RIP Tim Curry

A glam icon obviously for his Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a movie much darker and more interesting than I had first imagined and great fun to write about in S+A. (Interviewed Richard O'Brien who said the character was his own secret self.) 

But I also love Tim Curry's turn as Stevie Streeter in the TV music biz satire Rock Follies (something else I managed to squeeze into S+A). 

In particular these scenes where Streeter talks about his stage concept for the song "Street Signs" - a backdrop of urban decay: "filthy, violent, and honest" - and then rehearses the song with garbage underfoot and a chorus of sex workers. 

It's interesting for the way it shows the theatricality that inevitably lurks within any attempt to bring "reality" onto a stage.

But I wonder who it's actually meant to be a parody of? 

Springsteen? 

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band with their "Vambo Rules" graffiti aerosoled onto a backdrop of a fake brickwork like a tenement wall? 

The Heavy Metal Kids? 

Also rock-adjacent - and punk-adjacent - is Curry's memorable role in Times Square as a late-night  radio deejay who helps turn the teen punk she-rebel duo into folk-heroes 

Here's what I wrote about it in this Pitchfork piece on the Best and Worst Punk Movies.

Producer Robert Stigwood thought he’d do for New Wave what his Saturday Night Fever did for disco—which is why the Times Square soundtrack was a double album, crammed with tunes by the likes of XTC and the Ramones. The John Travolta counterpart here is Robin Johnson as Nicky Marotta, a raspy-voiced runaway who takes sheltered posh girl Pamela Pearl (13-year-old Trini Alvarado) for a walk on the wild side. The backdrop is sleaze-soaked midtown Manhattan, those same streets that Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle imagined a real rain sweeping clean. Pamela’s urban developer dad plans to do exactly that. But street life, incarnated in Nicky, fights back, stealing his child and revealing that Real Life exists “outside of society,” as Patti Smith sang it.

A busker, Nicky is herself a punk poet in the Patti / Jim Carroll mode. The story of the rebel duo, who call themselves the Sleez Sisters, enchants late-night radio DJ Johnny LaGuardia (Tim Curry). When Pamela sends a letter denying that she’s been kidnapped but rather “Nicky-napped, happy-napped,” the DJ reads it out over the air and turns them into Bonnie and Clyde-style outlaws at war with “banality… boredom… television… doing it for all us stay-at-homes.” Now a band with songs like “Damn Dog” and “Your Daughter Is One,” the duo inspire a copy-cat movement of girls wearing bandit-style eye makeup. Then they become urban guerrillas throwing TV sets off the top of buildings. Although increasingly implausible, Times Square works as a beguiling modern-day fairytale. A bomb at the time, it became a touchstone for latterday punks like Kathleen Hanna and Manic Street Preachers.

 Complete with an unconvincing American accent, Curry appeared in the Armchair Theatre play Vérité,  not as a rocker but as an underground film maker called Mik. It was written by Howard Schuman, who wrote Rock Follies, and  aired on 23rd October, 1973.  

BBC Archive report on the making of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

He had a role in the curious little film The Shout - which has scenes of John Hurt doing musique concrete - but I can't remember anything about Curry's contribution.

Hair today, gone tomorrow... 

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.