by Simon Philo
Teaming up with former Banshees guitarist Marco Pirroni, he proceeded to put McLaren’s seemingly random, possibly even madcap, ideas into highly glam practice—making use of Burundi rhythms delivered by a twin-drum attack last heard powering the Glitter Band guitars and “spaghetti western vocal chants to do nothing else but big himself up and make us dance” (Mulholland 130). In April 1981, as Ant-mania kicked in, Paolo Hewitt wrote in Melody Maker:
All the time I spend with Adam Ant, I had a recurring feeling: déjà vu. At first, I thought it was a dream I’d had and left it at that. But the feeling persisted. So much so, in fact, that it was only on the train coming back [from an Ants gig in Newcastle] that I suddenly realised what it was. Then I knew that I had been here before. Ten years ago, in fact, when Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Slade and Gary Glitter started inciting the kind of fan worship that Adam Ant is presently experiencing. (Qtd. in History 1981, 48, my italics)
And Hewitt went on to note that
the faces on the audience, the dressing up, the screaming, biting, and pinching, the devotions, and the worship, reminded me of when I first fell in love with music. Bolan was my first hero, Bowie my second. I was a fan then and so was Adam Ant. Only now he has five singles in the charts. (48)
Just like Bolan, Adam Ant would sell an “unmistakable ‘look’ (as he always put it) and an unmistakable ‘sound’ (ditto), but also a half-baked set of theories and attitudes that pinned the two together” (Rimmer 541). As Adam stressed, “The look has got to be as good as the sound.” He also readily admitted that he “hadn’t got an original thought. The originality comes in how I clash the ideas together and present them. That’s all it ever is” (qtd. in History 1981 51, 49). This was all very glam, of course. As was the fact that, as with the glam stars of the early 1970s, he “understood that the formats and possibilities of mainstream broadcasting, from Top of the Pops to [teen-pop magazine] Smash Hits, were not only available but wide open, and had huge and thrilling expressive potential” (Stanley 529). This focus was also evidence of the strongly held (and frequently expressed) belief that what he was “doing” was show business. “I am more involved in showbiz than rock ’n’ roll. I don’t think rock ’n’ roll is showbiz. I think rock ’n’ roll is rock ’n’ roll and showbiz is showbiz” (qtd. in History 1981, 50). A host of memorable videos bordering on pantomime and the band’s “Prince Charming Revue” tour in late ’81 would, then, effectively action the words and deeds of Bolan, Bowie, and a host of glam forebears, while simultaneously playing a lead role in British pop’s glossy turn. As Kureishi and Savage point out, “the early eighties were a time of pop unleashed” and “the New Pop aesthetic was playful, referential, at times even academic, and wore its calculation on its sleeve” (535). Rather like Roxy Music then? “To be honest,” Adam told Paolo Hewitt,
the least influential music I’ve listened to is rock ’n’ roll really. The most influential when I was at [art] college were Roxy. I was really into Roxy and that’s when I wrote a letter to Ferry. (Qtd. in History 1981, 49)
Dave Rimmer famously said, in direct reference to New Pop, that it was “like punk never happened.” He was wrong. For New Pop was as determinedly antirock as punk. It was also as determinedly antirock as glam. Adam and the Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier (UK no. 1, US no. 41) had been released in November 1980 and would go on to become the UK’s best-selling album of 1981. On “Dog Eat Dog” (UK no. 4), Adam had extended an inclusive message reminiscent of “Starman,” telling his rapidly growing army of followers that “it makes me proud to smile at you / and see innocence shining through.” In the spring of ’81, “Stand and Deliver,” with the nation’s teens gripped by Ant-mania, had entered the UK singles chart at number one, only the third single to do so since the glory days of glam back in 1974. Expressing New Pop / New Romantic values, it was, of course, also highly representative of a glam sensibility. Not least in its direct referencing of the dandy: “I’m the dandy highwayman / . . . / I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention.” Of the accompanying promo film, Adam explained that it was “an Errol Flynn video,” intended to look “like a three-minute Hollywood movie” (qtd. in History 1981, 51). If anything, follow-up single “Prince Charming” (UK no. 1) succeeded in being more brazenly showbiz, more camp, and more glam than its immediate predecessor—encouraging us not to “stop being dandy,” reminding us that “ridicule [was] nothing to be scared of,” and supplying us with another glossy promo video that featured a now-gone-to-seed former Brit-movie starlet Diana Dors as Fairy Godmother and synchronized dance moves that would make Mud proud.
