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
"Cocker
had been watching a lot of porn movies in various deluxe hotel suites around the
world, finding himself with a lot of dead time on his hands (and all over his
body) during the longeurs of long tours. Beyond their prurient use value,
Jarvis typically homed in on the pathos: the emptied-out eyes of the veteran
porno performer going through the chafing motions, that same dead look you see
with croupiers in Las Vegas.“I found it
fascinating wondering what happened to these porn stars…. what happens to the
older people when they've been used up and had everything done to them? … I
wondered about the people and whether there's any way back into normal life for
them.”You can why Cocker might have
felt a twinge of solidarity: isn’t the pop singer a kind of sex worker, a
strip-tease artist, an exhibitionist acting out a pantomime of erotic
excitement and yearning? No wonder that in olden times, entertainment of any
kind was disreputable, the distinction between the actor and the prostitute
moot at best."
- from the director's cut of my essay for I'm With Pulp, Are You?
You are hardcore, you make me hard
You name the drama and I'll play the part
It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream
I like your get-up, if you know what I mean
I want it bad
I want it now
Oh, can't you see I'm ready now?
I've seen all the pictures, I've studied them forever
I want to make a movie, so let's star in it together
Don't make a move till I say "action"
Oh, here comes the hardcore life
Put your money where your mouth is tonight
Leave your make-up on and I'll leave on the light
Come over here, babe, and talk in the mic
Oh yeah, I hear you now
It's gonna be one hell of a night
You can't be a spectator, oh no
You got to take these dreams and make them whole
Oh, this is hardcore
There is no way back for you
Oh, this is hardcore
This is me on top of you
And I can't believe it took me this long
That it took me this long
This is the eye of the storm
It's what men in stained raincoats pay for
But in here it is pure, yeah
This is the end of the line
I've seen the storyline played out so many times before
Oh, that goes in there
Then that goes in there
Then that goes in there
Then that goes in there
And then it's over
Oh, what a hell of a show
But what I want to know
What exactly do you do for an encore?
'Cause this is hardcore
The video was filmed at Pinewood Studios, with scenes redolent of scenes shot there for Peeping Tom.
"The inspiration for this video was a book entitled Still Life, edited by Diane Keaton and Marvin Heiferman (Calloway, New York, 1983). This beautiful book contains photographs of stills and publicity shots of films produced in Hollywood between 1940 and 1969. All possess a fantastic, super-real quality, reproduced very accurately in the Pulp video. Many of the scenes in the video reproduced specific stills, substituting members of Pulp for actors." - Pulpwiki
Interview with Cocker, Peter Saville and John Currin on the artwork of the This Is Hardcore album
Piece on the book Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp
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.
But in some ways the archetypal glam photograph would be this other one from the back of Raw Power - although he's less glammed up looking, it's the look - the looking into the mirror - that is pure glam.
It's part of a genre of mirror based glam / post-glam / neo-glam photography.
And mirror-themed songs ("Mirror Freak", "The Hall of Mirrors").
An alternative shot from the same session
As an extension to the genre - its antithetical inversion - Andrew Parker points to the iconic cover of Black Flag's Damaged
It's the anti-glam mirror. Where glam is about high esteem, inflated ego, narcissism, then this is low self esteem, fractured ego, self-hatred.
It's also where Iggy-of-Dirt-and-No-Fun collides with Iggy-as-briefly-Bowie-creature
Andrew also points to this cover to Sabotage by Black Sabbath (an influence on Black Flag)
What an odd image - backs to the mirror fits their unglam despondent 'heavy' vision, but if they looked in the mirror they might also see how ghastly their clothes are.
Also in the genre - the inner sleeve of Scritti Politti's Cupid and Psyche 85
My take on this is that the image dramatises the internal hierarchy of "the band" which is that Gamson and Maher are looking at Green's image in the mirror, Green is looking at his own image.
Can't remember if I used this in previous mirror-theme posts - but a very knowing bit of fun from Adam Ant here as image-obsessed Dick Turpin in "Stand and Deliver"
Stand and deliver / Your money or your life
Try and use a mirror /No bullet or a knife
We're the dandy highwaymen / So tired of excuses
Of deep meaning philosophies / Where only showbiz loses
Oh and I never noticed the back sleeve of the single before
Looking glass look-alikes
As Steve Pafford reveals in this blogpost, Adam Ant was the inspiration for "Mirror Man" by The Human League. Phil Oakey was genuinely concerned that Adam was getting lost in his image.
“We’ve kept this quiet for years but it’s actually about Adam Ant" he told Tracks in 1989, when the League and the insect warrior shared a manager, Miles Copeand (Sting, The Police). “It’s not anti Adam Ant and we didn’t want to offend him, but he was having to respond to his public more than was good for him.”
This puts the song (which I never much cared for - too clumpily Motown-redux) in the tradition of Cockney Rebel's "Mirror Freak", which Steve Harley wrote about his friend Marc Bolan but also about all wannabe stars.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A suggestion from Asif - by an offshoot of the very glammy-Goth Bauhaus.
"Oddity" might be the first time I registered the existence of the bass as an instrument - for those strange detonations
(Although there was the B-line in "Summertime Blues")
Although I think he didn't actually play on the record, just mimed for TOTP
But he's in the band for Marc's last TV series.
Some of his best work was Mr Essex and Jeff Wayne
He didn't just play on glam records though, Herb was in demand session bassman all over the first-half-70s shop.
Check out this amazing performance
Less salubriously, he wrote this monstrosity with Kenny Pickett
There is also this questionable song, as later interpolated by the Happy Mondays (and sung by Alan Partridge in one of his series, in an idle, mooching around sort of way).
I mean, they meant well, I'm sure.
At any rate, Herbie didn't write it, so that's okay.
Herbie was in a heavy rock band called Rumpelstiltskin.
And a blues-jazz collective alongside Alexis Korner, called Collective Consciousness Society - aka CCS.
The latter's version of "Whole Lotta Love" was the Top of the Pops intro theme when I was a kid.
And post-glam, as Phil points out in the comments, he was a member of Sky - a classical rock supergroop also including Francis Monkman ex-Curved Air and the dude who did the triffic snazzy OST to The Long Good Friday.
Talking about classical meets rock - Herbie played on Variations, the Andrew Lloyd-Weber and Julian Lloyd-Weber Paganini-rocked-up album. One of which ended up as this famous TV intro theme. I don't know if Herbie played on this track though as there was another bassist involved on the record.
Herbie Flowers also put out a solo album, Plant Life.
And another one called Potty.
Herbie Flowers - the name is quite close the gangster boss in Performance, Harry Flowers - was also adept at playing the tuba. He did that as a bandsman in the RAF, during which he time he also picked up double bass.
Before he got involved in rock, he had been in trad jazz bands, then a more modern jazz band, and then switched to electric bass and started becoming an in-demand session man.
