Music - William Cook on how the boys in skirts are back in town

"Give me a freak any day of the week," warbles a bloke in a policewoman's cap and an off-the-shoulder ball gown. "I'm comfortable with those you call demented." In a dark, basement dance hall beneath Leicester Square, a freaky, demented chorus line is rehearsing a new musical called Taboo, featuring a string of brand-new songs by the perennial British pop icon Boy George. But although Taboo's script and score are both freshly minted, its plot harks back to the slick soundtrack of the discontented early Eighties. Twenty years after their rapid rise and fall, amid a blizzard of kilts, berets and cheap cosmetics, the New Romantics are finally back in vogue.

The New Romantics were the terribly British pop stars that straight fashion sense forgot. And during Margaret Thatcher's divisive heyday, they achieved the unique feat of uniting left and right against them. Uptight Conservatives distrusted their androgyny. Po-faced socialists detested their conspicuous capitalist consumption. And both sides sneered at their outrageous, ostentatious outfits. Yet, a generation later, these New Romantic fops have aged far better than the angry undergraduates who pooh-poohed their feel-good, disposable hit singles, or the small-town Tories who tut-tutted at their hedonistic personal habits. And no wonder. Because this proletarian jamboree was a joyous plague on both their houses - a trash aesthetic triumph of fey style over pious, puritanical substance.

Now, against all odds, the New Romantics are hip again. There's even a weekly dance night at The Limelight (just around the corner from The Venue, Taboo's home in the West End) called Planet Earth - after the classic track by Lady Di's fave band, Duran Duran. Hearing Duran Duran again today, alongside the band's camp contemporaries such as ABC, Soft Cell, the Human League and Spandau Ballet, it is easy to understand why this immaculate pop music has endured. ABC's "Poison Arrow", Soft Cell's "Bedsitter", the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" and Spandau Ballet's "To Cut a Long Story Short" are all wry, witty ballads, sung in the self-deprecating drawl of suburban Middle England. And unlike most New Wave records, you can actually dance to them, too.

The New Romantics recaptured the rebellious joie de vivre that punk rock had lost somewhere in between Never Mind the Bollocks and The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle. "It was a kind of reaction to punk," says Boy George, whose band Culture Club took this underground carnival to the top of the singles charts. "It was just escaping from that kind of spitting, snarling, stamping on flowers and shouting at old ladies sort of thing that punk had become." Yet the flamboyant costumes and escapist attitudes of these dole-queue clubbers were also an eloquent reaction to the bleak austerity of those troubled times. "There are plenty of bands catering for people who want to hear about how bad life is," Duran Duran told the NME's Paul Morley in 1982. "We're not interested in that." Nor were they interested in paying lip-service to bourgeois Britain's liberal guilt about earning or spending money. "We'll buy a gymnasium," replied Duran Duran, when Morley asked how they'd avoid becoming fat and wealthy. "One of the perks of this job is getting rich!"

However, the New Romantics were never Thatcherite, merely egalitarian. "People used to call us Thatcher's children - that used to really annoy me," says Boy George. "The New Romantic thing was really a bit more DIY." And this very English amateurism was its saving grace. Steve Strange's elitist door policy at his Blitz club mimicked the chic snobbery of Studio 54 - but unlike the disco superstars who patronised that upmarket New York nightclub, Blitz celebs squatted and signed on, or scratched a living from dead-end day jobs. And yet they partied with such style. "It was very like pre-war Berlin, when it was really decadent," says Boy George, recalling the Kurt Weill kudos of Taboo, the club that gave his new show its name. "I don't think there was anybody from that club that didn't own a copy of the Cabaret album."

So will Taboo inspire a fully fledged New Romantic revival? Boy George isn't sure. "Young people have got really horribly conservative," he says. "They've got too many luxury goods." And yoof's frightening conservatism is reflected in today's Top 20. "The Nineties has been the revenge of the stage-school brat, the choreographer and the stylist." But where there's nightlife, there's hope. "I heard a band the other day called L33X, which was Oscar Wilde's prison number," says Boy George. "Quite a wild-looking band, writing their own music, styling themselves."

Meanwhile, back on that dance-hall stage, the bloke in the ball gown sings a closing couplet of which Wilde would have approved. "I like noise, aggressive boys, hookers, queers and thieves and those confused," he croons. "If you knew what I knew, you'd be a freak, too."

Taboo opens on 29 January at The Venue (0870 899 3335), London W1

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