The Oi! of Glam

Cockney Rejects rough up The Sweet

 

Long thought there was something glitterstomp about this tune

Never liked them at the time, now I do.

The convergence of glam and Oi! four years ahead of schedule - The Jook's "bovver rock" from 1974

The Jook carried on long enough to almost be Oi! - this is from 1978

Waving the class war banner  - a bit, anyway

Aggro rock - except they mean "aggravation" more than aggression

Heavy Metal Kids had the thematics and the accent - and sort of the image - but not the sound at all

Again, with Hustler, the music is rough-arsed boogie but the voice and the imagery is proto-Oi! Well, perhaps more Chas N' Dave, "Gertcha". 

However the persecuted character in the song is a longhair with a trench coat - a prog rock fan, "a scruffy little 'ippie" 

Good Lord actual footage of the band

"the geezer upstairs'll take me in" 

Another convergence - the sharpies down Under - aka the Bogan Boogie

The song here is by Rose Tattoo - more AC/DC meets Oi! than glam meets Oi! - but lyrics referencing "working class streets" and factory life. 

And yet more - Third World War (not really glam but meaty beefy stompy and class-war conscious)

Slade matured to full ideological consciousness

Also Slaughter and the Dogs, who started out as a glam band

I wrote about the bootboy glam / terrace stompers / punk-before-punk thing in this review of a junkshop glam compilation - also the idea of a 1970s hard rock continuum in which the once-crucial differences melt away into indistinguishability as the era recedes further into history

Various Artists - All the Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s

(Pitchfork, 2019)

The title of this glam rock box set is a cute twist on “All the Young Dudes,” the hit 1972 song Bowie gifted to Mott the Hoople. People, then and since, took it as an anthem for rock’s third generation—the kids who were babies when rock’n’roll first arrived, missed out on most of the ’60s, but craved a sound of their own in the ’70s. The Bowie/Mott/Roxy Music side of glam—literate and musically sophisticated—is not really what this collection is about, though. “Droog” is the true clue, a slang term for a teenage thug from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of the Anthony Burgess novel. Scandalous upon its 1971 release, the film was blamed for a spate of copycat “ultraviolence” and chimed with existing UK anxieties about feral youth and rising crime: soccer hooliganism, skinhead “bovver boys” in steel-capped Doc Martens brutalizing hippies and immigrants, subcultural tribes warring on the streets.

All the Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s largely celebrates the music that sublimated and safely vented the disorderly impulses of working-class kids in the not-so-Great Britain of the early ’70s. It’s packed with the coarse, rowdy rock whose shout-along choruses and stomp-along drums shook concert halls from foundations to rafters. Compiler Phil King’s focus, though, is not the huge-selling glitter bands like Slade or the Sweet, but the nearly-made-its and the never-stood-a-chancers: “Junkshop glam,” as collectors and dealers call this stuff, a term that exudes the musty aroma of digging through cardboard boxes of dirt-cheap singles.

Glam as punk-before-punk is an argument convincingly made on the first disc of Droogs, titled “Rock Off!” Ray Owen’s Moon’s “Hey Sweety” launches things with a stinging attack and pummeling power just a notch behind the Stooges, although the oddly phrased title-chorus diminishes the menace slightly. Most Droogs inclusions are fairly frivolous affairs lyrically—anthems of lust, celebrations of rocking out—but Third World War anticipate punk themes with the proletarian plaint and Strummer-like sandpaper vocals of “Working Class Man.” Hustler forge a link between the Faces and Cockney Rejects with “Get Outta My ’Ouse,” which is like Magic’s “Rude” recast as pub boogie: the hilarious lament of a longhair hassled by his girl’s disapproving Dad. In Supernaut’s “I Like It Both Ways,” the bisexual protagonist is confused by stereophonic propositions from a girl in the left speaker and a boy in the right. Other highlights include the chrome-glistening grind of James Hogg’s “Lovely Lady Rock” and the grating lurch of Ning’s “Machine,” akin to being run over by a bulldozer driven by a caveman.

