The Falseness of Teeth

Writing candidly about her own struggle with her teeth for The Irish Independent in 2016,  Victoria May Clarke admitted that it was actually late spouse Shane McGowan's teeth that attracted her to him in the first place. 

“A mouthful of rotting stumps and a gurning grin had become his trademark until this time last year, when he braved the dentists after having avoided it for 58 years.... 

"Having dodgy teeth and not caring about it was part of what attracted me to Shane. It was a sign of rebelliousness, of being a free spirit, a non-conformist. It was a sign of not being shallow, perhaps, of being willing to see beyond the superficial charm of a Hollywood smile. The Hollywood smile in America simply says that you had a good orthodontist, but in Europe it still carries a stigma of being ‘fake’ or vain.”

“What you do or don’t do with your teeth can be a style statement, a political statement, it can convey information about your values, in the same way that the kind of car you drive says something about you. Mine is held together with gaffer tape."

She further opined that once upon a time she didn't see flossing * as something that “cool” people would do.  

But now, after a course of expensive dentistry, Clarke's position on oral self-care is similar to  Pam Ayres's.

Far from being anti-image and anti-glam - a dissident refusal of pop's self-salesmanship - there was a perfect homology between Shane McG's gappy grin and the aesthetic of his songwriting.  

Principles outlined in this interview 

“People don’t understand what it takes to write a truthful song, a song that is trying to be pure and honest.”

And on the subject of his radical self-neglect and dissolution:

 “You call it chaos. I don’t regard it as chaos. I regard it as natural living.”

The anti-smile was in that sense a perfect billboard for the product - realness, refusal of showbiz, the embrace of unhappy endings and beautiful losers. 

Like Martin Amis, during his own struggles with extreme dentistry, looking in the mirror at his mouth - after having had all his carious remnants wrenched out - and seeing in the absence, the flappiness of loose lips around empty gums, a presentiment of his own death. 

It's an archetype

 

*  "Flossing" in the other, non-dental sense, too. Like sartorial slovenliness, rotted gnashers represents a valorous disregard for self-presentation,  a virtuous absence of  vanity... 

secret undeclared thesis

The secret - or secreted - thesis, undeclared but just faintly discernible, in Shock and Awe is that the clothes, the style, the look of glam rock has aged far worse than the music, the records, the sound of glam rock. 

Even Bowie looks shit as often as he looks exquisite

For every one of these ageless amazements

There's several of these

Bowie could get away with it because he was so unusually good-looking, in the sense of looking  beautifully unusual - an unusual kind of beauty

But when his plain-John or decent-looking-but regular-looking-bloke cohorts tried to get with the program, it looked ruddy awful 

As for Roxy Music - in truth, rather often they just looked a bit tatty - a right rocky horror show -  before their retreat into "timeless be-suited elegance" 

In the picture above, they are barely a notch above Deaf School.

And in this next shot, even Bryan looks bad (oddly resembling Ariel P**k)

They only get away with it really because Bryan is generally so incredibly handsome in a classic movie star sort of way.

The rest of Roxy look like a bunch of proggers.

Well to be honest in that shot above they look like the Fabulous Poodles or the Kursaal Flyers.  And Bryan is handsome but clothing wise it's not far off the singer in Mud.

Of course circa the first albums there is Eno, the rival visual attraction in Roxy, the other Brian/Bryan. 

Yet Eno in his balding-yet-long-locked, heavily made-up glam phase looks much less sexy (to my hetero male eyes at any rate) than the Another Green World era look (short haired; sensible 'visual artist at work' casual wear)

Much the same applies to the album artwork, actually

The first five Roxy covers (with the exception of For Your Pleasure  which still thrills and thralls) are embarrassing, don't you think? Softcore Pirelli Calendar, suitable for the locker room of a car repair shop. Especially Stranded and Country Life (and ain't that an ugly pun?)

Yet the music - the music - "For Your Pleasure", "2 H.B.", "Mother of Pearl", "Amazona" -  is an ageless amazement.

Of course sometimes the glam pose  / fashion-as-art-statement stuff doesn't look good from the off, it's sort of pre-dated. 

Dexys promo shot for their new single "The Feminine Divine"

Or going back to the original era, take a look these late-prog / late-glam turning into New Wave

 grotesques 

S+ A is written from an odd position - a glam rock fan who isn't that interested in clothes. Who is  reflexively suspicious of the fashion world. Who tends to see it as inherently counterrevolutionary - simply through its relation to money and the class system. (In that sense, very much like the art world. As in dealers and auction houses, not so much curators and museum administrators, who at least believe in something). 

