"Bowie damage" and the art-glam / new wave + postpunk nexus

 I didn't know the music journalist and author Mark Spitz  - who has died tragically young  - very well, but I always enjoyed chatting with him. He asked me some questions for a couple of his books: Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion and Film  and Bowie: A Biography. The twee talk was on the phone, but the latter chat was via email in 2007. In addition to the Dame, Iggy, and glam in general, it also covered DB's heirs in postpunk, goth, and new wave. It is reproduced below.

Mark Spitz: Eno had already been working on a new sound for years when he hooked up
with Bowie in ’76.    The language: ambient noise, both classical and deliberately unpolished structures, the Kraftwerk fandom, was already in place in many ways.  What do you think Bowie brought to it?

SR: The songs and the soul. Meaning the anguish. Does Eno do anguish? He does those slightly-dejected, passive drifting through life, fatalistic type songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science. But while Eno can enchant and delight (and disorient and amaze), I don’t know if he could reach the places Bowie did on Low.

What is, if it can be said there is one, the “Low” sound that’s so  influential.  Is it a texture or a feeling that’s particular, or the  way they process the noise on their new fangled synths. And who, in your opinion, has used it well since? (Nine Inch Nails?).    Clearly anyone
can master a synth now....

People go on about the drum sound. This painfully crashy, abrupt drum sound, is what I think they mean. Howard Devoto mentioned it when I interviewed him for Rip It Up, that the drums sounded so different and so modern. Also I read an interview with Steve Morris of Joy Division about how he felt Low was so revolutionary, on account of the drum sound. Morris was the most production attuned member of the band, also the one into Krautrock and esoteric music.

There’s a certain dank electronic sound on the second side that I don’t think had many precedents. This glum, damp quality. It’s related to things like Edgar Froese’s solo albums like Aqua and Epsilon in Malayan Pale (I think that’s the title) which Bowie was really into, along with Cluster and La Dusseldorf and the rest. But it just has a unique melancholia to it.

Do you suppose Bowie and Eno simply got bored with rock; even punk  rock, which was already taking root in ‘76.   Bowie gets accused of  dilettantism but in part at least it probably takes a dilettante’s fleeting attention to come up with something like “Warzawa” with the
doomy synths and almost gypsy wailing vocals.

I don’t know if he was even that aware of punk brewing. He was in LA, and then went straight to Europe pretty much, right? Did the massive self-immersion in European high culture as a kind of inoculation against America/rock/decadence. Whether deliberate strategy or accidental, being out of the UK for 1976 was a great move. He was able to come in early the next year and eclipse punk, in many people’s eyes, show it up as very traditional and backward looking.

You talk in Rip It Up about its influence on Joy Division in name.  And Ian Curtis’ Bowie fascination is well documented (as is the fact that he played The Idiot the night he killed himself).  Is J.D. the bridge between Bowie and post-punk?   Did they take all that was interesting about Bowie and use it best at the time?  If you could talk a bit more about the Bowie/Joy Division nexus and share some thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

I think it’s the inhibition and repression in the Bowie/Iggy albums made in Berlin that Joy Division and others responded to. The fact that the music, while guitar-based and harsh and aggressive, never rocks out. It’s imploded aggression. And that’s very British, and particularly very Northern British. People do bottle it all up. So Iggy going from “Loose” to a sound that was very much not-loose - that resonated for your British.  I think Iggy actually had hits in the UK with songs off those albums, Idiot/Lust for Life/New Values. They were much bigger records in Britain than America, at any rate.

You mentioned “Bowie damage” in your email.  Could you elaborate on it.  Were you referring to say Duran or the Blitz club fashion crowd?

There was a time when there seemed to be an awful lot of Bowie imitators on all sorts of levels of the UK scene, and a lot of the time the influence was pernicious. Most of the New Romantic/Blitz stuff was terrible, it picked up on the idea of posing, but not the soul that Bowie actually has in there. Or indeed the intellect.

But you can see the Bowie vocal mannerisms all over the place, e.g. Richard Butler in Psychedelic Furs has a voice pitched EXACTLY midway between Johnny Rotten and David Bowie.

Some of the people who were evidently Bowie influenced (and good) at that time I never actually realized were Bowie influenced. I never understood why people dismissed Numan as a Bowie clone. Now I can see it more, but I still think he really took the influence somewhere. And the same with Billy Mackenzie of the Associates. It’s only later that I noticed the extreme influence of the Low side two instrumentals on the early Associates stuff, as collated on Fourth Drawer Down.

Is it an accurate theory that the American garage kids who tried to play Stones and Beatles songs and came up with crude but exhilarating Nuggets tracks instead invented punk rock, then the British kids who tried to be Bowie invented New Wave?  Or am I just reaching?

That’s slightly overblown. There’s a bit more in the mix than Bowie. But you could say that in a lot of ways the poppy end of New Wave -- what we called New Pop, in the US they called in the New Music or the Second British Invasion -- was a re-staging of glam. All that stuff from ABC to Culture Club to Adam and the Ants to Duran to Japan was by Roxy and Bowie and T.Rex fans.

What’s the best fake Bowie song ever?  Worst?

The Associates’ “White Car In Germany” is the best. Closely followed by “Down in the Park” by Gary Numan/Tubeway Army which is quite influenced by side two of Low I think.

Worst. Not sure. Probably something by Spandau Ballet in their trying to be in Young Americans mode.

Why was ’77 such a watershed year for the weird getting attention.  Even things like Devo’s first record or Eraserhead, and its soundtrack seemed to find favor.   As you mention in the book, it’s often over shadowed by Never Mind The Bollocks, The Clash, etc. but it’s also
really year 1 for artboy rock too.

Yeah, but glam, eh? Alice Cooper, Sparks, Roxy, Glitter, even The Sweet with their women’s clothes and Hitler-mustache-wearing guitar player. The whole early 70s was a freak zone! There’s an argument (Dick Hebdige's) that punk is just a scrawled addendum to glam. And even prog was quite outré: Gabriel’s costumes in Genesis, Jethro Tull even. Not to mention Queen…

I suppose punk, through its assault on all taboos, took that glam freakery and added the sick humour, the grotesquerie.

Lyrically, do you suppose Low is underrated as far as establishing the classically angsty New Wave lyric?  Its subject matter seems to be damage and sexual or existential fear, all rendered with self-deprecating wit; a New Wave template.