Things stay stompy and simplistic on the second disc, titled “Tubthumpers & Hellraisers,” but with a slight shift towards pop. On Harpo’s “My Teenage Queen,” a lithe, corkscrewing melody contrasts with a relentless beat, which is interrupted by an unexpected outbreak of hand-percussion like a belly-dancer abruptly jumping onstage to join the band. Frenzy’s “Poser” sneers sweetly and Simon Turner’s “Sex Appeal” is a delicious bounce of bubblegum. Compared with the ferocious first disc, though, this radio-friendly fare often feels flimsier, stirring those doubts familiar with similar archival enterprises: Is this really lost treasure? Or is it deservedly obscure?

Shrewdly, on the final disc “Elegance & Decadence,” King switches gears and zooms in on what some call “high glam”: the Bowie-besotted, Bryan Ferry-infatuated side of the genre, which appealed to older teenagers and middle-class students with its thoughtful lyrics, witty cultural references, and the exquisite styling of the clothes and record packaging. The backings favored by performers like John Howard, Paul St John, and Alastair Riddell are svelte and lissome, shunning the beefy power-chords and leaden kick drums in favor of strummed acoustic guitar and swaying rhythms. The vocal presence on these songs is likewise willowy and androgynous: sometimes an unearthly soar above the mundane, other times highly-strung and histrionic.

The most fetching specimens here in this post-Hunky Dory mode are Steve Elgin’s “Don’t Leave Your Lover Lying Around (Dear),” with its saucy asides about how “trade is looking good,” and Brian Wells’ archly enunciated “Paper Party.” Themes of fame and fantasy abound, with many owing a sizable debt to Bowie. “Criminal World,” by the debonair Metro—who described their style as “English rock music, but influenced by a hundred years of European culture… Baudelaire and Kurt Weill”—would be later covered by Bowie himself on 1983’s Let’s Dance, a well-deserved compliment. Even more genteel-sounding is “New York City Pretty,” which could be an outtake from Rocky Horror Picture Show, so closely does Clive Kennedy mirror Tim Curry’s phrasing.

Like other retroactively invented genres such as freakbeat, part of the appeal of junkshop glam is its generic-ness: the closeness with which artists conform to the rules of rock at that precise moment. In many cases, these performers were opportunists: a year or two earlier, they’d been prog or bluesy-rock artists. Some would later adopt New Wave mannerisms, swapping escapism and decadence for lyrics about unemployment and urban deprivation. Droogs does contain an example of glam juvenilia from a future prime-mover of punk: “Showbiz Kid” by Sleaze, the early band of TV Smith of the Adverts.

Although this kind of aesthetic flexibility seems suspect and unprincipled, it reveals a couple of things about rock. First, it points to a sameness persisting underneath all the style changes. From today’s remote vantage point, the differences—once so significant and divisive—between ’60s beat groups, bluesy boogie, heavy metal, glam, pub rock, and punk start to fade and a continuum of hard rock emerges. The dominant sound on Droogs is situated somewhere between the Pretty Things, Ten Years After, the Groundhogs, on one side, and the Count Bishops, Sham 69, Motörhead, on the other. I’ve picked British names but you could just as easily throw Steppenwolf, Grand Funk Railroad, and Black Flag in there, or for that matter, AC/DC.

The other thing that Droogs shows is that originality is both uncommon and overrated. Herd mentality, which is to say the willingness of the horde of proficient but not necessarily creative performers to be influenced by the rare innovators in their midst, is what actually changes the sound of the radio. It’s the arrival of the copyists that definitively establishes a new set of musical characteristics, performance gestures, and lyrical fixtures, as the defining sound of an era. Send in the clones, then, because sometimes you can’t get enough of a good thing.

Disco Rock

One of the things I discovered during my research on Shock and Awe was that the teenybop end of glam 'n' glitter was synonymous with the discotheque - the local disco that every decent-sized town had by the early '70s. There was also a burgeoning economy of mobile deejay systems for hire.  Glam was stomp-along and shout-along music, a domineeringly prominent drum sound being a fixture of records that were built for dancing. 

