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The Rise And Fall Of Glam

The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in hisguise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatestcreation 40 years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, inwhich Chris Roberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changedhis adolescent world.

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8/16/2015 The Rise And Fall Of Glam - Uncut

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The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in hisguise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatest creation 40years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, in which ChrisRoberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changed his adolescentworld.

TWENTIETH CENTURY BOY In 1972, Britain joined the Common Market, Richard Nixon became the first Americanpresident to visit China, Arab terrorists turned the Munich Olympics into a bloodbath andOscars were won by The Godfather and Cabaret.

Like, I could’ve cared less.

For into this world of On The Buses and Lift Off With Ayshea, of much fuss about some guynamed Tutankhamen and newly decimalised currency, came a psycho-cultural force soirresistible, so spectacular, that one could only roll over and experience puberty as anabsurdly hallucinogenic riot.

Into this world came strange news from another star, came men singing of cops kneeling tokiss the feet of priests, and of queers throwing up at the sight of that, and of girls who wereslim, weak, windy and wild, and had the teeth of the Hydra upon them.

Into this world came Glam Rock.

Glam Rock, like first love, never died for me. Actually, first love did die: I was 11, and threw abrick through her parents’ front window; doubtless a formative experience. But throughoutGlam Rock’s ascent and decline I hung in there, loyal to a fault, like a party-crasher whorelishes every last twitch and shiver of the hangover, like a man addicted to the dysfunctionand push-me-pull-you pathos of a doomed affair. A Creamed Cage In August by Zinc AlloyAnd The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow? A true magnum opus. “The Cat Crept In” by Mud? Itrocks. “Saturday Gig” by Mott The Hoople? A tear in the eye. This rush of exuberant,narcissistic, electrifying records and poseurs only really went under when Bolan’s crashmoved from metaphorical to physical, and the bopping imp landed the Early Death kudos. A

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month earlier, he’d told Steve Harley, ‘‘I’d hate to go now. I’d only get a paragraph on pagethree.”

He was wrong, as he often was, and this was part of what we loved about him. (1974’s ZincAlloy…, the last great Bolan album, not content with asking, “Whatever happened to theteenage dream?”, included the couplet: “Do they have sickness in society?/Do they haveglitter crap gaiety?” The front page of the Evening Standard of Friday, September 16, 1977which broke the news might, in one way, have gratified him. It was dominated by a picturefrom his cheeky, diamond-eyed prime: “CRASH KILLS MARC BOLAN: Purple mini driven bygirlfriend hits tree in Barnes Common, kills rock star”. On the bottom right-hand corner ofthat page, in a minuscule box, a much smaller headline: “MARIA CALLAS FOUND DEAD INFLAT.” When the history of the century’s music is written, it seems probable that Callas,arguably the greatest, most emotive singer of any century, will be granted a more earnestappraisal than the man who wrote “Purple pie Pete, purple pie Pete, his lips are like lightning,girls melt in the heat, yeah!” On the day, though, nobody doubted that the Standard had itspriorities right. Even on the slippery slope, even after singles as dodgy as “New York City” and‘‘I Love To Boogie”, Bolan remained a fey, frolicsome figurehead for a pop phenomenon ofstellar scale and impact. He would’ve loved knowing that, even a month after Elvis Presley’sdeath, he’d outshone, in the popular imagination, the Diva Assoluta…

HANG ON TO YOURSELF Oscar Wilde asserted that we are never more true to ourselves than when we areinconsistent. If, in the early ’70s, you were leaving childhood and entering adolescence – thatawkward phase when the potency of cheap music is most likely to get you in the groin in anyera – then, boy, were you true to yourself. Swallowing whole a movement propelled by asatin-jacketed corkscrew-haired elf and a bisexual alien in a Japanese nappy with noeyebrows, one could easily become confused. Only decades on can it be fully appreciated thatpop music is not always, if ever, this edgy, subversive and exciting.

Todd Haynes’ magical Velvet Goldmine, a Nic Roeg/Ken Russell fantasy, is blatantly based onZiggy and Iggy and Showy Bowie and Loopy Lou, whatever the director’s opt-out disclaimers.By accident or design (I only suspect the former because his previous, critically-acclaimedfilms, such as Safe and Poison, have been so unutterably atrocious), and greatly assisted by

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the flawlessly contrived music (Shudder To Think, sodden with the spirit, sing of “starshipsover Venus”), Haynes catches the tricksy essence of Glam: the often ham-fisted flirting withissues of identity and gender, the hatred of all things worthy–but–dull, the denial of anysocial, economic or theological cause but self–promotion and astral ego-projection, thegreedy needy lust for fame.

