by Bob Stanley
The magnetism of Bowie and Bolan meant that they could both afford to stumble and fall several times, knowing that, eventually, each would pick up devotees. Bolan found his feet, and his warbling voice, on the 1966 single ‘Hippy Gumbo’. Whether he had become a star or not, this would still stand out as one of the weirdest singles of the decade. Bolan stirs the cauldron of almost atonal strings, chanting, ‘Hippy gumbo he’s no good, chop him up for firewood’. Parents led their children away from this tiny, twinkle-eyed figure, the Pied Piper of Hackney. Others were quite taken with his new direction. He was briefly talked into becoming a member of Leatherhead troublemakers John’s Children, cutting one classic 45 in ‘Desdemona’ (‘Lift up your skirt and fly’) in 1967 before heading further into the woods, acoustic guitar in hand. His new band – a duo with the studiously stoned bongo player Steve Peregrin Took – was called Tyrannosaurus Rex, and they quickly became darlings of Britain’s hippie underground, heirs to Tolkien with their spooked poetry and intense bongo-smackery. In small doses – ‘Debora’,3 ‘The Seal of Seasons’, ‘Child Star’ – they were thrilling, and quite unique. Bolan finally tired of the limited scope of a duo after four albums, introducing electricity and shortening the band’s name on 1970’s T. Rex album. Peregrin Took was ousted in favour of Mickey Finn, purely on the grounds that he was prettier.
Bowie snapped out of his arts-lab reverie in time to soundtrack the 1969 moon landing with the song that, even now, is his signature tune – ‘Space Oddity’. It was a one-off – the album of the same name was loaded with feathery things like ‘Letter to Hermione’ – but gave us the ingredients that made Bowie the perfect face for the seventies: as Major Tom the spaceman, adrift and confused, semi-fictional, schizophrenic. Swathed in Mellotron by producer Gus Dudgeon, with butterfly-wing delicate drumming from ex-Tornado Clem Cattini, it was a masterpiece and felt like a bigger hit than the UK number five it became in the summer of ’69.
Bolan and Bowie were now names, almost, and finally collaborated under the aegis of producer Tony Visconti on a 1970 follow-up to ‘Space Oddity’, ‘The Prettiest Star’. It was poignant and oddly backwards-looking; Bowie may have been singing it to the rising star on guitar, who was about to eclipse him entirely, rather than to his new girlfriend Angie. It was also melodically confused – gorgeous, but never a hit. Weeks later Bolan, now on a rock ’n’ roll primitivist trip, cut ‘Ride a White Swan’, with a lyric about wearing a tall hat like a druid in the old days alloyed to a three-note Chuck Berry riff. Over and done inside two minutes, it was simplicity itself and genuinely exciting, and it was number two in the 1970 Christmas chart. All over Britain, people were getting their first colour television sets. A snooker programme called Pot Black became hugely popular, simply because people wanted to see the brightly coloured balls – if someone appeared on, say, Top of the Pops in a colourful costume, then they might really cause a commotion. Enter Chelita Secunda.
‘I’ve suddenly tuned into that mental channel which makes a record a hit and I feel at present as though I could go on writing number ones for ever … the secret ingredient is “energy”,’ Bolan told Record Mirror as ‘Hot Love’ hit number one in spring ’71. ‘Let’s face it, the majority of pop hits that make it are a permutation on the twelve bar blues and I’ve found one that works.’ In the future he saw himself as ‘a science fiction writer who sings’ – you get the feeling Bowie was taking notes. On the way up Bolan had been an empathetic character because, even as an underachiever, he was rich in ideas, smart and full of desire. He was Jewish working class from the East End, but far from playing up to this he entreated his fans to ‘keep a little Marc in their heart’ with the effete light tenor of a RADA trainee.
The strange magic of T. Rex’s 1971 album Electric Warrior is partly to do with its reliance on acoustic guitars and restraint. It is also among the most sexually charged albums ever released in Britain: Electric Warrior audibly pants, yet also leans on cellos and the eerie banshee backing vocals of ex-Turtles Flo and Eddie for its power; it is dark, tangled up, a sensualised version of the pixie poesy of Tyrannosaurus Rex, only now ‘she was born to be my unicorn’ has become ‘you’ve got the teeth of a hydra upon you, you’re dirty-sweet and you’re my girl’. It’s quite a feminine, witchy sensibility, closer to Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks in its allure than the Doors or Scott Walker. His songs played with your sense of perspective. At their best they had a curiously disorienting quality. ‘Cosmic Dancer’ could be a fey boast – ‘I danced myself right out the womb, is it strange to dance so soon?’ – yet given its time-shifting lyric (‘I danced myself into the tomb’), and wrapped up in a haunted string section, it seemed to be as much about loss, absence and regret.
