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
it's already too long as a book, but S+A could have done with a chapter, or appendix, on disco as adjacent to glam - its cousin in so many ways: artifice, showbiz, razzle, escapism, narcissism, decadence, polysexuality, science fiction, fabulousness, fantasy, camp, proto-retro (covers, period looks, fancy dress)
the future-retro mish-mash a particularly shared attribute
and Chic were actually influenced by Roxy Music - the image and styling more than the music
Then again, there's another sense of "discoglam" - glam rockers going disco
The lighting in that seems to be an attempt to pictorialize the space of fame itself. Nice job, Cher show lighting technician!
Glitter's abject attempt to do a Young Americans - complete with Luther Vandross on backing vocals
And this sad moment in the downward arc of a superstar - credited to T.Rex Disco Party
x
A bit better - slow'n'lowdown funk - let's say "supernotbad"
"The final days of the Trump presidency have taken on the stormy elements of a drama more common to history or literature than a modern White House... On Saturday night, Mr. Trump planned to take his unreality show to Georgia for his first major public appearance since the Nov. 3 election. A rally meant to support two Republican senators in the runoff next month offered a high-profile opportunity to vent his grievances and promote his false claims that he was somehow cheated of a second term by a vast conspiracy that he imagines involved Venezuela, Republican officials and his own Justice Department.
"At times, Mr. Trump’s railing-against-his-fate outbursts seem like a story straight out of William Shakespeare, part tragedy, part farce, full of sound and fury. Is Mr. Trump a modern-day Julius Caesar, forsaken by even some of his closest courtiers? (Et tu, Bill Barr?) Or a King Richard III who wars with the nobility until being toppled by Henry VII? Or King Lear, railing against those who do not love and appreciate him sufficiently? How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless electorate.
"This is classic Act V behavior,” said Jeffrey R. Wilson, a Shakespearean scholar at Harvard who published the book “Shakespeare and Trump” this year. “The forces are being picked off and the tyrant is holed up in his castle and he’s growing increasingly anxious and he feels insecure and he starts blustering about his legitimate sovereignty and he starts accusing the opposition of treason.”
".... If there are these analogies between classic literature and society as it’s operating right now, then that should give us some big cause for concern this December,” said Mr. Wilson, the Shakespearean scholar. “We’re approaching the end of the play here and that’s where catastrophe always comes.”
"... So is there nothing left to be said about the final scene of the final act of this dismal play?
Trump, it bears repeating, is no Shakespearean villain—he is too willful, ignorant, undisciplined, and shallow for that. What we are watching is not the despair of Macbeth as he learns that Birnam Wood to Dunsinane Hill doth come and that Macduff was not indeed born of woman. It is, rather, a malignant narcissist’s psyche collapsing in on its hollow core. That process may be of clinical or purely malevolent interest, but it’s not the stuff of tragedy, because Trump is really only a few shards of a genuine human being.
But Shakespeare does have something yet to offer us about this moment when treason against the constitutional order is a matter for serious Oval Office debate. The Bard had a rich sense of the creeps and criminals, sycophants and slimeballs, weirdos and wing nuts who hang around power. And although it is true that in an awful lot of his plays the good guys end up poorly, it is reassuring to know that a lot of the toadies, demagogues, and opportunists get theirs in the end....
... It would be pleasant to contemplate a parade of senatorial and congressional lickspittles, craven fixers, nutcase advisers, and unprincipled hangers-on meeting their comeuppance, albeit in considerably less stark terms than befalls most Shakespearean characters. No doubt many will be able to minimize the damage done by their association with Trump. Many will safely monetize their government experience (Dancing With the Stars was Sean Spicer’s creative effort in that direction), pretending that their service had nothing but the purest motives behind it, and that they either did not know about the seditious inclinations and plots erupting at this very moment or opposed them. But let’s face it: Once the play is over, the supporting roles rarely get reevaluated, and all the lesser villains can hope for, like Iago, is a bit of wonder at their motivations and eventual fate.
And what of Trump himself? How might Shakespeare summarize his presidency? Let me suggest this: “A tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.”
