Glam Rock

by Simon Philo

  October 1974: Prime Minister Wilson calls a general election to secure a working majority and wins with a slim majority of three.

  October 1974: Rolling Stones release It’s Only Rock and Roll—their most glam LP; Queen’s “Killer Queen” peaks at no. 2 in the UK.

  November 1974: IRA murders 21 in Birmingham pub bombings.

  December 1974: Mud’s “Lonely This Christmas” gives glam consecutive Christmas no. 1s; by the end of ’74, glam-pop songwriters/producers Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman will be responsible for more singles sold in the UK than the Beatles achieved in any calendar year.

  January 1975: Creem story “Kiss It Goodbye” documents death of glam; Slade in Flame movie on general UK release.

  February 1975: Margaret Thatcher defeats Edward Heath to become leader of the Conservative Party.

  February 1975: Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel’s “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” spends two weeks at no. 1 on the UK singles chart.

  April 1975: Fall of Saigon ends Vietnam War.

  May 1975: CBS reports that “Britain is drifting slowly toward a condition of ungovernability.”

  May 1975: Mud’s revivalist retread “Oh Boy” is the UK’s best-selling single for two weeks.

  June 1975: In a UK referendum on EEC membership, 67% vote to remain.

  July 1975: UK unemployment is close to 1 million and up nearly 250,000 in just six months.

  July 1975: “Fame” gives David Bowie his first Billboard no. 1.

  August 1975: UK inflation hits its peak at almost 27%.

  October 1975: Bruce Springsteen declared “future of rock ‘n’ roll” and features on cover of Time and Newsweek.

  November 1975: Rereleased, “Space Oddity” gives David Bowie his first UK no. 1 single.

  November 29, 1975: Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” begins a run of nine weeks at no. 1 in the UK.

  January 1976: Bowie releases Station to Station.

  March 1976: Wilson resigns as prime minister.

  April 1976: James Callaghan secures the Labour Party leadership and so becomes prime minister.

  June 1976: “I Love to Boogie” is T. Rex’s last UK hit single.

  August 1976: Start of bitter strike at Grunwick photo processing plant over employees’ right to union representation.

  September 1976: As the pound plunges in value against the dollar, Callaghan tells the Labour Party conference delegates that “the cosy world is gone,” while his chancellor, Denis Healey, confirms the UK will seek a massive bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

  October 1976: The Damned’s “New Rose” is the UK’s first punk single.

  November 1976: In London, IMF demands huge cuts in public spending as a condition for a loan. Callaghan and Healey lobby for smaller cuts; most of the cabinet simply (and unrealistically) want no cuts at all.

  December 1976: Callaghan and Healey successful in persuading both cabinet and IMF to accept modest spending cuts; UK receives the loan.

  January 1977: Bowie’s Low LP is released, featuring “Sound and Vision.” It is the first of his “Berlin Trilogy.”

  March 1977: T. Rex on tour with the Damned to promote the release of Dandy in the Underworld LP.

  April 1977: Studio 54 opens in New York.

  June 1977: Violent clashes between strikers and police at Grunwick.

  September 1977: Marc Bolan killed in a road accident.

  October 1977: Release of Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks LP; rerelease of “Virginia Plain” sees it climb to no. 11 in the UK.

  January 1978: UK inflation now under 10%.

  July 1978: Grunwick strike over, as strikers concede defeat after almost two years.

  November 1978: Transport and General Workers Union strike for more pay; other unions follow suit and so precipitate the so-called Winter of Discontent.

  January–February 1979: Nationwide strike action peaks in the coldest winter in years.

  February 1979: “Bowie Night” moves to Covent Garden’s Blitz Club. New Romantics are on the rise.

  March 1979: Re-formed Roxy Music releases Manifesto.

  April 1979: Bowie releases “Boys Keep Swinging” from Lodger LP.

  May 1979: Margaret Thatcher elected UK’s first woman prime minister.

  May 1979: Release of Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” It will be a UK no. 1 for four weeks.

  May 1980: Roxy Music releases Flesh + Blood.

  August 1980: Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” is at UK no. 1 for two weeks.

  November 1980: Ronald Reagan elected—will firm up the “special relationship” with the UK through the 1980s.

  November 1980: Release of Adam and the Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier LP. Its success would mark the beginning of 18 months in which Adam would be Britain’s biggest pop star since Marc Bolan.

  December 1980: John Lennon murdered outside his New York apartment by psychotic “fan” Mark Chapman.

  August 1, 1981: MTV is launched in America.

  March 1982: Joan Jett begins a run of seven weeks at no. 1 in the US with a cover of “I Love Rock and Roll.”

  July 1983: Second “British Invasion”—motored by New Pop and spearheaded by Duran Duran, the Human League, ABC, and Culture Club—peaks with seven UK acts on the US Top 10 singles chart.

  July 1985: Live Aid. Queen steals the show.

  November 1998: Release of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine. Nominated for Best Costume Academy Award . . . appropriately enough.

  January 2016: David Bowie dies.

