by Simon Philo
what it meant was that what the world needed less of was some guy in a beard standing with his back to the audience playing an organ solo for twenty-five minutes, and what it needed more of was short, sharp attractive-sounding records performed by interesting-looking, visually flamboyant geezers with a different attitude.
In this way, glam constituted the very essence of pop life. It was
about posters on the wall, singles on the jukebox. That satin top in the window that would, please god, still be there come Friday when the pay packet / pocket money arrived so it could be worn to the Bowie / T Rex / Roxy Music concert on Saturday.
Plus, like all significant youth music movements, “it was a great parent shocker” (Shots, 223–26). In the same month as Shaar Murray’s funeral address, a double A-side single of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and “Pyjamarama” had been released. Designed to boost sales of a greatest hits package, it reached number eleven on the UK chart, where it found itself alongside the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun,” Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” the Boomtown Rats’ “Mary of the Fourth Form,” and the Stranglers’ “No More Heroes.” It did not seem out of place in such punky company. Neither had Marc Bolan. A little over two years earlier—in the summer of 1975—T. Rex had released the finest glam single of 1975. Spacey synths prominent at the start could do nothing to disguise the trademark boogie-shuffle and amiably bonkers lyric of “New York City” (UK no. 15) featuring a woman with a frog in her hand. With Flo and Eddie’s distinctive banshee BVs, its single verse of just two lines, and chorus of three repeated lines with a fourth as payoff, it had all the ingredients of a classic T. Rex track. In this respect, it could easily be viewed as a retread, as proof of Bolan standing still. Of all the glam acts, then, T. Rex seemed to be the least mobile. Yet, this would not spell the end for Bolan. In the summer of 1976, “I Love to Boogie” (UK no. 13) represented the band’s first single release of the post-glam era. Simple and repetitive, brief and shorn of hippy-dippy lyrical references, it was an expression of glorious denial and a willful refusal that aligned it with punk. In 1977 Marc Bolan would find his open embrace of punk reciprocated, as he took the Damned on tour and introduced the Jam and Generation X as musical guests to millions of viewers of his children’s TV show, Marc. T. Rex and the Damned might have seemed unlikely allies. Bolan’s most recent album, Dandy in the Underworld (UK no. 26), had, though, been a pretty lo-fi affair; and, in practice and sensibility, like the two genres they represented, they were not so different. Sex Pistols vocalist John Lydon and guitarist Steve Jones were self-confessed glam fans. Something that could be heard on the band’s surprisingly rich, glossy even, debut album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (UK no. 1), which had come out in the fall of ’77. As many punks did, the band also revered Iggy Pop, and Lydon had, in fact, auditioned with a version of Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen,” while the Banshees and the Skids would cover “20th Century Boy” and “All the Young Dudes,” respectively. The punks themselves were often prepared to acknowledge a kinship. The rock scribes less so. On the very cusp of a comeback, Marc Bolan was killed in a car crash in September 1977. Record Mirror ran with the headline “Glam Rock Is Dead.”
In early 1979 a reformed Roxy Music returned with a new album. Manifesto was the first of what would eventually be a trio in the band’s Mk II era (1979–1982), in what are sometimes disparagingly referred to as the band’s “disco years,” a time during which there would be some notable US successes—for example, “Dance Away” is only bettered in its Billboard showing by “Love Is the Drug,” while no Roxy LP will beat Manifesto’s peak position of number twenty-three—and, rather predictably, plenty of critical opprobrium. Embracing synth-pop and dance will also line up Roxy Music with the New Romantics, on whom, together with David Bowie, the band would have a profound influence in terms of both sound and (out)look, as pop culture—initially in the UK, but eventually in the States too—shifts in a “neo-glam direction” (Reynolds, Rip, 336).
