Expanding a Very Short Story: 'Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s'

Blitz, a short lived but influential club, is the focus of the latest London exhibition which looks back to 1980s youth culture. 

 

The 1980s are big news right now. Current day cool kids are wearing 501 jeans and oversize jackets, and a slew of recent exhibitions have mined the decade, most especially the youth culture angle. In 2025 London has already seen: The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at National Portrait Gallery, Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern, Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at Fashion and Textile Museum, and now Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s at the Design Museum.

Outside the Blitz club in 1979. Photograph: Sheila Rock

The back story to explain the flowering of youth culture, as articulated by all these exhibitions, is that the UK was down at heel and depressed in the early 1980s so as a route out of the drab austerity young people made their own clothes and music, created their own subversive (and hugely influential) glitter-filled worlds, and generally cocked a snook at the pervading big and small C conservatism. This explosion of 1980s counterculture was undoubtedly built on the groundwork of punk but with influences from European art movements, literature, cinema, and inspiration supplied by long standing cultural agitators and dreamers (Bowie), the post punk generation effectively created their own fun. It’s hard to overestimate the influence of art schools here, which were of course free, but also, as the Blitz exhibition, and Millennials more generally, point out, London rents were cheap and squats were plentiful. I don’t think the Blitz kids clutched copies of Deleuze and Derrida on the dance floor like some art schooled exponents of the indie new wave, such as Scritti Politti, whose name itself is derived from Gramsci’s ‘Scritti Politici’ (political writings) and in 1981 had a song called ‘Jacques Derrida’. But the thinking behind the looks and the larks was deeper than the hedonistic tag attached to the ‘new romantics’ (the name used to describe the movement which flowered from Blitz and other clubs) suggests, most particularly in the mining of history to create glamour.  

Kim Bowen. Photo Ted Polhemus.

 

Although there is treasure to be found in Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s it somewhat lacks the spark and sparkle that photographs of the Blitz kids suggest characterised the club. The clothes on show, such an integral part of the scene, mostly look a little dull – could it be that without the spectacular hair, makeup and attitude they are really not that interesting? It is also apparent that all the promise of the Bowie worship soon morphed into something more trad and the new romantic/Blitz look rapidly became an only slightly veiled version of the traditional attire of the landed gentry – tweeds, spats and rope of pearls (see Spandau Ballet). Maybe the Blitz kids were far more typical of their era than the pull quotes suggest – less revolutionary and more wannabe Loadsamoneys. 

Spandau Ballet’s debut photo shoot at the Warren Street squat, 1980. Photo Graham Smith.

Despite my quibbles (to which I add that I can't remember the term 'new romantic' being mentioned at all in the exhibition texts) there is much to enjoy here for students of British 20th century culture as it journeys from 1970s art to 1980s exploitation. Highlights include Bowie scrapbooks (courtesy of Iain R Webb), 'Looks Even Better on a Girl’, ads for 17 Cosmetics (from 1985 issues of Smash Hits), a map of the London haunts of the Blitz kids, a Swanky Modes dress and even a pack of Sobraine cocktail cigarettes. But aside from gorgeous photographs of Blitz kids, including a dynamic on the dance floor image from Homer Sykes, there is little left of the actual ephemeral experience of the club. 

Blitz attendees on the dance floor., c.1980 Photo Homer Sykes.

This brings me to the weird recreation of the Blitz club with its despeckled and smoothed video projections of dancers, a virtual Rusty Egan in the DJ booth and Spandau Ballet cutting a long story short. Although an amusing oddity this does not feel (or smell) like a basement club and its uncanny glossy veneer makes the dull clothes, on the mannequins, and behind glass, look even less connected to the short story of an influential hub of defiant creativity that (unbelievably) ran for less than two years. 

Cathy Lomax

September 2025

Recreated Blitz club at the Design Museum. Photo Luke Hayes.

Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s

the Design Museum

224 - 238 Kensington High Street

London W8

20 September 2025 – 29 March 2026

Anthony Rudolf’s Pictures to Prove It

 Paula Rego metamorphosises Anthony Rudolf in an exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery

 

Our lives are shaped by trinkets, trips, memorabilia, parties and passings. For over two decades Anthony Rudolf accumulated gifts and mementoes from Paula Rego. This personal collection of over 50 works by the artist are currently on show at the Ben Uri Gallery in London until 5 September 2025.  

 

Rego had a life before Rudolf, just as he did before her. Throughout the late 1990s the artist and the writer/translator/publisher built a companionship that would continue until Rego’s passing in 2022. More than twenty five years was spent together in and out of her studio. From work, to pleasure, gallery openings, and trips. From the beginning of their relationship Rudolf knew how important and demanding studio hours could be to Rego. 