  Acknowledgments

  At Rowman & Littlefield, big thanks to Scott. At Derby, for their patient indulgence as I explained for the nth time and at great length why Sweet were much underrated, I would particularly like to thank Doug and Adrian. For being a constant source of joy and pleasure from that day back in February 1974 when I came home with my first purchased 45, I’d also like to thank the music. Most important of all, heartfelt and sincere thanks and love go out to Linda and Amelie. Once again, I can only apologize for not being around on the weekend and for making you listen to “Telegram Sam” on repeat when I was.

  Introduction

  “Carry the News”

  January 2016. The outpouring of grief following David Bowie’s death was understandably accompanied by attempts to evaluate his legacy. Given his fifty-year recording career, extensive back catalogue, and shape-shifting tendencies, different Bowies were inevitably summoned. Perhaps to no great surprise, however, it was the early to mid-1970s incarnation—the “glam Bowie”—that was most frequently invoked, as critics, friends, peers, and fans of all ages struggled to come to terms with his passing. It was then—of all the Bowies available—this version that evidently meant the most to the most. So, it is these eulogies that will help us to at least begin to get a measure of glam—to evaluate, assess, and explain the genre as they endeavored to do the same for the man who has, more than any one musician-performer, come to represent it. For the British journalist Suzanne Moore, Bowie was “a guide, an inspiration and a university.” “In my youth,” she explains, “he showed us the endless possibilities.” Moore tells us that she “never grew out of” him (Moore 33); but, at the same time, she is keen to stress that it was with the glam-era Bowie that this lifelong connection was initially forged. In this, she is clearly not alone. Touring the career retrospective Sound + Vision album back in 1990, Bowie’s fan-made set list was tellingly dominated by material drawn from his glam years.

  July 1972. Reportedly written to give Bowie (and, more pressingly, his record label) a hit single, “Starman” would stand out as an un-doomy counterpoint to the ostensibly rather gloomy, often apocalyptic fare to be found on the rest of the Ziggy Stardust album to which it had been a last-minute addition. It was euphoric, hopeful, joyful—its message and meaning reinforced by an inclusive, sing-along fade-out reminiscent of “Hey Jude” (1968) or, perhaps more pointedly, T. Rex’s still-fresh-in-the-memory glam breakthrough “Hot Love” (19
71). The song’s powerful connective function was clearly audible. Lyric, in tandem with music, supplying effective unity of purpose. This alien has come to save us, not annihilate nor enslave us. He is even sensitive to our feelings. After all, he is frightened he might “blow our minds.” However, the deal was well and truly sealed—the connection dialed in—when a vast army of potential young communicants finally caught sight of Bowie performing “Starman.” On July 6, 1972, Bowie and his band, the Spiders from Mars, appeared on the UK’s preeminent TV outlet for pop music, Top of the Pops. After several years of trying and with numerous false starts along the way, it was this single and singular performance that would finally make Bowie a star(man). Yet, typical of the generosity that would help define glam, it was a performance that would also come to mean a great deal for a good proportion of the many millions of young Britons who witnessed it that evening. Here then was a cultural moment akin in impact to the Beatles’ first appearance on US TV eight years earlier. Here then was a song every bit as connective as “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” or “She Loves You.” In fact, “Starman” sets out the terms of a contract, in which our part, our obligation, is made explicit—“If we can sparkle, he may land tonight.”