In terms of glam's relation to visuality: I suppose my agenda in S+A was double. On the one hand, 

to argue the case for what no one talks about much when talking about glam, which is the music. To claim that there was a distinctive, if loose, rock aesthetic  there.  A set of sonic advances, or at least steps in a direction. Tons of stuff to be excited by musically, even if  you're constitutionally not that swayed by the glad rags and the poses.

But equally - conversely, even - the aim was to argue that in the context of rock in its entirety, image appearance gesture performance spectacle is always there. Even in apparently un-glam or anti-glam styles like underground metal, Deadheads / jam bands, grunge etc - always there is a rhetoric of the visual that aligns with the rhetoric of the sonic.

So the thesis is that "everything is glam rock"

Even the performance of non-performance is a kind of performance

Which parallels that thing which fascinates me about the various naturalistic turns in  acting for stage and screen alike (method acting, kitchen sink realism of the '60s, Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, mumblecore etc - the casting of non-professionals and the untrained, improvised scripts etc). There is  always a new code of stylization that emerges within this attempt to be unstylized, without style. . 

Each new push towards realism creates a form of artifice whose stagey-ness becomes apparent in subsequent decades. The initial Shock of the Real - the new levels of naturalism in terms of bad diction,  inanity, profanity, indignity, ordinariness, vernacular speech, stumbling inarticulacy, plainness and humdrum-ness - fades away. And suddenly you see the contours of its contrivance. You see that the "unwritten"-ness is actually written and there are new mannerisms, new codes, that have emerged.

Same with realism in rock - pub rock, New Wave, indie, grunge, lo-fi. Each new phase of anti-glam involves its own kind of theatrics.

Vivienne Westwood as anti-fashionista

I was going write something about Vivienne Westwood (RIP) but then realized I already had -  twice last year, in effect. First through the long LRB piece on Viv's partner-in-culture-crime Malcolm McLaren. And then again with a S+A blogpost about Jordan - Viv's first model - which is reproduced here, with some small tweaks. (Possibly three times, indirectly, if you count this piece on Pistol)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Jordan - the most iconic shop girl ever; the original Sex Pistol incarnating the attitude before the band even existed - died last week. 

Before she was a punk - the first face of punk - she was a glam fan. There's a story about her turning up to a Bowie concert wearing amazing self-made earrings and Bowie leaning down off the stage and asking if he could have them - and she said "no!"

The glam connection spotlights the essence of punk - or let's say, a particular strand of punk (to me maybe the truest punk and certainly the most confounding nowadays to think about as a grown-up.    And that is a spirit of empty provocation. 

"Her face was the front of shop" -  shops plural, although all in the same premises: Let It Rock,Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, Sex, Seditionaries. And what the face was selling was the idea of being looked at, but in a peculiar anti-attraction way. Call it atrocity-exhibitionism. Arrest the gaze and assault it. Kick the passer-by in the eye.

The look - hair, make-up, clothes, expression - mimes out a ruthlessness, that's brandished like a warning (I did this to myself; this is what I'm capable of; beware!).  It's analogous to, yet also the inverse of, actual terrorism (where the goal is to blend in with the populace - "we dress like students, we dress like housewives / or in a suit and a tie", Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"). Political terrorism and cultural terrorism share a common goal: strike fear. But with punk (this kind of punk) it's all means, no end.  The means is the end: shockwaves rippling across the faces and minds of the normals.

Why so appealing, to be so appalling? 

For sure, it takes fearlessness. More bravery than I would ever have been capable of mustering. And to be the first, and all alone, and female, running the gauntlet of the street  - yes, that is fucking fearless.

Yet it is a peculiar sort of fearlessness. Not the courage of someone involved in the French Resistance, or Greek Resistance. Nor the bravery shown by an eco-warrior in a speed-boat squaring off with a whaling ship or oil tanker, tying themselves up a tree, lying in front of bulldozers.... 

Fearlessness combined with pointlessness.  

More so than even the Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle (where there's some kind of smash-the-Spectacle politique), the filmic expression of this particular fashionista-as-terrorista idea of punk is Jubilee. Not smashing the spectacle but making a spectacle of yourself. Beauty as cruelty, cruelty as beauty. 

Jordan is the star of the show. And here, as Amyl Nitrate, she reads a paean to child-murderer Myra Hindley. 

