Glam Rock

by Simon Philo

  In peaking at number two on the UK singles chart, “Love Is the Drug” became the band’s most successful 45 to date in its own backyard too. (It would, in fact, take another “disco record,” 1979’s “Dance Away,” to match this performance. Indicatively, “Dance Away” was also the only Roxy Music single to get close to “Love Is the Drug” on Billboard, reaching number forty-four.) “Love Is the Drug” had been kept from hitting the top spot in Britain by a reissue of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Backed with “Changes” and “Velvet Goldmine,” it is tempting to view Bowie’s first UK number one as a fitting bookend to a glam era that had begun almost exactly five years earlier with the release of T. Rex’s “Ride a White Swan.” Certainly, from an industry perspective at least, it might have seemed as if every last ounce had now been squeezed out of the genre. Yet, it was not quite done. Sailor’s high-camp “Glass of Champagne” would reach number two in early ’76, while Slik’s gumbo of classical references, melodrama (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust, will love last forever? / I know that it must, my love”), and a rousing teen-pop chorus would ensure that “Forever and Ever” went one better.

  If these represented glam’s death rattle, then it was clear that it had no intention of going out with a whimper. No single track encapsulated glam’s unwillingness to go quietly more effectively than “Bohemian Rhapsody.” “No! No! No! No!” “Bohemian Rhapsody” was enjoyably, knowingly over the top. It was an apposite, (unwittingly?) meta, curtain call for the glam years—“Goodbye everybody, I’ve got to go / Got to leave you all behind and face the truth.” At nearly six minutes long but never outstaying its welcome, “Bohemian Rhapsody” stood as a symphonic endgame that simultaneously demonstrated the pleasures of the genre and the fact that it could possibly go no further. At a time when most of rock’s main protagonists appeared to have stopped smiling, it had humor and joy in spades. Undeniably overwrought (“spare him his life from this monstrosity”), full of “Bismillahs” and “Beelzebubs,” “Gallileos” and “Figaros,” it was never pretentious or portentous, due, in large measure, to the fact that it was so funny and so much fun—“Thunderbolt of lightning, very, very frightening.” Brought to a fitting close with the clash of a gong, here be glam in excelsis. If this was the end, then “Bohemian Rhapsody” would take glam out as it came in. Both ends burning. “Hot Love” had been at the top for six weeks. “Bohemian Rhapsody” would be the UK’s number one for a staggering nine. Elsewhere on the Mercuryal, generically on-point A Night at the Opera (UK no. 1, US no. 4), “Seaside Rendezvous” was perhaps this LP’s equivalent of “Bring Back Leroy Brown.” In a vampy, vaudeville, end-of-the-pier, music hall style, it featured Mercury on the upright piano, accompanied by kazoos and a duck whistle, belting out a supercamp lyric—“What a damn jolly good idea,” “so tres charmant, my dear,” and “get a new facial / start a sensation”—that climaxed with him asking his audience to “give us a kiss.” For Peter Doggett, tracks like “Seaside Rendezvous” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” channeled “a sense of joy that was entirely self-generated,” creating music “that was about nothing more weighty than the pleasure of its own existence” (Shock, 455). Although not necessarily intended as a criticism (and indeed possessing a good deal of truth), this suggests that glam could be a rather onanistic affair—one offering its practitioners plenty of “jollification” (“Seaside Rendezvous”) but “no escape from reality” (“Bohemian Rhapsody”). Yet if it really was that solipsistic, against what exactly should it be measured? How is mid-decade rock any more engaged or outward looking? One of 1975’s most commercially successful LPs, Bad Company’s Straight Shooter (US and UK no. 3) included such tracks as “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” “Good Lovin’ Gone Bad” and “Wild Fire Woman.” One would be hard pressed to find more solipsistic fare than these tired, misogynistic odes to liaisons de la route.

