Glam Rock

by Simon Philo

  “Merry Xmas Everybody” represented a conscious act of intervention. According to Noddy Holder, it had been conceived as “a real antidote to what was happening in the country at the time. We were right in the middle of a disastrous period politically. There were power-cuts every day and half the workforce seemed to be on strike” (qtd. in Turner Glam, 113). So, by directly addressing this context, “Merry Xmas Everybody” would function as one of the least escapist novelty records ever. Its tableau vivant of a contemporary British working-class Christmas is very unsentimental, without a trace of religion or nostalgia. “Little Drummer Boy,” it ain’t. Again, as the song’s lyricist Holder explained, this was no accident: “I knew exactly what I wanted in it. I didn’t want a children’s choir and sleigh bells” (qtd. in Harris, “Whatever,” 54). “Merry Xmas Everybody” remains determinedly earthbound throughout—the fairies’ job is to keep Santa sober, Granny may well be already drunk, there is no snow, and, stripping away the pretense that there is one true Santa, we are told that “every Santa has a ball.” While its abbreviated title—it is pointedly “Xmas” not the fuller “Christmas”—indicates the breezy informality that lies within, the song’s earthy snapshots border on the bawdy—“What will your daddy do, when he sees your mother kissing Santa Claus?” Then, toward the end, as the song builds to yet another boozy climax, Holder screams “It’s Christmaaaaaaas!” for an ear-piercing five seconds—issuing an order rather than an invitation, in much the same way that “everybody’s having fun” comes across as an offer we cannot refuse. Yet, though thoroughly grounded, the song is not without hope—“Look to the future now, it’s only just begun.” In this, as Holder explained,

  it fitted right with the political and social things going on at the time. It was very grim. . . . The whole country, just before the Christmas on ’73, was in turmoil. That’s why I came up with the line, “Look to the future now / It’s only just begun.” That’s what everybody had to do. The country couldn’t have been at a lower ebb. In times like that, people always turned to showbiz. (qtd. in Harris, “Whatever,” 54)

  Rather than being a song for Christmas ’73, it was Roy Wood’s intention that “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” should be added to the list of bona fide rock ’n’ roll Christmas songs. Utilizing his take on that Spectoresque Wall of Sound heard previously on Wizzard’s two number one singles—“See My Baby Jive” and “Angel Fingers”—“I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” is a typically dessert-only confection—rich and sugary, (sleigh) bells and whistles, festive lyrical staples, brass, strings, and children’s voices. In contrast to Slade’s realism, Wizzard offered a kinder, gentler take on the holiday season, projecting a warm nostalgic vision that perpetuated seasonal myths—of folks with “rosy cheeks,” for example, “skating in the park.” Unlike Holder, Wood clearly had no qualms about deploying either sleigh bells or a children’s choir. Indeed, a lengthy, half-minute-plus coda features just these two ingredients as kids’ voices repeat the line “When the snowman brings the snow.” By this time, Wood himself has already signed off with the instruction to “give your love for Christmas.” Yet, the song is not pure-grade, 100 percent schmaltz. This is glam after all. Witness that raspberry blown at its start to the accompaniment of a ringing cash register, and Wood’s barked order to the schoolkids—credited irreverently on the sleeve as “Miss Snob and Class C” and here addressed simply as “you lot”—to “take it!” Overall, though, the sentimental does win out.

  While Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” would emerge as the clear winner, the impressive chart performance of “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” would suggest that, when confronted with a choice, many record buyers simply purchased both singles. Though different in some respects, these songs communicated fun and joy, offered theatricality and spectacle, harnessed the unpretentious power of rock ’n’ roll, and actively encouraged inclusivity. Britain was having a glam Christmas.