She starts by talking about how her school motto was Faites votre désir réalité  - make your desires reality, and adds “I myself prefer the saying ‘don’t dream it, be it’ " i.e. the glam maxim first heard a few years earlier in The Rocky Horror Show.

“In those days desires weren’t allowed to become reality, so fantasy was substituted for them – films, books, pictures – they called it Art – but when your desires become reality, you don’t need fantasy any longer – or Art. I always remember the school motto – as a child my heroine was Myra Hindley – do you remember her? Myra’s crimes, they said, were beyond belief – that was because no one had any imagination – they really didn’t know how to make their desires reality – they were not artists like Myra – one can smile now at the naivete.

"When, on my 15^th birthday, Law and Order were finally abolished, all those statistics that were a substitute for reality disappeared. The crime rate dropped to zero… I started to dance. I wanted to defy gravity.” 

(That last phrase became the title of her autobiography, Defying Gravity)

Jordan's other big Jubilee scene is as a ballerina Britannia. (She'd trained as a ballet dancer as a child until an injury put paid to it).

 

The odd thing is that the memorials and tributes invariably mention what a sweetheart she was - kind and nice and lovely. 

So it's a false front - an image (Myra Hindley crossed with Margaret Thatcher with a bit of Ruth Ellis) that's the opposite of how you are inside.

There is a fascinatingly detailed Jordan interview transcript that Jon Savage has made available at punkgirldiairies - originally done for England's Dreaming. 

Jordan starts by denying that the way she dressed was designed to offend. 

"I liked to treat myself like a painting. I didn’t consider that people would be offended or outraged by it. It really never crossed my mind". 

That's a fairly typical punkoid posture of that era - a  profession of innocence combined with a feigned plea for tolerance ("we just want to dress like this,  why are people so closeminded"). See also this bit, which cues off tales of her commuting from Brighton to London wearing see-through chemises that showed her breasts, psychotic spiky hair, virulent make-up (a scene of this creating consternation among British Rail passengers - mums shielding the eyes of their kids, Jordan having to be moved to a First Class compartment by the conductor - is recreated in the new Sex Pistols TV drama by Danny Boyle)

"Some of the men got rather hot under the collar, paper on the lap.... There was absolutely nowhere you could go where people wouldn’t say something. It was just too blatant for them. People up on scaffolding would shout, there’d be tourists running, trying to get photos. This is long before it all burst, taking pictures of punks and what have you." 

[Note how these reactions are presented as if an unexpected byproduct of her dressing that way, hassle that she'd really rather not have gone through - rather than exactly the response actively sought and achieved with enormous effort]

As the conversation goes on, the front of "just wanted to dress this way" drops - it becomes  clear that symbols are being wielded in awareness of their likely effect, the goal is to goad

"People were very offended if you wore a Cambridge Rapist T-shirt; I got a lot of trouble on the buses at that time. They didn’t like people wearing them." 

[Bear in mind that "at that time" = when the Cambridge Rapist had very recently been an at-large rapist depredating on women. He wore a leather mask bearing the words 'Rapist' on it, so victims would have no doubt what was about to happen to them. Sometimes, if he couldn't break in to a house or flat, he would write 'the Rapist was here' on the window', just to sow fear and so his evening wasn't a total bust. Turning the Cambridge rapist into a "pop star" - McLaren & Westwood's provocation and act of "cultural terrorism: here - relies on exploiting the actual state of terror that women lived under]

Jordan on appearing on the TV show So It Goes 

"They got my back up because they wouldn’t let me wear this swastika armband, right, there was the biggest do about it. They eventually put a piece of sticky tape over it." 

On her later-phase twinset-and-pearls Thatcher look

"People found it very perplexing. The look was very rigid, the hair was always very tightly controlled." 

The opposite of a come-hither look.

"People were terrified of coming in [to the shop]. I’d heard reports from people who later became friends, that people wouldn’t go in because of me, that I wouldn’t say anything to them, I’d be horrible.... It was just my attitude. I thought I looked better than anyone else. I was very introverted, I know people thought I was an exhibitionist, but I was pretty stand-offish. Even today I don’t take pictures smiling, because I think I look better when I don’t smile. I felt powerful, and I think I looked powerful, I know I looked very intimidating. People were very worried, even the guy who eventually became my husband [Kevin Mooney of Adam and the Ants] was very worried about coming in to see me. Adam was the same. By that time I’d built this reputation for myself."

On Johnny Rotten's asexuality and her own ability to repel approaches: 

"He didn’t see himself as attractive in any way, I suppose, if you were to ask him. He didn’t want the trappings of a normal person. He was John Rotten, and much the same as myself, I didn’t go out with anyone either, the image was everything, in a way.