Aspects of it certainly seemed to have been picked up by people like Howard Devoto (in Magazine) and Gary Numan.  The language has a non-rock’n’roll-ness about it, a lack of American idiom (no blues or raunch or R&B derived expressions) , that I can’t see too many precedents for. But nor is it Englishness-y in the way that Syd Barrett or the Soft Machine alumni did things. It’s a stark, fractured, alienation that must have seemed stunningly modern in 1977.

I don’t know about under-rated, though!

What do you think the Bowie and later (on The Idiot and Lust For Life) Iggy croon’s influence is.  It sort of makes its debut here.  Certainly as far as Iggy’s previous albums were concerned.

Well he always had a bit of a non-rock aspect in his voice, didn’t he? If you think of the way he sings in “Space Oddity”. He was influenced by Anthony Newley, right? Who was a kind of show singer, cabaret… very English sounding. And also Scott Walker is in their somewhere.

But definitely the sonorousness and non-rock’n’rollness is more pronounced here. “Wild is the Wind” on Station to Station would be a transitional song in that respect I expect. That’s some kind of standard, a cover, right?

I must admit that while I can see how important the Iggy/Berlin albums are, I don’t really enjoy them that much, give or take the odd song. I think it’s because Iggy is American through and through, and his authentic artistic being is the wildness of the Stooges. It’s “Raw Power” and “I Got A Right”. When he does the croon it’s like he’s been forced to wear a tux and a bow tie. It seems more mannered than Bowie’s croon, where the mannered-ness seems authentic and to spring from within. But it could just be something where the grain of his voice and its range doesn’t suit the croon style like Bowie’s higher voice does. Iggy always seems like he’s crooning through a belch.

 Is Low an end to Bowie’s period of radical shape shifting?  Parts of it are disseminated throughout the other albums that he’ make, certainly through the 90s like Earthling and Outside, and obviously through the records of other artists, but he never did a complete 180 after that.   Let’s Dance was a polish but not a jarring style change as say Ziggy to 

Plastic Soul.

To me the Let’s Dance persona was the last massive, and significant change to his image. He went from being cocaine-raved thin, with this totally gaunt, pallid face, to this new healthy look -- blonde hair, tanned looking, very exuberant in the video for “Modern Love”. And that was Bowie for the first time following rather than leading. With Low and the Berlin trilogy and even with Scary Monsters’ “Ashes To Ashes” he was right ahead of what was going on, from postpunk to the New Romantics. But with Let’s Dance it was as though he was following the cues of New Pop, the rhetoric of health and self-discipline that was being propagated by groups like ABC and Scritti Politti. And the sound too with its Motown echoes and the upfulness and extroversion, the clean, bright sound, the blatant commercialism, that was totally New Pop.

Can you talk a bit about this period Bowie’s influence on the goth end of post-punk.  Bauhuas obviously, and Cure.   Do you suppose it was more visual than sonic?  The whole Euro-vampire look he was mining?

Again, almost without exception, the Goth performers were glam fans who briefly got caught up in punk and then reverted to type. They never had any truck with that being-the-same-as-the-audience, Everyman/"Ordinary Joes up on stage now" aspect of punk. They always wanted to be stars. Not that he was a Goth, but you can see it in a name like Billy Idol. You might say that was a punk name mocking the idea of rock stardom… but not really. And Idol was part of the Bromley Contingent, he hung with Siouxsie Sioux and Severin. None of these people were ever into the egalitarian side of punk. They were into the Doors and rock as theatre, Alice Cooper, Roxy, Bowie. There is an authoritatian subtext to glam, it’s a domineering relationship to the audience, who are down there while you are up there onstage. That’s why it has this relationship with showbiz. And hence all the flirtations with imagery of aristocracy and even fascism. And the obsession with physical beauty. Bauhaus were totally about that -  if the singer looked like the bassist they’d have got nowhere.

An interesting thing about Bauhaus is their cover of “Ziggy Stardust”, it’s almost like karaoke. Its shows the circularity of glam, where fans grow up to be idols having learned the art of posing from their idols.

Then again the Associates did a similar thing: their first single was a cover of “Boys Keep Swinging”, released only a month or so after the original single came out. Talk about chutzpah!

Pop(timist) Tarts (the "criminality" of sweetness)

Pop Tarts got on the front of Melody Maker in 1987.

They were a bit like the Pet Shop Boys if they'd read some of those little black Foreign Agents Semiotexte books by Baudrillard and the rest. The idea that resistance and being "alternative" just replicated the system - that hyper-conformism was the right strategy.

Frank Owen did the piece and the cover line was "Superband of Simulation Pop". So absolutely Baudrillard-infused.

Long before it became common for pop stars and rappers to have merchandise and branded clothing lines and perfumes, the Pop Starts talked about wanting to start a whole range of Pop Tart luxury products -  truffles, you name it.

They would sneer at the faux-authenticity of REM or Smiths.

Indeed I think they might have got the name "pop tarts" from something someone had written disparaging all the Second British Invasion MTV bands - Dave Marsh wrote scathingly about the  "new pop tarts" from England assailing American shores and destroying rock

Well, maybe not - most likely they got it from the sugary, refined-carbohydrate-dense "breakfast" snack. 

They were this couple, Randy and Fenton, who after the pop stardom masterplan (the cover story preceded them even releasing a single, if I recall right) fell through, then succeeded hugely with a company called World of Wonder making TV docs that specialised in anything extreme or wacky or kitschy.

Imagine if John Waters made documentaries.  

They also directed the movie, Party Monster,  about that Limelight club fiend Michael Alig. A Leigh Bowery type who created a Taboo-style scene of exhibitionism and excess in New York, populated with pill monsters and drug pigs. And who then murdered one of his drug dealer associates, chopped him up in the bath if I recall right.

And they are the team behind RuPaul's Drag Race.

These divides have been going for ever, actually - the ironic embrace of frivolity and vapidity. It goes back to Wilde -  probably further still.

You want to avoid anything that smacks of earnestness or the hale 'n hearty.

To be worthy and wholesome is anathema.

Certainly as long as I can remember, there's been someone ostentatiously publicly liking something  merit-less  - which is fine as far as it goes (challenge the boring established metrics of merit, sure, why not) - but worse, something devoid of interest on any level - at MM, for a moment, you had certain people saying that they thought Curiosity Killed the Cat were good - while looking sideways to see if it was going to get a rise from other people.

Or there was Morley saying that a  particular Tight Fit 12 inch was better than Led Zep III. Admittedly witty  - and, at the time, a timely polemic. 

But even before the New Pop era transvaluations, you can find examples of this reflex in pop writing.