 

‘I tentatively and nervously put it to her that I would be pleased to model for her if this would be of use to her work and at the same time give her pleasure, She flung her arms around me and said she had I thought you would never ask…’(1)

 

One of the earliest works in the show is Kneeling Chair (1996). Rudolf sits at attention in one of those writers’ computer chairs that seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s, promising good posture, while working endlessly at a bulky PC. Rudolf poses with hands clasped, body straight, gaze to the side, legs back. Rego follows his forms in pencil as she begins the process of rationalising him two dimensionally.

 

If you flip through any of Rego’s catalogues, Rudolf can be found in series after series. Sometimes as a main starring role, sometimes as best supporting actor. Always close to the artist’s stage. The first definitive series of the two working together was pictures related to the novel The Crime of Father Amaro by Eça de Quierós from 1997-8. The pictures had Rudolf playing the adulterous and troublesome priest, in various poses, in states of dress and undress. In one composition, adorned in a luxurious bathrobe, he is oddly posed over and behind a crimson armchair. This grand scaled pastel can be found on the lower level of the show. A photograph upstairs shows the artist posing with an unfinished work from the Amaro series where Rudolf's figure is centred in the still under construction composition. His feet and legs gigantic with foreshortening. Everything blank around him to be filled with four female figures that were all possibly posed for by Rego’s long time model and assistant Lila Nunes.

 

‘He’s very angular, with long feet and forearms.  I can get him quickly, and I can draw him over and over again like I can Lila.  But he doesn’t change like she does because I can’t identify with him as I can with her, can’t play the same games.’ (2)

 

Once asked by writer Marina Warner to respond to Ovid’s Metamorphosis for an exhibition, Rego winced. She loathed the idea of all those Gods up to nonsense. A fellow curator, Fiona Bradley, suggested Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a solution. A light went on for Rego. The tale of a man’s bodily transformation from human to insect after a night’s sleep is a story of embarrassment. Waking up immobile in bed on his back, horrified by his situation, petrified that his family will find out. On top of this he is nervous he will be late to work. The parents denounce their son, ashamed of his horrific state. While his sister sickened by his condition has pity on her sibling, throwing scraps of food into his bedroom.  

 

Anyone who has ever seen a bug on its back knows the helplessness that exudes in that moment. Rego devised a pose to literally harness the dangling wiry nature of bug-ness by placing Rudolf on his back with constructed pulleys and ropes to hold his ankles and wrists in aerial positions for the duration of posing. ‘He was like a prisoner’, said Rego, ‘He had to be naked because he was a beetle.’ (3)

 

Four versions exist by Rego confronting Kafka’s tale – two studies and two solidified versions. The ropes were left out so everything dangles. The first version has Rudolf’s body going from feet, torso, hands, head, in a room of severe Italian perspective. With an array of food scraps thrown to the floor referencing the sister’s charity from the tale. The exhibited Metamorphosis study presents the second version where the body and pose is turned the other way completely. Resting his lower limbs on an armchair, twisted hands are placed cupped to his chest. The tones of the face are pushed back and darkened, it is more the neck down that Rego wants us to digest and take in.  

 

Rego seems to realize not just how incredible Rudolf’s limbs are in length but also the deep cavity that his ribs could create from a reclining pose. His trunk down seems to be like a water slide from ribs to the groin. The torso and softness of the shallow belly create a swooping motion which she grasps in pastel. It is the most naked male flesh Rego had or will show in her oeuvre, and it wins. There is tenderness here, but there is something raw underneath that brings a strong whiff of the Spanish master Jusepe de Ribera, the true inventor of body horror in painting.

 

This whole process is alluded to in a celebratory drawing displayed upstairs called Writing Yes, Reading No. Here Rudolf is shown typing away at his computer screen with pleasure with one of Rego’s abortion series pictures is mischievously displayed on the screen. Books overflow everywhere like ocean waves. While the picture is predominately ink, flashes of colour come alive on objects on the shelf and the yellow towel that clads his body.  While under his work desk a huge insect hides in the shadow, approaching or leaving the writers bare legs. Look carefully or you’ll miss it.

 

There have been many exhibitions of Rego’s work over the past few years.  With many more to come where curators plead angles and theories. These are all valid but at times things are lost or repressed. This show is not presented in an ivory tower of art but has more heart and charm than most. The book lined walls of the gallery’s lower level makes the exhibition feel like a place of visual study. In a sense Rego has curated this exhibition herself for her beloved, with Rudolf ready to share its power. For anyone who has ever met her the show brings back the wide eyed, smart, unflinchable Rego as she truly was. The sensations are real and human.

Michael Ajerman

July 2025

'The Anthony Rudolf Collection – Works Gifted to him by Paula Rego'

Ben Uri Gallery, London NW8

Until 5 September 2025

 

1: Anthony Rudolf, The Anthony Rudolf Collection: Ben Uri Gallery Guide (2025)

2: Catherine Lampert, ‘Paula Rego Obedience and Defiance’ (2019), p39

3: ‘Paula Rego – Metamorphosis’, Web of Stories – Life Stories of Remarkable People (YouTube Channel)