By the start of 1972 Bolan was Britain’s biggest pop star, the Slider himself. He had his own new record label (T. Rex Wax Co., which went through EMI), his third number-one UK single with ‘Telegram Sam’, and ‘Get It On’ (retitled ‘Bang a Gong’ so as not to alienate prudish radio stations) was nudging the American Top 10. On the face of it, he should have taken America by storm: he wrote melodic but riff-born rock songs that could charm bikers and birds. The Born to Boogie movie captured the reasons why he didn’t click. He looks sweet enough but miscalculates his young audience by attempting Hendrix guitar wiggery – born to boogie he may have been, but he couldn’t touch the spaced-out avant-rock style of Hendrix, and ended up looking rather brattish; just as he was seemingly set as a superstar, he allowed his ego to get the better of him and let the mask slip. Worse was to follow. He had been a vegan for years but fame brought with it new desires for cocaine and champagne – Bolan ballooned.4 By the time 1973’s Tanx came out he looked more Elvis than elfin. His long-term girlfriend June left him and pulled a Samson move by ruining his beautiful locks, giving him an old-lady perm just before she walked out. Bolan never had another Top 10 hit.
Bowie appeared far less likely to break America. The Anglophile crowd on the west coast adored him, but he seemed way too fragile and art-school for mainstream success. In 1970 he had paid a visit to Andy Warhol’s Factory to meet his heroes. Hearing there was a rising English rock star at the door, the artist let him enter. In lieu of a mundane hello, Bowie began to mime. Warhol was nonplussed, turned to his assistant and asked, ‘Should we laugh?’
Like Bolan, Bowie wanted to work on your eyes as well as your ears. As T. Rex broke through in ’71 he released his fourth album, Hunky Dory, which paid blatant tribute to Dylan and Warhol while leaving room for his best, most individual songs (‘Changes’, ‘Life on Mars’, ‘Kooks’) since ‘Space Oddity’. ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ was terrifying, Major Tom lost in orbit, lost in his thoughts, degenerating into lunacy on its closing vari-speed wail, ‘I’m starving for me gravy!’ It also contained a line which became Bowie’s manifesto: ‘He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature.’ For the sleeve artwork he had taken pictures of Marlene Dietrich to the photo session, though the results were more Bloomsbury than Hollywood. No matter, he’d get there soon enough.
Watching from the wings, Bowie listened and learnt. As he had done with Major Tom in 1969, he decided to build his music around an image rather than just a specific sound and a carrier bag full of influences. He created an alter ego – the sci-firocker Ziggy Stardust – which enabled him to become a star before he had more than a handful of fans. His second masterstroke, one-upping Bolan’s glitter, was to drop the bomb on the implications of male make-up: I’m bisexual, he told the press, and caused instant pandemonium. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) was at once more alien and more inclusive – ‘Oh no love, you’re not alone’ – than T. Rex’s contemporaneous The Slider. As ’73 got into its stride, Bowie’s star ascended – ‘Jean Genie’, ‘Drive-in Saturday’, ‘Sorrow’ and the reactivated Hunky Dory track ‘Life on Mars’ all went Top 3. So did Bolan’s singles, but crucially none of them made number one as they had done with such ease in ’71 and ’72.
Bolan was so sweet to his fans – with the
Christmas flexidisc messages (‘Have a good Christmas, a real good Christmas, and … don’t cry!’) and extra bonus B-sides (including songs as cosmic as ‘Jitterbug Love’, which he surely regretted not saving for an A-side) – that he could only slip from his high ’72 perch. Bowie was wily, and killed the Ziggy Stardust character on stage in ’73, leaving the crowd wanting more. ‘Give me your hand!’ he wailed to his fans at the climax of ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’, and they felt his love, his outsider empathy. But this was his theatre training, the Anthony Newley of ‘What Kind of Fool Am I’ reborn for the glam age. Bowie wasn’t fake, but he’d never give himself to the public, or prostrate himself to be stroked like Bolan. He’d been in the theatre too long to make a mistake like that. When the NME asked if the Ziggy Stardust saga could be made into a film, he said, ‘I would not want to shatter anybody’s private movie.’
