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.”"
NME cartoon circa 1981 nicely skewers the self-declared aristocracies of club culture
Apropos
Oh the myopic narcissism of the young! Or in this case, the once-young....
Of course there was rather a lot more to the Eighties even within the narrow realm of trendy clothes worn and trendy sounds danced to than what went down at Blitz
A preponderance of right-time-right-places... and we won't even get on to rock's claims on all that
I'm sure it's just a subtitle to sell books and he doesn't actually believe that Blitz set the template for the entire decade.
Would be tragic if he did...
In The R.Elms of the Senseless.... Actually I don't mind his Face-era writing at all - a naturally gifted rhetorician, in full command of those cadences that announce "listen up, I'm about to hip you to the score", carrying you along despite yourself.
The Hard Times piece, while risible in its complete reversal on Blitz-escapism, is a rhythmically exciting read - redeemed (or at least, made effective) by the sense that he really does believe it, in the moment of typing.
Then there was another turn of the cycle - Hard Times (clubbing as political, deejays as militants, torn jeans as recession wear. "Money's Too Tight To Mention") was followed a few years later by Good Times (not quite an overt celebration of casuals and their expensive sweaters but it does say "money is in")
NME cartoon from 1983 skewers the Hard Times concept
The concept of "Style" discussed on the Oxford Road Show by Elms, Annie Clayson and Peter York (who opines that "Money is stylish")
Talking about self-declared aristocracies
“Picture angular glimpses of sharp youth cutting strident shapes through the curling grey of 3 am. Hear the soaring joy of immaculate rhythms, the sublime glow of music for heroes driving straight to the heart of the dance. Follow the stirring vision and rousing sound on the path towards journeys to glory.”
That's Robert hymning Spandau on the back cover of Journeys To Glory
The 1980 NME live review (no worries about conflict of interest in them days! he'd only named the band.... ) that launched it all
"Their strident elitism means that unless your ears are pinned firmly to the 'right' ground your chances of seeing them are at present slim. On the evidence of their latest performance it really is your loss"
NME pisstake Elms's I-wanna-Face-of-me-own venture New Sounds, New Styles
A novelist, yet... Wilde gives him a hard time, boom boom
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
In the Eighties, I used to think of the style bibles as the enemy but I read them avidly - well they had loads of good writing, including a lot of people who once used to write for NME and the other weeklies. The Face had some of the sharpest columnists around - Savage, Burchill, Marek Kohn.... and the super intellectual team of Steve Beard and Jim McClellan, who seemed to oscillate between The Face and iD.
And in truth I would have been happy to write for them and in fact did write for iD, sporadically in the second half of the Eighties, and then after a pause, again a few times in the '90s. (Eventually I did write for The Face too - in the 21st Century). (Oh yes and well before that, in the early 90s, I did some stuff for Arena - which was a sort of men's magazine offshoot of The Face, yet another Nick Logan invention with Neville Brody design).
In the 1980s, the style bibles were useful adversaries, ideologically speaking. They beamed out this fantasy of metropolitan chic and rock-is-dead eclecticism - the idea that there's a place where it's all happening, an in-crowd subworld - they beamed this dream out to hair salon owners and aspiring
fashion designers in the sticks.
We at MM pushed our own quite different fantasies.
The thing that surprised me when I went around to the iD office, which was then quite near Melody Maker, Drury Lane / Holborn, is just how shabby and cramped it was. Melody Maker was incredibly messy but it was quite a large space. And quite bustling. The iD office was empty apart from the editor Dylan Jones and assistant editor Alix Sharkey, whose face I recognised from
fronting the Morley-hyped but spectacularly null funk outfit Stimulin.
And apparently it was much the same with the Face in its first decade or so - a shoestring operation. Not the chic salon-like place that the design and the look of the magazine would suggest.
Both magazines were done on a meagre budget yet managed to concoct this mirage of hip London that they transmitted all across the country and indeed internationally. (Joy bought both religiously).