  Back in January, in a piece entitled “Kiss It Goodbye,” Creem had filed a report on a “Death of Glam” event that had been held at Los Angeles’s Palladium in late ’74. This eulogy had been rather hasty. At this point, at least in the UK, glam still had a good twelve months more to run. With differing levels of artistic and commercial success, 1975 did, though, undoubtedly witness various and varied attempts at negotiating the inevitable “end of days” that pretty much everyone knew would surely arrive. Most of its players knew that it was “only rock and roll,” that it was joyously ephemeral pop stuff. Yet, there would be an afterlife.

  Chapter 7

  “Who Can I Be Now?”

  So, was there a pop vacuum that needed urgent filling in 1976? Glam may have appeared to have expired along with the final, sustained chord of Freddie’s grand piano. However, as the varieties of rock and pop that followed confirm, reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. For, in their musical practice and performance, punk and post-punk, New Romanticism and New Pop, and—more obviously—glam-metal, were all indelibly glitter stained. With punk, then, it is too simplistic to argue that it enthusiastically nailed down glam’s coffin lid. Although punk apparently reveled in its aggressive commitment to that great big glam no-no, authenticity, it also clearly adopted and/or adapted several of the latter’s key ingredients. Indicatively, David Bowie and Roxy Music were often the only pre-punk role models British punk allowed itself. “Without Roxy,” declared Adam Ant, “there’d have been no punk” (qtd. in Doyle 45); and, indeed, it is widely recognized that—particularly in the time before the movement had recorded music to call its own—tracks like “Editions of You” (1973) would function as a soundtrack staple at many a punk gathering. Pete Shelley had even covered the song in his pre-Buzzcocks band, Jets of Air. So, as Alwyn Turner has pointed out, UK punk was “largely populated by those who had grown up on glam, whether as musicians . . . or fans,” noting that the “vast majority of British punks had grown up with T. Rex, the Spiders from Mars and Mott the Hoople, and [that] most were quick to claim the Stooges and the New York Dolls as well.” He also persuasively triangulates, in proposing that

  despite the superficial differences, punk—like disco—had much in common with glam: there were art school backgrounds, references to Weimar and science fiction, a love of the seven-inch single and of invented names, a taste for provocation and for excessive dressing up. (Glam Rock, 146)

  Many punks, then, concurred with the Specials’ Jerry Dammers, who viewed it “as a piss-take of rock music, as rock music committing suicide, and it was great and it was really funny” (qtd. in Maconie 223). Iconoclastic, humorous, determinedly antirock, and avowedly teen-centric, punk was the work of the children of the children of the revolution. Yet, in comparing it unfavorably with punk, Dick Hebdige has looked to highlight glam’s dereliction of duty. Punk is lionized for eschewing what he identifies as glam’s “meta-message” of “escape—from class, from sex, from personality, from obvious commitment” (66). This is, though, a surprisingly one-dimensional assessment that arguably misreads both styles in underestimating the latter while romantically overestimating the former.

  Less contentiously, glam was more audibly and visibly present in New Romantic’s DNA. Found, for example, in Duran Duran’s highly self-conscious mash-up of Bowie, Roxy, the Sex Pistols, and Chic; and, specifically, on tracks like “Careless Memories” (1981)—with its campy, cinematic lyrical references to “gun-smoke drifting in an empty room”—and the stompy, Glitteresque glory that was “Friends of Mine” (1981). Of course, that was then; but how did established glam acts fare in the immediate wake of its apparent demise? As has already been noted, while most could see it coming, their survival strategies were many and varied—ranging from pure, bloody-minded denial to wholesale willingness to “let go” and move on. Like Sweet, Mud had severed links with Chinn and Chapman. The band was also on a new label, Private Stock, having left RAK. These changes presaged a move away from glam-pop, and, particularly, the Elvis pastiches that had characterized its more recent output. A change in musical direction had, in fact, been evident on late 1975’s “Show
Me You’re a Woman” (UK no. 8), which had seen Mud come over like a male Three Degrees on what was a somewhat rough approximation of the then-voguish Philly Soul. Summer of 1976’s “Shake It Down” (UK no. 12) was an out-and-out, if unconvincing, cash-in on disco’s continuing appeal, while “Lean on Me,” an uninspiring cover of the Bill Withers soul classic, had made the Top 10 in December. It would be the last time the band troubled the UK chart. This was a fate that did not befall Showaddywaddy. Persisting with the rock ’n’ roll revivalism that had served it so well thus far, the band would be rewarded with its first UK best-seller, when “Under the Moon of Love” made number one in late ’76. Six further Top 10 singles followed up to the end of 1978, by which time Showaddywaddy had been joined by another revival act, Darts, whose double A-side single “Daddy Cool / The Girl Can’t Help It” had been the first of seven consecutive UK Top 20 hits the band enjoyed between fall of 1977 and the summer of 1979.