Reviewers often described singles by The Sweet, Suzi Quatro, Mud, et al, as "disco music" or "disco fodder". Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll, Part 2" became a hit not through radio play but through  the discos, gradually breaking out as a chart entry after sixteen weeks. It took nearly four months of dancefloor spins before it got its first play on the radio! 

Although bands like Slade were big live draws and mightily rocked crowds, for the most part the pop success of glitter rock was won not through gigs but through records.... the tours came after the chart hits. 

The more astute and teenmarket-attuned record labels, like Bell, started to do out-reach to local deejays, sending them promos and in some cases getting feedback about which records were igniting the disco dancefloor. This would influence their decisions on whether to proceed to a proper pressing and a promo push with adverts in the music papers and pluggers pestering radio. 

In short: for several years before disco meant what we think of when we hear the word "disco" - black music - disco in the UK meant white pop-rock aimed at teenyboppers. 

And one of the reasons why some of the big glam 'n 'glitter artists went funk in '74-'75 - Bowie, T. Rex, Glitter -  is that a shift in teen taste was happening in the discos: from stompy big-beat rock to the sway-and-shuffle of Philly soul and Van McCoy / Hues Corporation / George Macrae style soft-funk. 

One type of "disco music" was being displaced by another type of "disco music".

So abjectly was Bolan in need of a hit in 1975 that the single "Dreamy Lady" was credited not to T.Rex but to T.Rex Disco Party.

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

Here are some snippets from my research

June 5^th 1974 Melody Maker piece by Robert Partridge and Chris Charlesworth, looking at the differences between the pop scene in the U.K. and U.S.A. 

“The New Pop in Britain has been broken through the discotheques. Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter, Mud, Slade, The Sweet... all of them make good dance records…. But in the United States there is no equivalent discotheques, no natural outlet for the New Pop.”

They also point to a lack in America of kids-oriented TV shows with pop content of which there were several in Britain. 

September 14^th 1974 Melody Maker feature "Going to A Go-Go", by Geoff Brown and Laurie Henshaw 

Jonathan King and his UK Records label use discos as a test market.  King will take a demo to a club, gets the deejay to put it on, and see how kids react.

Bell Records - which in the States had a history of working with pop soul - used similar methods in the UK. 

After the late Sixties, when “kids had stopped dancing and were to be found slumped in comatose heaps around the floor rather than stomping or clumping or bumping on it”, there was a revival of danceable pop: the kids “emerged from their deep sleep” and “attention returned to the feet. To the beat. Slade  stamped....T. Rex boogied… and every other manifestation of “newpop” put out 45s in 4/4 time ideal for playing loud to the accompaniment of flashing lights and flying limbs.”

Bell drew up a list of every club in the land -- with information about the type of kids, the type of records played and the time in the night at which they were played.

When deejays flipped Glitter's "Rock and Roll, Part 1" over and played the near-instrumental B-side "Rock and Roll, Part 2"...  “the Paunch was launched”

Glitter's producer Mike Leander describes the disco as “a sort of market research.... We... are with a record company [Bell] that has terrific contacts and connections on a person to person basis with deejays in discotheques....  When a record is about to come out we now service around 600 discotheques with copies”

Deejays, because of “their good relationship with the company will give a call back and tell us the reaction, especially if it’s been a good one. You’ll know pretty quickly. Either the place’ll start jumping up or the kids drift off the dance floor and sit down. The deejay is a really important cog in the machine… he’s a very good barometer.”

 "Look at it is this way. There are, say, a thousand discos throughout the country each filled with 2,000 kids. Now they’ll play a popular disco record three times a night and they’ll play it six nights a week. On a national scale that’s amazing promotion.”

 "The kids’ll start going into their local record shop and ask dealers for a copy. The dealers normally only stock the top 30 but in one area they’ll become aware over, say, a two week period that they’re losing a lot of sales, because this one particular record isn’t in stock. So after 40 or 50 kids have been in asking for the record and this happens in several areas the dealers will start ordering a dozen or maybe a few dozen copies and this feedback will reach the factory. They’ll notice they’re receiving 300 to 400 orders a week for a record. From the factory, this will filter back to the company itself.”

