Dexys as glam

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. 

aka "the secret undeclared thesis"

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

The album's tracklist  

The One That Loves You

It's Alright Kevin (Manhood 2023)

I'm Going To Get Free

Coming Home

The Feminine Divine

My Goddess Is

Goddess Rules

My Submission

Dance With Me

From a Guardian profile of Kev by Tim Adams

"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.”"

Glam from Elsewhere in the Anglophonosphere

Well, if Canadian hauntology wasn't surprising enough, here's a whole book on Canadian glam

Yes it is an "untold story".

When I was doing my wide-trawling research for S+A, I did come across examples of glam 'n' glitter from Commonwealth territories.... but nothing that really asserted itself as essential to the tale. 

Mostly fairly straightforward Bowie-imitations. 

Sometimes well-done -  e.g. New Zealand outfit Space Waltz, fronted by Alastair Riddell

Canada's main claim seems to be Sweeney Todd, whose emulative pitch involved shoving the word "Roxy" into a song title. 

And it worked - it got to Number 1 in Canada. 

Then the band's Nick Gilder redid it as a solo song in an attempt to have a US hit.

But then Sweeney Todd rerecorded it - with a young Bryan Adams singing - also in an attempt to have a US breakthrough.

What a farrago!

(Gilder did hit on his own with songs like "Hot Child in the City")

It was also, around that time, covered by Suzi Quatro (whose image is rather toned down here - where's the black leather bodysuit?)

Ex-Runaway Cherie Currie covered it later too.

I feel like I came across some other Canadian groups that were a bit glammish but perhaps more proggish.

And then in Australia, the nearest to glam I came across was Skyhooks, who were probably more like 10cc pastiche-rock, or Down Under Buggles, or The Tubes meet Sailor. But who could really play, go head to head with ooh The Doobies maybe.

And then there was the Ziggy-damaged Duffo, who tried to jump on the punk wagon 

Lou Reed damaged too

Glam 'n' glitter from the UK was very popular in Australia - particularly the most lumpen kinds, like Slade - and overlapped with the sharpies subculture as discussed here earlier. 

New Zealand also had Split Enz were somewhere in a zone between glam and prog - a little bit Cockney Rebel, a little bit Genesis. And produced early on by Phil Manzenara. 

Via Down Underman Andrew Parker, some examples of AC/DC looking glammish 

And then Bon Scott in pigtails and schoolgirl frock to match 'n' mirror Angus's schoolboy get-up 

This is less glam and more partaking of that tradition of unpretty rockers dressing up in women’s clothing for a laugh, like local football teams did all around England, in order raise money for charity, or Widow Twankey in panto.  Keith Moon did it...  Fleetwood Mac's English Rose ...  Zappa and the Mothers…  

The Stones started it with "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby (Standing in the Shadows) -  the single cover, the video. 

In this lineage, the dragging is to look ridiculous or grotesque, not alluringly ambiguous and between-genders, as with Bowie wearing a frock and femininely draped over the chaise longue for the cover of The Man Who Sold the World. 

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

The Robert Dayton book on Canadian glam is to be published by Feral House.

Who recently published a whole book on glam metal - titled American Hair Metal: Can't Get Enough, it's by Steven Blush (a name I associate with hardcore punk)

I got sent a copy - it's heavily pictorial, full-color glossy!

Another era of men dressing like women and slapping on the make-up - and in this case, very much doing to look gorgeous. To, in fact, attract women in the audience who looked much the same as the men on stage.  

Well, there's exceptions - Twisted Sister played it for grotesquerie 

American Hair Metal is a departure from the old Feral House days of Apocalypse Culture and that kind of thing. 

        

But then I suppose for your edge-walkers, at a certain point only the mainstream at its most gross and vapid becomes truly transgressive,...   authentic Americana... the kind of exoticism / slumming combo that leads brainy people people to get into wrestling or demolition derbies or what-have-you...  

Bit like how the RE:Search people started getting into EZ listening and exotica and the like. 

Jaded palates need new frissons.

It's the ultimate taste-move, in the sense of a 'checkmate' to other edge-chasers, but also "ultimate" as in  there's nothing left, nowhere else to go.... a kind of self-stalemate

Unless, unless, you go round the circle completely and go back to the middlebrow, 'The Beatles are great", type position.

Glam Raiders / Glitter Ravers

Sampling from Kenny's "The Bump"

(ooh and right at the end a tiny bit of Steppenwolf)

Space Raiders almost seem like a belated belch from the back of Paul Oldfield's brain

Or like the runty lovechild of World of Twist and Denim

Space Raiders recorded for Skint and were thus aligned with Big Beat.

 

More glam-raiding -  "Monster Munch" samples the riff from "Teenage Rampage" - and further in, the chorus -  ensuring a flood of royalties into the coffers of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman (possibly also to surviving members of The Sweet, since its their performance). Well, more like a trickle of royalties. 

The opening track on the Space Raiders debut album Don't Be Daft

is  called "Raiders Rock the Nation" and the track's credit says "written by Marc Bolan".

 I can't work out the T.Rex  track it's drawing on, though.

It also features someone called Scraggy Pee.