  In February 1976, Slade’s characteristically self-effacing valedictory single “Let’s Call It Quits” (UK no. 11) had stalled just outside the Top 10. By now, all the band’s energy was devoted to cracking the North American market. Britain, it would appear, had been given its notice to “quit.” Like Slade, Sweet’s response to glam’s demise had been to focus its attention on building what it hoped would be a lengthy and lucrative career as a hard rock act in North America. This had also been driven by the band’s long-standing desire to take control of its own artistic destiny. However, 1976 kicked off even less successfully than it did for rival Slade. “Lies in Your Eyes” could only limp to number thirty-five, while March’s Give Us a Wink—the band’s first self-produced and self-written album—failed to chart in the UK. Give Us a Wink did, though, perform better in the US, where it reached the Top 30, and so perhaps validated the band’s now pretty much wholesale commitment to pursuing North American success. Through ’76, Sweet would play a string of headlining shows in the States, but the following year would see no activity either live or on vinyl anywhere in the world. In fact, Sweet would not chart again until early 1978, when—helped by its inclusion on the soundtrack of the Jackie Collins soft-porn movie The Stud—“Love Is Like Oxygen” made the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic. After this, unlike a resurgent Slade in the early ’80s, Sweet would never again be a commercial force to reckon with.

  This, of course, was not to be David Bowie’s fate. Preceded by the transatlantic Top 10 single “Golden Years,” January 1976’s Station to Station (UK no. 5, US no. 3) had been the first Bowie album to perform better in the States than in his homeland. The more challenging spring release “TVC15” (backed with “We Are the Dead”) did, however, prove less palatable to both markets. It peaked in the midsixties on Billboard, and, in only just reaching the Top 40, broke a run of fifteen consecutive UK Top 30 hits that had begun with “Starman” back in the summer of 1972. In hindsight, “TVC15” could be considered an aperitif for what would become known as Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy”—three albums that either derived directly from or, as with the last of them, were influenced by his time living and working in the German city. The first of these was January 1977’s Low (UK no. 2, US no. 11), which had included the single “Sound + Vision” (UK no. 3, US no. 69). Backed by another album track, the autobiographical (?) “A New Career in a New Town,” “Sound + Vision” appeared to lend weight to a hardening critical consensus that viewed glam as a stage or phase in Bowie’s “career.” As an illustration of his ability and willingness to keep moving, it was, though, simply another expression of that very glam sensibility that had lain behind each transformation. Extracted from an album Bob Stanley has described as the “blankest, loneliest record in all pop” (333), it should come as no great surprise to learn that June’s “Be My Wife” fared even worse commercially, in failing to chart in either Britain or the US.

  Undeterred, in a prolific year, October 1977 saw the release of Heroes, which featured King Crimson’s Robert Fripp and ex-Roxy synth man Brian Eno. Once again, while Bowie’s superloyal fan base ensured that it would be another Top Five album in the UK, its Billboard chart peak of just thirty-five signaled a precipitous decline in his commercial fortunes in North America—one given further confirmation when its rousing title track failed to even make the Hot 100. September 1978’s live double Stage (UK no. 5, US no. 44)—which had included versions of “Ziggy Stardust,” “Hang On to Yourself,” “Soul Love,” “Five Years,” and “Star,” alongside tracks from Station to Station, Low, and Heroes—steadied the commercial ship a bit in the States; but the final part of the trilogy, 1979’s Lodger, would continue the uncompromising musical journey Bowie now appeared to be on. Although Lodger (UK no. 4, US no. 20) did return him to the Billboard Top 20, it noticeably failed to supply any hit singles of even the minor, let alone major, variety.

