By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
I’ve always found it really irritating how people have this default setting to complain about younger generations, when it’s young people who cultivate change and move things forward. That idea of movement is what the movie is really about.”
–Kevin Hegge
A superficial glance back at the early 1980s and New Romantic might be mistaken for little more than New Wave’s baroque weirdo cousin. But as Canadian filmmaker Kevin Hegge reveals in his recent documentary Tramps!, scratch the surface of New Romantic and you discover a rich, complex history that ties into queer culture and punk and incorporates a diverse range of artistic fields from fashion to music to filmmaking to dance and beyond.
Tramps! is an extraordinarily intimate documentary marked by deep research and what is apparent even very on in the film is a real connection between Hegge and his interview subjects. Incorporating jaw-dropping archival material, these elements together paint a compelling and often at times very moving portrait of a particular moment in time when art and commerce bestowed upon one particular youth movement a world of creative possibility where they flourished.
Through first hand recollections by a veritable army of pop cultural icons including fashion legends like Judy Blame, Scarlett Cannon, Princess Julia, David Holah and Stevie Stewart, choreographer Les Childs, filmmaker John Maybury and artist Duggie Fields, Tramps! explores not just the socio-economic factors that allowed such talents to excel (such as free art school and a liveable dole), while at the same time refusing to gloss over the devastating impact on this community of drug use and the AIDS epidemic.
With its world premiere at the 2022 BFI Flare festival and now set to take the world by storm, Hegge very kindly took the time to speak to us about his extraordinary film.
So what’s your personal background with New Romantic? How does a guy from Canada end up in the heart of early 80s subcultural London?
I think just as a long time collector of things, but also histories….whether it be as a record collector or just a film or music fan you’re sort of always collecting data. At least I am, I think. I’ve always wanted to know more in general. Reading lots of biographies and autobiographies and sort of projecting my fantasies of “cool” onto different creative communities or eras. It’s a lifestyle of just constantly sourcing inspiration but also a rather insatiable hobby….I’ve always loved art-making communities that cross over between disciplines – musicians with very strong visual intentions as well. Most of the really exciting subcultural scenes operate like that, whether it be like the early California punk scene, or NYC No Wave or whatever, I like the multimedia element of it – I love freaks and how creative kids can get with very little resources.
I think that’s what lead to Tramps! It wasn’t so much that I had an interest in “The New Romantics” specifically, and to be honest I think the film kind of challenges our idea of what that even means, hopefully. My intro into the making of this movie came more from the origins of being a huge fan of Michael Clark, and his work with the filmmaker Charles Atlas, whose 1987 film Hail The New Puritan has long held a position as my favourite movie ever, basically (other than Angelic Conversation (1985) by Derek Jarman and No Skin Off My Ass (1991) by Bruce LaBruce). All of those movies house so many creative intersections between those in front and behind the camera – and picking those apart is sort of my fetish, I guess!
In Hail the New Puritan alone it features music by The Fall, costumes by Leigh Bowery and dancers like Les Child. It has set design by Trojan features the likes of Princess Julia and Jeffrey Hinton djing in a club scene, and Michael Clark is wearing a shirt by the artist Dave Baby. So I guess I had this pre-existing intention to follow all these leads, and this documentary was the vessel for that journey. The New Romantics thing just sort of…became a package for a way to present the time period – but now that I think of it it’s a bit misleading!
It feels like there are concrete ties between your previous film She Said Boom: THe Story of Fifth Column (2012) and Tramps! in that they both focus on these sort of burgeoning underground art scenes, albeit in very different contexts. Can you describe She Said Boom a little for us, and also map out a little what unites these two films – and what separates them?
With She Said Boom I wanted to celebrate the mythology of the band, and not get into anything personal, as it was the work they did collectively that was most interesting. With Tramps! I wanted to do the opposite, and put some depth of personality into a seemingly vacant style movement. With Fifth Column, all the conceptual stuff was in the foreground but with The New Romantics you really had to get to know the people who were actually hanging out at the time to reveal the richness of creativity that was actually a very big part of that time and place.
When I first met Jeffrey Hinton he had just started sharing some of his vast archive of video and photos. He had done a talk at the National Portrait Gallery about his work around the infamous Warren Street Squat which was inhabited or frequented by so many amazing fashion and art creatives. I had already loved the way the idea of squatting – admittedly an idealized version of that experience – provided a framework for the random intersection of creative people living under one roof to create a hub of output across a variety of practises. I mean, when you’re young and free you just throw down creatively, don’t you? I guess also squatting presented a sort of anti-capitalist stance as well, and since both movies have similar themes of trying to create alternative ways to operate outside of mainstream channels, squats seemed like a pretty obvious framework for talking about both of these groups of people.
