Pop of the Fops

From Boy George to Bryan Ferry, the New Romantics were working-class youths who created their own imaginary aristocracy through 1980s pop stardom. Did the mask end up eating the face?

Trust Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys, always one of pop’s cannier theoreticians, to succinctly describe the trajectory of those 1980s pop groups known as the New Romantics. “The New Romantic scene takes the lessons of punk, with well-crafted pop songs, but now they’re looking for glamour,” Tennant observes in Dylan Jones’s new, lengthy oral […]

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