  Chapter 5

  “Teenage Rampage”

  The first UK Top 10 singles chart of 1974 featured eight glam acts. Joining Slade and Wizzard were Alvin Stardust, Leo Sayer, Gary Glitter, David Essex, Mott the Hoople, and Roxy Music. The chart year would also be bookended by a couple of glam Christmas best-sellers—“Merry Xmas Everybody” and Mud’s “Lonely This Christmas.” And proving that it was not just for the festive season either, in the week ending February 23, three of Britain’s four best-selling singles were glam—with Suzi Quatro at number one with “Devil Gate Drive” and Mud’s “Tiger Feet” and Alvin Stardust’s “Jealous Mind” tucked in just behind it. After a five-year absence, Lulu returned to the UK Top 10 in early ’74 with a cover of the David Bowie song “The Man Who Sold the World” (UK no. 5). Recorded at Chateau d’Herouville during the Pin Ups sessions, Bowie produced, arranged, played, and sang on the track. It peaked at number three, two places higher than Bowie’s latest single, “Rebel Rebel.” Around the same time, Elton John took one of his most glam offerings, “Bennie and the Jets,” to the top of the Billboard singles chart, while back in Britain, the Rubettes’ “Sugar Baby Love” would eventually hit number one in the spring—having been forced to wait its turn by first Mud, then Suzi Quatro, and then Alvin Stardust. Such stories indicate the extent to which glam was the pop dominant. Glam-pop songwriter-producers Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman—likened by Brian Eno to Phil Spector in a September Melody Maker interview—would be responsible for more singles sales in 1974 than the Beatles achieved in any single year of their illustrious chart career.

  Nothing illustrated more graphically the extent to which glam had become front-page news than the media furor surrounding “Teenage Rampage” (UK no. 2)—a track mischievously described by its authors, Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, as a pop “Nuremberg rally” (qtd. in Thompson 268). Having already sought corporation bans on Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” and Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling,” Mary Whitehouse—founder/president of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association—now directed her moral outrage toward Sweet’s latest single. In a letter to the head of BBC Radio, she wrote:

  Dear Mr Trethowen. I am writing with regard to a “pop” record currently being played on the radio, namely, “TEENAGE RAMPAGE” sung by SWEET. The words include the following: “All over the land the kids are out to get the upper hand / They’re out on the streets / to turn up the heat / And soon they’ll be completely in command / Imagine the sensation at the teenage occupation / At thirteen they’ll be learning / But at fourteen they’ll be violent [sic—the actual lyric is “burning”] / Join the revolution NOW, NOW, NOW (crescendo) / Get yourself a constitution / Turn another page in the teenage rampage NOW, NOW, NOW.” This record, thanks to the publicity given to it, is now No. 1 in the charts. Yesterday I rang your duty officer about the matter and asked that it should be brought to your attention immediately. I hope you will agree that the playing of such a record is wholly inadvisable in present circumstances and look forward to hearing that you have seen fit to ban any further transmission of this record. (Qtd. in Loui, n.p.)

  Responding just a few days later, Trethowen wrote:

  Dear Mrs Whitehouse. Thank you for your letter of 13th January. Careful consideration has been given to “Teenage Rampage” but we have not felt that we would be justified in banning this record from the air. Nor do we feel that it would have been right for us to have excluded the recent recording from Top of the Pops. As you will know, we are not deterred from placing a ban on any record, however high it may be in the charts or however popular the group associated with it. Bans in the past have been placed on records by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. However, in this case, although I doubt if anyone would think the lyrics particularly distinguished (and you know I am given to understatement), they do not identify any target for “the revolution” and we believe that young people, while possibly enjoying the easy beat of the music, will be unaffected by the words, since they are totally empty of real content—like all too much pop music. Thi
s is by no means the first record of its kind and certainly past examples have proved harmless in their effect. Indeed, we believe that to ban this record would have the sole result of making young people feel it did have a significance, as well as a meaning, which, in my view, neither exists nor was intended. (Qtd. in Loui, n.p.)