In both cases, actually the squatting thing was meant to be central to the story, where in Toronto, everything is so corporate and shitty that I would love listening to my friend Bruce LaBruce regale me with tales about old punk houses in Toronto and all the hilarious gossip and stories rooted in that era that I romanticised as being more thrilling than the increasingly sterile surroundings the city had become around me. My interest in making a movie about Toronto didn’t last very long, and the creative elements of what Fifth Column presented became the focus of that film.
With Tramps! it was just too hard to get any images or concrete timelines about Warren Street – probably partly because of the amount of poppers the kids were indulging in at the time! No one was bothering videoing their apartment, or what have you, so the art-making element took over on that one too. Tramps! sort of operates as small chapters or segments covering all the working parts of this movement, so the squatting bit became one of those chapters.
The film is very canny in its use of archival materials, particularly in how they engage with who I guess are some of the more broadly recognised names that are a part of this bigger story – people like Siouxsie Sioux, Derek Jarman, Boy George and Leigh Bowery in particular. I guess this is a two-fold question; can you tell me how you saw these bigger names fitting into what you were doing, and can you tell me about the research/decision making processes both in terms of content and aesthetics that went into your engagement with archival film footage especially?
I wasn’t looking to make a movie about celebrities, although I’m not opposed to the idea at all! In fact, if we had those celebrities in the film it wouldn’t be such a struggle to finish a doc like this financially.
While trying to dredge up support for the film we had lots of industry types saying they wanted Boy George in the movie so as to broaden the audience for the film, and they wanted us to include his band’s music as well, but it was never my intention to make people hear Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” again (not that I would complain, honestly). The irony is it was so hard to find any money to make the movie at all and to licence those songs would have basically doubled our costs. In the end George was unavailable and Michael Clark didn’t do interviews, but they were both so intrinsic to the story as creatives, I wanted to be able to still include them in the movie in a way they felt equally represented to those we have on camera. Luckily there is so much brilliant content out there about the two of them it was fun and easy to do.
People always mention that this movie attempts to celebrate the “lesser known” artists or those who go overlooked – but again that wasn’t my intention. The people in the movie were the ones I was really drawn to speaking with. That said, there is a disparity in terms of celebrity and noncelebrity in the cast. The artists we speak to also span the generations, with the likes of Andrew Logan, Duggie Fields and Jarman from the 60s on to Andrew Czezowski and Sue Carrington and Philip Sallon in the earlier 70s and then onward to the 80s.
I wanted everyone to be recognized on a very balanced level – which was the case with people like Jarman, who is this queer film god, but these people considered him their friend, Derek. So it was important for me to try and position him that way, as a peer, not as some idol. We were able to include selections from his bigger films like Sebastiane (1976) and Jubilee (1976), for context, but really prioritized using his home movies to reinforce the idea that Derek was just one of so many talented people in a community of creatives, whose paths differed in terms of outcome.
I love Boy George, and a big thing about making movies like this, for me, is disputing how we commonly think of scenes or people. So although a lot of people were saying it was good to not have George in it because he is always the centre of attention in these things, I was really looking forward to the opportunity to position him amongst his peers and on the same level as them. He really was one of the first punks and will probably be one of the last, so cutting him out because he is the tall poppy of the group would be disappointing. It’s cool that he is known for pop music and was really revolutionary for gender-fucking pop culture, but I think if people understood the origins of that bold individualism he would get a lot more respect! So I guess just trying to balance all that stuff in a way that I could include George in the story arc and not have it feel like he was just too famous to be in the movie was part of the challenge.
Archivally, there was just so much to work with, really. I look at the movie as a sort of mixtape or collage of the artworks produced at the time, and by people involved in the film, to sort of showcase their work and bring them outside of this mass-image of the New Romantics. It’s amazing because a documentary puts you in this position where you can ask to see art that you wouldn’t normally have access to, so for someone like me it’s a total dream. The research process is a lot of watching incredible film and video and people digging out bits of their archive you would never see in a generic corporately produced doc – so it’s super thrilling and feels exclusive and sort of elite [laughs].
Because of this element of showcasing art works we really wanted to stay away from using too many literal visual references as archival support, and wanted to dislocate the viewer a bit in the way they could follow the story but also gaze up at these amazing works of art.