But there are some records that kids love to dance to but don't necessarily want to spend 50 p to buy as a single. 

Leander: “I'm personally going through a period of making disco hits but I'm not setting out to be a producer of disco records only. I'm making records to be sold." 

Side panel on Mobile Discos

Roger Squire used to run his own mobile disco but now runs Disco Centre, a company that sells or hires disco units and lighting equipment for mobile deejays

Squire's business is booming - his annual turnover is £250,000 

He reckons that there are 20 thousand to 25 thousand mobile discos in the UK and about 40 thousand deejays in the country. 

Your average Mobile disco is a two man operation -- the deejay who does the patter and has the personality +  a technically minded pal. 

They play at weddings, Masonic dos, football club functions...

Average work rate: from two nights a week to seven nights at week.

Fee ranges from £15 to £18

c.f. what a Radio One deejay can charge for a gig:  £250 

Incidentally, the weekly music paper most plugged into this corner of the music market was Record Mirror. Specifically RM writer James Hamilton and his Disco column.  This started in September 1974 around the time the UK meaning of "disco" decisively shifted from glitterstomp to black American music, but clearly is in continuity with the fact that Record Mirror was the most teenybop-friendly of the four weekly music papers, the one with the youngest and most female-leaning readership, and that had pin-ups of the pop idols, along with a column penned by Marc Bolan. 

That said, Hamilton's column was squarely aimed at jocks -  indeed he was a deejay himself, with deep roots in the soul scene. As time went by, Hamilton got into scrupulously noting the b.p.m. of each track reviewed, and indeed in his capsule reviews even noting the changing b.p.m of different segments of a tune, if the tempo fluctuated. 

Sharpie dressed men - and women

"Slade Alive! was the biggest selling album in Australia since Sgt. Pepper’s. Here Slade were embraced by an existing Aussie subculture called the sharpies, a Down Under mutant of skinheads.  Sharpies had their own uniquely odd style of dancing and a look that merged skin with glitter plus quirky local variations. High-waist denim trousers, platform boots, a torso-hugging cardigan worn a couple of sizes too tight – the sharpie style was a harder, meaner version of the look that the Bay City Rollers would adopt in a year or two. But the hair style was something else: cropped at the front and on top, but mullet-like with rat-tail wisps straggling over the back collar.  In addition to Slade, Sharpies loved other stompy glitter performers like Suzi Quatro but they also rallied to local acts purveying basic bluesy boogie such Lobby Loyde & the Coloured Balls."  - from S+A

Call it the Bogan Boogie...

At 1.12 below you can see sharpies taking over the stage at a Slade concert

More on the sharpies by Bruce Milne at Perfect Sound Forever

"The Sharpie movement was a short-lived youth subculture that seemed to explode out of nowhere, in Melbourne, Australia, in late '72. I can still remember the moment when I first noticed the tougher kids at my school turning up in strange clothes and haircuts. It seemed that within a matter of weeks Sharpies were everywhere.

"My most vivid memory was, as a longhaired 16 year old, going to the Sunbury '74 rock festival in a kaftan... "The festival was not quite the three days of peace, love and music I had been led to believe it would be. It was dust, scorching heat, no toilets to speak of and a lot of drunk, aggressive people.,,, 

"It was the haircuts and clothes that defined Sharpies. Though there were plenty of variations and permutations, the basic look (for boys and girls) was short hair, with longs wisps at the back, flared, high-waisted pants or jeans and a tight-fitted, striped cardigan....

"Largely, Sharpies were just bored, working-class kids from outer suburbs (that had sprung up too quickly, and with too few decent facilities and the needed infrastructure) hanging together and looking for things to do in a rapidly expanding city that was renown for its boring conservatism....

 

:Sharpies were very territorial. They named their gangs after the suburb (Broadmeadows -"The Broady Boys," Jordanville – "The Jordy Boys"), part of the suburb ("The South Blackburn Sharps"), or even the street they came from. Presumably because they were too broke or too young to own cars, they seemed to live half their lives on the trains and train stations around Melbourne. It made for some very scary travelling.