Right back in the early Seventies, you'd get a few critics saying actually Gary Glitter is good, the Sweet are good... arguing that manufactured product has a certain purity of mercenary intent to it.

I'm sure somebody in the rock crit community  must have opined of The Archies's "Sugar Sugar", that - bubblegum - was pop at its purest - in that sense needing no defense or apology.

Probably it was Nik Cohn was the very first to say  - in the field of rock writing - that teen crazes like PJ Proby  meant more to him than Dylan. That he preferred Hollywood pulp to art-movie profundity.

Then again Noel Coward - speaking through the character Amanda in Private Lives - declared "extraordinary how potent cheap music is" back in 1930. 

It's like a structural position within the field of pop taste.

PC Music and hyperpop are obviously the latest iteration of this sensibility.

So the question for me has always been - what's the dialectical next step beyond that? Given that it's already a played-out, over-familiar game.

At one point I was thinking it could actually be the embrace of middlebrow.

Or, conversely, a re-theorization of the value of snobbery and the hip versus square worldview. 

seeds of shock and awe

 [from 2011]

Whenever I hear Obama give one of his Major Speeches, like in Tucson, I'm moved by the oratory and I feel really grateful that we have him. But a part of me always thinks, "this guy hasn't got a rock'n'roll bone in his body". I don’t think he has a hip hop bone in his body either. Apparently he likes to listen to Jay-Z, but I wonder why--just a purely technical appreciation of the formal skill involved? It can't be the content he gets off on. Obama's vision of how the world should be is modest--so decent, so sensible, so sane. It's how the world should be and how it needs to be, Desperately. And it's nothing to do with the world as proposed by rock'n'roll, or hip hop.

From very early on with rap--as early as 1986, when I made my first serious attempts to grapple with the music, in the piece "Nasty Boys", which is now in Bring the Noise--I realized there were some serious limitations to a left-wing analysis of hip hop. Or at least, a straightforwardly hopeful and uplifting reading of it, which was what so many critics then, especially in Britain, were trying to glom onto rap. It was around that time I started to develop this over-arching sense of pop culture as being as much on the side of the Devil as on the side of the angels, which David Stubbs and I wrote up as the thinkpiece "Indecency", which is in Blissed Out. Or to put that another way: everything that is wrong with the world, our society, Humanity, etc, is bubbling inside of rock/pop/rap etc, just as much as all that's hopeful and helpful. More often than not, there's a kind of perfect stand-off between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary going on in most forms of popular music.

Rock critics, almost always left-wing and liberal, invariably focus on the uplifting, constructive tendencies, and ignore or downplay the negativity, the selfishness. Academics, who tend to be even more left-wing and progressive-minded, and also overly rational and somewhat cautious and prim in their approach to life, are even worse when it comes to ignoring these aspects of rock and rap. They are always on the look-out for "socially redeeming value". But when I started to listen to rap really closely, in 1986, it seemed to me that you couldn’t understand, or even aesthetically and emotionally feel rap without taking into account that it is fundamentally about vanity, the lust for glory, about competitiveness and domination. Rapping is about lording it over vanquished foes, insulting and humiliating them stylishly. Style is a form of combat, a mean of self-assertion and self-distinction. Developing a unique style as an MC is a form of self-coronation. And a lot of subcultures, not just hip hop, are quests for aristocracy: it's the superiority complex of those who've raised themselves above their more ordinary counterparts in their own demographic through style and knowledge. The motor is profoundly inegalitarian. Not nice!

But this is precisely why rap, like the more aggressive forms of rock, or more grandiose and bombastic forms of spectacular showbiz pop, are so compelling. It's why we're mesmerised by them. It's like watching a boxing match, or a great athletic contest. You thrill to the will-to-power.

I say all this as a fan. If you really listen to what is being proposed in some of the greatest rock -- in the Stooges and the Sex Pistols, in certain glam and heavy metal songs-- it is a celebration of self-aggrandisement, wanton destruction.

Rock, especially punk and metal, and rap, especially gangsta rap (which is kinda like the black punk or the black metal, kinda, sorta), are rooted in adolescence, that ability teenagers have to only think about themselves, to not consider the consequences of their actions, to take risks and revel in recklessness. Even though I am grown up and have kids, I try to stay true to these anti-social and irresponsible energies in the music. Not by trying to live out those energies: I'm not in any position to, even if I wanted to, and I don't want to, because that's not any way a mature, healthy person should lead their lives. But I "stay true" by refusing to pretend that these obnoxious energies aren't a massive part of what fuels the music.

Sometimes pop culture seems to me like a lurid rash caused by a tropical disease. Its feverish energy is really morbid vitality: the expression of capitalist unrealism, the unsustainable extravagance and irrational mania of a culture organized around consumerism and celebrity.

Lou Reed Retro

 

antitheatricality siouxsie

 

wintertime for Hitler (anti-theatricality 6 of ??)

" Trump is an increasingly symbolic figure — Norma Desmond with the nuclear codes and sycophantic butlers in his ears on a West Wing Sunset Boulevard soundstage." 

attention and submission

Because he was never properly loved, he requires attention and submission,” Mary Trump, the president’s niece and a fierce critic of his, told me. “He requires not ever being contradicted.”

secret thesis

secret thesis is that the clothes / style has aged far worse than the sonics

bowie looks shit as often as looks exquisite

roxy look tatty

the covers are embarrassing



my agenda double - fold

to argue for what no one talks about when talking about glam, which is the music - to argue that there was a distinctive, if loose, sonic aesthetic - and set of sonic advances, or at least steps taken


but also to argue, in the context of all rock, image appearance gesture performance spectacle is

"everything is glam rock"

and even the performance of non-performance is a kind of performance

- naturalistic acting in cinema, method, kitsch sink etc - casting of non-professionals

Illusion and disillusion

two interviews

1) What’s glam exactly? You said  its origin must be found in Oscar Wilde.

My book is about glam rock primarily, a 1970s phenomenon, rather than about “glam” or “glamour” in some more general sense. So on a really basic level of definition, what I’m looking at this historical phenomenon of glam rock as it was understood and written about at the time: a cluster of mostly British artists who emerged around 1971-72 and dominated UK pop culture for several years, then faded from the scene (or mutated) shortly before punk. So Bowie, T. Rex, Sweet, Slade, Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel, Mott the Hoople, many more. Glam rock also had exponents in America – Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Sparks, a few others. And there were certain US cities where the “glam vibe” was strong, like New York and Los Angeles, either through the local scene of bands, or through the strong reception for visiting English groups. But in the final part of the book I’m also looking at the legacy and “aftershocks” of glam as they reverberate through the Eighties, Nineties and into the 21st Century, ranging from the New Romantics and artists like Morrissey and Prince, through hair metal and Marilyn Manson, and onto the echoes of glam in Lady Gaga and – surprisingly – in certain rap performers.

