ロマンティック・モダニズム

ロモの誕生

クラブ・スキニーは、1995年春に、プロモーターのケヴィン・ワイルド (Kevin Wilde) とポール・"ハイファイ"・ニュージェント (Paul "HiFi" Nugent) によって、インディーズ系のブリットポップに対抗する形で、スタイリッシュな1980年代ポップをかけるクラブ・イベントとして始められた。当初の開催場所だったカムデンズ・ローレル・ツリー (Camden's Laurel Tree) は、ブリットポップのクラブナイトだった Blow Up の根拠地でもあった。ワイルドとニュージェントは、彼らのグラマラスなポップ・ナイトを、敵視していたインディーズ/ブリットポップ系の動きの中心地である場所で開催することが、破壊的で「パンク」な行動だと考えていた。当初は、客を呼び込むため、妥協的にブリットポップ系の新進バンドに演奏させるといったことも盛り込まれていたが、デヴィッド・ボウイの影響を受け、派手な衣装センスで知られた女性バンド、パーセキューション・コンプレックス (Persecution Complex) のメンバーがクラブの常連になると、このクラブは勢いを増し、さらに派手なクラブの客たちを呼び込むようになった。
やがて、さらなる展開として、プラスティック・ファンタスティック (Plastic Fantastic) とデクスデクスター (DexDexTer) というふたつのグラマラスな1980年代スタイルのバンドが出演者に加わったが、前者はブライトンを拠点とした、ロキシー・ミュージックやジャパンの影響を受けたバンドで、フロントマンは元スコルピオ・ライジング (Scorpio Rising)/スーパーチャージャー (Supercharger) のスチュアート・ミラー (Stuart Miller) であり、後者は、旧称を MkII といい、後にプラシーボのキーボード奏者を務めたポール・"ゼイヴィア"・ロイド (Paul "Xavior" Roide) がリーダーだった。これら二つのバンドは、8月17日のクラブ・スキニーで、ダブルヘッドラインを務めた。さらに、このクラブで演奏した、当時ブリットポップ系を目指していたバンドのひとつで、デレク・'デル'・グレイ (Derek 'Del' Gray) がリーダーだったヴィヴァ (Viva) は、このクラブに影響されて方向を転換し、アルバム『ルック・オブ・ラヴ (The Lexicon of Love)』の頃のABCのような純粋にポップ/ディスコ系のバンドに変身した。後にワイルドは、ヴィヴァやデクスデクスターのマネージャーを務めた。

主流メディアの注目

The scene began to achieve mainstream media coverage with a feature on Arcadia in Katie Puckrick's Sunday Show featuring live footage of Plastic Fantastic and Sexus (by now a full part of the Romo scene) and interviews with the two aforementioned bands, Xavior from DexDexTer and Simon Price, and queue/crowd/dancefloor footage of Arcadia featuring Wilde, Grey, Chipping, Edwards, Edgren and Leigh.  By the end of 1995, media coverage of Romo had included TV coverage on ITV, Sky News and an unspecified Japanese TV news programme, radio coverage on BBC Radio 1 and BBC World Service and print media coverage in Time Out, The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, as well as colour features in style magazines The Face and i-D.  Tabloid newspaper the Daily Star also printed an enthusiastic but largely inaccurate full page article depicting the scene as a straightforward New Romantic revival.
Melody Maker  meanwhile continued its enthusiastic coverage, culminating in a cover-featured Romo special defining the scene.  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,  Plastic Fantastic, DexDexTer, Sexus, Hollywood, Viva, 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 Mathew Glammore.  More significant was the inclusion of a "Romanifesto" by Price and Parkes which ideologically defined Romo as the rejection of authenticity in music in favour of creative artifice, a militant pop sensibility (which placed Romo in direct opposition to both rockism and the values of alternative music) and the ideal of recreating/reinventing oneself as a glamorous Star-type persona.