Adam’s tenure as the UK’s biggest pop star was nearing its end by the spring of 1982. However, not before his first solo single, “Goody Two Shoes,” made number one. A song about fame, “Goody Two Shoes” also included that most glam of ingredients, the direct reference to classic rock ’n’ roll, in “quoting” the iconic rhythmic riff of “Jailhouse Rock” as it came to its theatrical conclusion. One of the acts lining up to replace Adam Ant in teen hearts was Duran Duran—a Birmingham band in whom the glam force would remain very strong. (As it would also prove to be in the band’s two mid-1980s side projects—Arcadia and Power Station. Most obviously, perhaps, in the latter’s cover of “Get It On,” which went one place higher on Billboard than the T. Rex original in the summer of 1985.) Duran Duran were provincial New Romantics, whose first single, “Planet Earth” (UK no. 12) had been reminiscent of the upbeat apocalyptic glam-pop of Sweet’s “Hellraiser” or even Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs.” In a patronizing 1982 piece on the band, Paul Morley described Duran Duran as “lightweight poseurs,” “gummed-up glammed-over techno-rock twits,” who have “blinded [him] by their bounce” (551, 555). The band members themselves, however, are as unrepentant as their glam idols in being fully (self-)conscious of what they are “about” and who they are “for.” “It’s coming back to what it was like before punk,” they tell Morley. “During punk and just after there were no bands like us or Adam [and the Ants] playing Odeons that any age could go and see” (qtd. in Morley 553). Furthermore, as bass player John Taylor explains, “we were just never really into that grey, small-time independent thing. Our heart was in the early ’70s” (qtd. in Morley 556). Paul Morley, though, is having none of it. He has clearly come to bury Duran Duran—“Duran Suave are committed to dragging glamour and fun and games into pop music: simplistically and selfishly, [like the] Bay City Rollers”—and concludes that the band “are heroes of the movement away from reading the self-important words to looking at the pictures” (553, 556). Like Duran Duran’s eponymous debut LP, 1982’s Rio (UK no. 2) would belatedly make the Billboard Top 10 in the wake of the band’s successful MTV-motored US “invasion” in the following year. (In 1983, UK synth-pop acts would claim an estimated third share in both the Billboard singles and albums charts.) Via graphics and artwork, accompanying promo videos, and, of course, what lay musically within, Rio constituted the ultimate New Romantic pop package, the apotheosis of the post-punk glam aesthetic. Not so much the sons of Margaret Thatcher that the self-righteous likes of Morley et al. frequently pegged them as, as the sons of—often similarly reviled—glam fathers, for whom “recessions and economic insecurity” had also “provide[d] fertile ground for fantasy” (Turner, Glam Rock, 148).
A lot of early ’80s music might have been largely shorn of first-wave glam’s latent dread; but there was still plenty of irony, camp, and, certainly, no shortage of pop joy and glamour. It was also hard to miss the “dread” in the work some of the “Bowie-Roxy kids” were now producing. In the summer of 1979, Tubeway Army, featuring Gary Numan, had had an unlikely UK number one single with the chilly electro-pop of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” from the equally bleak best-selling album Replicas. Although starting out as a punk outfit, Numan’s inspiration and idol was David Bowie. This influence would be more in evidence on his first solo LP, The Pleasure Principle (UK no. 1), as well as in some of the things Numan would say in the many i
nterviews he was now subjected to as a bona fide pop star. Stage shows would include stunning lighting, extravagant set design, and even robots. It was, as Numan explained to Melody Maker, “showbiz for showbiz’s sake more than anything. I think I’m just taking it back to cabaret” (qtd. in Reynolds, Rip, 324). Japan’s David Sylvian—who had taken his stage name from the New York Dolls’ Syl Sylvain—was consciously rebelling against the mundane realities of urban Britain in the 1970s. In true glam fashion, Sylvian has spoken of his persona as functioning like a mask behind which to hide; key to his desire to be anyone but himself. The band’s Quiet Life LP had made little impact when first released in January 1980. It would, however, reach number thirteen in the spring of 1982 as Japan hits its commercial peak. Though the single “Life in Tokyo” had failed to chart on its initial release in May 1979, a Giorgio Moroder remix would see it make the UK Top 30 in the fall of ’82. Sylvian’s affected, mannered vocals drew frequent and justifiable comparison with Bryan Ferry’s idiosyncratic, un-rock-like vibrato-croon. There was also a familiar Weimar fixation to be heard on tracks like “Night Porter,” “Suburban Berlin,” and, particularly, “Ghosts” (UK no. 5)—the band’s biggest hit and one that would arguably signal its most direct lineage with glam. No great surprise here, perhaps, given Japan had started out as New York Dolls wannabes with a Bowie/Roxy fixation.