Emasculated by his ex, rejected by the press, Bolan trumpeted a new idea – the ‘intergalactic soul’ of ‘(Whatever Happened to the) Teenage Dream’ in 1974. It was complex, featured the gospel back-ups of Pat Hall and Gloria Jones, and impressed with its Dylanesque lyrical weave. But – like its creator – ‘Teenage Dream’ was not as light on its feet as it should have been. When Bowie trumped his concept with the ‘plastic soul’ of ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Fame’ (US no. 1 ’75) a year later, he sounded understandably bitter: ‘I really dig David Bowie. I like his songs and we have a good head thing … but we don’t make love. To make love wouldn’t be repulsive to me, it would just be a bit of a bore.’
What pop really needed in the seventies turned out to be someone to reflect a fractured world, one where chaos was just a kiss away – not a consensus band. Not a new Beatles. Bowie understood this and Bolan didn’t. Bowie was all about confusion, angles, ch-ch-ch-changes. By 1977 Bolan was embracing the punks, who, in turn, loved him back. He toured with the Damned and got his own TV show, Marc, on which he introduced schoolkids to the Jam and Generation X. On the last episode in the series he introduced a special guest, David Bowie, who sang his new single, ‘Heroes’. They attempted a new song together – ‘Standing Next to You’ – which lasted a few bars before Bolan, heady with his new role of Punk Godfather and giddy from the cold drinks in the green room, stumbled off the stage. The moment died in a few splutters and giggles.
Neither his current single – ‘Celebrate Summer’ – nor Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ made the Top 20, though one of them sounded like the future and the other sounded like 1972. While Bolan was theoretically on the way back, the physically wasted Bowie spent 1977 simply trying to stay alive. After three years on a diet of milk and cocaine, he looked like a silent-movie ghost. He had moved to Berlin, the city that reflected the rifts, the barriers and the disillusion of the seventies better than any other, and saved his life. Low, released in the spring, was his masterpiece, and possibly the blankest, loneliest record in all of pop. ‘Sound and Vision’ gave him a UK Top 3 hit and it sounded like little that had gone before: it didn’t swing but it rocked (in the cradle sense), like a machine-operated hammock. Only some fiercely bashed dustbin drums, miked up to sound simultaneously very loud and very small, could disturb a supine Bowie, who waited a good minute, humming and sighing to himself, before summoning up the strength to sing. Somehow, in spite of its morphine-pumped nihilism, it was a pretty single. The follow-up single, ‘Be My Wife’, wasn’t and went nowhere: ‘Please be mine, share my life, stay with me, be my wife.’ It is needlingly needy.
When punk rock came to town, and Bolan played up his part in its lineage, RCA came up with a perfect marketing slogan: ‘There’s old wave, there’s new wave, and there’s David Bowie.’ He didn’t need to shout about it. With the Berlin trilogy – Low, Heroes, Lodger5 – Bowie laid the groundwork for the sound of the eighties.
A few weeks after they had briefly kissed and made up for the cameras, Bolan was killed as his car took a bend too fast in Barnes, southwest London. That elfin face was destined never to turn thirty. Bolan remains forever the 20th Century Boy, remembered for his corkscrew hair and kissable lips. Which is maybe for the best, because the long-running battle between the North London mod and the South London mod was already over.
1 Ringo also released a single called ‘Back Off Boogaloo’, a blatant T. Rex tribute, and scored his biggest-ever UK hit – number two in 1972.
2 Bolan also recorded a single called ‘London Boys’ in 1976 which was an up-tempo stomper, but looked back to the mod era with similar unease: ‘Changing life’s patterns to get to the top. And when you get up there, you don’t know if you’re there or what.’
3 ‘Oh Debora, you look like a zebra’ puts ‘I don’t want clever conversation … I love you just the way you are’ in the shade as a backhanded compliment.
4 Bolan was unlucky it affected him this way; cocaine made Bowie stick-thin.
5 Lodger wasn’t recorded in Berlin, but the three albums were of a piece, and 1979’s Lodger is dreadfully underrated. By the time of 1980’s Scary Monsters Bowie had survived punk to become a hero to the New Romantics, New Poppers and electropop pioneers (notably Gary Numan); ‘Ashes to Ashes’ gave him his first number-one hit (excluding the reissue of ‘Space Oddity’ in ’75).
