Spandau ballet

It is hard to write the history of a subculture without upsetting people. Events were either significant or inconsequential depending on who was there, which leads to absurdities. When Jon Savage wrote England’s Dreaming, his history of punk, Jenny Turner berated him in the London Review of Books for being ‘a bit of a Sex Pistols snob’. Ironically, the most exclusive British subculture of them all seems to have escaped infighting over who or what mattered, possibly because so few people were part of it. The Blitz, Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s much mythologised early 1980s nightclub, had a brutally selective door policy. Strange let hardly anyone in, which must

In my second year at secondary school we were all deeply envious of a girl named Judi Taylor because, obviously, her name was only three letters away from John Taylor, the world’s most beautiful man, which meant she probably had the best chance of marrying him. I was thinking about this the other day just after I’d checked to find out if there were any VIP tickets left to see Duran Duran next year in Hyde Park (there aren’t), when one of my daughter’s friends jumped in the car.‘Hi, ‘she said. ‘I’m Charlotte Derulo. Well, I will be one day.’ Never underestimate the eternal passion of a tween girl. As