Examining the roots of one of the decade's defining movements
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Covent Garden nightlife suddenly found itself filled with pirates, exotic Eastern fantasies, painstaking facial decoration, and gravity-defying hair.
Duran Duran looked for the TV sound; Spandau Ballet worked 'til they were musclebound; Boy George took the coats. New Romanticism had arrived. A few years later it was gone, but during the brief period of its flourishing it became one of the most defiant, joyous, and reviled movements in British music, fashion, and art.
[For those who need clarification of these cultural references: Boy George was the cloakroom attendant at the Blitz club, the epicentre of New Romanticism; Duran Duran's 1981 song, 'Planet Earth', contains the only pop music reference to New Romanticism, 'Like some New Romantic looking for the TV sound', and Spandau Ballet, virtually the house band of New Romanticism, had a top ten hit with 'Musclebound' in 1981.]
New Romanticism was an odd movement. Academics who study popular culture largely pass over it; music journalists sneer at it. Even people who were labelled as part of the movement were often anxious to make it clear that no, they were absolutely not New Romantic: 'New Romantic was nothing to do with Adam and the Ants,' said Adam Ant in a 2012 interview. 'The Ants was a punk band, or a post-punk band if anything, and so historically it's inaccurate. New Romantic was basically, in my mind, clubbers with too much makeup on with stupid clothes.' When a man who wore make-up and a frilly shirt is that determined to differentiate himself from a movement full of other men who wore make-up and frilly shirts, you know there's something significant at stake.
In perhaps the final ignominy, though, the New Romantics didn't even get to name themselves. And in this way they resemble the group they allegedly connected to, the Romantics. The Romantics were first called Romantics by others, and their defining characteristics were first determined by others, which is how Wordsworth and Coleridge became linked with Byron and the Shelleys, who in life dismissed the two older men ('He is a slave,' Mary Shelley wrote about Wordsworth after reading his poem, 'The Excursion'). Similarly, the press first used the label New Romantic and set its parameters. This is why Adam Ant, who may not think of himself as a New Romantic and certainly at one point was not one, at one point most definitely also was one.
As it happens, though, when the press came up with the 'New Romantic' label they almost surely weren't associating it with the whole Romantic movement, which best known for its investment in nature, its turn toward simplicity and naturalness, and its emphasis on the sublime — the New Romantics could just about have been described as looking sublime, but they definitely weren't invested in simplicity, and the movement itself was relentlessly urban. No, when the newspapers and magazines used the label 'New Romantic,' they were almost certainly thinking — at least in some vague way — of what stands in for Romanticism in many people's minds: the Byronic Hero. And that means that when the press said 'Romantic' (as in 'New Romantic'), they meant 'Lord Byron'. For New Romanticism, whether self-labelled or not, whether acknowledged or not, even whether known by its participants or not, is directly descended from the public image of George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Academics have a term that's helpful in explaining this: 'indexicality'. Indexicality is the meaning that something — an object, a word, an event — has in context. This isn't the same as its actual meaning. It is, rather, the meaning it has for those who are using it at that moment (an inside joke is a perfect example of indexicality). From very early on in his career, Byron had a clear indexicality. This indexicality derived in part from popular images of him, disseminated via engravings that featured in the front of many of his books. The Byron in these representations had a haughty profile, curly hair, and almost always an open collar. Even now, these attributes telegraph 'aloof, independent, rebel'.
Byron's works helped to create a similar public image, and so a similar indexicality. His hugely popular poem 'Childe Harold' featured a hero who was, in fact, aloof, independent, and a rebel. Because of the connection between Byron, this hero, and all the heroes he wrote in the works that followed (who were also aloof, independent rebels), George Gordon, the real Lord Byron (a man with a bad leg who struggled with his weight, worried about the state and colour of his teeth, and began to go bald in his mid-thirties), became conflated with the aloof, independent, rebels of his works.
Byron is, for example, the model for all the vampires in English literature
In other words, the indexicality of Lord Byron was as a tortured but noble man, possessed of impeccable style and an immovable love of liberty, sexually available and possessed of a fluid sexuality, a rebel who always sided with the underdog and undermined the status quo. Some of this was true of the real Lord Byron, certainly, but some of it was simply what the word 'Byron' came to stand for: in a way, 'Byron' began to equal 'The Byronic Hero.'
This indexicality continued long after Byron's lifetime, stretching its tentacles into whatever culture became popular. Byron is, for example, the model for all the vampires in English literature — this is quite literally true, since the first vampire story in English was written by his doctor John Polidori, who modelled his vampire on Byron. But Byron's influence shows up in more unexpected ways, too.
