCH our 800 posts or ZOOM DOWN TO THE ARCHIVE INDEX
UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
LANDMARK FAREWELLS. . . HIT THE INDEX TAB UP TOP FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