There’s a certain core “glam rock sound” -  cleanly articulated riffs, stomping beats, an atmosphere of high-pitched vocal hysteria – but really glam rock as a genre coheres on the visual level: the clothes and make-up and outrageous hair styles, the spirit on male flamboyance and campy androgyny,  the emphasis on theatricality and showbiz spectacle.  But the glamour in glam rock is not straightforward glamour in the way that Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich were glamorous. Or indeed Hollywood red carpet Academy Awards kind of glamour today, which to me is a form of retro-glamour.  Glam rock’s “glamour” was deliberately excessive and absurdist, to the point of being a travesty or parody of glamour. If you look at New York Dolls, they don’t look immaculate or elegant in a Hollywood way, or even in a Diana Ross type of way. Their clothes and hair are a chaos of signifiers and trashy imagery drawn from all of the place. The same applies in a different way with early Roxy Music – there’s a wrongness, a cartoon quality. By the time you get to the pure teenpop glam of Sweet, Slade and Gary Glitter, the vibe is lumpen and ridiculous.  Bowie is the most exquisite and elegant of the glam rock stars, but even he is not really pursuing Hollywood glamour – he’s too alien and excessive, at times verging on ugliness.

In the book I look at some of the deep cultural roots for glam as a philosophy, and Oscar Wilde is definitely one of the first writers and thinkers to articulate the idea that artifice is more interesting – and ultimately more revealing – than naturalism. He has a series of brilliantly witty and challenging aphorisms that overturn common sense ideas – for instance, he asserts that sincerity is a pose, and a boring one. His critical essays like “The Decay of Lying” and his manifesto-disguised-as-a-novel The Picture of Dorian Gray lay out a view of life that rejects ethics entirely in favour of aesthetics: all that matters is the fascination of surfaces, the magical charm of physical beauty and charismatic presence. Wilde believes in a natural aristocracy of the beautiful over the plain.  It’s camp turned into a philosophy, basically: a view of the world and of life as theatre, in which we are constantly performing, constantly inventing ourselves as the personae we wish to appear to be.

 2) Glam Rock has changed the way to do music by giving space to imagination, disguises,  colours, ambiguities, gender ambiguities as well,  after the ‘70s  there was definitely a revolution on this regards

Glam rock marked a shift from the revolution talk of the Sixties, when people believed the world would be changed through the power of youth coming together as a collective force. With glam, the emphasis shifts to individual transformation – escaping your allotted social role or your fated physical identity, through reinventing yourself.  In a sense It’s about a private revolution: experimentation with gender and sexuality, becoming the person you want to be, the power of fantasy. You don’t change your material circumstances, but you escape them momentarily through posing in the club or dressing up when you go to see your heroes play concerts. And you also escape through the dream-worlds conjured by music.  And if you’re star, you can escape completely just through achieving the superstar lifestyle.

If pressed to distil glam to a core, I would say it is about: Illusion and Disillusion

In some ways glam is a retreat from the ambitions and hopes of the Sixties, there is an undercurrent of disillusionment and despair. But in other ways it finds different zones for radicalism – above all with the games with sexual identity.

3)  The name  of  David Bowie stands out among many and great artists, why, in your opinion, Bowie was so important ?

That’s too big a question – it would take a book to answer it. And in fact, it has taken a book – or a third of the very long book I’ve written! 

Bowie ended up being the spine of Shock and Awe -  but not really intentionally.  In fact my original intent was really to put Bowie in his place – to contextualize him as one artist in a whole field of glam and glitter endeavor, in which forgotten figures like Alice Cooper, Sparks or Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel were given their due. But writing the book, Bowie proved to be too insistently interesting not to cover in great detail and repeatedly through the book. He did so much and went through so many changes. 

If you were to point to just one thing of the many important aspects of Bowie, it would be the changeability – the way he kept transforming his identity over and over. He created a whole new model for rock star’s career, where you completely reinvent yourself repeatedly, jumping to a new style and a new sound. Before Bowie, rock artists were supposed to evolve gradually, organically – a Neil Young or Joni Mitchell model of artistic development.  Bowie taught fans and critics to see inconsistency as a positive -  as cool and brave, rather than a sign of a lack of integrity or artistic substance. By the Eighties with postpunk and new pop artists, it became much more common for groups to change their sound and their image with each album. These were the children of Bowie.

4)  Bowie was known because he  never took up any political stance,  which he did till the end of his life. Why?

Well, that’s not entirely true, because he did make political statements in the mid-Seventies – a whole spate of comments in interviews that were in favor of authoritarianism, in which he talked about the need for a strong leader to take control and “clean things up” – meaning the liberalism and permissive morals of the Seventies. That is what is so disconcerting about Bowie:  we generally expect rock people to be on the left politically, especially if they have progressive ideas about sexuality and gender roles. But the only really explicit political stances that Bowie ever made were right-wing – and these verged on flirting with fascism. I think there is just one interview in the late Nineties where he talks about having basically socialist ideas, but it doesn’t very convincing! For the most part, throughout his entire career Bowie either avoids politics or he makes a series of unwholesome, troubling comments on the lines of “what we need in the UK / the West is a strong leader” and even “I would make a good dictator myself”. Obviously some of this is the cocaine speaking – coke tends to make people feel in command and large amounts of it can cause megalomania and delusions of grandeur. But long before Bowie got into cocaine, there is a 1969 comment about how Britain needs a strong leader! So there’s definitely a recurrent tendency, which I think relates to his reading of Nietzsche,  his interest in the idea of heroism and the superman, and an aristocratic impulse (which I think is actually the essence of glam).  Bowie’s core essential politics are individualism and an intense work ethic, a drive to perfectionism and self-improvement.  I think mixed in there is a disbelief in the idea of equality and a misanthropic feeling about the human race. It’s the Individual Versus the Crowd.

These kind of feelings about the common mass of humanity are very adolescent, which is why “Life On Mars?” is such a great song about teenage alienation – you get that feeling from the line about “the mice in their million hordes / from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads”.  That’s not about mice, that’s about ordinary people: English working class tourists swarming everywhere. It’s a typically adolescent contemptuous view of humanity as vermin – too many stupid people breeding.  The idea of some kind of catastrophe that thins out the population is attractive to a certain kind of teenager.

