Tramps! – Doc’n Roll Film Festival

Writer and Director: Kevin Hegge

Premiering at this year’s BFI Flare, and now part of the Doc’n Roll Film Festival, Tramps! carefully examines the New Romantic scene in London in the early 1980s. Often thought of as the subculture that followed punk, Kevin Hegge’s documentary explains how the flamboyant New Romantics were an extension of the Punk subculture rather than a resistance to it.

And this is where the film starts. It traces the New Romantics back to the Punk hangouts of the King’s Road, and Covent Garden’s Roxy club. With old footage of people like Siouxsie Sioux performing on the Roxy’s stage, it’s easy to see the beginnings of the dramatic New Romantic look. Punks weren’t afraid of make-up; the New Romantics just applied it more artistically.

Other documentaries about this moment in time have often concentrated on the music, like Bruce Ashley and Michael Donald’s Blitzed! which charted the rise and fall of the pivotal Blitz club where the band Spandau Ballet got their big break. In contrast, Hegge’s film focuses more on the New Romantic aesthetic and the people who created and curated it, from fashion designers like BodyMap’s Stevie Stewart and David Holah to designers like Judy Blame and free spirits like Philip Sallon.

Indeed, there is no music from the time at all and only the briefest of mentions of how Boy George and Marilyn pursued pop star careers. Perhaps the film’s budget prohibited the playing of hits by Culture Club and Steve Strange’s Visage, but without that synth sound Hegge’s early ‘80s seem to be a grimmer time than previously portrayed.

Of course, this decade under Thatcher was hard for young creatives, but squatting was still semi-legal and many of these young artists found their way to the Warren Street squats, which, one talking head declares, were both “brilliant and dreadful.” The toilet may not have flushed, but the parties were legendary. Many of these squatters became famous filmmakers or fashion designers. Many, too, died from AIDS.

The verve and the vision of these artists, choreographers, and club promoters is similar to that of the Swinging Sixties, despite the fact that the country was in recession in the 1980s, with unemployment continually rising. Michael Caine, a significant part of 1966’s Swinging City, has said that London only swung for around 200 people. He saw the same faces in every new club or restaurant opening. In a similar way, Kevin Hegge’s film suggests that the New Romantic subculture was just as exclusive. One talking head, dancer and choreographer Les Child, calls the scene elitist and says there was something aristocratic about the way these young people dressed up so outrageously.

The late Leigh Bowery was the most outrageous of them all, and he and his club Taboo came at the end of the New Romantic movement, before MTV popularised the music and the fashion by playing music videos by bands such as Culture Club and Ultravox. In old interviews, Bowery is happy and enthusiastic and his eccentric costumes and his extravagant make-up add some needed colour to Hegge’s film, which otherwise emphasises the contributions of less famous movers and shakers of the subculture.

So keen is Hegge to offer a new perspective, a queerer one, for sure, that there are other surprising omissions in his story. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, the designers of the influential Pirates Collection of 1981, only are mentioned in reference to their earlier involvement with Punk band The Sex Pistols.

Hegge’s film isn’t about the people who made millions out of the scene like McLaren, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, but those people who were more interested in their craft rather than the money. Judy Blame, who sadly died after his interviews, perhaps gets to the heart of the scene when he affirms that rather than money being a sign of accomplishment for the New Romantics, success was a good outfit or a good night out.

Tramps! is screening at the Doc ‘n Roll Film Festival 2022.