It’s a brave bouncer who would turn away Mick Jagger in his prime, and a very particular sort of nightclub whose door policy could cause it to happen. But then London’s much-celebrated Blitz Club was a very particular sort of place and turn Jagger away it did. The reason? He looked too, well, normal. At least that’s the legend.

To be fair to Sir Mick, the Blitz Club set the bar high where normality was concerned. Behind the venue’s unprepossessing exterior the so-called Blitz Kids held sway, a coterie of musicians, fashion students, photographers and wannabes who would come together to form what became the New Romantic movement. They were a tribe and like all tribes they had codes of dress and behaviour which were exact.

Think extravagant make-up, gender-bending artistry, theatrical costumes and – according to cultural historian Ted Polhemus in his seminal 1994 survey of British youth culture, Street Style – “an addiction to the glamorous” which saw club regulars “substituting the elegant for the slovenly, the precious for the vulgar, Dressing Up for Dressing Down.”

Mick JaggerMick Jagger (Image: free)

Think Marilyn, Boy George, Michael Clark and founding members of Bananarama and Spandau Ballet hitting the dance floor together, which they regularly did. Or think Cabaret’s Sally Bowles dancing to Kraftwerk in a hat by aspiring milliner (and fully-paid up Blitz Kid) Stephen Jones. The Blitz Club certainly had a whiff of anything goes Weimar-era Berlin to it.

The late Steve Strange was the man on the door in what had once been a World War Two-themed wine bar in Covent Garden. But on the decks and shaping the all-important sound of the Blitz Club was his friend and co-founder, Rusty Egan. Together they would also go on to form synthpop act Visage and score a top 10 hit with Fade To Grey.

But in the late 1970s they were just a couple of ex-punks who had tired of that scene and who were looking for something different to do on a Tuesday night. Egan had recently left Rich Kids, the band formed by ex-Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock and which also featured Midge Ure.

Strange was kipping on Egan’s sofa and dragging him round gay clubs where you weren’t likely to get a glass in the face (good) but where the music hadn’t changed much in years (bad, at least to Egan’s ears).

Rusty Egan DJing at the Blitz Club in 1979Rusty Egan DJing at the Blitz Club in 1979 (Image: Peter Ashworth)

Now, 45 years on, Egan is releasing Blitzed!, a mammoth, 66-track retrospective compilation curated by him and based on his set-lists from the period between 1979 and 1980.

It features tracks by the artists you would expect from the beginnings of the New Romantic scene such as Spandau Ballet, Kraftwerk, Ultravox, The Human League and Visage. Alongside them are more traditionally chart-focussed inclusions from bands like Hot Chocolate, Blondie and Roxy Music. But nestling among these acts are dozens of others which are jaw dropping in their eclecticism, and it’s these which helped give the Blitz Club it’s character.

They run from The Walker Brothers and mysterious disco queen Amanda Lear (Salvador Dali’s long-time muse) to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew-era drummer Billy Cobham and (whisper it) The Glitter Band. Blitzed! may also be the only compilation album you’ll ever own which features both Lulu and avant-garde noise-art outfit Throbbing Gristle.

“To those who don’t know, I’m a drummer, and the drummer’s job is to create an original beat,” he says when I ask him to explain the club’s musical ethos. “When you get a drummer that’s interesting they create a beat that you remember forever, so as a drummer that would be it for me. A DJ would say to me I can’t play that, it’s not dance music and I’d say: ‘Well what’s dance music? Play some Bowie.’ So I went out looking for music that you could dance to.”

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Of course as Blitzed! shows, Egan’s definition of music you could dance too was loose to the point of being elastic. “I went off to Germany and met Kraftwerk,” he says. “I went to Berlin and came back armed with [albums by] Neu! and Gina X, so there’s a lot of German stuff in there, which was a massive influence.”

One track on the album, Dream Baby Dream, is by cult New York duo Suicide. It’s a bona fide underground classic – it’s used on a Sofia Coppola-directed advert for fashion house Marc Jacobs – but it’s hardly a floor-filler.

“I saw them on the Clash tour getting bottled off every night and I thought it was like punk synth music,” Egan recalls. “They were the inspiration for Soft Cell, you know. Obviously they were not making dance music, they were making punk music with synths – but I liked it.” And that was enough.

There are plenty of genuine curios too. Exhibit A: the skeletal synthpop of Vice Versa’s New Girls Neutrons, with future ABC singer Martin Fry on synthesiser. Exhibit B: Dalek I Love You by Dalek I Love You, which featured Andy McClusky and Paul Humphreys. They would go on to form Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.

There were no helpful Spotify algorithms in 1979 so finding music that fitted the Blitz Club bill was a consuming and labour intensive activity. Consequently Egan was a crate-digger extraordinaire and, by his own admission, a prime blagger of free vinyl.

A visit to legendary Edinburgh record shop Bruce’s secured him a copy of Life In A Day, the 1979 debut by Simple Minds and source of the band’s first two singles. One of them, Chelsea Girl, was a Blitz Club favourite though it’s third single Changeling, from Real To Real Cacophony, which makes the Blitzed! collection. But typical of Egan’s more esoteric finds was Italian disco outfit Change, formed in Bologna in the late 1970s. Scouring their 1980 debut The Glow Of Love, featuring a then relatively-unknown American singer called Luther Vandross on vocals, he found Giorgio Moroder-inspired instrumental The End. That too found its way onto the Blitz Club playlist.

Steve Strange and Boy George Steve Strange and Boy George (Image: free)

As for the Jagger legend, typically nothing is quite what it seems. So how does he remember it?

“On a Tuesday night there wasn’t much open but we were open until 3am and if you were out in the West End someone would always let’s go to the Blitz Club, so a lot of people who weren’t right for it pitched up,” he recalls.

“When they got there they saw lots of people lined up dressed in suspenders. It all looked like The Rocky Horror Picture Show to them but not to us. Some people did get in because they bribed Steve but Mick Jagger supposedly turned up when we were way over capacity and the manager was saying: ‘No more, no more’.”

But, he adds: “Steve would have let Mick Jagger in – he would have been all over him like a rash.”

Rusty Egan Presents Blitzed! is out now via Demon Music