5)  Does the glam culture still exist nowadays and who represents  it? Does it still symbobolizes / expresses that change of the early times?

You could see one of glam’s legacies in queer performers like Perfume Genius and Mykki Blanco. But the lineage that I track in Polvere di Stelle is more mainstream – pop superstars like Lady Gaga and Ke$ha, rap and R&B goddesses like Beyonce and Nicki Minaj, rap rulers like Drake and Kanye West.  Many of glam’s themes and traits resurfaced in the 21st Century in the songs, images and career strategies of these artists–  the cultivation of alter-ego personae, an obsession with fame and the dark side of stardom, a sense of narcissistic personality disorder and apathologically compulsive exhibitionism, an aura of decadence and excess. Gaga and Ke$ha explicitly identified with glam ancestors (Bowie for Gaga, Bolan for Kesha) and used glam imagery (outlandish make-up for the former, glitter for the latter).  Drake and Kanye West’s entire body of work is concerned with fame and the confusion and psychic damage that comes with it. Nicki Minaj has about 14 separate personae and Beyonce created the Sasha Fierce alter-ego. You ave Taylor Swift with her 2017 song/video “Look What You Made Me Do” in which she kills off the old Taylor Swift persona and then parades at the end of the video all her earlier images and identities. Her entire album Reputation is a meta-pop essay about her public self. In that sense it’s like the sequel to Britney Spears’s Blackout, which was about her fame spiraling out of control, although it also recalls Prince’s “Controversy” too.  For me the self-reflexive nature of modern pop stardom is pure glam. It harks back to David Bowie’s “Fame” and the dozens of other glam songs about being a rock idol or living the rock’n’roll fantasy lifestyle.

 6)  The glam rock  world lost many of its members  in the last few years,  I mean, Prince and obviously DB.  How did you personally react to these  losses, especially Bowie’s death?

I was saddened by both. Prince more so because I had grown up with his music in real-time and can remember buying his early records when he wasn’t that well known in the UK and then watching him getting huger and huger. Eventually as a young music journalist I would write about albums like Sign O The Times and Lovesexy as they came out. 

Bowie’s prime period in the Seventies was when I was a child, before I bought records or read the music press. So it was something I caught up with later, as Mythical Rock History. And Bowie was almost too large a figure to seem real as a human being. When I grew up he was this pop institution on the same level as The Beatles. His singles were played as golden oldies on the radio. The first Bowie album I really was aware of a real-time release was Lodger in 1979, and Scary Monsters was the first one I heard all the way through the month of its release. 

Through researching Bowie for the book, it created a weird effect of intimacy and distance at the same time. On the one hand, I felt like I really understood him and his motivations, and even identified to some extent – we were both products of middle class English suburbia, filling up our emptiness with a ravenous diet of cultural stimuli, from music and cinema to books and art. But at the same time, through approaching his work and his time as a historian, I achieved a distanced objective relationship. So I wasn’t that stunned when he died, especially as I’d known about him being sick for a while. When it came to writing the final essay on his life and his death, I approached it as eulogy for a funeral – something you write for the audience as much as for yourself. I found myself moved by other people’s reactions to the death, and also by snippets of information I’d never seen before that humanized Bowie.

1-      There were so many musicians wearing make up and androgynous costumes in the early 70s. Why do you think that Bowie stands out among everyone else who helped to shape the glam era?

Well, one way Bowie stands out is that he was actually really good at applying make-up and really creative with it. Most glam rockers would slap on lipstick and eye-shadow in a clumsy way, or they would just put a bit of glitter on their cheekbones. But Bowie studied with the master cosmetologist Pierre LaRoche and he became an expert on make-up techniques. In researching Shock And Awe, I came across a piece in Creem magazine – the American rock paper that most supported glam and glitter artists – in which Bowie offers the readers his “Makeup Do’s and Don’ts’. He describes in great detail how he gets a nice shine on his lips and eyelids, or smudges kohl along the eye-line, and how he created the iconic gold circle on his forehead circa Aladdin Sane. Bowie applied a similar sense of taste and experiment to his clothing choices, wearing flamboyantly avant-garde outfits made by designers like Kansai Yamamoto. So I would say that Bowie was exquisite looking in a way that most other glam rockers weren’t. Slade and Sweet and New York Dolls tended to look more like a parody or travesty of “glamour” rather than the actual real thing. Bowie looked weird, but also elegant. His only rivals in that area were Roxy Music, who combined being stylish with being strange. 

2-      Everyone has tried to push the boundaries in pop culture during the last 50 years, but no one (not Madonna, not Lady Gaga) has gone further than Bowie in terms of challenging aesthetics. Why is he still such a big influence nowadays for so many other artists?

I don’t think Bowie has ever stopped being influential, except for a period in the Nineties when grunge and alternative rock were dominant. In the Nineties I would say Neil Young was the admired elder rocker, someone who stuck to his guns and represented this kind of gnarly outsider image – old Neil was the role model for young groups like Pearl Jam. In the Nineties there weren’t many artists who took their cues from Bowie – there was Suede in the U.K., and perhaps Marilyn Manson. But all through the Seventies, the Eighties, and most of the 21^stCentury Bowie was hugely influential. In the Eighties you had one set of British groups inspired by his Young Americans funk-and-soul sound and wedge haircut look (ABC, Spandau Ballet, et al) and another set who were influenced by his Berlin sound circa Low – Gary Numan, The Associates, Magazine, Visage, Simple Minds.  So much of what happened in the Eighties with video pop, with movements like the New Romantics, and with style magazines like The Face and iD owed a huge amount to Bowie. In terms of the present, what seems to resonate with recent pop musicians is the idea of self-reinvention  - the fact that you can change your persona, change your sound, over and over again.  This idea of identity-fluidity seems to strike a chord with how people feel today  - that the self is infinitely malleable and adaptable, not just artistically but existentially and psychologically.

3-      Which of his artistic personas along the years do you find more interesting and why?

My favorite period of music is the stretch from Low through “Heroes” and Lodger to Scary Monsters – that’s when he’s really at the cutting edge of pop music, making music that is innovative but also beautiful and often emotionally intense. And I like that sort of outsider, exile-in-Berlin persona that he had then. In terms of an era of Bowie that I find most intriguing, though, in some ways it’s 1967 and his debut album, when he’s completely out of step with what’s going on in rock. Bowie is making comedy-pop influenced by Anthony Newley and other English music hall artists, at exactly the point when rock is becoming the major art form of the era.  Sgt Pepper’s and albums by Pink Floyd, The Doors, Cream, Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, et al are all pushing rock into new zones of musical expansion and lyrical expression. But Bowie is more interested in the previous generation’s forms of entertainment – the musical, cabaret, variety, mime. I find this oddly glorious, and it helps that Bowie’s debut album is really charming and incredibly English. It was z completely flop at the time, but I prefer listening to it than his next two albums, which are unconvincing attempts to go with the rock fashions of the time. Then with Hunky Dory, I think he finds his true musical voice again – and that voice isn’t really rock, it’s a kind of piano-centred, lushly orchestrated sound with searching lyrics: what I describe in the book as “existentialist Elton John”.

