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tres debonAyers
Some people have compared Kevin Ayers's debonair image to Bryan Ferry - the genuine genteel article as opposed to the faux. Some even se...
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Nothingelseon has just come to the end of a heroic run of archival activity - scanning and making freely available the almost-entire print... -
Mark Fisher would say that glam is intrinsically aristocratic. But it's supposed to be a Tom Ripley type interloper - someone from t...
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THE glam bassist. "Oddity" might be the first time I registered the existence of the bass as an instrument - for those strange d...
I suppose hair metal gives the lie to the romo/yob rock dichotomy of recent discussions. Motley Crue demonstrated beyond doubt that a group could be thuggish and braindead whilst dressing like a big bunch of jessies.
ReplyDeleteMore highfalutingly, I recall once hearing that the dandies of the Beau Brummell ilk should be understood as an especially masculine group, whose sartorial ostentation was oft an aggressive stance, and whose favoured pursuits of boozing, gambling and whoring are shared by squaddies on a stag night.
I never got the sense that the hair metal boys were thuggish - you don't hear about them getting into fights. Maybe the odd inter-band punchup owing to the extreme cabin-fever pressures of being a rock band. But generally probably more likely to injure themselves through extreme intoxication. But definitely boorish and piggish when it came to drugs / drink / women. Very far from David Sylvian dandy aesthete types.
DeleteI read something else about Beau Brummell's idea of dandyism - that far from being flashy and overtly flamboyant, it was actually a rather austere philosophy, characterized by an extremely pronounced sense of what was correct - there was only one way of going about something to do with one's dress or grooming. A hyper-fastidious attention to detail. So it was all about what was proper. The whole philosophy of it was about dignity. So whether that would encompass all the dissolute stuff you are talking about I don't know. But certainly Brummell dandyism was not about flouncing around ostentatiously.
True! Many such cases. The Sweet wore makeup and silver lamé, but could kick your head in if you laughed at them. The New York Dolls, too.
ReplyDeleteAnd before them the Mods: sharp dressers who enjoyed a ruckus.
And as you say, back to Georgian dandies, the Landsknechts, Assyrians with their lavishly styled beards....
I don't know about The Sweet kicking your head in... I do know that the singer of Sweet, Bryan Connolly, got very badly beaten up after going to a pub in some rough town and perhaps irritating the locals with his flash pop star ways.
DeleteNever got the sense that the Dolls were handy with their fists. There's a story in Please Kill Me about Johnny Thunders creeping up behind one of the Ramones - or was it the Dead Boys? - who had done something to annoy him - creeping up behind him in a bar and whacking him on the back of his head with a beer glass, and then running away. This struck me as a bit pathetic given his street tough image.
One of the Dead Boys got stabbed. Generally speaking punks - and rock 'n ' rollers in general - are on the receiving end of violence.
Ugh that Bryan Connolly story is terrible. I didn't know about that.
DeleteObviously appearances were deceptive.