On November 13th, 1980 Spandau Ballet made their Top of the Pops debut with their first single, To Cut a Long Story Short. Coiffed, primped and styled to within an inch of their lives, the north London quintet had kitted themselves out in full Highland dress for the occasion, complete with kilts, sashes, sporrans and ghillie brogues. Their singer, Tony Hadley clenched his fists, flicked his lacquered fringe, and sung a monotonous ditty about a non-existent soldier returning from a non-existent war. A few miles away in Barking, Essex, Billy Bragg saw their performance and felt galvanised—for entirely negative reasons—into becoming a musician himself. “Something inside of me snapped,” he later said, “I was waiting for a band to come along and play the kind of music I wanted to hear [but instead] I saw Spandau Ballet wearing kilts. At that moment I finally realised it was gonna have to be me.”
Why did the appearance of Spandau Ballet mark this turning point for Bragg? Was it the band’s relentless seriousness, the bland thudding of their debut single, their appropriation of Highland dress as narcissistic performance in a manner not seen in Britain since the age of George IV? Or perhaps it was the way in which all of these things seemed to be somehow wrapped up in the politics of Spandau Ballet? That November, Britain felt like a struggling, divided nation, but just a few weeks earlier, in the pages of Sounds, Spandau Ballet had published an upbeat “manifesto for the eighties” in which they’d celebrated their explicit championing of dandy style over substance (“the people who come to see us are interested in two things: enjoying themselves and looking good”), allied themselves with the entrepreneurial values championed by Britain’s new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher (“it’s about ambition. The whole scene attracts people who want to achieve something, whether it’s art or whether it’s money”) and, in the same year that multi-racial 2-tone bands had begun to dominate the UK singles charts, had described the widely-perceived whiteness of their music as “a question of identifying yourself more with music from your culture rather than somebody else’s”. Riots had recently erupted in the Bristol community of St Pauls in response to rising youth unemployment and the police’s heavy-handed implementation of the “sus” laws, but Spandau Ballet felt that British kids should be out buying their records alongside designer clothes in the style that was now dubbed “New Romantic”. “But what about kids who are unemployed,” enquired Sounds’ journalist Betty Page “who don’t have the money to buy clothes like that?” Decrying the “pack instincts” of the “grey anonymous mass” and their predictable fondness for “polytechnic rock” Gary Kemp brushed off the question “what I’d really like is, instead of kids wearing scruffy, terrible clothes … it’d be much better if they were doing the opposite of that, wanting to look good. The kind of people that come and see us would just rather spend a lot of money on clothes,” he concluded, “than libraries full of Jean Cocteau.” There were just too many bands about at the moment, Kemp went on, without any style at all, “bands like Orange Juice,” he noted dismissively, who were now “making music for over 21s.”
In the autumn months of, 1980, Orange Juice and Spandau Ballet were both new British bands with an up-tempo pop-py feel that sounded comparably fresh and forward-looking. Around both bands there circulated a lot of positive noise, and the word was that both might be about to make it big. Yet by taking a pot-shot at their rivals’ sound and dress-down style Gary Kemp had highlighted the material gulf that separated the two. Having come up through London’s West-End Blitz club, where aristos and couturiers cavorted in wigs and crinolines beneath photographs of Winston Churchill, Spandau Ballet had just signed to Chrysalis in an unprecedented deal that was the most valuable for a previously unsigned artist in the UK at that time. Orange Juice, on the other hand, were signed to Glasgow’s fledging post-punk indie label, Postcard Records, underwritten by a mixture of their own savings and borrowed friends-and-family funds. While Spandau Ballet received a “superstar” royalty rate on their retail record sales, Orange Juice had gleaned little income from the two singles they’d so far released, which had been pressed in small runs, with cheap black-and-white printed sleeves, jazzed up during parties of felt-tip colouring-in, before being hawked to record shops, distributors, journalists and DJs personally by members of the band.
Spandau Ballet not only had big-label financial backing but were surrounded by a moneyed entourage of fashion designers, stylists, hairdressers and oily PR guru, Robert Elms, who had given the band their deeply dubious name (they were previously called “Gentry”), introduced them with appalling “poetry” at carefully choreographed secret gigs, and assiduously framed them to the press as the vanguard of the aspirational youth culture he envisioned for the 1980s. In Glasgow, meanwhile, Orange Juice were supported by a small, keen group of local fans, and their manager, the erratic, truculent, and unreliable Alan Horne, who ran Postcard Records from the wardrobe of the flat he shared with their bassist, David McClymont at 185, West Princes Street. And while Spandau Ballet had received a £200,000 advance for their debut album, Orange Juice had so far reaped little financial reward from their fledgling musical “career,” and were (like many young musicians in the 1980s) supplementing their income by signing on. But pointing out this last fact in a swiftly-penned repost (band-rivalry back and forth then being the meat and drink of the popular music press) was to backfire on Orange Juice’s singer, Edwyn Collins, when he found a stern letter from the DHSS dropping through his letterbox, followed by the cessation of his giro.