If you look at an old issue now, especially early on, you can see how Face and iD were cobbled together in a last-minute dash just like the music papers. All kind of no-hope chancers getting featurettes, completely forgotten groups and motormouth types hawking something or other.
I remember Kodwo Eshun - I had no idea then who he was going to become! - came up to interview me (supposedly for the Oxford student mag Cherwell - I think he just wanted to meet). During a lively conversation at an outdoor table in Endell Street, he expressed disappointment that we hadn't gone straight from Monitor to The Face and iD. Like it hurt him to have to pick up a copy of Melody Maker every week, this broadsheet that left ink on your fingers.
But I rather liked the idea of operating from this supposedly clapped-out, obsolesced institution, going against the grain of times. (When the grain of the times was things like Absolute Beginners).
Besides, the format was in alignment with what we were pushing - a resurgent rock underground.
Also the music papers came out 51 times a year, whereas the style mags came out monthly. So there was just vastly more space for our verbosity to frolic in.
I should imagine it was very hard for a freelancer writing for a style magazine to make enough to live on, given you only have 12 paydays a year. And I seem to remember the iD word rate was modest, no better and possibly worse than the frightful word-rate at MM. At MM, if you were prolific and voluble, you could make a nice living as a freelancer, simply because there was so much space to fill.
The 51 issues (Xmas a double, lasted a fortnight) enabled you to construct more of an ongoing world.
That's what all these magazines were about - world creation, world maintenance.
I miss that. Is there any publication today, print or online that does that?
Well, No Bellsdoes. They have meet-ups, events where people read music criticism aloud. It's a social space, not just a disembodied discourse space. The magazine is a locus of vibe.
Talking of style bibles, on a recent trip to New York, we went into a store that was choc-a-block with magazines into cutting edge fashion. Sort of modern day equivalents to iD and Face (both of those still going of course, as print entities - and bigger than ever in a literal sense - each issue is a monstrous paving stone of glossy fashion spreads, adverts, something you could injure yourself with if you picked it up without bending your knees properly, or injure someone else with, if wielded as weapon.)
I was staggered by how many of these style magazines there were - piled up everywhere, not an inch of space in this hipster newsagent I guess. From all over the world, with Steve McQueen-esque ugly-as-beauty images on the front.
Rather like with art books, I wondered what the financial and production logistics are when doing a magazine like this - quality paper stock, full gloss ultra-vivid images. The bottom line.
Do all the photographers and models and make-up and styling people just work for free in the hope of furthering their careers?
Advertising must bring in some money, from fashion and beauty products and trendy shit. But the cost of doing something so luxurious looking and feeling, and in presumably quite small print runs, must be enormous. And then the physical cost of distributing something so bulky. The shops must take a hefty mark-up given the amount of sheer volume each issue takes up.
Also rather like with art books, I wondered who actually buys these things,... They seemed to be retailing anywhere from $20 to $40 bucks each. I have a mental block with paying that for a magazine.
So I guess very rich people, or cutting edge fashion obsessives (same difference?).
And they doubtless function less as something to actually read and more like a coffee table book. Something to flick through desultorily or just have sitting there.
Still mystified by the title of this sports-as-style-microculture magazine
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Paul Oldfield fires a salvo at The Face on the occasion of its 100th isssue.
Wandering around NYC I was amazed how saturated everywhere was with fashion advertising. I mean, yes it's always been there, but it was really kind of total in places like SoHo. Enormous, glossy images. Everything hyper-real and supersaturated. Often on LED screens rather than just posters.
Was also startled by the fashionization of Dr. Martens
I remember in the 1980s having to going to a rather poky, plain shop next to Camden tube station to get DMs. The kind of place that would do shoe repairs and cut keys as well as sell shoes. (Actually I might be imagining that aspect but it certainly had nothing fashion boutiquey about it).
