Tramps!

As someone who came of age in the late 80s, early 90s, I sort of expected my young adulthood to be not dissimilar to that of, say, my older cousins, or at least something like The Young Ones. It seems Paul Raven (whose new-to-me blog is quite the gem) had a similar journey of post-Thatcher dream shattering.

The older I get, the more obvious it becomes that for all their (fully justified!) hatred of Thatcher and the state of the UK during her hegemony, the bohemians of the generations immediately prior to my own lived in a time of considerable opportunity—particularly those who made it to London, where squatting was still relatively easy (and pre-gentrification housing stock still plentiful), and where the concomitant reduction in one’s basic outgoings meant that the unemployment benefits of the time could support a combination of artistic practice and low-budget decadent hedonism.

The review is of Tramps!, a doc about the post-punk (but not really post, more a continuity of queer subculture) New Romantics which I’m very keen to check out. This stuff bled into the mainstream through people like Boy George and Leigh Bowery but obviously never in its pure form and I’ve found every exposure to the actual stories from the people that were there to be endlessly fascinating. (via)