  So, hysterical overestimation was countered with contemptuous underestimation. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Whitehouse took pop much more seriously than Trethowen, who manages to dismiss her, Sweet, and the band’s fans in the space of a few patronizing lines. Charmingly, he thinks both the song and its young fans are stupid. Although he is right to note that “Teenage Rampage” did not “identify any target for ‘the revolution,’” this does not of course make it “totally empty of real content.” For, as with so much here-today-gone-tomorrow rock ’n’ roll of the past, the value of “Teenage Rampage” surely lay in its status as a thrilling, inchoate war cry. After all, it did invite us, urge us, to “imagine the sensation.”

  When Gary Glitter opined that “rock really must have more to do with fantasy than reality” (qtd. in Turner, Glam Rock, 138), he was simply echoing “Starman’s” call that “the children” should be allowed to “boogie.” In its headlong rush into hedonism, that determined escape into pleasure and laughter, glam would often appear to be tapping into what Alwyn Turner identifies as “a long British tradition of amused detachment, fleeing from seriousness as well as from hard times” (Glam Rock, 16). “More champagne to lose this pain,” as Ferry sang on Country Life (“If It Takes All Night”). Of course, this is a well-worn function of pop in any age, but one that had arguably much more riding on it in the unremittingly gloomy, doomy, deep funk of early 1974 when “there’s something in the air / of which we all must be aware.”

  In his revisionist history The Myth of Decline: The Rise of Britain Since 1945, George Bernstein contends that “ordinary Britons and scholars alike, in focusing on Britain’s economy and its role as a world power in the post-war era, have exaggerated the extent of [the nation’s] decline.” Too much attention, he argues, has been paid to “change that often was inevitable and so represents no failure on the part of the British people.” Understandably, though, at the time, neither “ordinary” folk nor “scholars” could summon this kind of perspective (xiv). Instead, declinism ruled—the belief that Britain was in a state of terminal, irreversible decline being widely shared, and—as glam has demonstrated—frequently and forcibly expressed. Echoing Bernstein, Sandbrook claims that focusing on declinism risks obscuring “the fact that for most people, life was getting considerably better, not worse” (State, 59). Yet, as someone who lived through these times, it certainly did not feel like this. For us “ordinary Britons,” the statistics simply did not lie, and their impact was keenly felt. By the mid-1970s, the UK’s share of world trade had slumped from 25 percent in 1950 to less than 10 percent; and whereas the average annual growth rate for the national economy had been a record-high 2.8 percent between 1951 and 1973, the six-year period from ’73 to ’79 saw the rate slip by over half to 1.3 percent—the lowest average since records began. Furthermore, the UK’s 16 percent average annual inflation rate between 1974 and 1981 was markedly higher—read, worse—than our benchmark economies (e.g., 8.4 percent in the US, 4.7 percent in West Germany, and 11 percent in France). In such a context, it should come as little surprise to anyone that declinism was “an established British state of mind” that “truly began to pervade the national consciousness,” filling “doomy books aimed at the general reader,” becoming “a melodramatic staple for newspapers, magazines, and television programmes,” and pervading “the work of artists, novelists, dramatists, film-makers and pop musicians” (Beckett, Lights, 177). So it was that, in the case of the latter, the airwaves in the spring of ’74 were filled with prime examples of declinism-on-45—as first Paper Lace’s “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and then Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun” made number one on the UK singles chart. In particular, Jacks’s English-language version of a Jacques Brel lyric went beyond mere wistful—hearts were “skinned” as well as knees—in appearing to be, at best, an extended suicide note, at worst, a message from beyond the grave (“Bye bye papa / It’s hard to die”).