The biggest challenge was not finding room for some of the incredible films we saw during this process, images that were so striking but at the end of the day fell away for whatever reason the edit deemed necessary!
But in the end we have rare works by John Mabury, Michale Costiff, Jeffrey Hinton, we see BodyMap’s runway shows and even documentation by designers like Juliana Sissons who we weren’t able to include in the film on camera. And of course, working with Trust Judy Blame – Judy Blame’s estate, was just insane. At the final hour we were able to swap out a lot of internet sourced images for Judy’s never before shared personal archive, from his photo albums and scrapbooks, and I just wanted to cram as much of that as possible in there. It was an amazing experience, and so beautiful to have them in the movie without any touch ups at all – you really get the feeling of these photographs being physical objects, very personal ephemera with bumps and scratches and tears. Judy’s archive somehow takes the whole thing to a deeply personal place.
Part of my agenda was to introduce these more subversive elements of what this group of people were up to, being young artists and having the freedom from financial pressures and scrutiny of observation from like 9-5 jobs or having to pay the rent.”
When dealing with such vibrant subject matter, the easy path here of course would have been perhaps to make a fluffy, glossy film that sort of beatifies the era, yet you take a distinctly different path. When talking about the grim conditions of lives lived on the dole and in squats, for example, there’s a really strong contrast with the razzle dazzle of New Romantic club life. Was this something that you had consciously planned going into the project or that evolved as you were making it?
I was actually really trying to make a glossy, poppy movie! Apparently I have a pretty skewed idea of what populace interests are like.
I think part of my agenda was to introduce these more subversive elements of what this group of people were up to, being young artists and having the freedom from financial pressures and scrutiny of observation from like 9-5 jobs or having to pay the rent. There’s all this room to play and to take risks creatively or with your lifestyle that’s very liberating to ruminate over – but on the other hand, there’s a dark side to all of that. With the squats, most people looked back at that time as having been super glamorous, actually!
I guess in terms of the narrative, as I was creating these one on one relationships with these people, and trying to navigate each person’s unique history – to identify the unique qualities of each character in personality but also in practice, art wise.
The frivolity with drugs led obviously to devastation, and then with AIDS, addressing it was unavoidable because that foundation of frivolity would be ripped away. It was a before and after situation. Many of these identities that were based on this lifestyle and presentation of self in public situations had to be restructured completely, if they were lucky enough to survive.
The themes we were working with just kept drawing closer and closer to the idea of survival – how to sustain such a deeply precarious lifestyle and how does one not give up completely when the terror extends way deeper than paying the rent. I was worried about tackling issues like AIDS because it just seemed, with my generational remove, that I wasn’t equipped to treat it with the respect it deserved, and it’s such a beast of topic. It seemed weird for me to add to that narrative, but it was so profoundly present in each interview subject’s eyes, as opposed to something torn from headlines of my youth. It was so tangible and terrifying to chat with people who had experienced it so closely – it actually seemed really indecent to not make room for that, because it really did end the entire history leading up to its outbreak. But also, when asking about survival, and searching for inspiration to carry on in my own life, it was really beautiful to be on the other side of that generosity of spirit, that after having experienced that, these people were still able to find the will to keep on.
Again though, I didn’t really want to make a New Romantic movie so much as look at this social political time where all these elements created a flourish of artworks, and it spanned generations but the New Romantic thing provided a framework from which to look at all this creative diversity, and the perils of being committed – or some may say doomed to the life of an artist. It really does get quite mortal out there!
Tramps! in many ways at times almost feels like a moving image photo album, your interview subjects are such strong individuals with such incredible presence that through their collective remembrances it not only tells a story, but sort of conjures up the enigmatic ambience that seemed to be so crucial to the period in question. Can you talk about this a little, and if possible walk us through some of your key interview subjects – how you met them, what they were like, where they surprised you, what your relationship is now (where relevant)?
I think the fact that we source most of the archival from people in the movie that it really increased the intrinsic intimacy of the entire thing. I was trying to get to the depths of each character’s relationship to their own creativity on some level, so it made sense that the archival was less literal and more personal. I was really lucky that so many people, like Scarlett Cannon for example, were willing to let me literally dig through their old scrapbooks and diaries and include selections from those so I didn’t have to rely on stock footage, etcetera. I think it really helps us get closer to their world, and hopefully the audience will see more of themselves in it because of that.
