by Simon Philo
In January, David Bowie had played four gigs in the UK, made several TV appearances, and recorded the bulk of Aladdin Sane, before commencing his hundred-day world tour at New York’s Radio City on the twenty-fifth of the month. The North American leg of the tour would end in Los Angeles on March 11, from where he would head to Japan, before returning to Britain in May. Through May and June, he then played sixty-one shows in fifty-three days—delivering two shows in a single night on eighteen separate occasions. On July 4 at the Hammersmith Odeon, on the tour’s final date, Bowie abruptly announced his “retirement.” By this point he had been on the road for eighteen months, touring the three albums’ worth of material he had released in that same period. Understandably, Bowie was exhausted and not a little bored. In its July 14 edition, New Musical Express reported the “retirement” and quoted Bowie explaining that “from now on, I’ll be concentrating on various activities that have very little to do with rock and pop” (qtd. in History 1973, 98). Yet, while his many distraught fans and a surprising number of presumably puzzled journalists took Bowie for his word, he was of course, in true glam fashion, simply “retiring” the Ziggy character. “Maybe I’m not into rock ’n’ roll. Maybe I just use rock ’n’ roll. . . . It’s just an artist’s materials” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 180). In the light of such statements, the “retirement” should surely be read as merely the final act in a drama of Bowie’s own design—the rise and fall of a rock star. As the perceptive Roy Hollingworth pointed out at the time: “It’s just tactics. Remember just tactics” (qtd. in History 1973, 104).
In the summer of 1973, with Melody Maker in the UK and Creem and Rock Scene in the US busy obsessing over it, glam would hit its peak and enter an imperial phase that would last for at least another twelve months. In August, Creem ran a cover story entitled “The Androgyny Hall of Fame,” which featured Bowie at its center with Bolan, Jagger, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, and Elvis Presley orbiting around him. Even in a more reluctant America, most urban areas would witness the rise of glam clubs playing host to both out-of-town and homegrown acts. A further measure of its commercial and cultural impact and reach could also been seen and heard in the glittery work of non-glam acts like Elton John, Wings, and even the Rolling Stones. Although Elton John had arguably flirted with it on the previous year’s “Rocket Man,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” (UK no. 7) represented an evidently less equivocal engagement with glam; while the glam ballad “Angie” (UK no. 5) was taken from the Stones’ latest album Goats Head Soup, whose ubercamp cover featured a gauzy headshot of an androgynous Mick Jagger doing his best Isadora Duncan impression. So, the rock establishment was glamming up; and, if it was not altogether unsurprising that teeny-pop opportunists like the Osmonds should look to join the glitterati, this was a significant development that would take things to a different level.
That July, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated twenty-one bombs in Belfast in a single day, leaving eleven dead and more than a hundred injured. Over the year, the IRA would also step up its bombing campaign on the British mainland. On December 18, bombs in London injured sixty. Such terrible events both contributed to, and were symptomatic of, a kind of national breakdown. In Not ABBA, Dave Haslam charts this “slide into instability,” identifying it as signaling the arrival of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the crisis decades.” A state of high anxiety, then, was tangible in all walks of British life. No one was immune. At the vanguard of UK pop culture, it could of course be felt in glam. For this was the moment “when a post-war era of relentless economic growth, high employment and a massive rise in the ownership of material goods” appeared to come to a shuddering halt (Haslam 104–5). This was a grim state of internal affairs that would be compounded by global events. October’s Yom Kippur war saw Israel engage the Syrians on the Golan Heights and the Egyptians at Suez, with Jordan and the Saudis quickly joining the Arab alliance. Middle Eastern oil producers OPEC then swiftly retaliated, cutting oil production by 5 percent and continuing to reduce its output by a similar amount every month until the Israelis withdrew. Eventually, the price of crude would quadruple. At the same time, both Saudi Arabia and Iran raised their prices. On November 11, Israel and Egypt struck a peace agreement, but the price of oil continued to rise. While no Western economy escaped, with two-thirds of its oil coming from the Middle East, the United Kingdom was particularly hard hit. Just forty-eight hours after that peace accord had been signed, with inflation now at over 20 percent, the British government declared a state of emergency. This was the fifth such declaration in three years. The year 1972, for example, had not gone well. An estimated twenty-four million working days had been lost to industrial action, in a year that had also begun with a mineworkers’ strike that had only ended with the award of a 20 percent pay rise. However, this time the stakes appeared to be even higher. In October ’73, the government had endeavored to check rampant inflation by imposing strict wage control. The powerful National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)—representing the interests of more than a quarter of a million workers—reacted to this by introducing an overtime ban. So, as Dave Haslam records, “These were, both literally and metaphorically, dark days, the lowest ebb Britain had reached since the Second World War.” The oil shortage was “exacerbated by the decision of the NUM to stage an over-time ban, thus squeezing energy supplies still further” (122), while there was also the very real possibility of similar action by power workers and a rail strike. And, of course, as the state of emergency confirmed, there were to be implications for all, beyond television’s mildly inconvenient 10:30 p.m. curfew and a 50 mph limit on the motorways. In the winter of 1973/1974,
