Glam! - Barney Hoskyns

 GLAM! - BARNEY HOSKYNS

The problem nowadays with glam rock is that its reputation goes before it and its reputation isn't a good one, not helped by Gary Glitter driving a stake through its heart with the exposure of all his crimes. At the time, however, glam rock was the sight and sound of a wedge being driven between generations. Decades don't normally cut off neatly from each other but tend instead to bleed into one and other. Subsequently, the Sixties didn't end in December of 1969 and nor did they end at Altamont. Likewise, the Seventies didn't begin in January 1970 nor did they begin with Bowie announcing he was 'gay and always had been'. Culture is never cut and dried and neither is history

According to Barney Hoskyns in his book Glam!, it was Marc Bolan who began the glam rock 'revolution', driven by his desire for pop success, by changing his musical style from hippy whimsy to cosmic electric, and by applying glitter make-up to his face for his appearance on Top of the Pops. According to music producer Tony Visconti, however, it was Bowie and Bolan simultaneously who invented glam, with Bowie pushed in that direction by his then wife Angie. According to Lou Reed on the other hand, glam came from Andy Warhol and in particular his Factory Superstars Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn who for some time had been making costumes out of things they found in the street, and wearing make-up, nail polish and glitter.

Who we should thank for glam is academic, of course. More importantly and as conveyed by Hoskyns, what glam's great gift to legions of disaffected teenagers was the implicit invitation for them to reinvent themselves. To strike a pose, to revolt into style. This is precisely what Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Wayne County, Cherry Vanilla, Candy Darling and indeed all of Andy Warhol's coterie did, transforming themselves from freaks and outcasts to instant superstars. Bolan and Bowie did the same, all of them in the process helping to build and add different elements to the torch that could be passed along and held aloft by future torch-bearers from the Sex Pistols to Marc Almond to Lady Gaga.

The phenomenal thing about glam was how very quickly it became the vehicle to take such things as androgyny and bisexuality into the mainstream, making it suddenly acceptable for blokes to put on a bit of make-up and to sport multi-colored tank-tops, platform shoes and feathered haircuts. Groups such as Slade, Sweet and The Glitter Band whose members wouldn't look out of place on a building site or behind the wheel of a lorry became the main representatives, pulling a host of other groups such as Roxy Music in their wake. With their retro-futurism Roxy Music in turn created another wake that broke down the barriers between high and low art, an attribute that Bowie ascribed the New York Dolls as also having.

Saying it before anyone else had the chance to, come 1973 Bolan was declaring that glam rock was dead though in response Angie Bowie replied that 'It may have been Nero fiddling, but he was playing a hell of a tune.' And she was right.

All in all, Barney Hoskyns' book is an adequate overview of glam, the only problem with it being he over-stretches himself and casts his net a little too far, in the process applying the glam label to Kiss and even Bette Midler. Kiss may indeed have been an attempt at appropriating glam but to the glam purist they never cut the mustard, at best being a kind of third-rate glam metal. The devil is always in the detail. To the glam purist there's a distinction between Mud, for example, and Showaddywaddy. That distinction might only be the cluster of baubles pinned to the ears of Mud's guitarist but it's an important one.

Hoskyns' book ends in 1997 with Gary Glitter having been arrested on suspicion of harbouring child pornography. There is then a footnote adding that he had been charged and was due to appear before magistrates. The rest is history. The Leader of The Gang was dead and so too 24 years after Bolan's original announcement was glam, Glitter's downfall being the final nail in the coffin, leaving many a good memory and many more good tunes but a very desecrated though still very glitter-encrusted corpse.

John Serpico