glam / new wave - the return

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At the exact intersection of prog, glam, and New Wave-to-be, you find: Split Enz

Grotesque and risible! 

Except there is one brief moment, from about 2.20 onwards, where their desire to be Roxy very nearly happens - the sax gets gaseous and the faint whiff of "2HB" and "Amazona" reaches our nostrils - but then it dissipates almost instantly, the sax shifts into a thin-bodied jocosity, like The Piranhas or a dozen other pubby New Wavers

("Desire to be Roxy" - just noticed that "Sweet Dreams" is from 1976's Second Thoughts, produced by no less than  Phil Manzanera  - I wonder how much he had to do with the eruptive-bit-in-"Amazona" quality to that brief exciting moment in the song?)

By the third album, Dizrythmia, released August 1977, Split Enz are fully, archetypally New Wave, but the late-glam dress-up-box thing lingers 

Those jackets are nearly cool though, almost like a hand-painted suit that Tristan Tzara might have worn at the Cabaret Voltaire

 

A December 1976 review of Split Enz live, from NME. 

"My favorite bit was Noel Crombie's spoons solo" !

Fully transitioned to Noo Wave (so in another sense, rewinding the clock to the pre-psych mid-Sixties - suits, neat hair). But still a bit garish and over-glossed.

Now there were a bunch of groups at this exact midpoint of the '70s who had this "let's get dressed up" late glam thing going on, but in a fatally "let's not take ourselves seriously" way. Generally, they looked a right mess, as if a fancy dress party in its last plastered throes had somehow wandered onto a stage.

Deaf School  - just like the Enz, hovering on the cusp between Old Wave and New Wave, with aspects of pastiche and winking irony that are sorta kinda pomo.

Also caught between late glam and New Wave, hovering on the cusp of bigness for a single year (1976), Doctors of Madness

 

As with Deaf School, not much prog in the equation here - unless we count the violin. 

Aussie neighbours to Split Enz, Skyhooks were coming from the same  rock-as-theatre place - this video pushes the "it's showtime"  vibe with its dressing room with lights all round the mirror frame mise-en-scene

And then like Split Enz, they strip down a bit musically and sartorially in hopes of hitching a ride on New Wave

Another Aussie - Duffo - a Bowie damaged feller  but here hitching a ride on punk (yet also looking like a laughing - or laughable - gnome).

   

Andrew Parker directs my attention to another Aussie bunch - The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. Strangely, just seeing their name, I could already see-hear them - and they look and sound almost exactly as I imagined!

Bang on the nail in terms of what I am talking about - and again, under the daft campy surface, there is serious musical chops on display. As with some other groups in this list, the music is not so much proggy as more in line with American roots-eclectic sophisto-rock, that area that includes The Band, Little Feat, Dr John, Ry Cooder, The Wild Tchoupitoulas...   If not for the silly clothes, voices and lyrics, you could imagine them joining the Last Waltz line-up.

 Another late glam troupe were Sailor, here brazenly imitating Roxy circa "Virginia Plain" and getting a couple of chart places higher (#2 to Roxy's #4) 

The voice and the piano bit  on "Glass of Champagne" are trademark infringement level infractions

And then just a little later in the decade  Big In Japan  - influenced by Deaf School, also heavily Bowie-damaged in the case of Jayne Casey and Holly Johnson, this troupe split into a number of postpunk / New Wave / careers of greater eminence

Also check out this embedding-disabled performance on What's On.

And then - later, mid-80s, quite out of synch with pop temporality, but still "at the precise nexus point" - the Cardiacs

Some would argue there's psychedelia in there as well as prog and New Wave.

Kooky but disturbed

This '82 Stonehenge free festival is probably similar to what greeted my aghast ears a few years later when me and my companions wandered unawares onto Port Meadow where a free festival was taking place, resulting in my first-time sighting-hearing of the Cardiacs. Although I didn't know the name of the group -  indeed it was years later that I realised "that was them!!". Hideous flashback ensued.  This video is really just audio, so only one dimension of the frightmare is captured - the herky-jerky psycho-clown sound.  

