glam / new wave - the return

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At the exact intersection of prog, glam, and New Wave-to-be, you find: Split Enz

Grotesque and risible! 

Except there is one brief moment, from about 2.20 onwards, where their desire to be Roxy very nearly happens - the sax gets gaseous and the faint whiff of "2HB" and "Amazona" reaches our nostrils - but then it dissipates almost instantly, the sax shifts into a thin-bodied jocosity, like The Piranhas or a dozen other pubby New Wavers

("Desire to be Roxy" - just noticed that "Sweet Dreams" is from 1976's Second Thoughts, produced by no less than  Phil Manzanera  - I wonder how much he had to do with the eruptive-bit-in-"Amazona" quality to that brief exciting moment in the song?)

By the third album, Dizrythmia, released August 1977, Split Enz are fully, archetypally New Wave, but the late-glam dress-up-box thing lingers 

Those jackets are nearly cool though, almost like a hand-painted suit that Tristan Tzara might have worn at the Cabaret Voltaire

 

A December 1976 review of Split Enz live, from NME. 

"My favorite bit was Noel Crombie's spoons solo" !

Fully transitioned to Noo Wave (so in another sense, rewinding the clock to the pre-psych mid-Sixties - suits, neat hair). But still a bit garish and over-glossed.

Now there were a bunch of groups at this exact midpoint of the '70s who had this "let's get dressed up" late glam thing going on, but in a fatally "let's not take ourselves seriously" way. Generally, they looked a right mess, as if a fancy dress party in its last plastered throes had somehow wandered onto a stage.

Deaf School  - just like the Enz, hovering on the cusp between Old Wave and New Wave, with aspects of pastiche and winking irony that are sorta kinda pomo.

Also caught between late glam and New Wave, hovering on the cusp of bigness for a single year (1976), Doctors of Madness

 

As with Deaf School, not much prog in the equation here - unless we count the violin. 

Aussie neighbours to Split Enz, Skyhooks were coming from the same  rock-as-theatre place - this video pushes the "it's showtime"  vibe with its dressing room with lights all round the mirror frame mise-en-scene

And then like Split Enz, they strip down a bit musically and sartorially in hopes of hitching a ride on New Wave

Another Aussie - Duffo - a Bowie damaged feller  but here hitching a ride on punk (yet also looking like a laughing - or laughable - gnome).

   

Andrew Parker directs my attention to another Aussie bunch - The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. Strangely, just seeing their name, I could already see-hear them - and they look and sound almost exactly as I imagined!

Bang on the nail in terms of what I am talking about - and again, under the daft campy surface, there is serious musical chops on display. As with some other groups in this list, the music is not so much proggy as more in line with American roots-eclectic sophisto-rock, that area that includes The Band, Little Feat, Dr John, Ry Cooder, The Wild Tchoupitoulas...   If not for the silly clothes, voices and lyrics, you could imagine them joining the Last Waltz line-up.

 Another late glam troupe were Sailor, here brazenly imitating Roxy circa "Virginia Plain" and getting a couple of chart places higher (#2 to Roxy's #4) 

The voice and the piano bit  on "Glass of Champagne" are trademark infringement level infractions

And then just a little later in the decade  Big In Japan  - influenced by Deaf School, also heavily Bowie-damaged in the case of Jayne Casey and Holly Johnson, this troupe split into a number of postpunk / New Wave / careers of greater eminence

Also check out this embedding-disabled performance on What's On.

And then - later, mid-80s, quite out of synch with pop temporality, but still "at the precise nexus point" - the Cardiacs

Some would argue there's psychedelia in there as well as prog and New Wave.

Kooky but disturbed

This '82 Stonehenge free festival is probably similar to what greeted my aghast ears a few years later when me and my companions wandered unawares onto Port Meadow where a free festival was taking place, resulting in my first-time sighting-hearing of the Cardiacs. Although I didn't know the name of the group -  indeed it was years later that I realised "that was them!!". Hideous flashback ensued.  This video is really just audio, so only one dimension of the frightmare is captured - the herky-jerky psycho-clown sound.  

