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 January 2007, Bernard Cribbins had a guest role as glam rock promoter Arnold Korns in Horror of Glam Rock, a Doctor Who audiodrama...."
Arnold Corns being "a band formed by David Bowie in 1971. Bowie played on the guitar and did most of the vocals, although his costume designer Freddi Burretti was considered as a lead vocalist. Mick Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass, Mick Woodmansey on drums and Mark Carr Pritchard on guitar, Arnold Corns was one of Bowie’s side projects at the time, and something of a dry run for Ziggy Stardust."
That's Buretti on the sleeve right
Somehow I don't think this was the dream fusion of glam and hauntology and pulp modernism that Mark K-Punk was dreaming of...
There's probably more glam - in the lumpen-glitter Sweet / Slade sense - in this Cribbins turn from The Good Old Days... . "I was feeling rather queer", "the barmaid she was six feet two and every inch a gent"... nostalgia / retro, English-all-too-English-ness, music hall as unacknowledged root of the Brit tangent-mutant form of rock'n'roll...
“Can you believe it? That people got so worked up about what someone was wearing?” he says today. But they did, and even those sympathetic to Rowland’s vision seemed baffled. One marketing guy at Creation sent him a bunch of material about cross-dressing. “And I was like, no, I don’t wanna wear a wig! I had sideburns on, a male haircut. I just wanted to wear a dress.”
He sighs. “Someone else at the label thought it was about sexuality. It may have been a bit. But I remember having to write something, saying it’s not a gay thing, it’s not this, it’s not that. I kind of defined it through people misinterpreting it. Because I’m not the kind of guy to go, ‘This is a statement and it means this.’ It was all intuitive.”
... Even today, Rowland says people just don’t get it. “Irvine Welsh, who is a friend and I respect him, put a tweet up recently saying it was an amazing album but the cover was a mistake. He doesn’t understand me! It was a lifestyle choice, not a fucking career move. That’s what I was wearing, that’s what I was into, that was who I am. All of my looks, everything I do, is like that. It’s not a gimmick.”
Perhaps the peak of the criticism came during his infamous appearance at Reading and Leeds festival where he performed a short guest spot dressed in a white dress and stockings.... The Leeds leg he admits was trickier. “I was about to go on, and then a woman called Hobbs … Mary Anne Hobbs? … introduced me. She said, ‘Here’s a legend in his own lingerie!’ And I thought, ‘What the fuck?’ It threw me, to be honest. I think Alan [McGee] thought the confrontation would be punk rock, but I didn’t want that. I’d done all that 20 years earlier.”
As a few people have noted, the universe - as revealed in greater detail and depth than ever by the new Webb Telescope images - looks a bit glitterball disco-rama.
In fact what it reminded me of fairly instantly is the staging for this TV rendition of "Fame" by David Bowie. The lighting struck me before as a fabulous evocation of the space of celebrity itself. Hats off to the Cher Show lighting director and crew!
"Exploding out of San Francisco’s vibrant late-60s counter-culture, Luminous Procuress is a psychedelic odyssey of unabashed hedonism. The only feature film by artist, mystic and polymath Steven Arnold, the film celebrates gender-fluidity and pan-sexuality in a voyeuristic phantasmagorical journey towards spiritual ecstasy."
"Often compared to the works of Fellini, Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, and featuring the outrageous talents of the avant garde drag troupe The Cockettes, as well as artist ruth weiss, Luminous Procuress was an underground sensation upon release but disappeared from circulation for many years. Now fully restored in all its sensuous glory, Luminous Procuress’s subversive delights are ready to be discovered anew."
Along with Jack Smith/K.Anger I also am minded of Ze Whiz Kidz, Pink Narcissus, the Angels of Light, Les Petites Bonbons, a less abjection oriented Ridiculous Theatre, etc etc. A queered counterculture. The Underground but without the macho adventurism and Rousseau-esque back to Nature fantasies. An urban and urbane Underground, in love with plastic, glitter, neon.
Further proof that glam of the Roxy / Bowie type was not such a total break from the Sixties, that there was continuity as well as rupture - the pandrogyny and polysexuality and freak-out excess shifting subtly in tone towards decadence and nostalgia, the melancholy palette and bygone evocations of Biba
Also a hint of Zardoz in there, as well as the psychedelic-camp decor of Avengers/Prisoner/The Final Programme
"The creation of a personal dream-world in cinematic terms seems to have been the aim of film maker Steven Arnold. Mr. Arnold studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and received an M.S. in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970. His short films have all been beautiful, visual experiments in color and mysterious settings where mythological creatures are given a celluloid life of their own. Mr. Arnold’s medium-length film, Messages, Messages, attracted a great deal of critical attention when it was shown during the New Directors section of the Cannes Film Festival, and it was linked by the French critics to the fanciful, cinema reveries of Cocteau or Fellini. If Steven Arnold admires the work of these filmmakers, his work does not imitate them, and his first feature, Luminous Procuress is an altogether extraordinary, individualistic phantasmagoria. It was filmed entirely in San Francisco over a two-year period, and describes the adventures of two wandering youths in San Francisco who visit the home of a mysterious woman, the Procuress. She is an elegant emblem of sorcery, her vivid features glowing under bizarre, striking maquillage, and one is not certain who she is or where she intends to lead the protagonists. Although the language she speaks is vaguely Russian, it appears that the Procuress has psychic powers. She discerns a sympathetic response to her on the part of the youths, and by magical means, conducts them through fantastic rooms, on a psychic journey. Through strange passageways, one voyages with the Procuress and her charges, glimpsing hidden nightmares and panoplied chambers of revelry, where celebrants, ornately festooned, dance and make love before unseen gods. The youths are soon drawn into the sensuality of the Procuress’ spellbound kingdom, and one is reminded of the sorceress-neighbor to Guilietta in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits. Only here, in Arnold’s film, the spectator is a willing participant in some unspeakably attractive but menacing ecstasy. The sexes become androgynous and one remains entranced by the wonder of such a film as Luminous Procuress."