Is "Red Light" the Banshees's version of "The Model"?
She falls into frame With a professional pout But the Polaroid's ignite Upon seeing their subject
And the aperture shuts Too much exposure Voyeur sucks into focus Floodlit the glossy kiss-pit
But as emulsion drips down - down The aperture shuts Too much exposure Come into this room
Come into this gloom See the red light rinsing Another shutterslut wincing The sagging half wit sister
Pretty, pretty picture Of an ancient nipple shrinking That kodak whore winking 'Til the aperture shuts
Too much exposure
One would have to say "opticality" (if that's even a word) is an obsession in Banshees music
A surprising - yet absolutely logical - detour into showbiz retro-swank
"Put your lips at my command" Imperious!
Camille Paglia could write an essay about the symbol-ogy within the "Right Now" video - mirrors, gold, Cleopatra, silent movie femme fatales, burlesque, swing, Mel Torme, glitterballs
Flamenco!
"See them staring"
All eyez on me
Still a superior analysis of Siouxsie's evolution, I think - from The Sex Revolts
If Nico felt herself stranded in the desert, then Siouxsie Sioux's renunciation of oceanic feelings was a means to power. The first Banshees album, The Scream (1978), contains some of the most unfluid, fleshless rock music ever created, stringent and staccato. 'Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)' fetishises the inhuman perfection of metal, which Siouxsie declares will 'rule in my master scheme'. 'Jigsaw Feeling' explores sensations of alienation from the body: the imagery of fractured organs and limbs, the sense of a disassembled bodily identity, resembles the hysterical un-body that figures in Lydia Lunch's songs. In 'Jigsaw Feeling', the Ice Queen cracks up: Siouxsie oscillates between 'feeling total' and being 'split in two'. It is only her dazzling, frozen exteriority that keeps the psychotic interior contained. Later in her career, songs like 'Christine' and 'Eve White/Eve Black' dramatise the schizophrenic's struggle not to 'shatter kaleidoscope-style'.
'Regal Zone' (from 1979's Join Hands) is the ultimate ice statement: Siouxsie stands 'alone in a Regal Zone', erect and intimidating. Similarly, Siouxsie's early image--S/M dominatrix clothes, peek-a-boo bras that exposed the breast but were far from titillating--invited the voyeuristic gaze only to punish it. Her image, her sangfroid vocals, her commanding demeanour all signify 'Look, Don't Touch'. Siouxsie doesn't want to be made of fleisch (that evocative German word that means both flesh and meat), she wants to be made of metal or ice, impenetrable, invulnerable.
This desire to be obelisk or basilisk (the mythological cold-blooded reptile whose glance was lethal) had a sinister side. Siouxsie wasn't just the first woman to take on glam rock's androgyny; in the early days of the Banshees, she also followed through glam's flirtation with fascism, to the point of wearing a swastika.
For most punks, the swastika was a shock tactic or cheap nihilism, but for Siouxsie, fascism's fascination seems to have run a little deeper. In a 1985 interview with Blitz, she recalled that 'when I was fifteen or sixteen I used to go out of my way to have very unattractive hairstyles, very short, geometrically very ugly, cropped and very frightening to the opposite sex... I think I always knew the way I wanted to live... was completely as a fascist. I mean, I call myself a fascist personally, I like everything my own way.'
Monumentalism--the desire to be as imposing as a statue--is proto-fascist because it's a flight from the liquidity of female biology, of nature. Like the Futurists, Siouxsie's aesthetic fetishised stark contours and severance; in 'Desert Kisses' (from 1980's Kaleidoscope) she even wrote a song of outright hydrophobia, where 'tidal fingers' hold her in their 'deadly grip'. Although she gradually distanced herself from the Banshees' early flirtation with fascism, Sioux continued to take on magisterial and forbidding female archetypes, like the dominatrix and the witch.
On 'Arabian Knights' (from Juju, 1981), she updates Grace Slick's posture of the stern matriarch who passes judgment on men's wicked ways, excoriating Islam's patriarchal enslavement of women behind the veils of purdah, where they're reduced to the role of 'baby machines'. In 'Monitor' she's an imperious dominatrix, commanding her plaything to 'sit back and enjoy'.
