Great Queen Street runs through central London, from Covent Garden along to Holborn. At its eastern end is the site of the former Blitz Club, where a plaque was recently placed to commemorate Spandau Ballet’s first gig there, 35 years ago. On the afternoon of its unveiling, I arrive to collect the band’s singer, Tony Hadley. The ceremony is running late, so I sit in the fury of London traffic and acquaint myself with the Seat Leon Cupra.
It might be competing with the likes of the Renault Mégane RS or the Vauxhall Astra VXR, but the Cupra’s more obvious comparison is the Golf GTI – the car on which it’s based, and with which it shares an engine. The Seat has considerably more clout – at 276bhp, 59bhp more than the GTI – and it has an extra gear. On our shuffle west through the city later, we won’t experience the Cupra’s full mettle, but for the time being its bucket seats make it a comfortable place to wait.
“This is nice,” Hadley says as he climbs in. “It’s a Seat?” You have to marvel at the polish of the performer – forever grateful to be wherever they are. “Birmingham,” he might as well have said, “it’s wonderful to be here tonight.”
Hadley and I chase ghosts through the city. “The Blitz was a wine bar,” he reminisces. “And then on Tuesday nights Steve Strange and Rusty Egan took it over and it became the Blitz Ritz Club. Boy George was the hat-check chappie. And there was Marilyn, and God knows who else. It was a very creative place, and we were the musical guardians of it in a sense.”
The Cupra isn’t yet the prince of hatchbacks but you sense its possibilities; a slight improvement in the handling would put it up there with the Mégane (for now, it’s a tad heavy-footed). It takes corners sweetly, thanks to its gigantic wheels – particularly the limited slip differential on the front ones. It makes a good, quiet city car.
We edge our way through Soho, Hadley reminiscing about the 1980s (next week sees the release of a documentary about the band, Soul Boys of the Western World). “Back then London was a very different place,” he says. “In the late 70s and 80s it was a very exciting period for music, art, fashion. In the early days Blitz was very electronica and very angular, and the fashion was very futuristic – people dressing up like Captain Scarlet. You could still shock the establishment. London still is a very buzzy place, there’s a seediness about this area that I quite like...” He looks out of the window. “Oh!” he says. “There’s Robert Plant!”
I drop Hadley at his hotel, and take the Cupra out for a proper run. As well as its speed (it’s the fastest hatchback on the market), it offers a range of driving profiles that allows you to move from Comfort to Sport to Cupra modes – though truthfully, these don’t feel overwhelmingly different. Still, there’s a dynamism to the Cupra that’s appealing, a sharpness to its drive and its look. It’s not quite Captain Scarlet, but has a sense of style and excitement all its own.
SEAT Leon Cupra 280 PS
Price From £25,690
Top speed 155mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 5.8 seconds
Combined fuel consumption 42.8mpg
CO2 emissions 154g/km
Eco rating 6/10
On the stereo ‘One Direction – they remind me of the Monkees’
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