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Rusty Egan Presents Blitzed! (Demon Music)

In the late 1970s, against a backdrop of strikes and nationwide discontent with even gravediggers downing their spades, Rusty Egan – former member of punk band the Rich Kids, and briefly The Clash’s drummer – hooked up with Steve Strange, a Newbridge boy enticed towards London’s punk scene, with the intention of starting a club night that would play the music they wanted to hear and flamboyantly kick the decade into touch.

Setting up in 1978 at a club called Billy’s, Egan and Strange then moved to the Blitz, a wine bar in Covent Garden. There, David Bowie enlisted some Blitz clientele as extras for the Ashes To Ashes video, Boy George ran the cloakroom, and it was rumoured that Mick Jagger was denied entry to the club for wearing jeans. 

Any given Tuesday night at Blitz might attract fashion designers – Katharine Hamnett, John Galliano – or artists like a young Tracy Emin. Siouxsie, Adam Ant, Sade and Gary Numan could be seen there too; Time magazine, taking an interest, flew photographer Terry Smith over from New York. By day, meanwhile, Egan could be found at Rough Trade looking for new music, or drumming in synthpop act Visage with Strange, Midge Ure and various members of Magazine. 

Blitzed!, available as a four-CD or four-LP boxset, is compiled from Egan’s Blitz playlists circa 1979-1980: if that whets your appetite, there’s a 250-song Spotify playlist too. Sleevenotes, by Egan and music critic Alexis Petridis, are accompanied by the photography of Smith, Peter Ashworth and Sheila Rock. With the CD edition running to 66 tracks, the Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Simple Minds, Ultravox! and Japan are all correct and present here, with tracks predating their commercial breakthrough (1978 Human League debut 7” Being Boiled for example).

The embryonic Mute Records are well represented – Fad Gadget’s Back To Nature, The Normal’s Warm Leatherette, Silicon Teens’ Memphis Tennessee – while Down In The Park by Tubeway Army, Visage’s own Fade To Grey and To Cut A Long Story Short by Spandau Ballet all gained mainstream success from the off, showcasing a new sound and aesthetic alike on primetime TV. This box set successfully captures a moment in time when postpunk was on the cusp of giving way to New Romanticism and the Futurists, with Egan taking a key role in this charge.

Not that the DJ was stuck in any one groove when it came to his Blitz sets. On this compilation, we also have proto-industrial renegades Throbbing Gristle (Hot On The Heels Of Love) and Cabaret Voltaire (Nag Nag Nag) nudging up to disco belters like the 12” version of Sparks’ Number One Song In Heaven, Blondie’s Heart Of Glass, Cerrone’s Supernature and Giorgio Moroder’s Chase.

Electronic pioneers Suicide and Kraftwerk also feature, of course, and more obscure, equally worthy contributions come from Cowboys International, Dalek I and Metro – whose Criminal World was banned by the BBC and later covered by Bowie. Whose influence is further stamped on Blitzed! via his productions for Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, as well as Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson.

Listening to this superb collection is as pleasurable as it must be for a cat to be let loose in a Dreamies factory. For those who never made it to Blitz, Blitzed! is as close as they’ll get. 

words DAVID NOBAKHT