  Glam’s inclusivity, its nourishing democracy, was something that its many critics would either miss entirely or deliberately ignore. Even the untypically supportive British rock journalist Charles Shaar Murray concluded that glam “only served to reinforce and emphasise the distinctions between the demi-gods (up there) and the punters.” Composing its epitaph in more ascetic punk times, Shaar Murray erroneously charged glam with being “horribly elitist and very destructive” (Shots, 226), failing to recognize that taking “the punters” with them was central to the mission of its “demi-gods.” Like his “Starman,” Bowie is otherworldly yet always within reach. Even though he is dressed like a space-age harlequin with dyed, cropped hair and makeup, he remains human. He may look like an alien, but he is never alienating. Indicatively, his unselfconscious grin never wavers from start to finish, while his outfit/costume—a kind of quilted onesie—is nonthreateningly, even endearingly, homemade. He is warm, humorous, and clearly having fun; not remotely rock-star “cool” as he leads the Top of the Pops audience in the almost inevitable hand-clapping the song’s extended fade-out seems to demand. Throughout this performance Bowie is always on the lookout for a TV camera and always, it seems, acutely aware of where they are. And as he delivers the line “I had to phone someone so I picked on you,” he finds one and looks directly into it, “smiles flirtatiously, points and twirls a beckoning finger at every mesmerised outsider kid in the land.” This, according to Stuart Maconie, was the moment when “everyone who’d ever been bullied, overlooked, teased or picked last for games just found a friend” (124), giving us a powerful demonstration of glam’s potential to convene a tribe for the nontribal, a true mass cult, a super-subculture. The impact of this single TV performance is encapsulated by future punk Siouxsie Sioux, who recalls that she “was really ill and in a hospital TV room. It was like I was being woken up, like being let out of a chrysalis. Suddenly, I was allowed to just become” because Bowie “gave people the courage to be who they wanted to be, as well as the courage to be who you actually are” (84). “Where I came from, you were pretty much told, ‘You’re not going anywhere in life.’ Seeing Ziggy on Top of the Pops, I found that I could escape”—concurs Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan. Bowie “enabled myself and Martin [Gore] and people like us to understand that we weren’t alone” (88). Such testimonials serve to confirm Bowie’s role as a catalyst, an empowering agent, a liberator, a “cultural politician” (Cagle 11). Showing a generation—in the words of former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr—“that you could be who you wanted to be” (Marr 87). All this, of course, even before we factor in the impact of those several points in the proceedings when, as the two men harmonize into a shared mic, Bowie casually drapes an arm with nail-polished fingers over guitarist Mick Ronson’s shoulder. Bowie’s Top of the Pops performance of “Starman,” via both sound and vision, conspired to serve up much of what the genre—and Bowie himself as one its chief emissaries—could and would bring to the pop table, in providing a perfect illustration of glam as a broad set of ideas and methods for understanding the performance of personal identity. This is important cultural work. Yet glam was—and still is—commonly (mis)understood as marking a retreat from commitment and cause, its challenges downplayed or, worse still, completely ignored, while classic rock’s are more often than not overplayed. Perhaps the reason for this is also to be found in Bowie’s TV performance on that summer night in 1972. In the unselfconsciously tactile relationship he has with Ronson, for example. According to Van Cagle, glam was “a celebration of sexual difference [that] provided a key to another world, a world that was not often made available to those who were living within the confines of particular localised cultures (for example, small towns)” (98). In the early 1970s, its many supporters either overlooked or, more commonly, celebrated rock’s rampant male heterosexuality, machismo, and misogyny; but glam—whether consciously or not—would challenge the heteronormative and in so doing embolden and liberate those who felt they simply could not live by its codes and practices any longer. No matter how painful. “My make-up was smeared with dried blood because I’d been hit over the head on the way to the show for the way I looked,” recalled Marc Almond of the price he had to pay for attending a Bowie concert in 1973 (qtd. in Turner, Glam Rock, 121).

  “Starman,” David Bowie, and glam all demonstrate, then, the significance of popular music in people’s lives. Not as entertainment—although this is not a function to be dismissed or sneered at or underestimated—but, in making it a part of our identity, as a kind of emotional resource that has it in its gift to help us make sense of who we are and to encourage us to be ourselves. This vital role was confirmed repeatedly in the immediate wake of Bowie’s death, as fans of all backgrounds and ages tried to put into words what he meant to them. If there was a common thread, it was that he enabled them to be who they wanted to be rather than who they were supposed to be. Coming “from a small town and what [her] teachers called ‘a broken home,’” Suzanne Moore would—in the wake of this first encounter—come to be “guided by Bowie,” noting that she and many others like her “could give up trying to be normal now that we entrusted ourselves to him” (33). In the words of sometime producer and longtime friend Tony Visconti, David Bowie “opened the world for people who hid in the shadows who thought they were different, too different to fit into society” (87). This could be achieved via vinyl alone, but—as the testimonials noted and quoted above demonstrate—it was even more likely to occur when (appropriately enough) sound and vision combined. So, July 6, 1972, marks Bowie’s emergence as a star. However, now that the “Jean Genie” is finally out of the bottle, we will be granted wishes too. He will take us with him in his role as a transformative agent, via the superinclusive nature of the music. “You’re not alone,” Ziggy generously and selflessly assures us at the very moment of his own destruction in “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” (1972). “Give me your hands,” he cries. What we learned about Bowie was less important than what he might have revealed to us about ourselves. At its very best, glam could also do this because, in common with the most effective popular music, it connects with us, it includes us. This is something that mainstream rock music had lost sight of in the early 1970s, but which is central to glam praxis. With Bowie, it is sometimes directly embedded in his songs—as when on Diamond Dogs (1974) he extends the invitation to “Rock ’n’ Roll with Me”—but it could also be demonstrated in the risks he took.

  As quintessential glam text, “Starman” can help us build the genre’s lexicon. The importance it placed on both the act of looking and being looked at, for example, can be identified as a staple. Glam songs abound with references to visual culture—to image and screen, the world of movies, theater, and art. From Roxy Music’s Bogart tribute “2HB” (1972)—in which Bryan F
erry croons that he “was moved by a screen-dream”—to David Bowie’s “Drive-In Saturday” (1973), from Cockney Rebel’s “Muriel the Actor” (1973) to Sparks’ “Looks Looks Looks” (1975). Part of the reason rock critics have tended to view glam with suspicion is that—while by no means always celebratory—these references are more often than not allied to an unapologetic emphasis on, and wholesale commitment to, spectacle and theatricality. Two things that the rock orthodoxy, forged in the late 1960s, simply could not abide—seeing and hearing only artificiality and insincerity. Augmenting the calculated and self-conscious staging of its performance, when Bowie sang, “there’s a starman waiting in the sky,” he would unashamedly borrow a key melody line from The Wizard of Oz’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” This did not go unnoticed or unremarked.