Romulus, 1975/6 - Retromania with the Birmingham Bowie/Roxy kids

In his autobiography 'Bless me father' (2025), Kevin Rowland talks about Birmingham club Romulus in the mid 1970s, which like similar scenes elsewhere saw people anticipating the future while refashioning the style of the past. Puts me in mind of the famous Marx quote from 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' (1852):'The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.Here's an extract from Rowland's reminiscences:'Wearing 1940s and 50s clothes and haircuts in the mid-70s was different. Nearly every young man was still wearing the feather-cut,…

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