Every member looks like the stolid military-history obsessed one in Peep Show. Well, except for the girl with the sax.

Toy World  (title of debut tape) is a good trope for the vibe - clockwork non-sense. 

Back to the mid-70s historical cusp, I remember Punishment of Luxury well from when I first  started listening to late-night Radio 1: the deejays were enamored of the B-side to "Puppet Life", a herky-jerky tune called "Jellyfish".  Punilux included fringe theatre people and were obviously proggers and/or Bowie-damaged mime artist types. 

As the presenter on this TV show (clad appropriately in an 'ironic, this is showbiz' glittery jacket) points out, Puniluxer Brian Bond was taught mime by Lindsay Kemp - just like David Bowie and Kate Bush were. 

Reformed but still deformed

Steevee in comments suggests Toronto New Wavers The Dishes

Conceivably Ze Whiz Kidz (Tomata du Plenty - later of The Tupperwares and then the Screamers), a Seattle "comedy glam troupe", belong here -  albeit progless 

Max Webster

Singer went solo with a New Wave remodelling

How could I forget? Be-Bop Deluxe - they go from glam-tinged prog to New Wave-adjusted glamprop across several years in the exact midsection of the 1970s. Well I say "prog" but it's actually more like pomp rock - a more refined Queen without the front-man effrontery. 

Here it's 1978 and Nelson & Co are trying manfully to adjust the New Wave mandated tightness ("New Precision" indeed) but still keep the guitar heroics. 

Rebranded as Red Noise, with quasi-militaristic outfits and herky-jerky riffage, melodies that shriek and jut angularly,  nasty Noo Wave sax - an agile style jumper, that Bill. Soon he'd be onto synthpop. 

I guess Sensational Alex  Harvey Band count as being on the nexus point of prog, glam, and New Wave - the musicians had been Tear Gas, a Zappa-phile prog outfit.... then they happily went theatrical with Harvey as their charismatic frontman, but he  had a menace - and street delinquent preoccupations - that anticipated punk (even if the music itself never did)

 

program from May 1976 Manchester Free Trade Hall - note reference to "punk" in the Cast List

Can't forget SAHB's buddies The Tubes

A common denominator with a lot of these groups is that the band could really play - under the fancy dress and stage stunts, and regardless of the punkoid  'sick humor' / 'bad taste' themes, there is a suspicious (and distressing) level of chops on display

Oingo Boingo were originally a highly theatrical proggish ensemble called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo

Then they become quite literally the worst group that has ever existed. The internal struggle between proggoid desires and New Wave / commercial-aspiring constraints is quite hideous to hear-see.

Amazed to see a lead review of a Danny Elfman project in the Wire in the last year or so.

No glam element with this next one, as far as I'm aware - but certainly existing at some kind of nexus between prog and New Wave: Poli Styrene Jass Band

(although maybe there were theatrics in the live performances = apparently they had some narrative set pieces on stage, and involved actors as well as musicians later on).  - 

Unusually the prog element here is clearly Canterbury Sound - Kevin Ayers, Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North, Caravan, Egg ... with possibly some Euro-prog / late-psych (Supersister)

Poli Styrene Jass Band (note the odd anticipation of Poly Styrene) eventually became The Styrenes, but via another alter-ego, Styrene Money

(via Cardrossmaniac2)

I feel there are more "nexus point" examples of this syndrome -  hyper-theatrical / overdressed late-glam / late-prog outfits who either have proto-New Wave aspects or manage to transition fairly seamlessly.  (Toyah - an actress, so has a head start... Sadista Mika Band... The Kursaal Flyers).

There are also New Pop era examples - Howard Jones, fairly clearly (the mime artist dude in chains whose only job in the group is visual is the giveaway). Also Nik Kershaw -  not so much image-wise as musically.  

The general tendency to visual excess in promo videos is where a lot of these tendencies seep back.

 

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.