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
In the Aftershocks section of S+A, I have a little snippet on Def Leppard, focused on their Sweet fandom and aspirations to Wainman / Chinnichap-style overproduction / hysteria. With particular emphasis on "Pour Some Sugar on Me" - the third and by far the best single off Hysteria.
But I wish I had seen this video for this other single off Hysteria (the SEVENTH single would you believe!!). Because it is one long testament to the band's glamfandom and would have been perfect to mention in this little section on D.Leppard.
Indeed some of the images that crop up in the "Rocket" video - UK music paper front covers and photo spreads and so forth - actually look like things I used or considered using as illustrations for S+A.
Beyond the overblown artifice and concocted excess of their sound - those shrill breath-blasts of oddly centreless vocals, the puff-pastry layering of guitar overdubs - another glammy thing about Leppard is a self-reflexive aspect. Not so much songs about being a rock star (although I daresay there's some, I haven't investigated that thoroughly to be honest). But more like a rocking-for-the-sake of rocking element. (Admittedly that's quite a metal thing too).
By the next album Adrenalize, this thing of announcing their intention to rock the listener, of declaring that they're in the business of rocking - it was starting to feel a little threadbare.
You sense that The Darkness, and Andrew W.K., are not that far off.
Much later on - 2006 - Def Leppard explicitly return to the glam era with this really rather decent cover of Essex's "Rock On" (again, rock-about-rock).
Oh, well I never noticed that this was off an album - Yeah! - of cover tributes to favorite Leppard songs that with a few exceptions are all from the early Seventies - and that include such glam classics as "20th Century Boy", "Hell Raiser", "Street Life", "Drive-In Saturday", and "The Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll", as well as the stompy proto-glitter John Kongos hit "He's Gonna Step on You Again."
Yeah!'s CD booklet has photos of Leppard each in a pose that recreates an iconic cover image from the glam-aligned early 70s: Rick Savage is Freddie Mercury from the album Queen II,
Vivian Campbell does Bolan off of T. Rex's Electric Warrior, Joe Elliott pretends to be Bowie from the back cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Rick Allen does Lou Reed off of Transformer, and Phil Collen poses ghastly a la Iggy on the front of Raw Power.
They also did one with the whole band imitating a Roxy inner gatefold
Scene: a shared and spartan apartment in Moscow circa 1939. Ninotchka, a diplomatic envoy recently returned from Paris, is catching up with her flatmate Anna, a musician who plays in a symphony orchestra.
ANNA (brandishing a chic silk undergarment Ninotchkabrought back from Paris): When I passed through the laundry yard today I saw all the women huddled around this, so I brought it up here. Things like this create a bad feeling - first, they didn't know whose it was, and then they saw the Paris label, and did it start a commotion! Some said it's what we all ought to wear and others said it's like hanging foreign ideas on our clothes line, it undermines our whole cause. NINOTCHKA: I see - ANNA: You know how it is today - all you have to do is wear a pair of silk stockings and they suspect you of counter-revolution. NINOTCHKA: Thank you, Anna - I'll dry it up here when I wash it next. I should hate to see our country endangered by my underwear. [Anna asks Ninotchka if she brought anything else back from Paris and she explains that she left everything else she bought behind because she had to return to Moscow in a hurry; she just happened to be wearing the camisole when she left for the airport. She mentions that among all the garments left behind, her favorite was a hat.] NINOTCHKA: It was very silly. I would be ashamed to wear it here. ANNA: As beautiful as that!
[Ninotchka mentions that she also bought an evening gown, which causes Anna to marvel at the extravagance of wearing different clothes for different times of day] ANNA: You are exaggerating! NINOTCHKA: No, it's true - that's how they live in the other world. Here we dress to cover up our bodies - to keep warm. ANNA: And there? NINOTCHKA: Sometimes they're not completely covered - but they don't freeze. [Anna strokes the exquisitely soft material the undergarment is made of, marveling that such luxuriant fabric is used for a piece of clothing that isn't even visible to other people's eyes. She asks Ninotchka if she can borrow if for her upcoming honeymoon, and Ninotchka says she can have it for keeps. An overjoyed and grateful Anna hurries off to work clutching her cello. Ninotchka, finding herself alone, turns on the radio for solace, looking for music. But every Soviet station is broadcasting state propaganda - facts and figures about the economy, productivity soaring, etc] NINOTCHKA (plaintively): No music!
Hollywood designers make Communist uniforms look chic!