streetlighting was switched off, floodlit football matches cancelled, electric heating outlawed in offices and factories. In mid-December [Prime Minister Edward Heath] announced that British industry would be limited to a three-day week from January 1974. The word that appeared in news bulletins almost daily—“stoppage”—was all too apt. After a while it became hard to remember a time when there weren’t blank television screens, electricity shortages or train cancellations. The nation was blocked, choked, paralysed, waiting for an end. (Wheen 7)
Even the music business was directly affected, as the weeklies got thinner and the oil crisis led to a shortage of vinyl that delayed releases and resulted in thinner discs. But what of the music itself? Was it simply the case that it offered “technicolor sounds in an overcast age” (Stanley 369)? Matters of sexuality and gender excepting, glam rockers were not usually given to making explicit political statements in either their work or interviews, but it was perhaps a measure of the extreme pressure exerted at this moment that many now would. “Who would have believed this country would get like this?” asked an uncharacteristically grounded Marc Bolan. “We’ve gone back to the Middle Ages in a week!” Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter observed, “One minute it’s 1973—now it’s 1073” (qtd. in Turner, Glam, 113).
The historian Dominic Sandbrook has urged a little perspective here to actively counter stories “dominated by everything that went wrong—bombs, strikes, riots, disasters” by stressing “that for most people, those things happened off stage” (State, 31). After all, he has pointed out, one in three Brits polled at the end of ’73 reported having enjoyed a meal out in the previous month; and “despite all the economic turmoil of the early 1970s, the strikes and inflation, the oil shock and power-cuts, most . . . remained far more prosperous than they could have expected twenty years before.” Indeed, in 1973, there were more cars on the roads, “more products on the supermarket shelves, more color televisions in suburban homes, more planes taking off for the beaches of Spain.” Yet, at the risk of contradicting himself, Sandbrook then goes on to acknowledge that for many—even the relatively prosperous, even presumably wealthy pop stars—this did not mean that it was not a “frightening world beset by inflation, terrorism, crime and delinquency.” (Here, we should also not forget that there were still more than two million people in England and Wales
living without either inside bathrooms or hot running water.) So, while Sandbrook is of course spot on when concluding “the point is not that Britain was a stagnant, or unchanging society, but that the overall picture was so messy, diverse and variegated that any generalisation is bound to be risky” (State, 20–30), he does not appear willing to apply his own conclusion to the popular cultural front line. Both young Britons and their music of choice—he has claimed—were largely untroubled by, supremely indifferent to, that “frightening world.” Yet, even as a seven-year-old, I can confirm that it was most definitely not a case of noises off, that a palpable fear, anxiety, and nervous energy frequently stalked the pop charts and made for some striking musical interventions. David Essex, for instance, had announced his arrival as a glam-pop idol via one of the strangest singles ever to grace the upper reaches of the UK chart. Released in the late summer of ’73, “Rock On” (UK no. 3) was a kind of “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” for the Top 40. Sparse and minimal, unafraid of space and silence, “Rock On” was—as its producer-arranger Jeff Wayne explained—“all about the hollows, absences and the mood.” Percussion led to the extent that it often recalled Norman Whitfield’s work with the Temptations on tracks like “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” the glam pedigree of “Rock On” was authenticated by the key contribution of Herbie Flowers, who was one of just three musicians used and whose double-tracked, delay-effected bass lines helped build its unusual polyrhythmic soundscape. Just as it had done on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Flowers’s bass effectively supplied the song’s lead riff. Complementing this sonic stretch, Essex’s lyric was at once on point for glam in exploring the familiar territory of classic rock ’n’ roll and 1950s Americana, but also undercut such potentially nostalgic referents by repeatedly dragging the listener back to a confusing present and asking the questions “And where do we go from here? Which is the way that’s clear?” “Rock On” was hypnotic, angular, unsettling. Its follow-up single, “Lamplight,” was nowhere near as sonically or lyrically adventurous. Neither, though, was it a conventional pop song. Top 10 at Christmas, “Lamplight” could be viewed as a “Time” for the Top 40, its Weimar vibe lending it a Cabaret-style theatricality that was perhaps only to be expected from an artist who had landed a lead part in the musical Godspell a few years earlier and who would “return” to the stage that December in a production of the rock opera Tommy at the Rainbow.