Manifesto featured an “east” and “west” side, reflecting its collision of New Wave/post-punk and disco/dance. (In the case of the latter, did the presence of Luther Vandross on BVs and Marotta and Ferrone on percussion, and the fact that some tracks had been mixed at Atlantic’s studio in New York, codify Ferry’s still-burning desire to crack the States?) As it limped to number forty, the first single to be taken from the album, “Trash,” hardly marked an auspicious return to the UK chart. It was, however, noteworthy for its adoption as a ready-made anthem for a new, still at this point nameless, subcultural scene then emerging from selected West End clubs that would subsequently come to be known as New Romantic. More successful second single “Dance Away” (UK no. 2, US no. 44) combined a by now familiar desperate desire to escape with a debilitating ennui. This, of course, made it very on message, linking it with earlier songs like “Love Is the Drug” and future Roxy tracks like “Same Old Scene” (1980) and “Avalon” (1982). For Gary Mulholland, “Dance Away” lacked “any of the pop-art edge and threatening ambiguity that made” Roxy Music Mk I “so extraordinary.” Yet, he is still forced to concede that “although essentially a goodbye to the essence of Roxy Music, it was a fond farewell”:
It begins with Ferry lighting a [cigarette] and sighing, before that familiar vibrato leer sums up his entire “alone at the cocktail party” schtick: “loneliness is a crowded room,” and of course, the spectacular “she’s dressed to kill / and guess who’s dying?”
Ultimately, Mulholland has argued that “Dance Away” witnessed “lounge-rock” giving way to “old-folk’s disco” (86), an uncharitable assessment that was widely shared. Reviewing Manifesto, Trouser Press charged Roxy Music with a “lack of adventurousness,” for “pandering” and so “conceding” to the “dreaded disco,” and made a telling distinction between the album and “human music” (qtd. in Rigby 199). Writing in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus dismissed the record as a “lovely footnote” that led “nowhere” (Manifesto, web). Yet, as if to demonstrate that they were more than a footnote, the band toured Europe with twitchy post-punk art-rockers Wire, and hardly anyone appeared to notice that the album’s opener and title track featured a full two minutes of angular music-as-noise prior to Ferry’s vocals crashing in—“I’m for life around the corner that takes you by surprise / That comes leaves all the need and more besides.” As a comeback, it was neither humble nor apologetic—boldly declaring “I am for the revolution’s coming,” urging us to “hold out” when “in doubt,” and to “question what [we] see.” Once the lyric was done, it proceeded to serve up the kind of noise then being made by John Lydon’s post-Pistols outfit, Public Image Limited. By this time, Roxy Music had also recruited a new bass player—the former Vibrator, Gary Tibbs, who would go on to play with Adam and the Ants.
As a fourteen-year-old budding New Romantic, I had first become aware of Roxy Music in the autumn of 1980, when, on the strength of the modish hit single “Over You” (UK no. 5, US no. 80), I had purchased a cassette of the band’s seventh studio album, Flesh + Blood. Normally, there would be a battle to gain control of the communal stereo we were fortunate enough to have access to in our school rec room—a struggle that, in this Darwinian bear pit where seniority was everything and I was currently at the very bottom of the heap, I would invariably lose. However, attempts at playing Flesh + Blood proved surprisingly successful. It was clear that Roxy Music—even a Mark II version supposedly flirting dangerously with disco—was still a palatable proposition to pop kids of all ages. To those eighteen-year-olds with a taste for Crimson and Floyd, to the sixteen-year-olds “into” their punk and New Wave, and of course to my own peers, desperately casting around for a pop music style to call our own. It was perhaps for this reason that Flesh + Blood (UK no. 1, US no. 35) would prove to be even more commercially successful than Manifesto. There were, in fact, only five LPs that would better it for UK sales in 1980. Predictably, though, it also proved even less appealing to the rock authe
nticity lobby than its immediate predecessor. Rolling Stone, for example, declared it to be “shockingly bad.” With its creation of a sonic landscape that will prove instantly influential, this is the album where and when Ferry’s search for studio perfection really kick in. Yet the undeniably glossy end product is never cold to the touch. It could, in fact, be deemed warmer, more “human,” than any predecessor. In the UK singles chart at the same time as Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” “Oh Yeah (On the Radio)” (UK no. 5) combined a great hook with plenty of savvy references to the “radio.” It was straightforwardly inclusive in a most un-Roxy way. Indeed, Rigby has rightly described it as “unashamedly sentimental,” its lyric “drawing for a change—straightforwardly, sincerely—on common currency” and so “trad[ing] cheerfully in outright cliché—cars, radios, movie shows, ‘our song’” (226). In contrast, “Same Old Scene” (UK no. 12)—the second single to be taken from Flesh + Blood—mined classic Roxy Mk I territory. Similar to “Love Is the Drug,” it was motored by world-weariness, ennui, cynicism, and not a little self-loathing, depicting “a nocturnal existence devoted to non-stop clubbing and younger partners as a decadent vacuum” (Rigby 227). “Nothing lasts forever,” we are repeatedly told. “Our lighter moments” are “precious few,” the world being marked by the “heavy weather, we’re going through.” Dismissed by Melody Maker as “empty, disco-oriented pap,” the “infectious rhythmic pulse” of “Same Old Scene” would prove highly influential. Indeed, it has been suggested that Duran Duran constructed “Planet Earth” and “then a career” on it (Rigby 227).