"People were scared out of their wits of me. Absolutely.

"I never got anyone saying they’d like to take me out.... I exuded that leave me alone-ness."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The thing about the dialectic of outrage is that there's a constant pressure to up the anti, as it were - you have to go from sticking a safety pin through the Queen's nose and comparing the Royal Family to a fascist regime, to recruiting an actual fascist on the run into the Sex Pistols ("Martin Bormann", symbolically not literally, but this is all symbol play). 

That then leaves you nowhere to go - you either have to escalate ("kill someone / kill yourself" as "Belsen Was A Gas" puts the options) or climb down, de-escalate, relapse into normal life, reveal that hidden niceness.

Although Too Young To Die/Sex/Seditionaries is considered a convulsion within the post-Sixties fashion-etc culture, a drastic break (symbolized by the "What Side of the Bed" T-shirt - with recent heroes consigned to the condemned side of the garment), really there's a fair amount of continuity. Not just with the shock aesthetics of glam (the swastika and iron cross play of the Sweet, Lou Reed and others; Alice Cooper's ghoulish make-up; Rocky Horror, with some of the cast reappearing in Jubilee of course). But actually there's a continuity with the counterculture and underground press. Think of OZ and the infamous Rupert the Bear comic strip that led to the magazine being prosecuted: there's the desecration of a children's favorite in pretty much the same way as Who Killed Bambi and the photograph of an actual dead baby deer with an arrow in its bloody throat (except that being Sixties cats OZ use Eros in all its hairy and tumescent graphic-ness, rather than Thanatos). 

You can see the anti being upped across the '70s in the escalation from defiling beloved images from children's literature (a priapic and monstrously endowed Rupert) to "celebrating" actual torturers of children (Myra Hindley, Ian Brady - both namechecked in "No One Is Innocent", the Pistols tune featuring Ronnie Biggs and "Martin Bormann". And then the brief infamous existence of a band called The Moors Murderers, featuring another exhibitionist later known for geometric make-up, Steve Strange).  

                                               

With OZ / Rupert the Bear and "Who Killed Bambi" alike, innocence - the sanctuary of childhood itself, not just its sentimentalization by grown-ups - is the target. And the assault comes from the adolescent, the ex-child who's discovered the power of cynicism. 

(Also assaulted: the innocence of domestic pets and wild animals: Vicious's "to think / I killed a cat", members of Clash shooting pigeons for a laugh, and the actual living creature killed for a scene in movie, Russ Meyer's aborted Who Killed Bambi). 

Another '60s pre-echo:Jeff Nuttall's 1968 book on the UK Underground,  Bomb Culture, has this passage on the Moors Murderers that rehearses the Jubilee / Jordan monologue about Myra as Artist: 

"Romantics, Symbolists, Dada, Surrealists, Existentialists, Action painters, beat poets and the Royal Shakespeare Company had all applauded de Sade from some aspect or other. To Ian Brady de Sade was a licence to kill children. We had all, at some time, cried "Yes yes" to Blake's 'sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire'. Brady did it."

Vicious lives this idea out... and the echoes continue through postpostpunk with Big Black and Rapeman, zines like Murder Can Be Fun and Answer Me! (a series of issues dedicated respectively to murder, suicide, and rape), the Slacker scene in which the aging radical academic exalts the "Texas sniper" Charles Whitman who gunned down strangers from the top of a tower...  

To this way of thinking, the serial killers, assassins, etc, aren't just Artists; they're superior to artists, more committed.  They don't act out ruthlessness, they take ruthless action. They dissolve the barrier between art and life, take their desires for reality. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And to close a little bit from the LRB piece: 

"When he flew to Manhattan to bail out Vicious and hire the best defense lawyer in town, McLaren’s next plan was to record a Sid solo album packed with showbiz standards , including the Brecht-Weill song about ruthless killer “Mack the Knife” (which features lines like “On a Sunday, Sunday morning / Lies a body, oozin' life.”)  Alive, Spungen had been seen as a manipulative junkie leading Sid astray; dead, she was just a bump in the road to Vicious’s superstardom. In the New Yorker recollection, McLaren notes with admiration his partner Westwood’s lack of sentimentality: “Vivienne didn’t spare a thought over the death of Nancy. We designed a new T-shirt for Sid: “She’s Dead—I’m Alive—I’m Yours.” 

 "Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture."  

Vivienne Westwood