Steve Strange

Died: February 12, 2015

Steve Strange, who has died of a heart attack in Egypt at the age of 55, was one of the key movers in the New Romantic scene in London that changed the sound and the look of British pop at the start of the eighties.

His later years were blighted by drugs, ill health, headlines concerning his shoplifting of a £10.99 Teletubby toy and appearances in celebrity TV programmes including Celebrity Scissorhands. But his gilded past was often recalled in documentaries about the Blitz Club and even featured in the West End musical Taboo, based on Boy George's life.

Born Steven John Harrington in Newbridge in Wales in 1959, Strange became a punk after seeing the Sex Pistols in Caerphilly in 1976. He arranged gigs for punk bands in his home town before departing for London in 1976 to work in Seditionaries, the shop ran by Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood. He also formed a punk band with punk face Soo Catwoman and Chrissie Hynde, later of The Pretenders, giving it the tabloid-baiting name The Moors Murderers. A few gigs were played but they never released any records.

By 1978 punk was stuttering out and Strange was looking for a new direction. He had met Rusty Egan, drummer with The Rich Kids, the group Glen Matlock set up with Midge Ure after he left the Sex Pistols. They became flatmates and then started their first club night, Billy's, aimed at London's Bowie fans. Strange quickly established himself as the doorman-turned-dictator, ruling on who could get in based on how they looked. Punk orthodoxy was out. It was all about dressing up.

Boy George, Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp, Peter Robinson - aka Marilyn - and Midge Ure were all regulars and followed Strange and Egan when they set up the Blitz Club in Covent Garden in 1979. Boy George became the club's "hatcheck girl".

Strange again manned the door dressed up to the tens with spiky hair, make-up and frills. Customers who didn't measure up to his high-haired standards were turned away. Strange even refused Mick Jagger entry at one point.

The outre - usually DIY - regalia that the club encouraged among its clientele soon caught the eye of the music press and television and the Blitz Club was anointed with a visit from Bowie himself, which led to Strange being recruited to appear in the video for Bowie's 1980 single Ashes to Ashes.

Strange was by then a member of Visage, formed in late 1978. "A confederacy of punk failures," as the music journalist Simon Reynolds noted in his book on postpunk, Rip It Up and Start Again, Ultravox was made up of Strange, Egan, Ure, Ultravox's Billy Currie and three members of postpunk band Magazine, Dave Formula, Barry Adamson and guitarist John McGeoch. Strange was the heavily painted face of the band.

Visage took the emerging electronic sound of the late seventies inspired by Kraftwerk and Bowie's Berlin trilogy and a rejection of American rock cliches and married it to the Blitz Club's visual style. The result was synth laced mitteleuropean melancholy on tracks such as Fade to Grey (a top ten hit in the UK in 1980) and The Damned Don't Cry. The band was among the first to embrace and exploit the emerging pop promo form exploiting Strange's unique look.

Drugs soon figured large in Strange's life. He said he got through the punishing promotion schedule by taking cocaine. But it was when he was modelling for Jean Paul Gaultier in 1985 that he was first offered heroin at an after show party. Soon he was an addict and his life spiralled out of control. "I thought heroin was the way of coping with my problems and all the pressures," he told a newspaper at the end of the eighties. "Instead it nearly killed me."

By then Visage had long since faded to grey and Strange had turned to Djing and in the early nineties, after getting clean, returned to hosting a night club.

But in 1997 his London home burned to the ground the day after his friend Michael Hutchence hanged himself and he retreated to Wales where he suffered a nervous breakdown and began taking a cocktail of anti-depressants and tranquilisers. He also began shoplifting. "I was doing things to win love. D'you know what I mean?" he told The Guardian in 2000. "Like, the Teletubby was for my nephew."

He was given a three-month suspended sentence when caught. "My client had found it difficult to cope with falling from grace after being a man of considerable wealth," his solicitor said at the trial.

Further treatment followed and in the last few years he began to reclaim his heritage. He recorded a new album as Visage, as well as getting involved in a classical interpretation of the band's top ten hit. But he was also dogged by ill health and in December was admitted to hospital with a bronchial infection and an intestinal blockage. He died while on holiday in Sharm-el -Sheikh.

Strange, who was played in a BBC drama about Boy George's Blitz club days by Marc Warren, will be remembered for his waspish wit and his flamboyant style. "Nobody should knock escape and fantasy, dressing up like a Hollywood star," he once said, "because they're getting away from it, escaping the nine to five."