Whether true or not, it would appear Roxy Music might just have beaten David Bowie to the New Romantic punch. Lodger (1979), Bowie’s last album of the ’70s, had included the track “Boys Keep Swinging.” When released as a single, it reached the UK Top 10. However, perhaps it was its androgyny and ubercampness—visually reinforced by a promo film featuring a cross-dressing Bowie—that was just too rich, too glam, for the States, where RCA released “Look Back in Anger” instead. The video had been directed by David Mallett. From a conventional beginning featuring the besuited singer miming to the song, Bowie then proceeded to appear as a trio of drag queens, from vamp to aging actress. Due to the very shifts Bowie himself had been instrumental in effecting, the impact of this video when screened on Top of the Pops in the summer of ’79 was not as game changing as his performance of “Starman” had been on the same show seven years earlier. It did, though, demonstrate that here was an artist-musician still pushing. “Boys Keep Swinging” (UK no. 7), on which Brian Eno received a cowriter credit, had been produced by its musicians swapping “their” instruments, so that guitarist Carlos Alomar played drums, while drummer Dennis Davis played bass. According to Gary Mulholland, the end result was Bowie’s “last great Berlin-era single” and “one of [his] funniest”:
With a glam-stomp compressed into a jangling ragged polyphony, it exhibits the first signs of the self-parody that would come to dominate Bowie’s future. . . . But the pompous, pom-titty-pom voice he chooses here is perfect for the two levels of piss-take. Firstly, there’s the whole homo-erotic undertone, all that swinging and other boys checking you out. But, more pointedly, “Boys Keep Swinging” baldly states that which was patently untrue . . . that young men still ruled the world. (86)
As Bowie himself confessed, “the effect is somewhat histrionic” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 304).
“Ashes to Ashes,” the lead single from 1980’s Scary Monsters and Super Creeps (UK no. 1, US no. 12), has sometimes been viewed as evidence of Bowie’s rather opportunistic reinvention as a New Romantic. Much of this is arguably down to its promo video, which featured Bowie in a Pierrot suit being accompanied on a Sussex beach by a bulldozer and several New Romantic scenesters recruited from Convent Garden’s Blitz club. Of course, with the vision threatening to relegate the sound to a distant second, it was all very glam. “Ashes to Ashes” brought back the character of Major Tom, and further suggested that here was a sequel to “Space Oddity” by using characters and key themes from Bowie’s earlier work: the Pierrot leading space cadets through an alien landscape; the madman in his padded cell; Major Tom, the now-spaced-out junkie with a bulldozer on his trail. “For me, it’s a story of corruption,” Bowie explained at the time, admitting that the song’s “most anguished section—in which he effectively demolished his past as being neither good, bad nor spontaneous” was a confession—with those “three lines represent[ing] a continuing, returning feeling of inadequacy over what I’ve done, in as much as I don’t feel much of it has any import at all” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 315). As Peter Doggett notes, the song “was certainly a confrontation with the past, a confession about the present, and a sense of misgiving about the future” (Man, 316). “Ashes to Ashes,” then, would not have been out of place on Aladdin Sane.