It may have been punk that said never trust a hippie, but it was Glam that said never even beseen in the same building as one, it’s bad for your image.

It’s a shame that Haynes overindulges his own sexual preferences in the film, with all themain characters unequivocally gay or bisexual (as far as you can be unequivocally bisexual).The funniest and perhaps most radical thing about the Glam Rock era which, coming severalyears before the mass advent of video, made Top Of The Pops an indecently powerfulparochial semiotic, was the way in which it influenced a generation of heterosexual boysand men to dress up like moist and fragrant gardenias.

Ridicule, as Adam Ant later whooped, was nothing to be scared of.

It was entirely routine for classmates to sit after football practice adorned in the most feyand billowing of shirts, glittery stack-heeled shoes, dangly earrings and inexpertly-appliedeye shadow, while butchly exchanging tips on how best to see down Melanie Thomas’generous blouse. No dichotomy was perceived in this double standard, though one wasfrequently perceived, behind the sand dunes, down Melanie’s blouse. The dandy, in 1972-3,walked hand in hand (as it were) with the overground lad.

It’s difficult now to gauge how sensational David Bowie’s declaration of bisexuality to MelodyMaker (“Hi! I’m Bi!”) seemed at the time, with subsequent generations of stars adopting theploy as an industry standard. Madonna has claimed to possess the soul of a gay man inside awoman’s body; Suede’s Brett Anderson equally hilariously touted himself as “a bisexual who’snever had a homosexual experience”. The gay male is a common enough cuddlyuncle/flatmate figure in mainstream movies and sitcoms; the gay female, even if she has togo through Ellen high water, will catch up. But back then, Bowie’s arch scam (for scam itchiefly was) probed under rocks, tapped into irrational fears, taboos and sinister

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psychological hang-ups. For most impressionable fans and camp (sorry) followers, it was aninsincere handle, a “mere” style statement on which to hang the fun-fuelled desire to dressup like a peacock on LSD.

This dovetailed beautifully with Glam’s urge towards the celebration of oneself as a star, withwhich great levelling intention it presaged punk. Punk, however, didn’t distrust the earnest,or, indeed, clamour for glamour. Punk struck me as a bit grubby, a bit spit and sawdust. A bitreal. Heaven forbid. Reality was never a friend of the Glam rocker. Lou Reed, who with TheVelvet Underground had always worn black so that films could be projected onto him, wasurged by Bowie’s wife Angie to dress more adventurously to promote the aptly-named album,Transformer. He threw himself into the challenge, adopting an alabaster-faced, black-eyelinered “phantom of rock” persona. He said something that everyone was thinking at thetime, a time when “Walk On The Wild Side”, with its lyrical cast of transvestites, lowlifes andspeed freaks, was sharing the early ’73 airwaves with Donny Osmond and Peters & Lee. “Irealized,” he said, “I could be anything I wanted.”

That was the thing. That was the rallying call, the vision, the inspiration. Even as abewildered, uncomprehending 12-year-old wanker in the provinces, you could be anythingyou wanted. Anything. That was the beautiful lie.

RE-MAKE/RE-MODEL At the dawn of the’70s, rock, self-important and self-conscious only in terms of devout musonoodling, was disappearing up its own back passage, with such flatulent grizzlies as JethroTull, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Deep Purple huffing and puffing to be the most stoned, theheaviest. The option was navel-gazing, introspective singer/songwriters. A new generation ofteenagers craved a lightness of touch, a letting off of steam. “The fans are fed up with payingto sit on their hands”, said Slade’s Noddy Holder. “They want a party atmosphere.”

At the tail end of ’71, T-Rex’s Electric Warrior went to No. 1. Although it was replaced after sixweeks by Concert For Bangladesh, the hippies’ death throe, it regained pole position, and in’72 T-Rex became the first band since The Beatles to achieve three No. 1 albums in the sameyear. The next 18 months saw these charts dominated by Bolan, David Bowie, Roxy Music,Slade, Rod Stewart, Elton John and Alice Cooper, all of whom were either kooky-monsters of