As her career developed, Siouxsie found her way to more 'feminine' images of power. At the same time--surely no coincidence--her lyrics ooze moisture. With A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (1982), the Ice Queen melts; proto-fascist rigour softens into luxuriant, langorous decadence. From the ornamented Klimt-inspired cover image to the heady haze of neo-psychedelic sound, the album was all lush sensuality and blissful blur. The opening 'Cascade' has Siouxsie enswirled in droplets of fragrant sound, 'like liquid falling'. In 'Green Fingers', Siouxsie's even able to imagine women's proximity to nature as a magical source of strength, not vulnerability. Supernaturalism rather than anti-naturalism becomes the new model for the Banshees, as the earthly lore of the witch supersedes the glacial terrorism of the Ice Queen. With its Rites-of-Pan flute, 'Green Fingers' recalls the psychedelic classic 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by the United States of America, in which Dorothy Moskowitz sings ominously of 'venomous blossoms' and 'omnivorous orchids' that lurk within a girl's eyes; love is a Venus fly-trap whose nectar lures man to a sticky end.
Siouxsie revels in similar imagery of deadly voluptuousness in 'Melt', where sex is blissful bondage, 'tiny deaths' that leave the man 'beheaded'. 'Slowdive' imagines swimming and swooning in carnal confusion, taking the plunge into the uncontrol of desire, bathing in flesh. 'She's A Carnival' offers a less sinister vision of the psychic fragmentation that once threatened Siouxsie. She celebrates the idea of the self as a benignly chaotic polyphony
of unruly desires and clamorous voices. Fascism fears the mob, but in 'She's a Carnival' Siouxsie imagines mingling and merging with a festive multitude, in the spirit of Dionysus. Where once Siouxsie's musical alter-egos were sharply etched against the landscape, now she's "spinning in a dizzy haze", and her forbidding glare is replaced by "a smile like Mardi Gras".
On the next album, Hyaena (1984), 'Swimming Horses' is outright oceanic rock, a song inspired by seahorses. Still, Siouxsie's interest in gender-bending (women should be strong, men should be as weak as the incapacitated, 'melting man' of 'Melt') persists: Siouxsie was struck by the fact that it's the male of the seahorse species that gives birth. She clearly likes the idea of women being freed of the burden of fecundity.
By 1991's Superstition, Siouxsie completed her trajectory from the vampire woman of her Goth goddess prime, to the vamp of 'Kiss Them For Me'. Here, Siouxsie modelled herself on '40s movie idols like Rita Hayworth, who played strong and sometimes sinister female roles.
To this I would add only that the explosive tension in the sound / image of Siouxsie and Banshees (Creatures too) stems from the opposed pull of the Dionysian - the tribally tumult of the drums, the dervish churn of hypnotic rhythm - which is in stark contrast to the frozen poses of the classical-Appollonian extremism - wildness / madness / frezy versus statuesque control and poise
Their love of Can, a band without image or theatrics or even stage presence really
Years ago on MTV I saw live footage of the band, in the early 90s, that was unbelievable in its churning Dionysian intensity.
"Dance music's primal scene: a writhing, humid murk of
sweat-stippled bodies. Sound is a physical presence, an intimate pressure of
beat and bass so voluptuously thick it enfolds you, permeates your flesh, and
invades your body.You can't work out where the DJ booth is located, can't find
the bar, stumble through a jungle of buffeting limbs, until you abandon the idea
of orientation altogether and merge with a crowd you feel more than see.
Fitful illumination catches the curlicues of smoke, an arched spine, a head
thrown back, lips puckered and eyes closed in rapture.
"There's a good reason why all clubs take place in the dark,
why many warehouse raves are almost pitch black. It's the same reason you turn
the lights low when listening to your favorite album, or wear headphones and shut
your eyelids. Diminishing or canceling one sense makes the others more vivid.