Mark's glam

off cut from

And likewise, although we might like to emphasise the collectivity and cooperative element to blogging, what with being on the left and all, it was also — let’s be honest — a competitive space too. The blogging world was fuelled in part by competitive drives, by ego. And Mark was competitive, he wanted to excel, to flex his gifts — to come up with a better take than anyone else on whatever it was he was moved to write about. Mark’s ideas were very important, but he was also a pure writer in a way that an athlete is a pure athlete — in love with style, with the pacing and drama of a piece of prose. 

That side of him — the Nietzschean aristocratic impulse and style — is what fed into his particular glam aesthetic, and which he had to go through great contortions to reconcile with anonymous collectivity Kommunistic swarm-logic, because glam and socialism are irreconcilable — one is the opposite of the other. (But that’s a side-argument, and possibly an interminable one.) 

I learned recently that one of Mark's planned future projects  was a book about glam. As with Retromania coming out a few years before Ghosts, I pipped him to the post and came up with a reading of it that would have jarred with his own i think, he would have disliked the empiricism and wide-trawling approach of Shock and Awe.

His ideas about glam were based on a very select group of examples, as opposed to the historical reality of it (he would probably have said he was precisely interested in the antihistorical unreality of it - its hyperstitional potential rather its messy actuality. That select group would be Roxy Music... second-wave figures Japan, John Foxx and Ultravox, Grace Jones, Siouxsie, Steve Strange and Visage... and then bizarrely, a modern inheritor (which i cannot see) Roisin Murphy .. fellow travelers like Helmut Newton

I don't think he was even that keen on Bowie... I suspect he would have had little time for Bolan, or Sparks, or Cockney Rebel, or New York Dolls, or Alice Cooper ....  all the bubblegum stuff like Glitter, Sweet, similarly... And Slade would have been anathema 

This is a good example of Mark's approach - the blog essay Ripley's Glam

Very interesting reading -  the comparison between Tom Ripley and Bryan Ferry seems convincing, and redounds to Ferry's discredit (and underlines how reactionary a figure the actual real-world Ferry became - as opposed to the Ferry of his music-image, although that quickly became conservative too I think)

cf Eno, the figure who renounced glam very quickly, started dressing down,  and was a strong defender of Corbynism and long-term ecological thinking

Snippets from Mark's piece


"He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time.

We can learn a great deal about the Glam impulse from these lines from The Talented Mr Ripley.....

Ripley's trajectory is uncannily in sync with that of Bryan Ferry. Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop's equivalent of The Talented Mr Ripley. The clothes , the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly. The roots still show, and the painful drama of becoming something you are not still carries an existential charge. Stranded and the subsequent albums, meanwhile, are the equivalent of the later novels; here, success is assumed, and the threats to the tasteful but banal idyll come from ennui, a certain unease with contentment, and – most ominous of all – the danger of the past returning. The vapid bucolia of Roxy’s Avalon – recorded when Ferry was himself married to an heiress and living on a country estate  would be the perfect soundtrack to Ripley puttering around in his Harpers and Queens dream home, Belle Ombre, with his wife, Heloise.

The first step to Ripley’s becoming a Something turns out to be his vampirising of the identity of Dickie Greenleaf....

 By taking the place of Dickie, Ripley can escape the pain, anxiety and awkwardness of being himself, a self. To become an Object = to be relieved of the pressures of subjectivity, untroubled by any interiority - isn't this one of central fantasies of Glam?

.... The pivotal moment of the novel comes when Ripley is no longer capable of sustaining his fantasy identification with Dickie. When Tom looks into Dickie's eyes and sees not the windows of a soul with which he can identify but the dead, glassy surface of an inert and idiotic dummy, he falls (back) into a deep existential nausea and vertigo, experiencing a moment of profound cosmic loathing and miserable dislocation....

Shulamith Firestone - “Sex objects are beautiful. An attack on them can be confused with an attack on beauty itself. Feminists need not get so pious in their efforts that they feel they must flatly deny the beauty of the face on the cover of Vogue. For this is not the point. The real question is: is the face beautiful in a human way – does it allow for growth and flux and decay, does it express negative as well as positive emotions, does it fall apart without artificial props – or does it falsely imitate the very different beauty of an inanimate object, like wood trying to be metal”

feeling groovy

 

zok zong

 

"A Cantonese term, used to describe something uneccessarily performative - like an actor who's perceptibly self-conscious about their onstage presence" - Joshua Minsoo Kim, The Wire, writing about extended voice artist Charmaine Lee

 

This blog now closed because of problems with the feed - archive remains here but posting resumes at Shock and Awe 2

https://shockandawesimonreynolds2.blogspot.com/

really?

  Rosie O'Donnell talks about her pal David Bowie... 

For sure I can totally see someone absolutely seething about having been tricked into seeing Rent, godawful as it is.  But David Bowie "hated musicals"? Erm, you sure about that, Rosie? He started out modelling his career and, well, his voice on Anthony Newley, who not only performed in musicals but wrote a bunch.  Before Bowie decided rock was a surer, swifter route to fame, that's what he wanted to do - be on the West End and Broadway, as an all-round entertainer, an actor-singer-writer, just like his revered (but unreciprocated idol-model) Tony. And stages of DB's career are pretty much the merger of rock and musical theater. 

Of course someone who once loved musicals might very well have come to loathe the ghastly travesty they'd degenerated into by the '90s and even more so thereafter (made extra repulsive by the unexpected undead-artform-rises-from-the-grave-to-command-the-centre-stage-of-pop-culture zombie omnipresence that happened with La La Land , Hamilton, etc).   

Glamour Mix

Siouxsie and the Banshees have at least two Glamanifesto Songs -  two singles released within two years of each other. 

"Fireworks", a national anthem for the emerging and then as yet unnamed tribe soon to be known as Goth

"Dazzle", which I only just realised (courtesy Simon Price) came with a Glamour Mix on the 12-inch. 

Here's the single version and its incandescent video. 