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Glam Rock or shrewd enough to cruise in its slipstream. Slade were a quartet of distinctlyunfeminine Brummie bruisers, whose terrace choruses and self-mocking sense of humour(guitarist Dave Hill boasted the highest heels and a Bentley with the plate YOB 1) gave them arelentless stream of massive Glam–with–chips anthems. Stewart and The Faces brieflyglammed up their all–boys–together party games and stumbled on a fleeting wit with songslike “Maggie May” and “Cindy lncidentally”. Reg Dwight, ever the parasite, found an excuse todon the clobber by hacking out a relevant riff on “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting”,while Alice (aka Vince) introduced Hammer horror trappings to the OTT theatrics of Glam,molesting snakes and beheading dolls as accompaniment to such banger cute teen protestsas “School’s Out” and “Elected”. The triumvirate, though, was Bowie, Bolan and Ferry. There’llalways be some debate over which of the prettiest stars Bolan and Bowie was the father ofGlam, which the son, but Ferry was definitely the holy ghost. Academics will continue tooverstate the significance of Brian Eno’s contribution to Roxy Music. I can assure you that theaverage sparkle magnetised youth at the time of their ’72 debut album was no morefascinated by the fringe keyboard player’s twiddling of knobs than by Andy Mackay’sinnovative use of saxophone reeds. Eno dressed the part, but so did Manzanera and the rest.Ferry, however, sang of the future and the past, of sci-fi and romance, of something wished-for and something lost, in the voice of F Scott Fitzgerald starring in Casablanca.

You have to remember the teenage fan leaps insatiably on illusion and fantasy – especiallywhen it mythologises love and sex – like a starving piranha with seven thousand deadlyfangs. We wanted swooning, not science. Experimental synthesiser sounds? Maybe we’d getinto them when we were all growed up.

As these artists were deconstructing the stage act and rehabilitating the album – Bowierealigning the relationship between Star (exhibitionist/actor) and Fan (voyeur/inventor) – the45rpm pop single became a vessel of buzzy adrenalin and swagger not glimpsed for years.Serious rock giants like Led Zeppelin had decreed that the mere single was for pop tarts. Anew breed agreed heartily, thanked them for their diagnosis, and proceeded to shake theirtinselled tushes to three glorious minutes of crass, flashy sass. Among these, customising theBacofoil-suit-and-bizarre-plumage panto aspects of Glam and hamming them into thenation’s homes, were Gary Glitter, who beat his matted chest and proclaimed himself theleader of the gang, Wizzard, a vehicle for the studio genius of rainbow–thatched Roy Wood.

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Mott The Hoople, Steve Harley’s Cockney Rebel, David Essex, Alvin Stardust, Barry Blue,Arrows, Hello, the emerging pretenders Queen and the inspired, genuinely idiosyncraticSparks. The Bay City Rollers, often erroneously annexed to Glam, were a different, inferiorjape.

Each had moments of vulgar genius (Harley’s tarnished reputation in particular is wellserved by Velvet Goldmine), but the Holland/Dozier/Holland or Stock/Aitken/Waterman of theera were undoubtedly songwriters/producers Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, whose corditeconstructions for The Sweet, Mud and Suzi Quatro were the trash aesthetic in excelsis.

Streamlined barrages of stomping Burundi drums and raw, pithy guitars such as “BallroomBlitz’. “Hellraiser”, “Teenage Rampage”, “Tiger Feet”, “Rocket”, “48 Crash” and “Devil Gate Drive”were sneered at by mature critics, but were a vital, visceral component of my peers’ musicaland even sentimental education. Doubtless they infected their victims with chronicimpatience, peripatetic attention spans, and a lust for cheap thrills. Furthermore, they stillsound more knowingly numbskull than 99 per cent of punk rock’s avowed avengers. TheSweet brought some high comedy to Glam’s history by not only plagiarising the sameYardbirds riff for “Blockbuster” as Bowie did for “Jean Genie”, but also keeping the hipperrecord from the No. 1 spot in January ’73.

“Blockbuster” remains the first, last and only chart-topping single to get away with shouting,“Aw, fuck!” Listen closely to Steve Priest’s cameo lost-the-plot exclamations. This band,incidentally, thought nothing of appearing on Top Of The Pops as gay Nazis. Pouting bassistPriest ranted furiously at the television producer who didn’t agree that his turning roundafter the opening bars of “Ballroom Blitz” to reveal the phrase “Fuck You” emblazoned on hisback was a sound idea. Chinn had one minute to cajole Priest into acquiescing. And thechutzpah of that “WE WANT SWEET!” section that fronts “Teenage Rampage”!