DMs were "cool" through the skin and punk connection, but they still had some kind of residual currency as practical footwear, the kind of thing someone who worked in a factory or on a building site might wear for protection against things falling on the foot.
I expect this chic-ification has been going on for a while and I hadn't noticed.
Our kid asked for a pair of DMs some years ago and only wore them once - I was furious. They cost about $130.
Carlyle had this type figured a century plus earlier
"First, touching Dandies, let us consider, with some scientific strictness, what a Dandy specially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress. The all-importance of Clothes, which a German Professor, of unequalled learning and acumen, writes his enormous Volume to demonstrate, has sprung up in the intellect of the Dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with Cloth, a Poet of Cloth. What Teufelsdröckh would call a 'Divine Idea of Cloth' is born with him; and this, like other such Ideas, will express itself outwardly, or wring his heart asunder with unutterable throes."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
R.Elms makes a cameo in this report on Marxism Today's 1986 conference on the Left's problem with style and hedonism for its own sake
Nothingelseon has just come to the end of a heroic run of archival activity - scanning and making freely available the almost-entire print run of Melody Maker and NME from the late '70s through to the late '90s. (And some other magazines too, but mostly those two UK weekly music papers)
For amid the heights there's misfires, excesses, hapless hypes, empurpled follies.... and a legion of makeweight plodders, the hamburger-helper of the rock discourse.
But it's all part of the tapestry, the highs and the lows and the mids.
Nothingelseon decided to wind it up when he reached the end of 1996...
Probably a shrewd move - things start to decline steeply in the last three years of the '90s, both in terms of the stuff the UK (non-dance) music scene was generating and the quality of the coverage it got. Still odd flickers, still some great writers hanging on in there by their fingernails... but it's a logical cut-off point, a sensible decision.
One of the most fun things in all the approaching-the-finish-line material that Nothingelseon scanned and tweeted in recent months was
I remember Romo fondly as the last blast of the old-style weekly music press - a scene willed into being, semi-fictionalized, born aloft on the rhetorical efflorescence of its champions
The product of hype in its purest sense - that job we music journos do for the sheer sport of it
The original Romanifesto, penned by Simon Price and Taylor Parkes, is a classic of the genre
Wilde at heart!
This post is titled "the second glam renaissance" because
a/ the first glam renaissance would be the New Romantics and the Bowie-Roxy admirers in New Pop
b/ "renaissance" because Price + Parkes were adamant that Romo was not a revival, it was a renaissance of the ideas and impulses of New Romanticism
so this would be a re-renaissance - another phase in the glam (dis)continuum
^^^^^^^^^^^
What surprised me with each subsequent issue after the Romo Special that got redeposited in the commons by Nothingelseon was the extent to which Melody Maker continued to throw its weight behind the movement, all through late '95 and deep into the following year
There was a MM-sponsored tour of the UK with the leading lights
There was a cassette, Fiddling While Romo Burns...
The big groups on the scene got double-page spread interviews
Also what surprised me was the controversy - Melody Maker's letters page Backlash was full of, well, backlash... Romophobia ran rampant... The bitter back-and-forth raged right through into the spring of '96...
Then there came a proper Backlash, in the form of the Yob Rock issue and subsequent acrimony.
I was in America and missed almost all of this, although I do remember on a visit to UK going to a concert at which three of the most touted Romo groops played... I think it was Dexter and Orlando and another... a group who seemed rather Duran Duran circa Rio... Overall I wasn't swayed as much as I'd have liked. (I do remember being quite taken with Minty and picking up one of their singles or EPs...)
But honestly it hardly matters if the music substantiated the hype... the point was to put the ideas out there, shove them into the mix... and make a Grand Gesture against the laggardly ligging laddishness of post-peak but still dominant Britpop
A bit of context:
The things that Romo defined itself against, rebuked, flashed garish against the dowdy flock included aforementioned Britpop (now in its Bluetones / Cast / Shed Seven / Northern Uproar / Sleeper phase).... there was also still quite a bit of grunge around... and there was the faceless brainfood or footfood of drum & bass, post-rock, IDM, Mille Plateaux...