Bryan Ferry’s solo album These Foolish Things (UK no. 5) would, however, appear to lend unequivocal support to the Sandbrook line. Its title could well be taken as an indication of its shameless desire to escape into the pop trivial. Perhaps anticipating critical disapproval and expecting reviewers in the rock weeklies not to like it, a nevertheless unrepentant Ferry had cheerfully admitted that the project was indeed an exercise in self-indulgence. “I hope the general point of it will be understood. It’s amusement value, I think” (qtd. in vivaroxymusic.com). In this respect, it was also, of course, a highly glam exercise. Just like the first two Roxy albums, in fact, it too was full of pop joy, committed to collapsing boundaries, highly theatrical, irreverent, and so, to some, quite irritating. Its track sequencing alone created some interesting and bold (or annoying and sacrilegious) juxtapositions—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” ran into “River of Salt,” “Don’t Worry Baby” immediately preceded a version of “Sympathy for the Devil,” Dylan and the Stones cozied up to Ketty Lester and Lesley Gore. If anything, then, These Foolish Things was a more “peculiar” affair than David Bowie’s own covers LP, Pin Ups—which had shared the same release date in early November, but which had at least been consistent in its mining of mid-’60s Brit-rock for its source material. In this, the Ferry record was also therefore a more obvious counter to classic rock, reaching back much further than Bowie had done. Written in the mid-1930s, “These Foolish Things” had been made famous by Billie Holliday. Here, though, it represented not only a perfect fit for a world-weary Ferry, but for current times in which the narrator’s expressions of loss and regret seemed entirely understandable. While “These Foolish Things” was played straight, Ferry’s take on the Brill Building confection “It’s My Party” is gloriously camp. Delivered from a young girl’s perspective, there is a moment at exactly one minute in when Ferry’s voice catches with faux emotion and he makes like he is just about to cry that captured the joyous humor of the whole project. This is humor that was by no means absent from a rip-roaring cover of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (UK no. 10), which, in true glam fashion, urged the listener to dance in the face of the impending apocalypse it documented. As with the cover of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” our narrator delivers the news with theatrical abandon to the rich backing of instruments, voices, and effects; and as the end of both the song and “days” approaches, a fiddle plays a memorable, mad, dervish reel to accompany us to the other side.
On the evidence of These Foolish Things, Ferry would seem to be having even more fun than Bowie does on Pin Ups. He is more prolific than his rival too, as 1973 also sees the release of two Roxy Music LPs. Released just a month after his solo record, Stranded (UK no. 1) represented the band’s first post-Eno vinyl work. Eno had quit the band in the summer, to be replaced by multi-instrumentalist Eddie Jobson (violin, keyboards, synths). Unlike his predecessor, however, Jobson would never be officially a member of the band, would receive no royalties, and would in fact be paid a weekly retainer. In a similar vein to “Virginia Plain” and “Do the Strand,” album opener “Street Life” was upbeat and danceable. Perhaps because of this, it would give the band its third consecutive Top 10 hit single. “Street Life” helped Stranded become Roxy’s first number one album, but the high-profile success of both—coupled with the knowledge of Brian Eno’s departure—would subsequently lead some critics to argue that the band had become less musically adventurous as a result. At the time, though, Stranded did not appear to disappoint. Indeed, many reviewers—Eno somewhat mischievously included—maintained that Roxy Music got better when he left. “My favorite Roxy album is the third one, which I wasn’t on,” he said. However, he also noted that Stranded “contained the seeds of their destruction, because it was getting very polished by then and didn’t really contain any new ideas” (qtd. in Stump 103). Roxy historian Paul Stump has identified a “discernible musical difference” between For Your Pleasure and Stranded, “largely concerning texture and composition,” implying that Eno’s departure resulted in the latter being less interesting and heralded the end of the “pleasant sense of flux and unpredictability” that he brought to the table. “Instruments begin to sound like ordinary rock instruments in an ordinary rock setting,” with Roxy Music now “flying in conventional formation, with roles allotted according to rock convention” (102–3). Yet, on the evidence of a track like the sinewy, funky, futuristic “Amazona,” with its squelchy midsong breakdown, this seems a little harsh if not downright inaccurate.