By the time the Chinnichap combos were burning out (reduced to heavy metal pastiches orscampi-in-a-basket cabaret), Bowie and Roxy had moved on to other, resiliently ambitious,modes of expression. Mixed-ability cash-in movies such as Born To Boogie (Bolan), Slade InFlame, That’ll Be The Day and Stardust (Essex), Remember Me This Way (Glitter), Never TooYoung To Rock (Mud, Hello, Rubettes, Glitter Band) and DA Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust

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concert film had sped up the process. Glam, nothing if not voracious, was devouring itself.Even Bolan, in ’73, was declaring, “Glam Rock is dead. It was a thing, but now you have yourSweet, your Chicory Tip, your Gary Glitter. What they’re doing is circus and comedy.”

Or Glitter Rock, as some would have it. The basic sound: hefty Diddley beats, cranked-upCochran riffs, Duane Eddy/Link Wray delayed twangs, and wacked-out doggerel withinsanely high multi–tracked backing vocals, today smacks of the facile and flippant. Or of amean-as-snakes, razor-sharp, minimalist purity, depending on your attitude. I was alwayssold on shiny baubles, sexy surfaces, the truth of trinkets.

On imitations of joy.

THE BOGUS MAN In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale gamely plays Arthur Stuart, an ex-pat reporter who’sresearching an anniversary article on the faked assassination of rock star Brian Slade’s alterego, Maxwell Demon. While Haynes says this isn’t “necessarily” based on Bowie’s killing-offof Ziggy Stardust: hey, let’s get real. Just this once. Arthur is compelled to excavate a past he’sleft behind.

Brian Slade, and Glam Rock in general, had been a religion to the younger Arthur, who wassucked by its allure into a vortex of hedonism and decadence, ultimately being “gentlyfucked” by Curt Wild, who whispers, “I will mangle your mind.”

But that’s the movies for you. While I may well be a jaded hack looking back on acraze/crusade that shunted me (with my full co-operation) across a few airstreams, I havenot as yet engaged in robust anal sex on a rooftop with a bewigged, lggyesque EwanMcGregor, so the resemblance, happily for me, ends at a certain point.

Still, the experience of meeting and interviewing David Bowie in LA gave me a rare case ofprematch nerves. Both times. He was in the event(s) charming and unaffected (unless heaffects unaffectedness, which is, of course, very likely), and a little verbose, which is fine byany interviewer. Naturally, I interrupted him long enough to press a copy of my ownrecently-recorded album into his palm.

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Iggy Pop is an absolute diamond, who stunned me with his intellect, then turned up at mybirthday party and within seconds was chatting up girls with the killer line, “Hi, I’m James.”

Another time I had to leap athletically into the road and wrench him back as he was about towalk blithely under a speeding car, and thus earned the right to claim I once saved Iggy Pop’slife. We both ended up arse-over-tit on a Piccadilly pavement, giggling dementedly. Me andIggy, ha, ha, ha.

On the whole, I think I prefer my pert little experiences of meeting my idols to Arthur’s moreoperatic, sweaty, life-buggering-art epiphany.

The most poignant moment of the film comes when, accosted by misguided fans, Arthursays, “No, sorry, I’m just a journalist. Perhaps you’d like to keep my press pass, as asouvenir?” Just a journalist. The chagrin! “Glam gave me a sense that there was more to lifethan life on Earth,” this journalist told Melody Maker in ’92 while having a go at being a popstar. “That you could shoot for the stars, and at least hit the crossbar.”

There’s a blind-spot part of everybody, however sentient, however cynical, which thinks theycould make it all worthwhile, could play the wild mutation, could fall asleep at night, as arock’n’roll star.

To a certain generation this is because Ziggy Stardust told us it was so.

THE KING OF THE MOUNTAIN COMETH Head of Creation Records, Alan McGee, says that “the reason I got into rock’n’roll is because Isaw David Bowie on Top Of The Pops with a bright blue acoustic guitar playing ‘Starman’ inJuly, 1972, and Mick Ronson on 10inch platforms, bending over, giving the guitar fellatio. Iwas gobsmacked. My reaction was part wanting to be David Bowie and part sexual arousal. Ihave since discovered my sexuality, and bizarrely it’s not towards men. I can honestly saythe first person who turned me on was David Bowie. Respect to Ziggy Stardust.”