“Blitz kids” Spandau Ballet’s debut album Journey to Glory (UK no. 5) featured a title, artwork, and sleeve notes that combined to create a similar Teutonic vibe, a “Nietzschean tone of beauty-as-cruelty” (Reynolds, Rip, 327):
Picture angular glimpses of sharp youth cutting strident shapes through the curling grey of 3 A.M. Hear the soaring joy of immaculate rhythms, the sublime glow of music for heroes driving straight to the heart of dance. Follow the stirring vision and the rousing sound on the path towards journeys to glory. (Qtd. in Reynolds, Rip, 327)
The band’s first appearance on Top of The Pops in December 1980, performing its debut single “To Cut a Long Story Short” (UK no. 5), had given the nation’s youth its first sighting of the New Romantics—“They wore spats and sashes, capes and neckerchiefs. Tweed jackets, even” (Beckett, Promised, 197)—while the third single taken from the album, “Musclebound” (UK no. 10) was a kind of New Romantic “Rock and Roll, Part 2.” Ridiculous but fun. The Human League did not bother with such approximations. Its precommercial breakthrough mash-up of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” and Iggy Pop’s “Nite Clubbing” (UK no. 56) was indicative of the band’s glam antecedents. Chart success would only come, though, after vocalist Phil Oakey had recruited two new band members—Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley—whom he had spotted dancing at “Futurist Night” in Sheffield’s Crazy Daisy nightclub. According to Simon Reynolds, the album that immediately followed this change in personnel, Dare (UK no. 1),
could only have been made by a group who knew about Roxy, Iggy and Kraftwerk, but their music was inviting and accessible enough to win over the great unhip masses—mums and dads, teenage girls, children, grannies. (Reynolds, Rip, 333)
As Dare was climbing to the top of the UK album chart, another Sheffield band, ABC, had made its Top of the Pops debut. Coming on like Roxy Music, lead singer Martin Fry led knowingly from the front in “white evening shirt with a dark but spangly suit—again the feel was traditional glamour in quotation marks—and danced in a cautious, heavy-shouldered way” (Beckett, Promised, 188). The message was very New Pop, very New Romantic, very glam—anyone can be a star. As Fry explained, “We wanted to look like we came from Vegas, so we went to Carnaby Street and hired this very camp tailor who used to make clothes for Marc Bolan” (qtd. in Reynolds, Rip, 379–80). ABC had evolved from a post-punk, Joy Divisionesque band called Vice Versa. The change in name was accompanied by a radical change in outlook. “Words like ‘artistic integrity’ are meaningless these days. It’s got to be color, dance, excitement.” The journey from Vice Versa to ABC was, for Fry, like going “from matt to gloss” (qtd. in Beckett, Miracle, 186), and nothing captured this better than the kitschy, campy, cartoonish, carnival promo video to “The Look of Love” (UK no. 4).
Powered by New Romanticism, New Pop reached its zenith in 1982. Described by the duo’s vocalist Billy MacKenzie as sounding like “Abba on acid” (qtd. in Reynolds, Rip, 406), that summer saw the Associates’ marvelously overwrought Sulk (UK no. 10) deliver three sizable hit singles: “Party Fears Two” (UK no. 9), “Club Country” (UK no. 13), and “18 Carat Love Affair” (UK no. 23). MacKenzie and fellow bandmate Alan Rankine loved, and evidently channeled, the glam work of Bowie (a cover of “Boys Keep Swinging” had been their debut single), Roxy Music, and Sparks. Like their glam heroes, they too would draw on interwar torch songs, Sinatraesque ballads, disco, movie scores, and even postwar musicals. As Rankine, perhaps unnecessarily, pointed out, there was also “a hell of a Germanic thing going on in our music” (qtd. in Reynolds, Rip, 356). Elsewhere, though, in the gauzy gossamer-thin New Romantic years, glam dread was either missing or buried beneath a layer of heavily stylized pomp and pretense—as with Ultravox’s rather silly but always enjoyable Weimar pantomime “Vienna” (UK no. 2). It would, however, find a more willing carrier in the form of goth rock. The Banshees had reportedly first met at a Roxy Music gig at Wembley; and, together with bands like the Cure and the Sisters of Mercy, owed a clear debt to glam in both sound and vision. As Banshee bass man Steve Severin confirmed, “That’s what appealed about the intelligent side of glam—the fact that there was some kind of theatre going on, a drama was being presented” (qtd. in Reynolds, Rip, 404). Fueled by glam and rockabilly, goth rock would emerge from its spiritual home in Soho’s Batcave over the winter of 1982–1983, offering an apparently real alternative to the then-dominant sounds of synthy dance pop. In the case of glam, the most obvious family resemblance could be found in arch-goth band Bauhaus, whose coverage of not one but two glam classics—“Telegram Sam” (UK dnc) and “Ziggy Stardust” (UK no. 15)—made it an easy spot. While the latter was noteworthy for being particularly reverential, much of the band’s self-penned material such as April 1983’s “She’s in Parties” (UK no. 26) could be just as glam soaked—“Learning lines in the rain, special effects by Loonatik and Drinks / The graveyard scene, the golden years.”
