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The Book With No Name
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The Blitz Kids
This book looks at the early days of the New Romantics era. When boys were gorgeous and everyone had perfect if over the top make up. It is the glamour and polish of the era that Birch captures in his photo essay. The pictures are beautiful and well presented. Some of the layout of the text gets a bit annoying if you are trying to read the book as a book from cover to cover. But it isn't meant to be read like this rather to be dipped into and sampled. It tells the story of how the glamourous dance scene grew out of the shattered wreckage of the punk era and then fed upon its own excesses until it collapsed under the weight of its own pretensions. Then we got the sad and sorry grunge era which had all the tattiness of punk with none of its fighting spirit. For a glorious nostalgia trip into the mid 1980s I would definitely recommend this book if you can find a copy. My only minor complaint is that the book is very poorly bound and has a tendancy to fall apart if treated with less than absolute respect!!! Mine is a much-loved mess in need of rebinding!!!

                                                                   
amazon review - 1996
review - The Rock Year Book - 1983
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