31
DELUXE AND DELIGHTFUL: GLAM
It’s 1974. The scene is a transport cafe on the A5 just outside Towcester, Northants. Lorry drivers in donkey jackets sit by steamed-up windows, drinking dirt-brown tea from smoked-glass cups as wonderful Radio 1 plays the intro to Mud’s latest single, ‘The Cat Crept In’. It’s just a tinny Alba radio, but as the song begins, as if by magic, a pop group appears. It’s Mud. They jump on the tables, cavorting, sticking out their tongues, hamming it up in full panto-glam regalia. There’s singer Les Gray, his back hunched from hod carrying, his Elvis shades getting a little greasy in the grey-green atmosphere, and his lecherous, bum-pinching smile familiar to the whole caff; Dave Mount, the double-drumming drummer who made ‘Tiger Feet’ 1974’s best-selling single, twirls his sticks and batters a kettle as his eyebrows threaten to fly off his head; Rob Davis on guitar, with a perm straight out of Crossroads and Gypsy Rose Lee’s earrings, wears powder-blue, faux-satin bell bottoms that flirt dangerously with plates of black pudding and fried eggs; and there’s Ray Stiles, the bassist, smiling like a Cheshire cat in his blue crêpe brothel creepers. His band are number two in the chart after a decade of slogging around pubs in Carshalton. Hell, they’d barely made it out of Surrey before Mickie Most signed them to his RAK label a year before, got Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman to start writing their A-sides, and their run of hits began with ‘Crazy’, ‘Hypnosis’ and ‘Dynamite’.
Outside, the rain beats down. In London’s Square Mile, in Welsh pit villages and in the mill towns of Lancashire, the three-day week is screwing with the economy. In America, the Symbionese Liberation Army has kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst and the president has been impeached. In a cafe just outside Towcester, everyone’s having such a raw time that Rob Davis doesn’t even care when he stands on a squeezy bottle of brown sauce and it squirts right up his trouser leg. The scene is not very glamorous, but it’s very glam.
David Bowie lived in a spaceship, primed and ready to whisk you off to some blank alien planet where everyone was bisexual and lived on soma (‘Don’t laugh babe, it’ll be alright’). Mud were quite at home in a greasy spoon, with a copy of the Racing Post, winking at the waitress. Both were glam, even though few realised it at the time.
The hippie counterculture was politically committed to the present tense and largely mistrusted theatrics. Take the first issue of British underground music monthly Let It Rock in October ’72, which devoted its cover story (‘The Great Pretender?’) to an annihilation of Bowie – ‘Bowie on stage looks fantastic – no more, no less’ – while elsewhere it took three critics to pick over John and Yoko’s right-on but almost unlistenable Some Time in New York City (conclusion: ‘There’s something important here’). Glam – garish, ultra-commercial and colourful as a Dulux pa
int chart – was its worst nightmare. And while Bowie and Bolan were media-savvy enough to keep most of the counterculture music press on side, the glam acts who followed in their wake were all about jumping on tables, wearing the spangliest outfits and treating the Top of the Pops studio like a home from home. Whether miming their hits astride a motorbike, or descending to the stage on a crescent moon, or throwing custard pies at each other, the likes of Mud, Wizzard, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter, Slade and Sweet picked up on certain lines of Bowie and Bolan’s glam manifesto – the Bo Diddley riffs, the glittering artifice, the outrageous make-up, the tremendous sense of fun – and rewrote them with an abundance of exclamation marks.
Top of the Pops was reborn in the early seventies. Though it had been running since 1964, it was always seen as a bit of a drag, not as exciting as ITV’s Ready Steady Go! or as cool as an art/pop show like Late Night Line-Up. Now it was inadvertently on one side of the fence, with the BBC’s own Old Grey Whistle Test – on the arts-led second channel, BBC2, to indicate something alternative and heavyweight – on the other side, the rock side. Top of the Pops and glam went hand in hand. The Old Grey Whistle Test’s Whispering Bob Harris declared Roxy Music, the first big glam act to emerge after Bolan and Bowie, too ‘computerised’. You could see what he meant. Glam reduced pop to shorthand. It used trigger terms like ‘teenage’ (‘Teenage Dream’, ‘Teenage Rampage’, ‘Teenage Lament ’74’) and ‘rock ’n’ roll’ (‘Rock ’n’ Roll Winter’, ‘The Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll’ and – best of all – ‘I Didn’t Know I Loved You ’Til I Saw You Rock ’n’ Roll’) just like pop had done in the late fifties. In fact, glam was just like rock ’n’ roll.
Unlike Beatlemania, T. Rextasy did not lead to a bunch of Bolan clones. Possibly no one felt they were pretty enough to compete. Neither were there many acts doing a Bowie,1 though his chameleon changes were mimicked on a more prosaic level by Chicory Tip, who went from denim rockers to full Martian costume overnight, and Mud’s Les Gray, who felt quite at home slipping into a suburban Elvis impression mid-song. There was no blueprint for glam. If anyone had to define glam in 1972, they would have described a new pop sound with a retro-futurist feel – a collage of rock ’n’ roll drive, electronics and space-age lyrics which occasionally mentioned jukeboxes and Chuck Berry. In a nutshell, they were describing Roxy Music.