Melody Makerカセットおよびパッケージツアー

The 9 March 1996 edition of Melody Maker gave away a compilation cassette of Romo bands entitled Fiddling While Romo Burns. 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 – Sexus and Minty having by now decided to keep their distance from the scene. Despite Minty's non-involvement in the tape, individual members and collaborators contributed to the continuing flow of fresh Romo acts such as Elizabeth Bunny and Massive Ego, the latter featuring a young Dan Black on guitar. Other newcomers to the scene were Universe (a similar "perfect pop" concept to Viva) and Acacia (an earlier incarnation of which featured future Mercury Music prize winner Talvin Singh.)  German pop act Sin With Sebastian also played Arcadia during this time.  Romo club culture also continued to develop with the launch by Price and Gray of Saturday night clubnight Paris 6 am at Oscars nightclub in Leicester Square as well as two clubs organised by other parties – The Cell at Gossips in Dean Street promoted by Stewart Ubik and the Roxy Motel Club at The Fridge in Brixton.
The climax of all this activity was a package tour of Romo bands, also entitled "Fiddling While Romo Burns", featuring a quadruple bill of Orlando, Plastic Fantastic, Hollywood and DexDexTer (with live drummer Laura "Elle" Schellino).  Although the showcase London concert (also featuring Viva) at the LA2 venue was a 750 capacity sellout and reasonable crowds were also attracted to the Brighton and Manchester shows, other provincial dates on the tour – mostly at student venues that were the fodder of the very indie music that the militantly pop Romo movement opposed – failed to attract large audiences and those that did attend were generally sceptical. More seriously, the strain of having to live, eat and sleep together rather than merely go nightclubbing together had severely strained relations between the bands. Chipping was relatively diplomatic about this in one interview at the time: "There's a definite reason why we have two tourbuses. It's to do with the fact that some bands just won't tour with each other, not because they dislike each other, they just have different... living styles."  Nevertheless, by the end of the tour, all of the seven core acts originally featured in the Melody Maker  special had recording contracts with either major or big independent labels – Orlando with WEA subsidiary Blanco y Negro Records, Plastic Fantastic with Mercury Records, Sexus with ZTT, Hollywood with U2's Mother Records label, DexDexTer with Island Records subdivision Trade2, Viva with Planet3 Records and Minty (whose transvestite drummer Trevor Sharpe had filled in as drummer for Plastic Fantastic on the tour) with Candy Records.

ロマンティック・モダニズムの「死」

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. Despite this, the scene in London continued with more bands emerging such as Anglo-Japanese female quartet Étoile as well as the arrival in Britain of Donovan Leitch's band Nancy Boy.  Another late major addition to the scene at around this time was Belvedere Kane, fronted by Romo scene face Barry Stone, later of the Jewels And Stone writing/production partnership. In his review of the latter's gig, Price recanted his "Romo is dead" declaration, dismissing it as a red herring tactic and further adding that the continued spread of Romo was by now beyond even his control.  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 Hoi.  However, continued tensions in the scene led to the discontinuation of both Skinny and Arcadia in July 1996.  Romo activities continued at the individual bands' concerts (although one Plastic Fantastic concert at Dingwalls from this time ended in a mass brawl after a hat was thrown onstage. Plastic Fantastic also had a residency at the Dublin Castle, Camden during this period, although this was terminated by management after an incident where stage invaders performed a sex show.
The bands mostly concentrated on their recording contracts at this point – in late 1996 Hollywood released a heavily remixed single Apocalypse Kiss while Plastic Fantastic – having previously released the Eno-influenced Fantastique no.5- recorded a planned album Autumn which was never released due to a dispute with Mercury over the mix of planned second single Plastic World.  Sexus, who had also released a second single The Official End Of It All and recorded an album The Boyfriend Olympics, similarly fell out with ZTT over the mix of planned third single How Do You Kiss.  Personal differences between Xavior and his bandmates led to the demise of DexDexTer in early 1997 just as their single Another Car Another CarCrash was released. Both parties remained signed tor Trade2; the bandmates as ExDexTer recorded demos for the label but were swiftly dropped as eventually was Xavior in 1998 after he had recorded an unreleased solo album, Chainsaw Mass Appeal and appeared in the film Velvet Goldmine.  After several years producing, playing keyboards for Placebo and recording further unreleased solo albums, he would reemerge as a frontman in the late 2000s fronting Paul St Paul and the Apostles with David Ryder Prangley. Viva meanwhile, despite continuing to demo material, never released any records and would later rename themselves Scala 5 and revert to a heavier guitar sound before their demise circa 2000.  Stuart Miller dissolved Plastic Fantastic and revived his old band Supercharger, while Hollywood's Hannah Edgren was spotted (by Dickon Edwards) fronting a new band in 1998 – she and Stacey Leigh would later reunite as Fubar.  Sexus were frozen into inactivity due to a dispute with management after the fallout with ZTT – they would eventually re-emerge in 2002 as the Psychodelicates with a download/mail order album Psychodelicates Go Adventuring.
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.  Orlando, having already released two singles "Just for a Second" and The Magic EP in late 1996 (the latter of which achieved #96 on the UK Singles Chart) and a third, Nature's Hated in spring 1997, having toured extensively with Kenickie and having 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, released their album Passive Soul in October that year before Dickon Edwards departed to found Fosca.  Tim Chipping would continue to use the Orlando band name for a planned folk-orientated second album under the working title Sick Folk (to have included a collaboration with Kenickie/Rosita members Marie Du Santiago and Emmy-Kate Montrose), before finally dissolving Orlando in Spring 2000.  Minty, likewise, having released singles "Useless Man", "Plastic Bag" (a No. 2 hit in the Netherlands), "That's Nice" and "Nothing", released their parent album Open Wide in late 1997 before also disbanding, with some members later forming rock band The Servant.  With all the core bands and major London clubnights now defunct (or at least no longer in their Romo incarnations), the Romo scene effectively came to an end.