"Bowling alleys and pinball parlors were another place you could always count on running into a contingent.

"Before long, Sharpies could be found in every major city, though Melbourne was always Mecca. You couldn't find the right clothes in other places. The weather probably had a lot to do with it, too. Melbourne is the only major city in the country that isn't warm almost all year long. Walking around any other city in a tight, woollen cardigan would have taken a lot of commitment.

"I've since read that Sharpies evolved out of Sharps – sorta mod dressing kids in the late 60s who didn't go in for the whole cheese-cloth and sandals hippy thing.... 

"The boys' haircuts were short all over with styled (and often bleached) strands ("rat tails") hanging down the back. The girls' haircuts were often similar, though they tended to have their hair a bit longer. Red dye seemed to be very popular, too. Whenever I see the cover of Bowie's Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs or (especially) Pinups, I think of Sharpie girls.

"The most important item of Sharpie clothing was the "Conny," a super tight, ribbed and collared cardigan. They came in a variety of colors, with stripes of a clashing colour, and they usually had a silly little buttoned belt on the back (similar to what you might find on an old waist coat). ...

"Under the connys, a Crestknit short-sleeved shirt, with a small collar and a 3-button neck was go. Or a T-shirt. It was really hard to find T-shirts with cool designs or band logos on them in the early '70's. But almost every shopping mall had a small booth where you could take a t-shirt and have flock (velvety) block letters glued on it. The organised Sharpie gangs always had t-shirts with their gang's name done in these.... 

"Jeans were almost mandatory. For boys, they had to be tight Lees or Levis. If you had the money, or you were really dressing up, ridiculous Staggers jeans were the go. They had a really tight seam up the crotch that split (and highlighted) your balls. They must have been painful to wear. They often had extreme flared legs..../ 

"A lot of guys also wore chequered flared pants that (I'm guessing) were inspired by Noddy Holder's (of Slade) stage wear.

"Girls had more variety but the most popular jeans were really high waisted with wide flared (loon) legs that often covered the tops of their platform shoes. Denim miniskirts were also popular. Worn with colored tights and/or striped socks....

"Big platform boots were standard for boys. They were often two-coloured, in much the same way as a sunburst guitar is. They had a heavy, high heel and an exaggerated rounded toe, or a blunt, squared toe.....

"Girls wore platform shoes that had a solid cork base. As high as possible.

"The height of the shoes meant that Sharpies walked in a sort of Herman Munster-ish way."

"Sharpie guys were the first males I ever saw with earrings, usually just one, small ring. Sharpie girls had heavily plucked eyebrows and exaggerated eye make up in terrible (powder-blue, orange, ugh!) colours."

"The Sharpies loved their music tough, loud and simple. Suzi Quatro, Sweet, Sensational Alex Harvey Band, T-Rex, Gary Glitter and Bowie (as long as it was songs like "Rebel Rebel" or "Jean Genie"). But the most popular overseas group was Slade. They were probably bigger in Australia than anywhere else. "Slade Alive!" was played at every party I went to where there were Sharpies. When Slade toured with Status Quo in early '73, every gig was like a mass meeting of the Sharpie clans.... 

"Looking back, all of the fave Sharpie songs tended to be the simple, call-to-arms anthems – "Can The Can, " "Rebel Rebel, " "Get It On," "Metal Guru," "I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am!)," "Rock'n'Roll Pt. 2," "Jean Genie," "Ballroom Blitz," "Liberate Rock," "All The Young Dudes," "Smokin' In The Boysroom," "Speed King," "Teenage Rampage," "Framed," "Get Down and Get With It," "Mama Weer All Crazee Now," "Cum on Feel the Noize."

"The Sharpies had a particular dance. They'd form small circles and bounce on their legs a bit whilst thumpin' their fists up and down in front of their bodies."

An older post on the Sharpies and Bogan Boogie, with comments from actual Aussies who witnessed the Down Under subculcha in real time.