Dance culture takes this simple fact and uses it to overturn the hierarchical
ranking of the senses that places sight at the summit. Visual perception is
eclipsed by the audio-tactile, a vibrational continuum in which sound is so
massively amplified it's visceral, at once an assault and a caress. The body
becomes an ear.
" If rave culture and the ever-proliferating forms of techno
and house music have any claims to subversive power, one of them might pertain
to the way they resist the privileging of the eye in contemporary pop culture.
Thanks to the pop promo, MTV, BET (Black Entertainment Television), et al,
success in genres like rock, rap and R&B now depends on the videogenic
charisma of the star vocalist, even on a measure of acting skill. The ability to
bust cool dance moves in front of the camera is more important than vocal skills:
a weak or erratic voice can be enhanced and salvaged using studio techniques; whereas an
inability to move elegantly to syncopated rhythm---Whitney Houston, for
instance--can only be masked by above-the-waist shots and quick cut-aways to the
backing dancers. Part of techno's "underground"-ness relates to its
refusal of this culture of the icon, of spell-bound, enthralled fascination.
For video is about spectatorship (almost by definition, if you're watching a
video, you're not dancing; it's hard to focus on a screen when you're shaking
your stuff), whereas club and rave culture are about participation.
"At a more phenomenological level, sound is about involvement
and impact, whereas sight contains an intrinsic distance and detachment.
"I don't see anything when I hear this music," says Nico Sykes,
the engineer/producer/owner of drum 'n' bass label No U Turn. "One of
the things it does for me is stop me thinking about that, I'm just absorbed
with the sound. I don't get lots of images of rushing down steel corridors of the
future fighting aliens or exploring some zone---I'm an audio man.Visually I'm
pretty dead."
"Although many people on the dancefloor close their eyes to
watch their own music-catalyzed and often drug-enhanced "eyelid
movies," and most clubs have some kind of visual element (fluorescent
backdrops, lasers scything through clouds of dry ice, use of strobes or
"black light"/UV, back projected videos, etc), Sykes's comment does
crystallize techno culture's relative indifference to the visual and its re-privileging
of the ear's primacy.There's a kind of sliding-scale ratio between the visual
and the sonic: the more underground the club or party, the less there will be in
terms of visual divertissement; the more hardcore the scene, the less there is
to be seen. Of course, financial factors go some way to accounting for this;
promoters of underground, small-scale parties have less money to spend on visual
spectacle than the mini-corporations that run "superclubs" or organize
huge commercial raves. But the fact that they choose to skimp on visuals and
decor in order to have enough funds for a powerful sound system again reinforces
the priorisation of the aural in techno culture. Essentially, the purer and
truer to techno's "spirit" a club or scene is, the more it is "dead"
to vision.
All of this goes some way to explaining the relatively
underdeveloped nature of techno and electronic dance music videos. A genre
predicated on the stripping away of pop/rock/rap's iconic apparatus of stars and
stage spectacle in order to facilitate a massive reinvestment in pure
sonic intensity, is almost inevitably going to create something of
an imagery/music gap. What's striking about most electronica videos is the
lag between the futurism and alien-ness of the music and the visuals...
from Seeing the Beat: Retinal Intensities in Techno and Electronic Dance Videos, by Simon Reynolds, 2002
And at the time, I bought into the whole thing, I was just young enough then to plunge fully into it without reservation.
Hand-painted the Antz regalia on various garments... there are pictures of me with the white stripe and an attempt at the look.
This is a neckerchief scarf thingy I made - I think I wore it tied at the waist though
How did I do that? Indian ink? Felt tips? Can't remember.
The little faded self-made badge says "Elimination Dancing" - a Bow Wow Wow song. In the middle, those are meant to be shoe movements as in a diagram of steps in a guide to dancing. But that must be from later on, as the debut album, on which "Elimination" appeared, didn't come out for quite a while after Kings of the Wild Frontier.
I was totally into Bow Wow Wow as well - even more so really. The whole McLaren-inspired caboodle. Even bought my girlfriend a Westwood frock from World's End which had found its way to an Oxford shop - cost a fortune it did (for a student-grant recipient). She never wore it once! But she did come with me to see Bow Wow Wow in St Albans - and conceded afterwards "there's something to be said for the primitive". (She was more into classical music, Mahler, that kind of thing).