レガシー

In Romo's wake over the next several years came a fresh wave of glam/style orientated clubnights.  One of the first of these was Club Kitten, the successor to Club Skinny, based at the latter's old location of HQ's in Camden and featuring Stuart Miller as DJ.  Another important post-Romo club was Stay Beautiful, run by Simon Price at various London locations from 2000–2009 and in Brighton 2011-2016.  Several other Romo musicians ran glam/style orientated club nights – notably Minty vocalist Mathew Glammore's "Kashpoint" (at a January 2004 installment of which Glammore performed a medley of old Minty songs and a March 2005 installment of which featured a Minty reunion), Xavior's "Hanky Panky Kabaret" clubnight (and associated meetings in London's Wolsey restaurant) and Dickon Edwards' "Beautiful And Damned" and "Against Nature".  Wilde and Nugent would later unleash another scene – the Club Rampage/Club P*rnstar "Bratpop" scene in late 1998 (also the beneficiary of a Melody Maker  cover special).
Other promoters also hosted such glam/style-orientated clubnights in the 2000s – most notably Glam-Ou-Rama, which later relocated to Tel Aviv.  Romo Night in Sweden, first established in 1996 during the original London scene's lifetime, was still active as of 2003.
Romo was also frequently cited as a precedent for (if not actually an influence on) the electroclash scene of the early 2000s. The Disciples by James Mollison, a book of photographs of music fans, includes a spread of photos of fans at a London concert by major electroclash act Fischerspooner, mostly dressed in Romo-style attire (one of whom is Simon Price).
Writing and production team Xenomania, who became critically and commercially successful in the 2000s for their work with groups such as Girls Aloud and Sugababes, started out as remixers for songs by several Romo bands, including Hollywood's "Apocalypse Kiss" and Sexus' "How Do You Kiss?". According to Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger, writing in 2003, Xenomania's Romo roots could be heard in their then-current work. Writing in 2004 in regards to Xenomania's commercial success, Ewing said: "You can find Romo links everywhere if you look!" Ewing also compared Hollywood (whose repertoire had included "Lost in Moscow 3am") to Russian duo t.A.T.u., who he said were "entirely Romo, though it would be more accurate to say that Romo was a spirited runt in a litter that also birthed them."

音楽的特徴

One wing of Romo bands, such as Plastic Fantastic and DexDexTer cleaved towards art-glam.  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.  The influences are that transparent!"
Other bands such as Viva, Belvedere Kane, Sexus and to a lesser extent Orlando, took inspiration from the nightclub-orientated Hi-NRG/Handbag house chart pop of the mid 1990s. Viva bassist Lee David described how his band's sound "came from going to clubs and seeing what got people dancing." Sexus's sound was characterised by Price as "intelligent handbag." 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.
The dance-pop influences seeped through to the scene's art-glam wing also - interviewing Plastic Fantastic, Melody Maker's David Bennun suggested that the band's preferred mix of Plastic World (by dance producer Howard Hughes) "sounds like Hawkwind gone disco." 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."
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."

批判

Being as it was an attack on the very notion of authenticity in music, Romo's inauthenticity was itself declared pernicious by its opponents.  While Erlewine praised Fiddling While Romo Burns he nonetheless complained "...There's nothing but style and artifice here, and at crushing levels ... it's filled with affectation and pretension.". Others were more blunt about this, such as Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys. "I hate Romo" he declared, "it's so plastic!"