Mirror Star / Mirror Freak

Where punk has glam running through it like jam in a Swiss Roll - anti-fashion is only glamour turned inside out - New Wave seems to me the actual anti-glam backlash - the reign of the ordinary bloke and blokette. A parade of only-a-mother-could-love faces (sometimes only-a-mother-could-bear voices too) in clothes that often seem to mock the idea of style or elegance, whether scruffy or showbiz-parodic. Facially, instead of alien beauty, it's the genre of geeks and speccy gits. Kooks and inadequates.  Spudboys. People who ought to have never had the remotest chance of being in pop music, actually finally got their chance to be in pop music. 

Lyrically likewise, there's a relentless emphasis on the mundane and the quotidian...   Routine, office work, commuting, suburbia. The Members's "Sound of the Suburbs" and "Solitary Confinement", Jona Lewie the unsmooth operator hiding in the kitchen at parties, The Chords singing about  English commuter belt drones who swallow their dreams like their beer....  Madness with their "Grey Day"s and "Cardiac Arrest"'s happening to briefcase-wielding commuters on the double-decker bus. Emotionally, the registers are bathos and pathos (Madness again - "Embarrassment";  the sheer genius of a song about the awkwardness of a teenager going to the chemists to buy his first packet of rubber johnies  ("House of Fun")) 

And all of that is what's good about New Wave. The bubble of fantasy punctured. The plodders and the mis-shapes get their moment. No more heroics. Anti-stars.  

Here's a song from a bunch of Noo Wavers (whose record covers I  must have flicked past a hundred times) that's actually about stardom and being a no-mates loser. 

Fabulous Poodles turn out to sound less pathetic than I'd always imagined from the name and the look - vocally a little bit Wreckless Eric, which I like... violin that's a tad Doctors of Madness.. , tiny bit of talk box which makes me think of "S-S-Single Bed" by Fox -  but still falls some way short of making me want to investigate further 

I mean look at these album covers

Here's a late-glam era group with a song about in-the-mirror play-acting wannabe-stars, supposedly inspired by Bolan, a friend of Steve H's 

Although I say "late glam", Cockney Rebel look even more gorm-free in that get-up than Fabulous Poodles

Here in this American Bandstand clip, the Fabpoos are done up in ironic "entertainers, we" outfits. 

"We're all losers on the dating game" says the singer.

I suppose that look is coming out of Deaf School maybe (a group on the edge of late glam / New Wave) (shades too of Sailor or Kursaal Flyers)

In this FabPoo clip singer's got a sparkly jacket - to be taken as a kind of anti-theatrical joke, I think, indicating the mutual discomfort between band and audience about the very idea of performance. "It's showtime!"