Glam Explosion

 

Paul Oldfield on The Great Glam Rock Explosion and a Suzi Quatro compilation, Melody Maker, March 19 1988

Paul here reprising in precis the argument - or some of it - from his great Monitor thinkpiece of 1985

Originally so enthused were we by the early 70s 7 inch singles we'd exhumed from jumble sales and junk shops that we planned to devote a whole issue to glam and glitter....  I believe David Stubbs was going to write about the Year 1975 as the nadir of pop history that 1985 mirrored and that he envisioned extending itself perpetually...  I certainly had some notes on the Sweet, Gary Glitter, Alice Cooper that I stumbled on only a few years ago for the first time since they'd been written in '85 and discovered to my surprise that many of the same phrases and thoughts occurred to me again when working on Shock + Awe

Some of those thoughts and sensations did get aired in this 89? 90? piece for Melody Maker on Last Few Days!, one of those phantom groups that sauntered through the pages of the music press leaving nary a trace on official poprock history 

rockclubbing

"The single was... mainly determined by what was left out... “we wanted to make it purely a tune and rhythm with no embellishments like harmonies or chords.” Mike Leander claimed that it was not black music, but in some sense, a rock’n’roll record. The r’n’r is “deep down”, but it seems to me to be mainly there by association, by lyrical suggestion. What there IS is a minimal dance-track, unprecedented except perhaps for James Brown’s spare disco breaks, and vocals that are mixed well back, with a fast, slight echo that makes them disembodied, all attack and no decay, all hard edges and hardly inflected. When the Human League covered it, it could have been a manifesto for vocals-and-synths-only, and the cover could only succeed in so far as it managed not to add anything" - Paul Oldfield, Monitor #4, October 1985

Between Fun House and Funtime - me on The Idiot-era Iggy Pop versus The Stooges