In terms of key interview subjects, I mean I remember being super nervous and talking to Princess Julia about her childhood and asking her what her father was like her mother and what their relationship was like now. I was finding it really uncomfortable trying to get some of these people whose public-facing personas are very based on performance and intrigue, so it was a real hurdle trying to play their personal narrative up front and centre in the conversation. In many ways, I don’t think that some of these characters really even know how to do that in the first place because it has never really been asked of them in a social capacity.
The sweetness of youth within the punk movement – it seemed like a new take on the narrative to me.”
I got the impression that many of the interview subjects had never been asked to be part of the narrative in this way before, and if they have – like Julia for instance, who appears in many docs on the matter, they had never been asked about their personal journey – I think that was new and sometimes difficult for them to navigate conversationally. Again, I think that’s why the film feels so tender and relatable. It’s almost like we were reminding them they were people, not just sources of some “I was there” commentary.
Speaking with Mark Moore really had a profound effect on me because he was very able to to find the language to describe his childhood experience, and how specific cultural experiences moulded his teacher identity, especially like punk as a de facto parenthood to him, having been made an orphan quite early in his youth. The community that he found with older punks taking him under his wing was central to that tenderness that was revealed to me about the punk time period that seemed so played out to me. The sweetness of youth within the punk movement – it seemed like a new take on the narrative to me.
And of course as I mentioned before, working with people’s personal ephemera is just very intense especially like Judy Blame, because to be sitting there and routing through family photo albums and bits and bobs that have been shaved into scrapbooks and just the candid nature of physical photographs it really was a very tender sort of experience. There’s an intrinsic juvenilia and relatability through that experience because we all have those scrapbooks and there’s nothing that strips away all of the noise of a celebrity or fashion or documentaries or pop culture than sharing that first-hand information about somebody’s DNA. It really makes you feel closer to them and I’m hoping by incorporating that into the movie the audience can glean a little bit of that feeling as well.
Tramps! very much reads like a long-repressed queer history, rewriting the queer element that has largely been missing from punk onwards back into the history of late 20th century subcultural London. Can you talk me through this aspect of the film a bit?
Well, when we started showing the movie of course many festivals or journalists would sort of assume that it was my agenda to highlight these queer histories, but it wasn’t at all. I just think that with most subcultures – or any innovation or creative gesture that is radical, whether in art or fashion or music or even politics – usually begins with queers or women or people of colour, before it becomes absorbed into popular culture.
Unfortunately, I think the queer representation was most intentional when we talk about AIDS in the movie. That section really aims to take that space for creative queers purposefully, and John Maybury has some particularly poignant reflections that really hammer it home. The fact that half the creative community was literally wiped out just speaks so much to the history of queers turning to creative pursuits to find a place in the world, and how bars and clubs really nurtured those communities as what we are now only starting to recognize as legitimate forums for art practice and performance.
Beyond queerness, it was also really important for me that we were including the women in this movement at the forefront of the film. Most of the New Romantic legacy is based around men – and on a mainstream level, sort of blokey men (the Duran Durans and the Spandau Ballet’s of it all) – but the scene we were looking at was very much populated by, if not dominated by women.
In this case, I was really focused on the art-making and fashion end of things, so it was just sort of par for the course that this community would be populated by queers, in the same way that if you actually look at punk, it’s the same story. And if you look at anything before that, I think you’ll find the same. I think when you’re born operating outside of a cultural binary you just naturally are drawn to revision and revolutionary actions, so all the queer content was kind of just built in. I can’t remember asking even one person about being gay. I mean, we were talking about fashion most of the time so it was hardly a bunch of football lads I was chatting with!
It’s the history of the world! Punk is remembered as this butch thing when it really was just a bunch of queers and women and weird others making things happen – and the world doesn’t know until a bunch of dudes have ruined it for everyone and the interesting people have moved on to something new. In a way, it’s the same with the world embracing the New Romantics – the radical nature of these straight boys wearing frilly shirts, when the actual radical transformations were happening way before it reached people through their TV sets.
This wasn’t so much of a concerted effort to highlight the presence of women or queers, so it actually speaks more to how much effort has to go into actually discluding women from the narrative, as we have seen historically around this and basically any other cultural documentation to this point.
There is something of the spirit of an artistic manifesto to Tramps! – in particular, the importance of free art school and a liveable support welfare system that meant artists could thrive on the dole. One of the many things I found so compelling about the film was the dual empathy and optimism many of your interview subjects had for young artists today’s emerging in a very different cultural and social climate where there just isn’t the luxury to experiment creatively without the restraints of commercialism breathing down their neck. Could you expand on this aspect of the film a little for me?