Bowie would help “make” New Romanticism, and not vice versa. For the so-called Blitz kids, he and other glam acts were the movement’s “absent saints.” Blitz “faces” like Boy George and Steve Strange were self-confessed Bowie, Bolan, and Roxy Music fans for whom “style was as crucial and defining as music” (Doggett, Shock, 508). “Surrounded on all sides by a casual array of slightly askew cinematic stereotypes in a self-consciously down-at-heel club in Covent Garden,” Rosetta Brooks had described the Blitz in the very first issue of ZG magazine as looking something like the cantina scene in Star Wars:
Tuesday night is the focal point at which these self-consciously styled individualists are brought into contact with one another. The setting is the ground against which these ironic self-images stand or fall within the microcosmic star system that posing represents. (537)
Here were the Blitz kids, aka the futurists, aka the New Romantics—members of the same scene Robert Elms had christened “The Cult with No Name” in a piece in the Face that had been subtitled “Nightclubbing and the Quest for a Life of Style.” It had all started back in the fall of 1978, when Tuesday night was “Bowie Night” down at Billy’s on Wardour Street—“a subterranean otherworld of diamante and occasional drag, where sharp dress meant everything and to be out was literally outside” and ex–Rich Kid Rusty Egan deejayed with the “turntables dominated by the Thin White Duke and the air was thick with an atmosphere of stylish and extravagant sleaze.” According to Elms, it was Egan’s idea “to transform a chance gathering of fashionable young things into an evening specially set aside for those with an abiding interest in all things Bowie and beautiful.” As a result,
Tuesday night became the night to look right as the still dominant black leather of the post-punk depression was rejected in favour of gold braid and pill-box hats. It was toy soldiers, Cossacks and queens to the outsider, an odd fantasy world down the stairs; to the participants it was a mutual admiration society for budding narcissists, a creative and competitive environment where individualism was stressed and change was vital.
Billy’s, noted Elms, “wasn’t a place for those who dressed up for the occasion but for those who dressed up as a way of life”—at this point, “those” numbering no more than a few hundred. In February 1979, “Bowie Night” decamped to the Blitz in Covent Garden. Yet, it was still “a very small, closed world of some 300 devotees, among them clothes designers, artists, hairdressers and musicians” whose “looks . . . ranged from shoulder-padded futurism to fringed outlaw revivalism,” and who “were revelling in the belief that they were all special, every one a star in their own right.” Très glam, with a playlist that had by now expanded to include Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk, the electro-work of Giorgio Moroder, homegrown synth acts like Human League, and even—for a time in the winter of ’79—an “immaculate version of Berlin in the Thirties” (15–17). Signing off his piece, Elms reported that
outside of London the story is just starting. You might think this kind of thing couldn’t happen in your town but you’d be wrong. The idea of commandeering a local club for one night of fashion and fun has already spread to Cardiff (The Tanschan) and Birmingham (at the Rum
Runner). Embryonic scenes are also happening in Liverpool and Southend. (17)
And, as the Face’s Mick Middlehurst would confirm, in Manchester too. Interestingly, it was during one of his interviews with provincial New Romantics that he was told that Britain was “wide open for a huge pop hero at the moment. Sooner or later someone is going to take the teen market by storm, it must happen” (qtd. in Middlehurst 20). It did happen, and “sooner” than anyone—barring possibly the new “pop hero” himself—could have predicted.
In October 1978, Adam and the Ants had released “Young Parisians,” a rather quirky piece reminiscent of Cockney Rebel, Sparks, or even Mk I Roxy Music—“Young Parisians are so French—they love Patti Smith.” It demonstrated that, while nominally a punk, Adam was glam at heart. However, “Young Parisians,” like his other late ’70s single releases—“Deutscher Girls,” “Zerox,” “Car Trouble”—failed to chart. So, openly craving commercial success, Adam had paid former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren £1,000 for advice that he hoped would make him a pop star. Shrewdly betting on a post-punk return to glamour and heroic imagery, McLaren offered several ideas—including pirates, Native Americans, eighteenth-century fashions, and African rhythms—and urged his “client” to “wear gold and look like you don’t need a job” (qtd. in Reynolds, Rip, 310). Unfortunately, Adam could only watch as, encouraged by his mentor, his band proceeded to desert him for a band McLaren himself was then in the process of putting together. (Fronted by the fifteen-year-old Annabel Lewin, Bow Wow Wow would also put some of McLaren’s suggestions into practice and go on to enjoy limited commercial success.) For Adam, this was a setback, but one that “did not soften his resolve” because he wanted to be a pop star so badly “with a single-mindedness bordering on obsession” (Rimmer 541). “I want success,” Adam openly admitted in 1981. “Cult is just a safe word meaning ‘loser.’” In Gary Mulholland’s view, “no one, perhaps in Britpop history, ached to be a star as much as Adam Ant” (134). This had, of course, been said about Marc Bolan back in 1970. What was indisputable, though, was that Adam Ant would become the UK’s biggest pop sensation since T. Rex.