But there were also what you might call Romo Fellow Travelers - groops not included in the Romo issue but who were also embracing sharpness and image: Pulp (in their ascendancy)... Moloko.... the EZ listening initiative (the Ratpack-homaging Combustible Edison + Mike Flowers in the charts, travestying "Wonderwall")... the mod-ist immodest faction within Britpop: Gene, Menswear.... neo-glam (70s rather than 80s) flickers from Denim and Earl Brutus... sharp-dressed man Ian Svenonious's besuited new groop The Makeup.... old glam gods lurching back into action (David Bowie, Boy George, Mark Almond, Human League) and then right there in middle of pop, accidentally aligned with Romo, there was Babylon Zoo... and poking through towards the end of this phase, the androgynous Placebo
So some kind of rejection of post-grunge and post-Britpop ordinariness was being disparately mounted
Below you will find the first inklings and stirrings of Romo; then the Romo issue itself; a few bits and bobs from the aftermath ... and then the Yob Rock countermove.
ROMO - THE BUILD UP
The first mention of Romo I could find is from June 1995 in this Pricey review which makes Sexus single of the week.
ROMO - THE MELODY MAKER SPECIAL ISSUE
x
ROMO RAGES ON (AND ON)
below just a few of the letters pages and special columns etc - none of the many double-page features on Romo bands, singles of the week, lead album reviews etc etc
By June '96, Romo has petered out, pretty much - making for a year of livening up the pages of the paper, since it was June '95 that Price's made Sexus's "Edenites" Single of the Week
But mere moribundity doesn't stop the Romophobes rallying to give the good-looking corpse a good kicking
For the June 29 1996 issue, MM investigated the phenomenon of "Yob Rock", convening a round table that contains a number of people representing ladpop and ladette-pop but also a rather large contingent of Romo musicians and Romo-writers, who deplore the Loaded-ladded hegemony
There's also a sort of historicising thinkpiece about the yob tradition in British rock by Taylor Parkes
Below, the Yob Rock debate - Orlando members and Romo-in-spirit Placebo singer plus Simon Price critique the ladpop, while Ben Stud + some lad + laddette performers retort that this is elitism and snobbery and stereotypery
I think this is actually the UK music press at its best - purely ideas-oriented and ideals-oriented argumentation - flashbacking to similar debates about e.g. Synths in Pop, or the New Mod, that Sounds convened around the turn of the '80s.
It gets pretty fiery.
Ben Stud: "Romo.... was a comprehensive failure" (from the most acrimonious bit of the exchange)
You might draw some discomfiting conclusions from the fact that in this Lads versus Dandies furore, the women present barely get a word in edgeways.... suggesting that Cavaliers versus Roundheads is just a fratricidal battle within the Patriarchy - Sons versus Sons.
In following weeks the surviving Romos out there bite back at the Yob Champions
- but futilely.
And then Oasis have the front cover for two issues in a row - Loch Lomond and Knebworth
Followed, with a week's interval (Ash) by The Stone Roses
(At Knebworth, John Squire joined Oasis on stage)
And then this!
A brief flicker of Romo-adjacent ambiguity
And then Oasis again!
This cover is the bookend to an early cover from April that year
Ladrock's grim hegemony holds fast
(1996 was really a dead-arsed year when I think back to it - outside of dance music and R&B)
A few diehards don't want to turn the page
August 31 1996
And Price still flies the flag now and then
That's September 1996
But it won't be until electroclash circa 2002 that Romo-ish ideas get back in the ascendant (and even then they don't go mainstream)
The mainstreaming would come with the re-re-renaissance - and it would be female-led - Gaga, La Roux, etc
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
