From Blitz Club to Companies: Art School, Subcultural Capital and the 1980s Creative Economy

Established in 1979, the Blitz Club was an influential London nightclub famous for being “the spiritual nightclub home of the New Romantics” (Brownlee, 2011, p.92). Following in the wake of punk, the Blitz Club was known for the stylistic experimentation of its patrons, many of whom went on to prominence in the creative industries (Stratton, 2022; Worley, 2024). Held up as a metaphor for the Thatcherite consumer culture of the 1980s freeing individuals from collective identity to facilitate the pure creative expression of individual identity (Kallioniemi, 2017), the Blitz has been the subject of considerable mythmaking,Not least because so many Blitz Club luminaries went on to fame and fortune in the enterprise culture of 1980s Britain. This conference paper reports research from a project that delves deeper into the Blitz Club, going beyond the clichés and myths to understand the experiences and motivations of those lesser-known Blitz attendees whose stories have not been recounted in the books and exhibitions. This includes female participants, who have long complained of being excluded from official accounts of the scene (Morère, 2019; Worley, 2024), and those who went on to live lives outside the spotlight of minor celebrity. Drawing on interviews with 25 Blitz attendees, this paper focus on how in the context of the culturalization of the economy (Lash & Urry, 1994; McRobbie, 1988) and postmodern fragmentation (Jameson, 1991), the Blitz Club facilitated the trajectories of the lesser-known research participants into the creative industries of the 1980s. This is approached in terms of the ‘(sub)cultural capital’ (Thornton, 1995) accrued at the Blitz and at London Art Schools more generally, with this paper arguing that the Blitz milieu was a vehicle for class mobility that facilitated careers in the creative industries even for the Blitz’s less-known faces.