Of course nowadays these appropriations by Adam and crew - the Burundi drums, the Apache whoops, the stripe across the nose, the reference to lost tribal potencies and red skin under the white skin held down by centuries of taming - these would be shamed out of its existence. And not without reason I suppose....
From Jim Morrison and his dead Indian souls scattered on dawn's highway bleeding (then jumping inside his fragile eggshell mind), through to Adam and The (Southern Death) Cult, to Ke$ha's head-dresses, and probably a dozen other examples, there is a stern dissertation to be written about exoticist / primalist projections towards the Native American / First Nations.
Even Kate Bush with her "The Dreaming" might get a scowl.
In the case of Bow Wow Wow, some of the guitar parts and vocal melodies were directly stolen from Soweto songs.
Talking about Adam Ant and the image/sound makeover that McLaren as conceptualist-for-hire came up for him, that turned him into a pop star...
One of my favoritest stories in all of rock'n'roll is about Darby Crash from the Germs.
Like the whole LA punk scene really, his thing was massively based on English punk. (As opposed to NYCBGBs). Indeed I believe before punk Crash and that lot were Anglophile glam fans, Bowie-ites who went down to Rodney's English Disco etc. Always looking to the UK. It's an LA thing.
Anyway, Darby Crash is hurtling down the Vicious nihilistic death trip path.
Then he goes to England and sees the Antz just after the McLaren make-over.
Comes back to LA with a white stripe across his nose, telling everyone "this is the new thing", urging anyone who'll listen to get with the new program that he's brought back word like Moses with the tablets of stone.
I think I like the story because I'm never convinced there's anything there, with the Germs.
Still at least he inspired one of my top 5 pieces of music of 21 C so far.
Sparks kind of invented New Wave as well as took the glam sound to its baroque de-blues-ified limit
"This Town" is somehow simultaneously The Skids and Queen
But when New Wave actually happened, instead of claiming their geeky-shrieky stiff-rhythmed prize alongside XTC et al, Sparks went full blown Eurodisco / synthpop with Giorgio at the electronic helm.
Shot themselves in the foot a bit by putting "number one" in the title, but only getting to #14 or something like that. Incredible song, though, with a breakdown that anticipates acid house.
Marvelous video - and I love the breakdown when it drops down to drums + pulse and the song seems to whoosh.
I didn't know this was even a single off the Number One in Heaven album
After a couple more, less impressive efforts with the Moroder camp...
... Sparks did actually go Noo Wave - in the early 80s, but a bit too late to benefit.
Russell + Ron even collaborated with ultra-Noo Waver Jane Wieldlin ex-Go Go
On this single off Angst in My Pants, the sound is almost Joan Jett but the imagery is glammy with some saucy cross-dressing
Rewind to the start - briefly glimpsed in the "This Town Ain't Big Enough" video was the bassist on Kimono, Martin Gordon - whose services were dispensed with swiftly because he wanted to contribute songs and I suspect because he was a photogenic rival to the Mael Bros. Shame cos his plunging prominent B-lines add muscle and melody to the Sparks sound.
Gordon would then form the late glam groop Jet (too late, alas, for success) with someone from Jook and some ex-John's Children personnel (J's C = protoglam AND protopunk if you think about it)
Love the very Mael-like Gilbert & Sullivan-ish delivery on that tune, sung by Andy Ellison
Jet would nosedive after just one album - but then swiftly re-ascend in reinvented form as the New Wave / pop punk outfit Radio Stars
And actually got on Top of the Pops finally - third time lucky for the ex-John's Childreners.
Gordon reminds me a little of Graham Lewis from Wire.
Musically and image-wise, it's sort of a bit like the Vibrators. Clean punk. The hair well-washed.
Bob Harris has trimmed his hair, but he won't be holding onto the Whistle Test seat for much longer.
