"Fade to Grey": The forgotten history of the British New Romantic Movement

Abstract

During the early 1980s, a new popular music and youth cultural phenomenon emerged from the austerity of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Combining a Glam aesthetic with Disco, Funk, and Synth-Pop, New Romantic, as this phenomenon came to be known, was to become the platform for a new generation of artists of which Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Visage, and Ultravox were to become the most well-known, established, and commercially successful examples. If New Romantic was musically eclectic, this was matched by the visual style of its per-formers and audience. While Hebdige (1979) suggests that Punk drew on the rep-ertoire of youth cultural style from previous generations of youth, New Romantic carried on this trend, taking stylistic inspiration from Punk and Glam rock, among a number of other youth cultural eras, while also mining the stylistic trends of European history and Hollywood stars of the 1930s and 1950s.