As its title infers, Stranded was as much a meditation on psychic dis-ease as Aladdin Sane or even its predecessor For Your Pleasure had been. Indicating that, even if Eno’s departure had ironed out some of the band’s musical kinks and quirks to leave us with an ostensibly more conventional rock unit, it had done little to blunt Roxy’s thematic edge. This should have come as no surprise, since lyrics were always Ferry’s area. Here, it might be argued that “Street Life” sits rather uncomfortably on an album whose dominant tone is established by its closing trifecta—“A Song for Europe,” “Mother of Pearl,” and “Sunset.” In its brooding rumination on love lost and loneliness, “A Song for Europe” brings to mind Piaf rather than Brecht—“Here I sit in this empty café, thinking of you.” Tackling false promises and false hope, emptiness and bitter regret—“Though the world is my oyster, it’s only a shell full of memories”—the song’s descending chords offer up the faintest musical echoes of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” However, while Ferry claimed it was a pun on the Eurovision Song Contest, its mourn
ful sax and piano, French (“Jamais, jamais, jamais”) and Latin words and phrases, and even the whistling at the close that recalls “These Foolish Things,” all work to put genuine distance between “A Song for Europe” and the Anglo-American tradition. More Noel Coward than Noel Redding. For its first ninety seconds, “Mother of Pearl” does exhibit conventional rock stylings, even including a guitar solo. At this point, though, some things change—the pace slowing and the song becoming piano driven—while others stay the same. Indeed, with “every goddess a let-down,” as Ferry points out, “it’s the same old story / All love and glory . . . a pantomime.” A recognition that even as we find ourselves on familiar lyrical ground, we are perhaps in musically unfamiliar territory. In this respect, “Sunset,” featuring Ferry on piano with the accompaniment of an acoustic bass, offered an appropriate curtain call.
Becoming the singer’s second number one of 1973 when it held the top spot for a month in November, Gary Glitter’s doleful “I Love You Love Me Love” would also end up as the year’s best-selling single. A tale of lovers grimly determined to stay a couple no matter what—“We’re still together after all the things that we’ve been through”—it could hardly be classed as a celebration. Indeed, augmented by that by now familiar airless, supercompressed production, its glam-burlesque rhythm and pacing made it all rather cheerless—dead eyed, dirgey, funereal even. Its success is perhaps all the more surprising when—as Turner notes of this time—“the need for escapism, for some light relief, could hardly have been greater” (Glam Rock, 112). Or possibly not surprising, if one looks at pop hits like “Seasons in the Sun” and concludes that relatability operates on different levels. Sometimes the pop public prefers to stay put rather than run away, favors realism over “light relief.” As the UK headed into the Christmas break, its singles chart stood as proof to this effect. It also demonstrated that one genre was particularly well suited to this multitasking. Eight of the Top 10 for the week ending December 22 could be classified as glam—Roxy Music’s “Street Life” was at ten, Mott the Hoople’s “Roll Away the Stone” at nine, David Essex’s “Lamplight” was at eight, Pierrot-ed Leo Sayer was at number seven with his debut single “The Show Must Go On,” Alvin Stardust’s “My Coo-Ca-Choo” was at five, and Gary Glitter was still at number two. This Top 10 also featured not one but two glam Christmas singles—Wizzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” and Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody.” While the former had settled into the number four position it would occupy for the next month, the latter held on to the number one position it had claimed in the first week of its release on the back of an unprecedented half a million advance orders and was already the fastest-selling 45 in British chart history.