Every member looks like the stolid military-history obsessed one in Peep Show. Well, except for the girl with the sax.

Toy World  (title of debut tape) is a good trope for the vibe - clockwork non-sense. 

Back to the mid-70s historical cusp, I remember Punishment of Luxury well from when I first  started listening to late-night Radio 1: the deejays were enamored of the B-side to "Puppet Life", a herky-jerky tune called "Jellyfish".  Punilux included fringe theatre people and were obviously proggers and/or Bowie-damaged mime artist types. 

As the presenter on this TV show (clad appropriately in an 'ironic, this is showbiz' glittery jacket) points out, Puniluxer Brian Bond was taught mime by Lindsay Kemp - just like David Bowie and Kate Bush were. 

Reformed but still deformed

Steevee in comments suggests Toronto New Wavers The Dishes

Conceivably Ze Whiz Kidz (Tomata du Plenty - later of The Tupperwares and then the Screamers), a Seattle "comedy glam troupe", belong here -  albeit progless 

Max Webster

Singer went solo with a New Wave remodelling

How could I forget? Be-Bop Deluxe - they go from glam-tinged prog to New Wave-adjusted glamprop across several years in the exact midsection of the 1970s. Well I say "prog" but it's actually more like pomp rock - a more refined Queen without the front-man effrontery. 

Here it's 1978 and Nelson & Co are trying manfully to adjust the New Wave mandated tightness ("New Precision" indeed) but still keep the guitar heroics. 

Rebranded as Red Noise, with quasi-militaristic outfits and herky-jerky riffage, melodies that shriek and jut angularly,  nasty Noo Wave sax - an agile style jumper, that Bill. Soon he'd be onto synthpop. 

I guess Sensational Alex  Harvey Band count as being on the nexus point of prog, glam, and New Wave - the musicians had been Tear Gas, a Zappa-phile prog outfit.... then they happily went theatrical with Harvey as their charismatic frontman, but he  had a menace - and street delinquent preoccupations - that anticipated punk (even if the music itself never did)

 

program from May 1976 Manchester Free Trade Hall - note reference to "punk" in the Cast List

Can't forget SAHB's buddies The Tubes

A common denominator with a lot of these groups is that the band could really play - under the fancy dress and stage stunts, and regardless of the punkoid  'sick humor' / 'bad taste' themes, there is a suspicious (and distressing) level of chops on display

Oingo Boingo were originally a highly theatrical proggish ensemble called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo

Then they become quite literally the worst group that has ever existed. The internal struggle between proggoid desires and New Wave / commercial-aspiring constraints is quite hideous to hear-see.

Amazed to see a lead review of a Danny Elfman project in the Wire in the last year or so.

No glam element with this next one, as far as I'm aware - but certainly existing at some kind of nexus between prog and New Wave: Poli Styrene Jass Band

(although maybe there were theatrics in the live performances = apparently they had some narrative set pieces on stage, and involved actors as well as musicians later on).  - 

Unusually the prog element here is clearly Canterbury Sound - Kevin Ayers, Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North, Caravan, Egg ... with possibly some Euro-prog / late-psych (Supersister)

Poli Styrene Jass Band (note the odd anticipation of Poly Styrene) eventually became The Styrenes, but via another alter-ego, Styrene Money

(via Cardrossmaniac2)

I feel there are more "nexus point" examples of this syndrome -  hyper-theatrical / overdressed late-glam / late-prog outfits who either have proto-New Wave aspects or manage to transition fairly seamlessly.  (Toyah - an actress, so has a head start... Sadista Mika Band... The Kursaal Flyers).

There are also New Pop era examples - Howard Jones, fairly clearly (the mime artist dude in chains whose only job in the group is visual is the giveaway). Also Nik Kershaw -  not so much image-wise as musically.  

The general tendency to visual excess in promo videos is where a lot of these tendencies seep back.