  Roxy Music’s fifth album Siren had performed as expected in the UK; but, given the success of “Love Is the Drug,” its chart peak of just fifty in the States was the source of some disappointment. In a presumably connected development, the band had called it quits in the middle of 1976. Bryan Ferry’s third solo LP, Let’s Stick Together, was released that summer and spawned two UK Top 10 singles, including the title track with its memorable video promo featuring a superlouche, pencil-mustachioed Ferry and then girlfriend, model Jerry Hall, in a tiger-print dress complete with tail. In very glam fashion, Let’s Stick Together also featured several “covers” of Roxy Music originals—“Sea Breezes,” “2HB,” “Chance Meeting,” and “Remake Remodel” from the band’s first album, and “Casanova” from Country Life. Pop will eat itself. By the time In Your Mind (UK no. 5) came out in February 1977, though, Ferry’s critical stock had hit rock bottom. While David Bowie had, by and large, escaped the critics’ opprobrium, this was not the case for Ferry, who was subjected to sustained attacks, often bordering on outright abuse, from the British “inkies.” At the mild end of the spectrum, Charles Shaar Murray would write in October 1977 that Roxy Music had been rapidly sidetracked/soundtracked into a

  chintzy evocation of Thirties/Forties movie star Gatsby and cocktail eleganza that had flat-out nothing to do with rock and roll at all, simply being an extension of the vapid croonerama that made the invention of rock and roll necessary in the first place. (Shots, 223)

  Ferry’s solo work, then, might have taken the “faux-matinee idol image to its logical conclusion” (Hoskyns 64). Yet, it is too simplistic to simply fix him as a kind of McCartney to Eno’s Lennon, as the UK press seemed keen to do at the time. Although the band’s trademark wit and camp might not be immediately apparent in Ferry’s solo LPs, the Roxy MO was still surely in evidence. Recasting those five Roxy Music songs, for instance, was very postmodern and so very Roxy Music. As Ferry explained, “It was weird ’cos in a way it was like I was covering myself and trying to do them in a different way” (qtd. in Doyle 49).

  It had not helped, however, that Ferry had relocated to California in 1977. At almost the exact moment David Bowie had made his “interesting” and so, in the eyes of the rock press, credible move east to Berlin—where he would team up with the man they continued to see as Roxy’s true artistic heartbeat—Bryan Ferry had headed west, to the very epicenter, the dark heart, of the showbiz mainstream. For a time, Ferry has admitted, he rather enjoyed mixing it with movie stars, while also recognizing that

  LA was very conservative in those days, there was nowhere to go, there weren’t any cool restaurants. It was very old-fashioned in that sense. . . . There was no kind of street life. After a while it seemed rather empty and barren. (Qtd. in Doyle 49)

  Punk was, of course, a major contributing factor to the mistreatment of Bryan Ferry. Barney Hoskyns has proposed that punk “was glam ripping itself apart,” drawing directly from the work of Dick Hebdige in seeing and hearing it as a conscious “addendum to the ‘text’ of glam rock—an addendum designed to puncture [its] extravagantly ornate style” (95). In January 1978, Harper’s magazine had identified the “fragmentation and par
anoia” as the “real keynotes” of the seventies (qtd. in Beckett, Lights, 178). For many, then, punk “was the most famous cultural significance of this mid-70s unease and volatility” (178). Yet surely it was the undeniably more visible and audible glam that—at the very least—got there first in registering such “unease and volatility”? At the time, with punk right in front of them, the critics simply could not see or hear this. Writing in the New Musical Express in October 1977, Charles Shaar Murray noted that glam had now “receded, leaving nothing but a sequinned scum over some of the rock that it touched.” While Shaar Murray clearly shared in that palpable sigh of relief emanating from the massed ranks of the UK’s music journos who were simply glad to see the back of it, he was forced to concede that “there was room for an awful lot of enigma-variation in the glitter universe.” Above all, he appreciated that