successor to Shock and Awe whose feed no longer seems to be working properly - original blog + archive remains here: http://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ the blog of the Simon Reynolds book about glam and artpop of the 1970s and its aftershocks and reflections to this day
Came across this snippet from Kevin Rowland's The Q & A in The Guradian a few weeks back (Kev promoting his memoir Bless Me Father):
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
I’d have stuck with the original Dexys Midnight Runners look we started in 1978, which became known as the New Romantic look a couple of years later. Our management and record label talked us out of it. Later, Duran Duran and Spandau came out with that look and that made us look old-fashioned.
So 'tis proven!
What is proven? you ask.
The argument of this old post:
Back when I was reading old Dexys Midnight Runners interviews for Rip It Up, I came across a passing reference to how before punk, Kevin Rowland had been into Bowie.
Well, who wasn't, out of that punk-into-postpunk generation?
Still, it surprised me somehow - Rowland being so into Truth and Soul(-baring) and Authenticity, how could he really have any time for someone bound up with artfice and the Pose - with the idea that the performer is an actor?
Then the other day I discovered that Rowland's very first group Lucy & the Lovers had been influenced by Roxy Music.
(In fact, in '83, onstage, Rowland slagged off Bowie-circa-Let's Dance as a bad copy of Bryan Ferry).
The glam connection starts to make sense, if you think about Dexys's serial reinvention - how each successive album involved a New Look.
And it really starts to make sense if you consider subsequent developments.
Video for "Rag Doll" - single off the 2020 rerelease of My Beauty - featuring Rowland's grandson, Roo – “who has been wearing dresses since he was 13”. The song is by the Four Seasons’ as in "Walk Like A Man".
Cheeky glimpse of suspenders here
The My Beauty move seemed to involve Rowland revealing - and reveling in - his own long-suppressed feminine side.... asserting publicly his right to softness and the wearing of "pretty things".
While still remaining a man, and a hetero man for that matter.
Here's what he wrote to Alan McGee about the album and what he was trying to do
He has headed stationery!
It's a striking switch-up especially c.f. the first-phase Dexys look, which was so butch - the "spiffy" Mean Streets / On the Waterfront gear, followed later by boxing training hoods that created a vaguely monastic look.... the cult of Intense Emotions... "punish my body until I believe in my soul"... the working out together, jogging en masse to create team spirit ... . the missionary zeal... the thematics of fire and fortitude ("Dance Stance", "Burn It Down")... the fixation on the harder, horn-pumped type of Sixties Soul... the jousting jabbing horns
Such grave, earnest young men - so uncamp, it goes all the way round to become camp
Another glam-echoing thing about My Beauty - it's a covers album, in the tradition of Pinups and These Foolish Things. An artist explaining himself through choices of others material and through the delivery. Although in this case, it's not an inventory of influences or pantheon of ancestors, so much as an emotional accounting, a "this is where I am now" / "this is who I've always been inside" unveiling.
The other "glam" syndrome at work here is that irony that holds both generally and applies in this specific case with Dexys - which is that the clothes age faster and far worse than the music does.
Mind you, some of the recent get-ups looked awful from the off.
Like, what's he going for here?
The cover of this most recent album The Feminine Divine is a catastrophic taste failure - this looks more like a Goa Trance flyer or compilation than something you'd associate with Dexys Midnight Runners
Psytrance imagery actually makes sense as Kev in recent years got into Tao and tai chi and went on a retreat to Thailand to get his head sorted
"It’s Alright, Kevin (Manhood 2023)"... sees the singer in a lively therapy session with his backing chorus: “Were you always feeling edgy?” they wonder.
“Yes,” he admits.
“Afraid the mask would slip and they’d see?”
“I carried so much weight on me / I never truly was myself / Just an amalgam off the shelf …
“And did you ever get found out?”
“All the time”
“Did that compound your sense of doubt?”
“Totally. It was so hard not being real /Let me tell you how for years / I was waking up in fear / What would they think of me, no personality? / A no one from the start …”
The album is a kind of pilgrim’s progress, in which a character not a million miles from our Kev confronts the controlling habits of his earlier masculinity – “I had so much hate in me” – in order to celebrate not only his own freer, feminine side, but the guiding female spirit of the universe.....
. “I think we are going through a big change,” Rowland says, “different ways of relating. And we can either be entrenched in our old views – ‘I’m not bloody changing’ – or we can go with it…”
Oh and looping back to where we started
"Rowland tells a poignant story from the time about how he couldn’t quite bring himself to say hello to Bryan Ferry when he had the chance.
“I stood next to him once in the studio,” he says, “We were both recording something and Top of the Pops was on and we both came down to watch it. I was dressed in a scruffy old tracksuit and we didn’t speak – I was always very shy in those kind of situations. And Roxy Music were heroes of ours, if you like. If you listen to the early albums, he is really singing from his soul.”"
Here, although already becoming a pop star, Bolan sounds like he still half-belongs in the world of Ten Years After, Edgar Broughton Band, the Deviants, The Groundhogs
Then again, he sounds pretty raw even at the other side of his pop stardom
If it weren't for that feathery exploded-ostrich thing wrapped around his neck, would you even think "glam" here?
This is my preferred form of pop - underground goes overground, the pop group as autonomous aesthetic unit, steering its own path, often fronted by a warped personality chasing his own freak visions
I mean, yes, the manufactured, manager-conceived pop packaging process gets results, produces entertaining products for the delectation of ears and eyes - in this era, The Sweet
But I am all about the line from the Stones to Barrett-Floyd to T.Rex to Adam Ant to Smiths to Pulp to... I'm not sure what the equivalent is today. (Some would say Billie Eilish and Lorde)
For it to work, it has to actually chart, and chart big, or decent-sized
Having a pop aesthetic, being a pop aesthete, but no actually hits is a pathos-laden scenario
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