Having these liberties of being able to live in squats for free and going art school for free and not yet having had AIDS stomp all over their dreams and youth were really central to the flourish of art making and community. So unavoidably, it’s a bit of a “you had to be there”, sort of idealised scenario these people were living in.
I mean for me the making of this movie was actually quite personal and almost selfish really, because it’s so hard to make documentaries and we had no funding and it just really seems impossible to undertake and in what ways I was asking my interview subjects why or how I should actually pursue this endeavour and how I could survive it if I did. I was struggling with the idea of living such a precarious lifestyle that seemed to have no end in sight, and really I was in search of some sort of altruism to stop feeling so daunted by it all! So dramatic, I know.
If anything, addressing that introduction of precarity into an otherwise thriving youth culture I felt more relevant to “kids these days” than some sort of nostalgic film about how much better things were in “the olden days”.
My questions were quite literally “have you ever wanted to give up?” and “what makes you continue” – what were the things that inspired them to continue on his creative path. With people like Jeffrey Hinton and Julia still djing and attending events and seeming so genuine and enthusiastic about their work – and being very engaged in youth culture because of it – it was alarming that the precarity of the creative life hadn’t beaten that out of them yet! I was feeling the threat of that, so really that’s why the movie zones in so much on those themes. Whether I realized it at the time or not, it’s quite obvious now.
I’ve always found it really irritating how people have this default setting to complain about younger generations, when it’s young people who cultivate change and move things forward. That idea of movement is what the movie is really about. So movement and survival go hand in hand – and I feel like now more than ever we need to talk about nurturing that creativity because the world at large is so stifling, on a very basic economic level.
What surprised you the most when making the film?
Really and truly the research for this film could go on forever because of the intersection of art practices and personalities, and the way that it spans generations of creative people. The thrulines and connections that reveal themselves are endless – so that element of surprise is endless and exponential.
There is so much that happened and after the narrative of this film ends that continues to intertwine a lot of his creative people in pop and subcultures that I don’t feel have really been explored. Somebody like myself who has the sickness of unrelenting curiosity in terms of exploring those creative relationships and intersections of practice are always really fun and addictive.
I guess a major one was how sentimental, emotional and personal the punk movement was to everyone who experienced it first hand. I tried my hardest to skip over punk and find other ways to talk about what was going on at that period of time, but when chronicling these peoples personal journeys the punk thing was very intimate in terms of social structure and individuals that contributed to it! You know – Sid Vicious was a sweetie and just a kid from down the road.
So I guess I was most surprised about the personal impact and emotional impacts that the punk movement had on his kids rather than it being some sort of diluted cultural idea. You read about these kids being nihilistic terrors, but when you hear about them first-hand it’s actually quite discerning because you see everyone as just kids from the small towns and how they end up in the punk scene and how impactful finding connection in these youth communities, however fleeting those connections may be.
What surprised you the most with its public reception thus far?
That everyone liked it! I was mostly surprised that everybody loves it so much because when trying to compile all this information into some sort of sensible narrative I was really worried that I would be dragged over hot coals regarding timelines and details or who was or wasn’t there.
The movie does jump around quite a lot and leaves out significant personalities from the story, since everyone has an opinion on who was or wasn’t there. It can be a lot of pressure to have so many people’s legacy in your hands this way – it can be taken as a slight to not include every person, every band, every song or club night in your film, when in reality it’s just that there is so much amazing history to cover that you can’t cram it into one project. So it has been really surprising that instead of attacking me for that, people who were part of that community have said they think the movie more accurately depicts how it felt at the time, and that they enjoyed it on that level, rather than feeling dismayed.
So many people have been so supportive of the way we tried to explore some new themes and bring the people involved to the forefront. I was sort of anticipating being a black sheep with my decisions around this movie. I guess because it was so important to me that these beautiful people’s histories resonated on some emotional level with the viewers.
What’s next?
I mean I really just wanted to live in this world a bit longer! I am very interested in continuing along this track in some capacity and sharing more of these tales that, as explained earlier, continue to unravel or intertwine after Tramps! ends.
With all the research I did, it just uncovered an infinite amount of potential for other stories to share whether that be through documentary or other curatorial pursuits, I’m very much interested in developing more work around this world. If you take each character from Tramps! they could easily have entire features dedicated to them individually, and that’s only the people we managed to squeeze into the movie. I have a lot of content I am hoping to find a home for, so for now I’m just trying to find the right context for whatever shape that might take!
On the other hand, despite everything I’ve learnt from this New Romantic crew, I should probably get a real job or something – but who needs one when you are in such good company.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: the Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.