On June 6, 1972, curiously enough my 12th birthday, David Bowie released The Rise And Fall Of

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Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. It got to No 5. It was the first record I ever bought.My dad embarrassed me by coming with me to the shop. With hindsight, he may have beenconcerned. Imagine: your boy suddenly becomes obsessed with a gay Martian in a greenjumpsuit who hangs out in phone boxes – like, what’s that about? Certainly, he seemedrelieved when pictures of Suzi Quatro and Liverpool FC joined those of Bowie, Bolan, Ferry andco on my bedroom wall. Next, I bought scratchy second-hand copies of Bolan Boogie andElectric Warrior, the two albums which confirmed T. Rex as a crackling, ecstatic pop entity,no longer hippie warblers. T. Rex sold 16 million records in their first 14 months (The Beatles,in the equivalent period at the beginning of their success sold five million). At one stage, fourin every hundred singles sold in Britain were by T. Rex. They had wonderful blue labels witha picture of Marc and the T. Rex logo in red. My friends and I would believe that in buyingthem, we were helping Marc get to Number One. We didn’t then know that the records thatsell the most are the ones which the record companies have decided will sell the most. Thiswas something we wanted, something we cared about. For one thing, if he was No. 1, he hadto be on Top Of The Pops.

Bolan and Ziggy killed the ’60s for us. They killed them good’n’dead until the majors’ businessacumen brought them back. They charted a map of style and in technique for white rockbands that was still being consulted, with equal degrees of reverence and shock, in the early’90s. The ’60s meant nothing to us. We didn’t remember them and we weren’t there. I havenever fully got over this prejudice. Dylan, “the artist of the century, our Keats”, looked andsounded like exactly what Glam Rock, with its breath of fresh hair. had come, to blow away.

Ziggy Stardust was, according to Cashbox magazine, “an electric age nightmare, a cold hardbeauty – an album to take with you into the 1980s.” Charles Shaar Murray wrote that, “as anobject lesson in media manipulation it eerily presaged Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistolsadventure, and as a blueprint for a generation’s capacity for self-reinvention, it marked theturning point between the worlds of hippie and punk”. For David Fricke it was “a marvel ofgenetic pop engineering, a brilliant and authentic collision of classic rock’n’rolI extremes –erotic frenzy, gender confusion, celebrity arrogance, private dread, apocalyptic fear”, andfeatured “Bowie’s star-crossed glam-Christ”. The NME reckoned: “Bowie is our most futuristicsongwriter, and sometimes what he sees is just a little scary.”

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Bowie himself later said. “I wasn’t at all surprised that Ziggy Stardust made my career. Ipackaged a totally credible plastic rock star – much better than any sort of Monkeesfabrication. My plastic rocker was much more plastic than anybody’s.”

It was what ironic icon Ziggy s uggested that rocked our world. That first song, “Five Years”,where the news had just come over that earth was really dying… what a way to start! Thebeginning of your love affair with music is the end of the world. Now that’s guaranteed togive the listener a grandiose sense of self-importance. This melodrama carried through, pastthe queer throwing up (my, how we analysed that), to the line that coloured your solitude forthe rest of your life: “And it was cold and it rained, so I felt like an actor…”

Over ascending chords, this had such an overwhelming effect on my peer group that we wereall instantly the stars of the movies in our heads and, frankly, Yes, Genesis, ELP, Pink Floydand all Americans never stood a chance. Sure, if you liked them, you didn’t get called a poof.They were “proper” musicians. But who could like them? We were too busy making love withour embryonic egos, or buying 20 Embassy between four of us so that time could take acigarette and put it in our mouths. And when your head got “all tangled up”, as it does at that(and, let’s face it, any) age, you were “not alone”, because Ziggy said so.

Which pretty much made Ziggy God in a godless world, I guess.

Interesting factual aside: most of the album was recorded live in autumn ’71, before therelease of Hunky Dory. Bowie planned ahead. Originally it wasn’t going to include “Starman”,“Suffragette City” or “Rock’n’Roll Suicide”. It was going to include “Velvet Goldmine”, whichended up on a B-side. Bowie has refused the use of any of his songs for Haynes’ movie,preferring to keep them in stock for his own planned Ziggy revival film, 25 years on from the“retirement” of the persona which gave him the springboard to shuffle and search throughsome of the most incisive, cold, scorched music and imagery of our times.

The ICA in London staged, this July, a tribute to the quarter-century anniversary of that“Rock’n’Roll Suicide”. They had the gall to present this as conceptual art. It wasn’t. It pissed onour memories. It was a covers band, and until we were on our fourth or fifth pint, wethought it was bollocks, after which it was funny. But I liked this, from the programme:

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“Ziggy bore himself, defined himself, faked himself and killed himself in a surge of creativeexcess. Nothing related to a reality anyone knew, yet generations then and now bought inunconditionally to a way of life that can only be played out in full onstage.”