You can see it, for example, in the famous Rudolph Valentino film, 'The Sheik'. In stills for that film, Valentino's costume is a precise copy of the outfit Byron wears in one of his best-known portraits, 'Lord Byron in Albanian Dress', painted by Thomas Phillips in 1813. And as if the visuals aren't striking enough, the hero of 'The Sheikh' is a white man adopted by Arabs as an infant, a Westerner 'gone native' who is both noble in personality and a bit of a rebel. Consider, too, 'Lawrence of Arabia', the film, released in 1963. Its hero is also an Englishman gone native, a troubled soul of androgynous beauty who is an admirable rebel. And Peter O'Toole's T E Lawrence also dressed remarkably like Byron in his Albanian portrait.
Both 'The Sheikh' and 'Lawrence of Arabia' were hugely popular — 'Lawrence' in particular is one of the best-known and most influential films in history. Both also helped to keep a certain indexicality of Byron alive in popular culture, even as the clear connection between 'Byron' and that indexicality was lost: people understood that a certain kind of person or hero would have certain characteristics, but they didn't know that those characteristics were originally linked to Byron. Nonetheless, the symbols lingered on in cultural memory, so that a photograph taken in 1981 shows Boy George wearing an outfit that echoes Byron's Albanian portrait almost scarf for scarf — although it's unclear whether he had ever seen the portrait for himself.
What's more, this isn't the only instance of direct, although not necessarily conscious, influence of Byron on the New Romantics — even on New Romantics who didn't know they were New Romantics. Remember Adam Ant? He's said in interviews that his 'dandy highwayman' persona was influenced by his memories of British pop star Tommy Steele starring as Jack Sheppard (a famous 18th-century thief) in the film 'Where's Jack?'(1969). One can see this connection in Ant's costumes, which mimic the loose, open-collared white shirt and cutaway coat Steele wore in the movie. But Steele's shirt and coat themselves mimic the clothing worn by Byron in another of his pictures, the 'Cloak Portrait' (also by Thomas Phillips, 1813), where they give him the look of dashing insouciance that Steele-as-Sheppard is drawing on.
In fact, on at least one occasion Ant skipped the middleman and drew directly on Byron. Another famous portrait of Byron, if not the most famous, is an engraving of him done in 1816 by George Henry Harlow. He is captured in aloof, androgynous profile, his high coat collar folded behind the crisp white linen of his shirt, his curls tumbling over his brow. A publicity still of Ant from 1981 is virtually an identical match: Ant wears make-up that suggests an 18th-century fop, but still, there he is in androgynous profile, his folded coat collar framing the snowy linen of his shirt, his curls tumbling over his brow. Someone (I like to imagine it was Ant himself, since his art-school training would have exposed him to a wealth of images) spotted the power inherent in that image of Byron, and his physical resemblance to Ant, and decided to exploit both.
So it seems undeniable that Byron was an influence on the New Romantics. But now the question becomes, Why? Had Byron simply become a stand-in for exoticism, for flash and dash, for Romantic dress?
Well, in part yes, but in part there's something more, and that more lies in Byron's indexicality as an outsider and a rebel. 'Lawrence of Arabia', 'The Sheik', and even 'Where's Jack?' all show his influence as a symbol of rebellion and transgression, but Byron was a hero to rebels almost from the start. As early as the 1830s, the Chartists loved the poet who wrote, 'I wish men to be free — As much from mobs and kings as you and me' (from 'Don Juan'). Although the main reason for this was his poetry, Byron's image telegraphed his rebelliousness without the need to read a word of him. A man who had his portrait painted in Eastern costume, or with his shirt collar open, was a man who didn't care about social expectations, a man who had a sense of himself as different and pleased by that difference.
So Byron is also a representative of proud difference, of acknowledgement of the value of individuality, particularly unconventional individuality. This aspect of him, too, found echo in the New Romantic movement. New Romanticism has often been condemned as a movement all about surface, empty of any deeper political or social import: in his book, 'England is Mine', Michael Bracewell has argued about the New Romantics that ‘politics, when you were dressing like Lord Byron … came fairly low down on your list of social responsibilities'. Leaving aside the question of why fashion and music need to be political, this remark seems to me to miss one of the central points of New Romanticism. The members of the movement were largely working class, or at least lower class: the very stratum of society that 1980s Toryism was doing its best to undermine, not to say destroy. In such circumstances, dressing up becomes a political act, a call to be seen as valuable and vibrant in the face of supposed relevance.
And here, too, is a connection between Byron and the New Romantics: they both challenge the belief that you can recognise political weight by its lack of style. Byron and the New Romantics knew that sometimes style goes hand-in-hand with substance, and both have been discounted because of it. But then, as Adam Ant once said — and Byron would surely have agreed — 'Ridicule is nothing to be scared of'.
The John Murray Archive contains the largest collections of papers relating to Lord Byron, including many of the original manuscripts for his works, collected together and preserved by the Murray family. Find out more in the Lord Byron section on the Library's website.