a book about glam rock and art pop - 1970s mostly - but also tracking its echoes and reflections through the 80s, 90s and into the 21st Century - footnotes to follow here soon
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).
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.
"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.
"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.