As the acid house decade has done away with stars (how the ravers need a crash course!),and Oasis and others have insisted that stars are just thick blokes in anoraks anyway, we’vebeen shown the little old man working the levers behind the curtain in Oz. It’s been of late alean period for fantasy, mystery, the indefinable.

Ziggy really was something else.

SOUL LOVE For those of us who “never got off on that revolution stuff” and invented the term “dad-rock”when referring to The Beatles, Stones and Beach Boys, Bowie had the nous to go on to be thesingle most important and influential rock performer. When he became a white soul boy, sodid we.

Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs could be considered Glam albums. The former filtered inwired impressions of cracked Americana while hooking us up with that larger-than-lifelightning-bolt make-up. Was he perhaps, we mused, Zeus? The latter moved towards an archGothic, was ambitious and spooky, threatened real emotion in bursts. Pin-Ups, a collection ofMod covers (The Who, The Kinks, The Merseys) invited us to accept that maybe the ’60sweren’t complete bunk after all.

As did Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things, which even made us re-evaluate Dylan (andcleverly repositioned Ferry in the marketplace as a lounge lizard, as opposed to an ironic,post-modern, lounge lizard). “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” may have been written by an oldfur-face in jeans, but it was a hypnotic, delirious stream of intense imagery. We wouldwriggle under the mesh fence and bunk off school at 1.15 every day to hear it as it was RecordOf The Week on Radio 1.

This was a seminal single to a Glam fan: it seemed to be about a guy who’d been everywhereand done everything but understood nothing. It testified about other worlds and lifestyles

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and dreams. We signed up for those dreams. It’s easy to sell pop music to teenagers, becauseto paraphrase the glamorous WB Yeats, if you tread on their pop music you tread on theirdreams. Cunningly, with Machiavellian manipulation, it comes to represent escape fromdrudgery and school and no fun and no sex and no idea. It’s The Other. It’s sure fine-looking.

The worship of celebrity is a substitute for romantic love, which has itself been defined asthe need to evade the self and immerse in another, a projection, however deserving orunworthy. So you give the star your loyalty, your money. You pay your tithes.

Bowie knew this, and stayed thin and hungry. Bolan did not. He drove a Rolls-Royce becauseit was good for his voice. As Mark Paytress wrote in his recent book, Ziggy Stardust, “Bolanenjoyed his stardom: Bowie (or Ziggy) critiqued his.”

A week before his death, Bolan recorded the last in the series of amusing childrens’ TV showshe’d been reduced to (although he salvaged some “credibiIity” by championing punk rockwithin its confines, and setting himself up as its “godfather”, hanging out with The Bansheesand Generation X and having The Damned support him on tour). This edition of Marcfeatured old friend/rival Bowie as guest star. Bowie, gaunt and clean-cut handsome,premiered the song “Heroes”, demonstrating the healthy, advancing state of his art. Then thepair duetted on “Standing Next To You”, a little (and to this day enigmatic) something they’dknocked together earlier. They were just into the first verse when Marc tripped on a cableand fell off the stage.

Cue credits.

“Could there have been a more painfully symbolic end to the Electric Warrior’s career?” asksBarney Hoskyns. If Bowie attracted the cerebral (or what passes for it in 12-year-olds: let’s sayhe sparked imaginative connections), Bolan aroused the physical. Though historians will tellyou his was standard three-chord rock played loud and in-your-face, I hear it as pure funk.When T. Rex play, it’s like tiny electrodes, fixed to my body by crafty Lilliputians in 1972,causing my legs to suffer chronic delusions, such as that they can groove foxily to music bywhite folk.

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Soon, Marc was bigger than air. “Telegram Sam” and “Metal Guru” felt like cascades ofsensual bliss. We’d play each one a hundred times. Then we’d go to someone else’s house andplay it a hundred times on their record-player, to see if it was any different. That intro to“Metal Guru” – we’d never heard anything like it. Actually, we’d never heard anything much,but why tarnish an important rites-of-passage tale?

As Glam eventually became a short cut to the Top 10 for a bunch of cheerful clowns, it tarredand feather-boad Bolan, who, having failed to break America while neglecting his Britishfans, clung to coke and cognac and watched his preeminence slip inexorably away.