Fountains = a symbol of aristocratic extravagance from time immemorial -  command of the vital elements, and squandering thereof, at a time when the lower orders had to lug it by the bucket out of the ground from wells or carry jugs full of it on their heads for miles and miles.

"Fireworks" is much the better song I think - the orchestration and stampede-y beat on "Dazzle" make it a bit overbearing and stiffly strident. 

And he crackling in our colours

With teeth of gelignite

When he sighs his song and pirouettes

Thro' a dance of dynamite

We are fireworks - slowly, glowing

Bold and bright

We are fireworks - burning shapes

Into the night

Twist and turn - burn, burn, burn

Twist and turn - burn, baby, burn

Tempting to roll out the Bataillean reading here... 

"Painted Bird" is also something of a Goth Nation rally call and war song. 

Confound that dowdy flock 

With a sharp-honed nerve 

Because we're painted birds 

By our own design

There's other Siouxsie songs in these regions of self-worship / demand-to-be-worshipped and exhibitionism / voyeurism - or that speak of a morbid excitation of the eye.

"Red Light" and "Peek-A-Boo", as discussed earlier on this blog. 

"Regal Zone" - I had always fondly imagined this as another song in this zone of Star Solipsism / Siouxsie as Untouchable Idol enthralling  her fan-vassals... But it appears to be a political comment - if I remember right, something to do with the Iranian Revolution, the fall of the Shah, the Ayatollahs...  File alongside The Stranglers's "Shah Shah A Go Go" then... 

Coronets rest on a death's head mask

No-one is safe while the curfew lasts

But crusted orbs glitter, sceptres gleam

While helmets of blood fill the screen

They look away

And then they say:

"For the good of the land

For the love of the man"

Standing alone sitting alone

On the throne of the regal zone

Old limbs hang in the torture room

While old kings hang in the portrait room

Their noble eyes gaze on the uneasy dance

Of the squirming body on the marble plate

They look away

And then they say:

"For the good of the land

For the love of the man"

Standing alone sitting alone

On the throne of the regal zone

"Icon", likewise, is no self-deification exercise but something to do with organized religion, about  a Polish priest who burned himself alive if my memory serves.. sitting alongside "The Lord's Prayer" on Join Hands.  

 

Still, imposing regality drips off of all these songs and vocal performances, so it is temping to take isolated lines like "standing alone... on the throne of the regal zone" or "icon in the fire" and see them as imperious proclamations of Siouxsie's self-regard. Especially as she once described herself as a fascist, in the sense of wanting things absolutely her own way. 

Likewise, who the fuck really knows what "Dazzle" is about - all you really come away with is the lines 

Dazzle it's a glittering prize

Before your eyes

 - and the self-goddessing hauteur of Siouxsie's voice.

"Plastic is the material of the future, after all..."

A piece from, I think, 1989, that is a kind of rehearsal for Shock and Awe, or maybe it's a flash-forward.  At any rate, there's a kernel here. 

I wish I knew where the demo tape that got me all excited was stashing and I would digitize it for you and you could tell me if I'm absolutely barmy. 

LAST FEW DAYS

A little over a year ago, a demo tape turned up in the post, from the now-defunct Product Inc*. The group's name,Last Few Days, stirred faint memories of a shaven-headed, vaguely totalitarian outift, with a single on the Touch label: a spartan electro work-out with the apocalyptic title "Too Much Is Never Enough". So I popped the tape in the machine, expecting something collectivist/constructivist, and out of the speakers leapt this crazed glam bubblegum apocalypse. "Soul Destroyer" and"Yes I Would" were all shockadelic attack and dead-eyed riffs, apoplectic menace ("I don't know what I want/I blow you apart") and brutally vacant intensity. "Wild" sounded like the missing link between Glitter's "Rock 'N' Roll Pt Two"and Cool J's "Rock The Bells". "Kix" was like Southern fried Spiders From Mars. And "Hot Tonite" was deliciously rubberised pulp funk, all bass squelch and spandex swank.

Raw raunch; self-preening vocals; rebellion in a void, without rationale, context or content; a kind of enflamed artifice. Last Few Days seemed to have found their way to the absence at the heart of glam. Their music suggested all manner of reference points - Alice Cooper, Glitter, The Sweet, Hello, T. Rex, KC and The Sunshine Band, Billy Idol - whose common denominator was an enormous instantaneous impact that burned out leaving nary a singe mark on the "official" history of pop. As '89 proceeded, and the noise extremists began to run up against definite limits, Last Few Days stragegy - updating the emptily sensationalist gestures and effects of Seventies glam - began to seem like an exciting option. After all, the early Seventies was the last time that extremity and pop had co-existed, as the norm.

Since then, I bided my time til Last Few Days got their shit together. Eventually they signed to Phonogram, with the single "Kicks" b/w "Hot Tonite" announcing a new, groovier direction. Finally I got to talk to Keir and Si, the core of LFD, over afternoon tea at Fortnum and Masons.

How did they come to make this massive leap from avant-gardism to trash pop?

Kier: "What we did back then was part of its era, that period after punk had killed everything off. It was a black couple of years, and that kind of soundtrack just seemed appropriate. There was a feeling around of the End of things. The late Seventies and early Eighties felt like music and culture in the death throes, really. Hence the obsession with noise and the darker side of things."

When did all that extreme noise terror become invalid for you?

“It wasn't a conscious decision, just that the times changed. As the Eighties wore on, we felt the music needed a more positive feel."

How did you come to reawaken to Seventies music? What's been lost from that period?

"A naivety, a sort of joyous expression, before punk and the late Seventies made you look at things twice, look at things harder. But you can't separate your experience of those things from your mentality at that time, and we were young. So the memory is tinged with innocence."

What Seventies groups in particular appealed to you?

"It was more that the whole area of mass music, commercial music, suddenly seemed interesting for the first time after a long period. It suddenly seemed like it was possible to express yourself within those confines. We started to listen to Radio One, and just got more into regular music, after years of extremism. We had been playing to three hundred people, and you don't feel like you're achieving very much. When we did this thing in Eastern Europe, we sometimes played to three thousand people, and that felt more real. We visited Poland and Hungary and Yugoslavia, playing with Laibach. The intention back then was total culture clash. Especially in Eastern Europe, we wanted to leave people with brain damage. We were trying to do shows that people would never forget."

Maybe the connection between what you did then and what you do now is that the early Seventies was the last time that shock rock could be chart pop. Even bubblegum groups like The Sweet and Sparks had a perverse hysteria to them.

