In the spring of 1993, cult icon MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi looked over London’s club land and what did he hear? House music, house music, house music and….house music. Of course MC Rebbe had nothing against house music, after all, he himself was the creator of ‘Kosher House’ music, he even wrote a regular column for leading dance music publication ‘Mixmag’. Nevertheless, MC Rebbe could not help but feel that something was missing from London’s club land. So while everyone else was ‘on one’, MC Rebbe ‘went off on one’, declaring that it was time for a New Romantic (and futurist) revival.
And so it came to pass that ‘Pretension’ was born. Raving mad? Well no actually, that was the whole point. And to press home this point, with the audacity and surgical sense of irony for which he is infamous, MC Rebbe chose London’s legendary ‘Brain Club’ as the home for his new fortnightly event. Recently re-branded as ‘#11’, The Brain Club had, of course, been home to the birth of Acid House and ‘the second summer of love’, so it was only fitting that it should, once again, play host to something of equally legendary status and of equal cultural significance (and to the New Romantic/Futurist revival as well).
Upstairs, on Planet Pretension, under the watchful eyes of ‘False Maria’ (the robot from Fritz Lang’s iconic 1927 film, ‘Metropolis’), DJs ‘Le MC Rebbe’ and ‘Shalom Strange’ spun a non-stop pretentious cabaret of New Romantic and Futurist grooves from a DJ booth emblazoned with the legend “If music be the food of love, play on…”
Meanwhile, the downstairs bar was transformed into ‘The Cafe de Pretension’ where delicate and lovely creatures swapped poses over coffee and croissant, while listening to music by the (original) romantic composers and discussing the relative merits of pretentious, avant-garde and bizarre works of art exhibited by new young artists, in Le Galerie de Pretension (which, it should be noted, opened its doors prior to The Saatchi Gallery).
Naturally there was no VIP lounge as everyone at the club was special!
With a dress code of “be art” the club was soon bursting at its frilly white seams with new romantics, futurists, goths, punks, fetishists and numanoids, as the brave, the beautiful and the heroic danced the night away in scenes the likes of which had been unwitnessed since those heady days of 1980.
Coverage in publications such as style bible ‘The Face’ secured Pretension’s reputation and suddenly the eighties were cool again. As numerous eighties acts (some extremely good…most extremely bad) re-launched their careers on the back of this renewed interest and Pretension spawned (and spurned) numerous imitators (most of whom, alas, did not know the difference between ‘Duran Duran’ and ‘Wham’), MC Rebbe, fearing the monster he had created and busy with Live shows and television appearances, decided to quit while everyone else was ahead, thus securing Pretension’s place in the annals of clubbing history.
The eighties scene eventually gave way to ‘Romo’ and the short lived ‘New Wave of New Wave’ (N.W.O.N.W.) which was not so much a scene as a case of a couple of music papers desperate for something to write about. Romo/N.W.O.N.W gave way, in turn, to the inappropriately named ‘electro’ (presumably christened by someone with scant knowledge of the early eighties). Unlike Romo and N.W.O.N.W. which were always names searching for a scene, ‘electro’ (aka ‘electroclash’ / ‘electro trash’ / ‘electro whatever’) were and continue to be a scene searching for a name.
MC Rebbe will not be drawn either way on persistent rumors about the return of ‘Pretension’, though he does make special guest DJ appearances from time to time on the ‘electro’ scene…of which he approves!