MUSIC: RoMo No-No

In the fall of 1996, on one of our many (OK, one) transatlantic phone calls, Neil Tennant (lead singer of Pet Shop Boys) and I discussed the current state of UK pop for a newspaper interview.

"How do you feel about this new New Romantic revival?" I asked.

"You mean RoMo? Neil asked, with a laugh. "You know, that never even really happened."

"You mean it was just a press thing?" I asked.

"It wasn't even a press thing. It was only in the Melody Maker!" he laughed again. "But it would have been nice to have a counterpoint to the whole Britpop thing, which is getting a bit 'laddish' at the moment."

[Reminder: find someone who can transfer audio cassette to either a CD or MP3 audio file. It's a great 45 minute interview]

'RoMo' (short for 'Romantic Modernism' - how pretentious, right?) was a short-lived fad in the mid '90s that was a reaction to the 'everyday lad/bloke' look of Oasis and their sound-a-like children. No more jeans and hoodies. RoMo was the first musical retro look back to the '80s.

Taking cues from early Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell and Human League, among many others, RoMo celebrated synths and boys in make up. Club nights sprung up in London to play these early '80s synthpop hits. But dancing to records wasn't enough and soon RoMo bands sprouted up; a few of the bigger names were:

Orlando

Sexus

By 1996 it had gone mainstream, with a piece about RoMo on Sunday TV in the UK:

By then the fleeting interest had dissipated. By 1997, RoMo was another footnote. All hype, no hits. Some thought that RoMo was just a precursor/think tank for the more successful Electroclash movement that bubbled up three-to-four years later. The Electroclash looks may have been more subtle, but the music was better.