glam / new wave edition Francais

 

The best T.Rex reinvention I can think of 

And the video is so fucking French

Androgyny .... ultra-stylized 

Plus a Sparks connection!

fame abdication

" I don't want to be king, I want to be real." 

John Lennon

Nik on glamma

 

(via Peter Stanfield's blog)

glampunk - Jeff Starship

Joey Ramone in 1973 fronting Sniper

Hard to tell because he's such a bad singer at this point but I think that is his attempt at "fey"

And the lyric appears to be about how much he wants a "glitter doll"

Joey at this point bore the alias "Jeff Starship" and he later recalled that  he "used to wear this custom-made black jumpsuit, these like pink, knee-high platform boots- all kinds of rhinestones- lots of dangling belts and gloves".

Mickey Leigh - "Joey started getting into glitter and joined his first band... Sniper and started hitching rides down Queens Boulevard to hang out at this club called the Coventry. I think Joey became the lead singer of Sniper by answering an ad in the Village Voice: "Let's dress up and be stars tomorrow." I thought it was great that Joey was in a band, but it was really dangerous to hitchhike down Queens Boulevard looking the way Joey did. Joey's so unusual to begin with, so tall - he's about six six naturally, but in platform shoes he stood over seven feet tall. And he wore a jumpsuit. At that time, you really couldn't be doing that safely. You were taking a chance hitchhiking down Queens Boulevard like that..... Sniper became regulars at Coventry - playing a couple of times a month - so I wanted to go check them out, see what was going on. When I got there it was a real glitter crowd - everyone was into that band the Harlots of 42nd Street. So I thought it was going to be lame. I was shocked when the band came out. Joey was the lead singer and I couldn't believe how good he was." -  (from Please Kill Me) 

Nothing to alter my verdict here (and recycled in the book)

"the period after Loaded and before Marquee Moon strikes me as historically significant and importantly transitional, but surprisingly thin in terms of actual musical achievement"

Still, the rock pickings were even thinner in Los Angeles at this time, so there's that

knock on Wood

"For a musician of his acknowledged brilliance, Roy Wood has shown an inordinate interest in paying tribute to the past works of others" 

- Greg Shaw, reviewing Wizzard's Introducing Eddie & the Falcons, in Phonograph Record, November 1974

"A craftsman knows what he's going to make and an artist doesn't know what he's going to make, or what the finished product is going to look like" 

- Ken Price, ceramics sculptor 

 "I felt very puny as a human. I thought, ‘Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman."

~David Bowie

The Show that Never Ends

 “If one assumes -- as I do -- that in the future every home will become like a TV studio in which one is simultaneously writer, director and star of our own show… what is life? What is our existence except our own show? That home movie that we all live inside… it’s already started to some extent. It won’t be like ‘Crossroads’”  -- his smooth features produce a startlingly wolfish smile -– “it’ll be more like ‘Eraserhead’."

JG Ballard, interviewed by Charles Shaar Murray, 1983