Trust Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys, always one of pop’s cannier theoreticians, to succinctly describe the trajectory of those 1980s pop groups known as the New Romantics. “The New Romantic scene takes the lessons of punk, with well-crafted pop songs, but now they’re looking for glamour,” Tennant observes in Dylan Jones’s new, lengthy oral history of the New Romantics, Sweet Dreams. “Then, of course, as with Bryan Ferry — who was the first to do this — it becomes the thing it imitates.”

Witness Bryan Ferry, late of a working-class, Northern English family, reconstructing himself as the marionette Elvis, a crooner-puppet in the nightclub at the end of the world — and then, in reality, defending foxhunts and sending his children to Eton. Or witness Boy George, late of a working-class, South East London family, and known, even as a teenager, for his sour wit and extravagant costumery, who found himself, at the height of Culture Club’s success, shaking hands with that ultimate clotheshorse, Princess Margaret. (In George’s partial defense, he did say, in his 1995 memoir, Take It Like a Man, that the British royals are “just a bunch of Sloanes who live off our taxes. They’re certainly not my moral guides.”)

The dandy Warholians who brought the New Romantic scene into being — art school students, nascent fashion designers, suburban freaks, and door bitches with grand visions — were mostly based in London, but they had a crucial outpost in Birmingham, which would gift Duran Duran to the world. It was a scene made by a confluence of teenagers slightly too young to have caught the Sex Pistols the first time around, along with the queerest remnants of the original punk movement, grown disenchanted with its mainstream turn. “The Clash had gone all American rock,” comments journalist Robert Elms in Sweet Dreams. They worshipped Ferry and David Bowie but also soul music — the influence of the latter was obvious on tracks like “Church of the Poison Mind,” a 1983 single by Culture Club, and, of course, Soft Cell’s immortal 1981 cover of Gloria Jones’s northern soul classic “Tainted Love.”