Romantic Modernism, more commonly known as Romo, was a musical and nightclubbing movement, of glam/style pop lineage, in the UK circa 1995–1997, centred on the twin homes of Camden-based clubnight Club Skinny[1] and its West End clone Arcadia,[2] as well as concerts by the chief associated bands.
The Romo movement was essentially a derivation of late-1970s disco and early-1980s club music, with an emphasis on the extroverted sartorial style and decadent air of New Romantic-era bands such as Japan and Soft Cell.
The former was a Brighton-based Roxy Music/Japan-influenced outfit fronted by former Scorpio Rising/Supercharger frontman Stuart Miller with bassist John Gold and German brothers Conrad and Shadric Toop on guitars/keyboards interchangeably.
[7] Melody Maker writer Simon Price was already alert to the existence of Plastic Fantastic and had previously linked them, together with Sexus, a Manchester-based "intelligent handbag" duo consisting of singer David Savage and keyboard player Paul Southern (together formerly indie guitar duo Sanity Plexus) and a non-glamorous electronic act called Boutique, as "New Romo" [sic] in a June 1995 review for Sexus's debut single "Edenites".
The cover image was a group shot of Chipping, Miller, Savage and Xavior clad in their Romo finery, while the feature identified seven core bands – the aforementioned Orlando,[19] Plastic Fantastic,[4] DexDexTer,[5] Sexus,[20] Hollywood,[11] Viva,[21] and linking in one non-scene band Minty, the former musical project of the late Leigh Bowery being continued after his death by his widow Nicola and various artistic friends, most notably singer Matthew Glammore and guitarist Richard Torry.
Five bands featured on the tape – DexDexTer, Hollywood, Plastic Fantastic, Viva (whose track Now was co-produced by Marc Almond and Neal X) and Orlando[24] – Sexus and Minty having by now decided to keep their distance from the scene.
[25][26] Despite Minty's non-involvement in the tape, its individual members and collaborators contributed to the continuing flow of fresh Romo acts such as Elizabeth Bunny and Massive Ego,[27] the latter featuring a young Dan Black on guitar.
Other newcomers to the scene were Universe (a similar "perfect pop" concept to Viva)[28] and Acacia (an earlier incarnation of which featured future Mercury Music prize winner Talvin Singh.
After the tour, Price wrote an editorial in Melody Maker declaring the movement dead as it had achieved its aims but was now being soured by the revivalist portrayal in the mainstream media.
[42] At around this time, a first anniversary party was held for Club Skinny headlined by Crush, the band of former Byker Grove TV stars Donna Air and Jayni Hoy.
However in July 1996, feeling that their clubnights were being soured by continued tensions in the scene, Nugent, Wilde, Price and Slater discontinued both Club Skinny and Arcadia.
[44] The bands mostly concentrated on their recording contracts at this point – in late 1996 Hollywood released a heavily remixed single "Apocalypse Kiss" and both Edgren and Leigh participated in performance art side project "Anti-Marilyn."
"[46] The band had accumulated between two and three albums' worth of recorded tracks which would be eventually uploaded by Shadric Toop to an official posthumous Youtube channel circa 2019.
Thus by the middle of 1997 it was left to Orlando and Minty to be the most prolific – and in that sense the most successful – Romo bands as they were the only two of the seven core acts to reach the stage of releasing their respective albums.
They also had toured extensively with Kenickie and scored the only UK Top 75 chart hit of any core Romo act with their contribution to the Fever Pitch soundtrack EP, a cover of Tim Hardin's "How Can We Hang On to a Dream".
Although actually mostly referencing Brian Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets (particularly the tracks "Baby's on Fire" and "Needles in the Camel's Eye"), Fantastique no.5 was reviewed in the NME by Pulp members Russell Senior and Candida Doyle as "Ro-mu - as in Roxy Music.
"[20] Musically, Orlando combined the synthesised dance-pop of 1990s boybands and American swingbeat acts with verbose lyrics in the general style of Morrissey and Richey Edwards.
"[78] Hollywood's single "Apocalypse Kiss" (transformed from the original dark electropop 1995 demo to a piano house sound by remixers Apollo 440) was described by Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger as "gothy handbag with big production and those flattened Europop vowels.
"[75] Despite the Romo scene being a backlash against the values of Britpop and indie, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic nonetheless characterised it as "a fey, arty offspring of Britpop," noting that the genre took influence from "a touch of irony, modernist art, a healthy love of the Style Council and the Spice Girls, inspiration from Pulp, jealousy of Menswear, a vague idea of Roxy Music, heritage in the Smiths and the Manics, and a minor obsession with Dead Poets Society."
Erlewine furthermore summarised that "Romo essentially boiled down to a cross between Adam Ant, Roxy Music, Pulp, and Blur, with a hint of an idea of what Bowie may have meant.
"[80] In his book Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy (2016), Reynolds praised Price and Parkes for penning "a brilliant Romanifesto", but considered many Romo bands – namely DexDexTer, Plastic Fantastic, Sexus and Viva – to "fall a good way short of the rhetoric."
The latter was fully mastered for release before being rejected by the record label; the former reached the stage of preliminary mixes which the band uploaded posthumously to their official site.
So too did unofficial copies of the above-listed DexDexTer and Hollywood cassette tracks and Arcadia co-promoter/DJ Toby Slater's "Brattish" synthpop project demo,[97] most of the eleven songs on which were re-recorded as guitar-based indie pop by his later band Catch.