Si: "They also had such a massive sense of fun, and wackiness, and I think that's really missing. We're trying to inject a bit of that. That real monster irreverent vibe."

I throw some of my thoughts at the pair. To me, it seemed like LFD had taken all the pinnacles of pop at its most inauthentic - glam rock, Bowie's plastic soul and plastic funk phase ("Fame", "Golden Years", "Fashion"), even the honky superstar pseudo-disco of Rod Stewart and Rolling Stones during their most discredited, mid-Seventies trough - and aggregated their most fabricated aspects.

"Plastic-y," nods Si. "Yeah, we're into that."

Kier: "Plastic is the material of the future, after all..."

The lyrics too aren't authentic or torn from the heart, but more like a string of fantastical buzzwords and fizzy doggerel.

"Fantasy and the fantastic is more inspiring to us, than that 'dear diary' approach to songwriting."

When I listen to "Hot Tonite" I imagine this rock star, wrapped in a fur stole, cruising around in a limousine from discotheque to discotheque, hustling for chicks and action. The new Last Few Days seems very pleasure-principled and hedonistic. The songs are all about kicks, getting down, groovin', "flying high". A stark constrast to their early days of shaven austerity and severity. New songs like "Work" and "Satisfy" are very much in the groovamatic "Hot Tonite" vein. Have they dropped the shock rock of that early demo tape?

"At the moment we're not really into the rockier stuff. It was kind of a bridge between the old Last Few Days and where we are now. Dance music and electronic music: there's a kind of purity to them. Perfect beats and clean noises**. Music is moving towards that cleanliness and plastic-ness. The Nineties are more about that purity."

But your groove is much more dirty and lowdown and from the hip, than House, which, as brilliant as it is, is pretty sexless.

"I think it's a different ... sort of sex, maybe. But dancing is never gonna be sexless, is it? I just think that the technology of pop is dragging music kicking and screaming into the machine age. People just can't match machines, can they? The sort of things we were into, extreme frequencies that affect people in ways they can't help, I'd like to do that to people in their living rooms rather than in some sleazy cinema."

Si: "I'm not sure I agree with all these notions of music being subversive and all that."

Kier: "Music on a mass market scale is an expression of the unconscious of the society, and it's a challenge if you're a musician to see to what extent your creative urges can fit in with that. And see if something new and the masses can coincide."

What might be jarring about Last Few Days if they charted is that their music is juvenile and ego-centric in a way that's been disallowed by the post-Live Aid consensus that pop should be adult-erated with altruism.

"A lot of that is just shallow guilt after having made a lot of money."

Like all successful capitalists, it's an attempt to to legitimate their domination with philanthropic acts.

"But it's inevitable that the generation that grew up with pop should want to start to shoulder responsibilites, rather than growing old disgracefully like the Stones. But you're advocating irresponsible pop music?"

I think that pop has lost touch with both its drive (the self) and its domain (the present tense). Pop is about burning up like there's no tomorrow.

Si: "Doesn't that make the caring pop more of an innovation?"

Historically, maybe. But I think the music's weakened because it's less ruthless, less carnivorous... But how will Last Few Days be live?

Si: "A big party, lots happening. Mayhem. Which is what we used to do. Going to see a band is such a boring thing, in a way."

Will you dress up?

Kier: "I think it's your duty. Don't you? I've got my eye on some nice yellow fur suits. Fake fur."

How does something as foxy and neon as "Hot Tonite" spring out of your everyday life? Is it a reaction against your life?

“It's more like a dislocation. I think every person is complicated, has lots of parts to them, and music is a way of giving voice to some of those parts."

So your secret self is a raver?*** Fey but rampant?

"I feel quite schizophrenic about it. When I get in a vocal booth, I feel I can let anything out. Fuck knows, what I do, you'd have to be there. Everybody has a greater potential, I think. The old Last Few Days had a much more group expression, where we presented a flat, aggressive, emotiveless front. We were provocateurs, and some gigs in East Europe got stopped by the police. We were never out to entertain people. We were out to provoke them, or upset them. Now we're trying to caress them. Tantalise them. I can't really imagine what we were trying to do before. I suppose it must have felt good and right for us then, but looking back it just seems perverse. Nasty. But it's hard to separate that from how you feel at 21. You feel the need to get a reaction, you feel negative towards the world. Now, all that seems black, nihilistic, heavy. You can generate just as much energy through having fun."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

hindsight thoughts and annotations, originally done on Blissblog 

* Product Inc -- affiliated to Mute if I recall right; vaguely similar to Blast First; seemed quite a crucial label for a moment there (their roster included World Domination Enterprises)

** After the debut single Last Few Days misguidedly went “house”, their second single was really disappointing, shedding everything that made them seem exciting, and they faded away completely. I think they never even got to record an album.

*** “raver” used here not re. the contemporary E culture but in the Sixties sense--nympholeptic fan

^^^^^^^^^^^

I guess this Last Few Days piece is almost a manifesto for my own personal brand of POPISM, rooted not so much in New Pop as Nik Cohn’s SuperPop. 

(I’ve sometimes wondered what Cohn would have liked in the ‘70s if he had not lost interest in pop not long after Sgt Pepper’s when everything went bearded, self-serious and concepty. Would he have been into Bowie and Roxy, or found them too clever-clever and art-school? Surely he’d have dug Marc Bolan and T-Rextasy--although maybe the music itself wouldn’t have been LOUD enough for Cohn the Spector fan. Slade? Alice Cooper? He fell for disco obviously and even had a role in inventing its mainstreamed version with the fictionalized "report" on Brooklyn nightclubbers he did for New York magazine that became the source for Saturday Night Fever).

 C.f. “camp sublime” as used later in the World of Twist reviews, which I think is either something I nicked off Fredric Jameson, whose thick tome on postmodernism and late capitalism I’d just read/reviewed, or a concept reached with his help, as it were. 

The “sublime” is the rockist tinge to SuperPop: the craving for shock, sensation, having your eyes blown, pop as a force from above that leaves you rapt and raptured. And it’s that element (thoroughly absent in yer actual chartpop of that era, e.g. Stock Aitken Waterman’s brand of mild ‘n’ perky) which gives the Neo-SuperPop proposed here its bygone quality, that sepia-tint of epigonic yearning. 

Because those were different times.... and when bands materialised with similar ideas.... WoT, Denim, Saint Etienne... they would all fail. A failure that indicted the times maybe (in what godless universe does "Avenue" not become #1 for six weeks?!?!?!?), but so what…

Of them all, only Pulp would make it.