DO THE STRAND The notion of the dandy (rather unsatisfactory dictionary definition: “man greatly concernedwith smartness of dress, beau”) survived the over-exposed bon mots of such as Wilde andBaudelaire and permeated popular music from Little Richard and Billy Fury, through Hendrixand Brian Jones, to the original Glam Rock icons. From there, its influence skipped ageneration of snotty punks in thrall to tatters and aggression before resurfacing in the NewRomantic heyday of Spandau, Duran, Soft Cell, Adam Ant and – the most subtly effective ofthe troupe – Japan (David Sylvian understanding that its successfully effete projectionrequired an intellectually aloof stance as much as gaudy gladrags). It’s arguably undergoneanother flurry more recently, watered down for Suede, Placebo, and others who may talk itbut can’t walk it (even The Sweet looked more androgynous).

And if Bowie, Bolan, and Ferry did change lives and attitudes, personally anddemographically, this is where they played their strong suit. The Mods (among whom Bowie,with The Manish Boys, and Bolan, with John’s Children, had flitted) had taken pride inappearance, and valued stylish self-betterment.

The art-school crowd (Ferry, Eno, Harley, Sparks) had taken on board Pop Art’s ice-coolreassessment of the validity of bold, glib marketing techniques. Now, with the “real” issuesand campaigns that had so motivated the ’60s (between joints) seemingly resolved, andfreedom of expression a passé given, the battlefield was a soft one, a matter of aesthetics. Thetwitches and traits of the theatre and art worlds entered the excitable realm of Hot Hits.

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The early ’70s may have given us spacehoppers, hot pants, patched dungarees and bean-bagchairs, but they also gave us some silly, pointless stuff. Like, clearance to wear preposterousgladrags and look a proper pansy. While this resulted in more than one horribly misjudgedparty of shame for most of us, it meant that one had a much higher tolerance level for thequirks of others. Anything went. Dignity and restraint were on the first boat.

Denis Leary has said something that Ewan McGregor likes to quote: ‘‘In the ’70s we were inthe middle of a sexual revolution, wearing clothes that guaranteed we wouldn’t get laid.Everyone looked a shambles.”

Except Ferry, who always looked immaculate. Whether carrying off a sheen-black jumpsuitor a white tuxedo, the man was always a cut above, a class ahead. How we admired hisconceited cool. his parody (though we wouldn’t’ve known it) of slightly wasted elegance.

“With every goddess a letdown. every idol a bringdown, it gets you down,” the Ferryman sangon “Mother Of Pearl” from late ’73’s chart-topping Stranded. Before this, Roxy’s first twoalbums, Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, had introduced them as experimental avant-garde acrobats of sound. These remain the critics’ favourites. But with Eno gone (Ferry wasapparently jealous of Eno’s greater success with women: so much for the bisexual ethic therethen) and carving his own niche as baldie boffin, Ferry’s Roxy were free to indulge thecrooner’s overt romanticism and melancholy. Stranded is the true Roxy classic, a Max Ophulsepic where all the bridges sigh and at swish parties the poet falls fatalistically in and out oflove nightly. Some of us were shaped and influenced by this myth to a perverse, unhealthydegree.

I have no doubt I would have allowed my life to be happier and more carefree had I not, oninnumerable occasions, thought it preferable that it resemble the cool, airy, pained grandeurof a Roxy Music song. One learns too late that the cool and airy bits don’t come easily to reallife, and the grandeur bit is also tough to achieve.

On the positive side, the pained bit is attainable enough.

ANDY’S CHEST

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Bowie, for his part, had taken a number of cues from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene (whereasFerry’s Pop Art references “were the brasher, less nocturnal Rosenquist, Johns, and Dine –anyone who echoed the hyper-real, faintly twisted sexual veneer of Hollywood and The JazzAge). Warhol’s “superstars” – Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling – used glitter andtransvestism as weapons in their war against convention. Bowie is reported to have startedpainting nails and shaving eyebrows after meeting this crowd.

He’d been into The Velvet Underground (and the fixation with whips, furs and a shadowycrossdressing demi-monde) as early as ’66, and admired Warhol’s toying with personae aspuppets. On Hunky Dory he’d dedicated “Queen Bitch” to the Velvets (“white light returnedwith thanks”), who the New York Dolls were soon to replace as New York’s local left-field éliteband. When he met Lou Reed, Bowie flirted and fawned. The habitually sarcastic Reed wassussed enough to realise that an artistic union between two self-confessed weird freaksmight be strange and wonderful fruit.