  Events in the first half of 1974 undoubtedly contributed to the widespread and palpable sense of declinism that fueled British cultural life. Back in January, the so-called three-day week had been imposed by a British government desperately trying to combat the ill effects of a severe oil crisis exacerbated by homegrown labor unrest, such as the strike called by the National Union of Mineworkers that eventually began on February 4. To demonstrate that he had the country’s backing, Prime Minister Edward Heath then called a snap general election for the end of that month. He lost. At the same time, the first few months of 1974 also witnessed a big increase in Irish Republican Army (IRA) activities on the UK mainland. In January there were two IRA bomb explosions in Birmingham and five in London; and in February, an IRA device would kill twelve on a bus traveling on the M62 highway that was carrying British army personnel and their families. Yet, Sandbrook argues that, while for most Britons “these things happened off-stage” (State, 31); for “one social group,”

  the political and economic shocks of the seventies hardly registered even as a distant rumbling on the horizon. Unless their parents were unusually political, most children were barely affected by the major news stories of the day, which is perhaps one reason they later remembered the 1970s so fondly (State, 347).

  This revisionism is, though, a little hard to swallow. Indeed, it is often the case that those who “remember” the early 1970s most “fondly” tend to be those who did not experience it firsthand. On the other hand, life on the ground could be tough for all. Indicatively, 1974 saw emigration rise sharply, and—“aided” by a fall in births—there followed three years in which the UK’s population declined for the first time in its long history. The middle years of the decade also saw a noteworthy fall in average monthly disposable income from £202 in ’74 to £187 three years later, prompting the New Statesman to declare that “living standards, for the first time in 40 years, are falling” (qtd. in Beckett, Lights, 176). As inflation spiraled, house prices fell too—by a hefty 13 percent in 1974 and an even chunkier 16 percent in the following year.

  To assert that this had little, if any, impact on “ordinary” Britons, young or old, seems rather far-fetched. Particularly so when much of our cultural matter of choice did not let us forget it; particularly so since “it spoke ominously to audiences beyond the traditional constituencies of the elderly, the conservative and the instinctively pessimistic” (Beckett, Lights, 177). Towing a familiar critical line, Steve Millward has argued that by 1974 the “fervour had gone out of music and that what was left was sterile and going nowhere” (ix). Waiting impatiently for the arrival of punk, he has maintained that glam rock should be characterized by its “apolitical hedonism.” Presumably with material like Bowie’s Diamond Dogs in mind, Millward is at least ready to concede that it “had a darker side” (117). Glam’s “darker” hue, though, was much in evidence right across the board in 1974. It might not have been Walls and Bridges, but a lot of it would undoubtedly channel the zeitgeist. Slade’s uncharacteristically reflective, piano-led ballad “Everyday,” for example, would peak at number three in the spring; Gary Glitter’s positively funereal “Remember Me This Way” would achieve an identical chart placing; and the year was also noteworthy for several histrionic wide-screen glam elegies—Alice Cooper’s “Teenage Lament” (UK no. 12), T. Rex’s “Teenage Dream” (UK no. 13), and Mott the Hoople’s “Saturday Gigs” (UK no. 41).

  “Teenage Dream” worked on various levels. While 1973 had seen “20th Century Boy” and “The Groover” reach the Top Five, that year’s T. Rex album Tanx had been a commercial disappointment, in failing to come close to matching the sales of its predecessors, The Slider (1972) and Electric Warrior (1971). Confirmation, if it were needed, that T. Rex was in decline came in March 1
974 with the release of the Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow LP. Credited to Marc Bolan and T. Rex, it could only limp to number twelve. It was hard, then, not to hear unalloyed regret, even self-pity on “Teenage Dream”—a track that as a single could not even make the Top 10. At over five minutes, “Teenage Dream” was a full-on pop melodrama featuring lush strings and swooning BVs. As Dave Thompson points out, “The plaintive chorus served up a slice of autobiographical pathos quite unlike the self-aggrandising of old” (274). As ever, it was all about Bolan. This time, though—as if perhaps to acknowledge that the game was up, the race run—that godlike self is vulnerable and “broken,” living in “a rusty world” whose “prison bars are hard to clean.” “Whatever happened to the teenage dream?” Bolan asks, before proceeding to answer his own question. In July, “Light of Love” would fail to make the Top 20. In November, “Zip Gun Boogie” stalled outside the Top 40.