As had been the case with glam, there was much suspicion and often open contempt for this music in the UK’s rock press. New Pop or New Romanticism (or whatever it was called) was antirock. Predictably, “attitudes to synths were even more polarised” over in the States, where “for many metal fans, keyboards were innately queer, their presence immediately signifying the ruination of ‘real’ metal.” Indeed, “since Bowie,” what had developed was “a real sense in which England . . . connoted ‘gay’ in the American rock imagination”—a perception often motored by the “over-bearing heterosexism of mainstream American rock” (Reynolds, Rip, 335). Yet, as it had done since its inception, glam would continue to find a way around this. In February 1978, Van Halen released its eponymous debut LP, and, lo, glam-metal was born. The band’s cover of the Kinks’ garage classic “You Really Got Me” was a Billboard hit and helped propel the album into the US Top 20. Van Halen was fronted by the flamboyant David Lee Roth, whose theatricality and showmanship supplied the band with most of its glam chops. Yet, as with Alice Cooper and Kiss, it was all still pretty testosterone-fueled stuff, with Roth playing the dandy in the Stones’ heteronormative mold. The album 1984 included Van Halen’s first US number one single, the hook-filled and synthy “Jump.” Afterward, Roth departed to focus on a solo career of diminishing commercial returns, which was notable for a rather Ferryesque, campy, novelty medley of pre–rock ’n’ roll songs, “I Ain’t Got Nobody / Just a Gigolo” (US no. 12).
Other high-charting covers in the early ’80s that indicated a disproportionate presence in the mix of more glam than metal included ex-Runaways Joan Jett’s versions of the Arrows’ “I Love Rock and Roll” (US no. 1, UK no. 4) and Gary Glitter’s “Do You Wann
a Touch Me?” (US no. 20) and Quiet Riot’s cover of Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize” (US no. 5). Sheffield’s Def Leppard was more successful in the States, where “Photograph” (US no. 12) had been the band’s breakthrough hit in 1983 and contributed to Pyromania peaking at number two on the Billboard album chart. Its follow-up, 1987’s Hysteria, would go one place higher, with its hit singles “Animal” (US no. 19), “Pour Some Sugar on Me” (US no. 2), and “Love Bites” (US no. 1) all betraying the influence of Queen, Mott the Hoople, Slade, and Mick Ronson. Subsequent covers of Sweet’s “Action” and Alice Cooper’s “Elected” merely confirmed Def Leppard’s glam credentials. The mid- to late 1980s also witnessed glam-metal’s high-water mark, as the success of acts like Mötley Crüe—Theatre of Pain (US no. 6) and Girls, Girls, Girls (US no. 2)—and Poison—Look What the Cat Dragged In (US no. 3) and Open Up and Say . . . Ahh! (US no. 2)—confirmed. However, the genre made very little impression in the UK, where, in a period dominated by the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, rave culture, and indie “shoe-gazers,” a band like the Manic Street Preachers would keep the glam fires burning on May 1992’s “Motorcycle Emptiness” (UK no. 17) and July 1993’s “La Tristess Durera” (UK no. 22). Cross-dressing and androgyny were most frequently delivered via two of its members, Nicky Wire and Richey Edwards, who wore T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “All rock and roll is homosexual.” Although sometimes identified as the instigators of Brit-pop (1993–1997), none of the acts associated with this genre were as self-consciously and recognizably as glam as Suede. Lead singer and principal lyricist Brett Anderson’s mannered vocals, self-confessed admiration for Marc Bolan, and Bowie-like pronouncements—“I see myself as a bisexual man who’s never had a homosexual experience. I’ve never seen myself as overtly heterosexual, but then, I don’t see myself as gay. I sort of saw myself as some kind of sexual being that was floating somewhere” (qtd. in Maconie 275)—were accompanied by guitarist Bernard Butler’s decidedly Ronsonesque licks on darkly decadent, melodramatic tracks like “Metal Mickey” (UK no. 17) and “Animal Nitrate” (UK no. 7) that would not have been out of place on Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs.