A great little interview with the Mael bros that I drew from in the book - with Sally James of Saturday Scene (and later Tiswas)
not really on theme as this not a glam failure cannily / desperately reinventing themselves, but a New Wave / punk revision of glam (a whole other area with quite a lot to choose from)
Roxy / Ferry of course themselves reinvented themselves as sort of New Wave / sort of disco. I remember being really struck by this song at the time (1978) catching it by chance on TV - a kid's show too I think - but only having a very faint sense of who he or Roxy were.
Whereas this solo single, from only a year or so before - released early 1977 I think - could not be more pre-punk unless it was actually an episode from the first series of Rock Follies.
Love the girl on keyboards with the frizzed red cloud of hair. Background in mime?
Jeff Duff, or Duffo, is an Australian singer/cabaret performer in the tenor range, who in his career has used various personae, wardrobe, and satire as features of his performance. Duff's shows 'Ziggy' and 'Bowie Unzipped' are portrayals of the music of David Bowie, who he met while Bowie was a Sydney resident.
Jeff Duff began his musical career in Melbourne in 1971 as lead singer of jazz-rock fusion band Kush (1971–75) Kush are notable for performing to 45,000 people at the 1974 Sunbury Pop Festival, "conceived and promoted as Australia's Woodstock".
Duff relocated to London in 1978 as "the waif-like androgynous oddball Duffo". His keyboard player and arranger for most of this period was Sev Lewkowicz. At this time his single, "Give Me Back Me Brain" reached No. 60 on the UK mainstream charts in 1979.
His 1999 compilation, "Martian Girls Are Easy" is a 40-track, double CD anthology covering Duff's solo career from 1978, described by music historian, Ian McFarlane as showing "the satirical, new wave origins of 'Give Me Back Me Brain', through the soulful classical arrangement of Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side', dipping into funk on the way and then back to his glam roots"
Jeff Duff appears as 'Secta' in the Australian science Fiction movie Sons of Steel, released in 1989, featuring Duff's single, 'Here Come the Freaks'.
Duff performs regularly at Sydney's live music venues. He juxtaposes his sophisticated twenty piece Big Band swing repertoire with the raunchy glam rock of his Alien Sex Gods shows.
Duff's Ground control to Frank Sinatra project merges the styles of David Bowie and Frank Sinatra. The show features, dancers, singers, audiovisuals and a nine-piece band. Ground control to Frank Sinatra Duff's stage show has produced two albums: Ground Control to Frank Sinatra and Lost in the Stars.
Duff is currently writing and recording a new show based on the music of his favourite singer Scott Walker.
He has paid homage to Bowie in a show called 'ZIGGY'. which is a concert production featuring members of Jimmy Barnes band, Noiseworks & Leo Sayer's band.
Jeff Duff's official David Bowie tribute is the Bowie Unzipped show which has been playing around Australia since 2016, and features a rotating list of Australia's top musicians including Glenn Rhodes (Margaret Urlich, Thelma Houston, Dione Warwick, Ian Moss, Albert Lee, Grace Knight) on keyboards, bass and vocals, Jak Housden on guitar and vocals, Jess Ciampa on drums, percussion and vocals, Gordon Rytmeister on Drums, Rex Goh on guitar, Paul Berton on guitar and Paul Mason on guitar. The Bowie Unzipped band has played to sell out shows in both Sydney and Melbourne, and continues to tour around the country.
Duff released his tell-all memoir This Will Explain Everything through Melbourne Books in 2016. After reading the book Alan Howe in The Australian newspaper, said that 'Duff was a musical pioneer and perhaps the most fearless artist in the country.'
"Bolam, while he was working on The Likely Lads, shared a flat in Barnes, South West London, with a diminutive young up-and-coming singer named Mark Feld, who later (according to many accounts) 'adapted' his flat mate's surname to re-emerge as Marc Bolan. It would, for many actors, have served as a sound source for countless anecdotes, each successive one slightly more embellished for full and fresh chat show effect, but James Bolam, as usual, never discussed the matter in public" via https://www.comedy.co.uk/features/comedy_chronicles/strained-relationships-bewes-and-bolam/
"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