Orange Juice and Spandau Ballet have always, for me, represented the opposing poles of everything I love and loathe about early 1980s pop. Preparing to write this piece has prompted me to reflect on why that might be so. Why, exactly, am I so strongly in camp OJ? I can perhaps make the argument with a quick comparison of two tracks which both bands put out in 1981: Muscle Bound (the third single from Spandau Ballet’s debut album, Journeys to Glory) and Consolation Prize (the B side of Orange Juice’s cover of the Al Green classic, L.O.V.E, Love).
In the extraordinary video which cost twice its original budget, and accompanied Muscle Bound’s release, the members of Spandau Ballet are swathed in pseudo-imperialist Peter O’Toole costumes while struggling on horseback through Cumbrian snowdrifts, wielding scythes and burning torches. A group of dwarves in blackface flee from the band’s oncoming advances, before Tony Hadley appears with his conquering hero anthem “tough is the leather that’s strapped to my skin,” he intones with thrust-out chin, “strong are the bonds that we sing.” The video is completely ludicrous by today’s (or any) standards, but, like everything Spandau Ballet did, it also somehow manages to take itself very, very seriously, disturbing crusades-meets-strength-through-joy aesthetic and all. “Try playing Muscle Bound, back-to-back with Tomorrow Belongs to Me from the soundtrack of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret,” Sunie Fletcher advised after the single’s release in Record Mirror, “the mood is the same. Tread very carefully for all our sakes.” Nor were the band’s earnest celebrations of masculine muscle lost on Britain’s far right when, in the 25th issue of British Bulldog, (the youth magazine of the 1980s National Front), Eddie Morrison praised the “strains of classical and traditional Aryan music,” he felt he could detect in Spandau Ballet.
Alongside po-faced, proto-fascist Muscle Bound let’s consider the playful ambiguities of Orange Juice’s Consolation Prize. In this song, a jangly staple of the gigs Orange Juice played in Paisley’s bungalow bar, Edwyn Collins proposes himself as the consolation prize of the song’s title to a girl whose boyfriend, he observes, appears to be treating her very badly. While the boyfriend only seems to make her cry, Collins is able to cheer her up with his “frightfully camp” “fringe like Roger McGuinn,” and is beginning to win her round with laughter. On stage in pubs and clubs around Glasgow, Collins was notorious for hamming up his own effeminacy in response to belligerent punk hecklers “imitating an especially camp style to annoy them even more” as Dave McCullough put it in the NME. With a joyous swirl of guitar underlain by a Scottish-accordion-sounding synth, Collins celebrates his refusal to conform to alpha-male stereotypes alongside the mischief and irony of his own defiant selfhood: “I’ll never be man enough for you,” he happily sings, “I’ll never be man enough for you.” In Consolation Prize, the whirling reels of a community ceilidh are replayed as post-punk identity anthem, as Collins lauds the virtues of not getting the girl, while remaining completely himself.
I could continue to compare the bloodless “soul” of Spandau Ballet’s Chant no. 1 with the sweet bubblegum groove of Orange Juice’s Rip it Up and Start Again; I might set Spandau Ballet’s increasingly slick, calculated, corporate style against Orange Juice’s ramshackle DIY aesthetic; I could talk about how Orange Juice were playing miners’ benefit gigs while Spandau Ballet sang their sub Bond-theme mega-hit, Gold, to a Wembley arena full of 1980s London bankers, but ultimately I think the issue of allegiance to team OJ or team SB might just come down to the question of whether or not you have a sense of humour.
After Spandau Ballet’s tartan-clad appearance on Top of the Pops, it appears that Orange Juice might have been galvanised into action just as much as Billy Bragg, for it was at precisely this moment that the band’s manager, Alan Horne, decided to change the label’s aesthetic, branding, and identity with a flourish which quickly became Postcard’s recognisable calling card. Christening the label, “the sound of young Scotland” (in a knowing and sardonic nod to Motown), Horne proceeded to both subvert and reclaim the very images of Scottish heritage which their London rivals had appropriated so very heavy-handedly.
Combining paper ephemera (which Horne and Edwyn Collins had picked up at Glasgow’s Paddy’s market) with a heavy dose of post-punk irony, graphic designer, Krysia Klasicki created a collage of old-fashioned scraps, in which tartan clad figures performed “traditional” Scottish Highland activities, like shooting, curling, and striding through the heather. By ripping up and reworking Spandau Ballet’s hackneyed, shortbread-tin-Scotland image; by dressing as makeshift, post-punk things of shreds and patches rather than preened and primped New Romantic dandies; with falling-and-laughing self-deprecation in place of their rivals’ pompous self-inflation, unlike Spandau Ballet, Orange Juice always managed to take the piss out of themselves whilst simultaneously reminding you exactly where they were coming from.
Kate Davies
In preparing to write this piece, I traced the Spandau Ballet / Orange Juice rivalry of 1980-81 and reviews of the early releases of both bands through the pages of Sounds, NME, Record Mirror and Creem all available via Rocks Back Pages (https://www.rocksbackpages.com/)
See also:
Chris Brickley and Martin McClenaghan, Glasgow: Post-Punk City (2023)
Simon Goddard, Simply Thrilled: The Preposterous Story of Postcard Records (2014)
Simon Reynolds Rip it Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984 (2005)
Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey, ‘White Youth: The Far Right, Punk, and British Youth Culture 1977-1987” JOMEC 9 (2016)
The Glasgow School: An Oral History of Postcard Records (documentary) (2023)
Leave a Reply