Hence Transformer, produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson, and Reed’s biggest commercialsuccess, which included such declarations as, “We’re coming out, out of our closets, out onthe streets.” In July ’72, Reed – and a similarly rehabilitated-by-Bowie’s-adoration Iggy Pop –had been displayed as trophies at a Bowie press conference at The Dorchester. Reed nowdenies that much ostentatious kissing took place. He also denies that he resented Bowie’staking the credit for much of Transformer, and bitched boisterously about this to the press. Iknow this because the sleevenotes l was asked to write for the current repackaging ofTransformer were vetoed by the revisionist Reed himself on the grounds of “factualinaccuracies”.

So he’ll love Velvet Goldmine then, for the loose Curt Wild is as much based on Reed as onIggy.

The lg’s unhinged stage performances (rolling around in gold body paint and broken glass)with The Stooges, the antithesis of ’60s feelgood surf music, had also caught Bowie’s eye, andthe hyperactive Englishman was soon involved with Raw Power (later work on The Idiot andLust For Life was much more fruitful). Bowie wished he had lggy’s carnal abandon, andfound an element of it through playing Ziggy.

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Tony DeFries, Bowie’s MainMan manager, had the gumption to maximise Bowie’s Americanobsessions, hiring a troupe of Warhol hangers-on and extras as “publicists”. Theirunorthodox demeanour fanned the forest fire of Bowie’s mystique. And when he gave thesong “All The Young Dudes” to Mott The Hoople, prior to this a run-of-the-mill West Countrystodgerock band, he conjured up Glam’s international anthem. Young, foolish and slack, theglittering and priceless heard this as their very own jackboot-to-the-jacksy of ‘‘All You Need IsLove” and “Woodstock”.

It even mentioned T-Rex. If Mott, who’d already turned down the gift of “Suffragette City”,were in truth about as sexually ambivalent as Sid James (despite having one member calledAriel Bender), Ian Hunter at least had the grace, on their farewell single “Saturday Gig”(ironically their first with Mick Ronson) to croak: “Did you see the suits and the platformboots? Oh dear, oh gawd, oh my oh my! Don’t wanna be hip, but thanks for the great trip…”

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION So whatever did happen to the teenage dream? Is the world, as that notorious GlamsterWilliam Shakespeare put it, “still deceived with ornament”? Jobriath, groomed as theAmerican Ziggy, retired in ’75. He was a decade too soon for Middle America. Renamed ColeBerlin, he died of AIDS in the Chelsea Hotel in 1983. Bolan died. Brian Connolly of The Sweetdied. Alice Cooper plays golf. Lou Reed is in denial. Steve Harley says he doesn’t remembermuch because everyone was doing so much coke at the time. Queen saw a niche and cleanedup with “Bohemian Rhapsody”, which many consider Glam’s swansong. Freddie Mercurydied. Mick Ronson died. Prince, in a big way, and Morrissey, in a pernickety non-visual way,tapped the legacy. Kurt Cobain and U2 were photographed wearing dresses: it’s no big deal.Mike Chapman went on to produce Blondie. Eno wants to be perceived as Einstein. Lightmetal acts from Kiss to Hanoi Rocks to Jane’s Addiction have dabbled with stereotypes,though thanks to Boy George, Marilyn and the New Romantics, it’s a moot point as towhether the “gender bender” is in any way startling today. This would explain the lack ofreaction to the stalled “Romo” movement, and account for how Brett Anderson and BrianMolko can make “shocking” claims without having to back them up. It’d also explain whyManic Street Preachers elected to drop their provocatively glitzy manifesto and become amore commercial Big Country, yammering on about politics instead. I should declare a

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grudge: the Manics dissed my own attempt at a Glam Rock fling some years ago. Theyweren’t alone. It broke my tiny heart. Nobody had or has a greater genuine love for the genrethan me. I’m the kind of person who gets really excited at receiving a letter from Bill Legend(one-time T. Rex drummer), who’s been to see sad “tribute” bands to both T. Rex and TheSpiders (in fairness, T-Rexstasy weren’t sad at all: they knew what they were doing, theyslid). Who found introducing Sparks onstage a couple of years back a genuine and profoundhonour. Who around the same time, in what was realistically my last gig before retirement(a nation mourned), got to sing “Pyjamarama”, in London. At the age of 12 l’d have said l’d diehappy if I ever got to do that. And I wouIdn’t’ve been far wrong.

Glam Rock, for better or worse, taught me that you’ve got to jive to stay alive. That love iscareless in its choosing; love descends on those defenceless. That the throne of time is akingly thing, and the way somebody flips their hip can always make you weak. That it’s fromyourself you’ve got to hide, and that there’ll always be a sheer, chic, teenage rebel of theweek. That one thing we shared was an ideal of beauty.

And that life’s a gas.

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