A nod to Marc also in the title to this tune "Middlesboogie (U Gimme Hot Love)" (as well as a nod to their hometown Middleborough)

Now this grebo trudger from the second album Hot Cakes sounds very glam and so does the title with its echo of "Truck on (Tyke)"

An odd choice for a single, this - sort of ambient big beat

I used the word "grebo" above and it turns out aptly because my favorite act on Skint - well apart from Norman Cook - was Bentley Rhythm Ace and one of them, I discover, was in Pop Will Eat Itself. 

(Big Beat is all about about picnicking on pop history and regurgitating it entertainingly )

Adding to the rockdance provincial lumpen-ness, another person involved in BRA - on a guest level - had once in been in EMF. 

Although Bentley Rhythm Ace derive all their samples from the lowest strata of vinyl (car boot sales etc), they don't appear to have scooped up any scrags and scrap from the glam 'n ' glitter era. 

They did do a track called  "Kenny Beats (Part One)", though. 

This was my favorite BRA - it struck me as sort of Professor Branestawm version of plunderphonics. 

But also like a Spike Milligan version of freakbeat. 

Or perhaps I'm really thinking of The Alberts and "Professor" Bruce Lacey. 

"As a small boy Bruce Lacey was fascinated by junk.... No one in this world can convince him anything is useless in his" 

Talking of the Midlands - and of glam intersections with dance -  I once described Stafford's Altern 8 as the Slade of techno. Not really sonically but more in the overall daftness, image-gimmickry, and mis-spelled song titles. 

Mind you, Slade did say of their back-to-basics / rock-made-for-dance stance:

"The kids don't want to sit down and think about music.... 

"The kids want to rave". 

lost in the schaffel

 

Minimal house was in such a rut by the early 2000s they tried to juice it up with some glammish boogie swing in the form of the "schaffel" fad  pushed by Kompakt.  

Born of Wolfgang Voigt's formative adoration of Marc Bolan - as evidenced much earlier in the 1996 Love Inc. track "Life's A Gas" (which samples you-guessed-it). 

Schaffel - a moment so minor that I clean forgot to mention it in this 2011 archaeology of the term and the rhythm-feel known as boogie  via a Soul Jazz compilation of Southern Rock titled Delta Swamp Rock

As it seems to languish behind a registrants-only wall at the Graun, here is the relevant portion of the piece:

... Southern Rock overlaps with that broad strip of Seventies blues-tinged rock called boogie, which ranges from ZZ Top to Brit combos such as Humble Pie who toiled on the US arena circuit and became vastly more popular in America than in their homeland. Boogie has a technical definition: a musician friend explains that it has to do with 4/4 being subdivided by 12 rather than 16 notes, with syncopations on the third subdivision of each beat. 

But the best way of conveying it is to just point at examples: "Get It On" by T.Rex (Bolan's 1972 T.Rextasy-exploitation flick was titled  Born To Boogie), "Slow Ride" by Foghat, "Whatever You Want" by those dependable boys in blue denim Status Quo (who then got parodied by Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias on "Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie").

"Boogie" originally comes from "boogie-woogie", a piano-oriented style of blues designed for dancing, which emerged in the 1930s and filtered into numerous corners of American popular and roots music.  As adopted in rock, it signifies a black-and-bluesy swing, a funky shuffle feel.  What's odd is that boogie today has a third, completely different meaning: it is used by DJs and collectors to refer to an early Eighties postdisco style whose slick, synthetic funk couldn't be further from the low-down earthiness of Southern rock.

The origins of this other boogie go back to the late Seventies when the word started cropping up in the titles of disco-funk tunes like Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie", Earth Wind and Fire's "Boogie Wonderland", The Jacksons's "Blame It On the Boogie" and Heatwave's "Boogie Nights". The week before Delta Swamp Rock arrived in the mail, I received a boogie CD-mix from a deejay friend, Paul Kennedy, which he'd titled Juicy Nights and crammed with postdisco gems by outfits like Change and BB & Q Band.  A few of the names were familiar to me from the Eighties, when another deejay pal of mine used to buy U.S import 12 inches, an outlandish concept to someone on a student grant.

What defines this  boogie is that it's disco but slower and funkier: 110 to 116 beats-per-minute is the prime range, says Paul, with a strong accent on the second and fourth beats rather than disco's straight stomping four-to-the-floor. It's mostly played by bands, as opposed to being the creation of a producer, but synth-bass, electronic keyboards and drum machines get more prominent the deeper you get into the Eighties. Some of the most famous examples of the style are hits like D-Train's "You're the One For Me", Peech Boys "Don’t Make Me Wait", and Yarborough & People's "Don’t Stop the Music", while pioneers and exemplars include Kleer and Leroy Burgess  (of Black Ivory and Aleem).

Thing is, I don't recall anybody calling this stuff "boogie" back then; they'd just have talked about "club tracks" or  "discofunk".  In deejay Greg Wilson's exhaustive etymological history of the genre,  the word "boogie" crops up as  a vague reference in the occasional club flyer or record shop section, or as a verb equivalent to "get on down" . But boogie only really becomes a genre tag retrospectively, to describe a kind of music no longer made, and even then only by a small number of London-based soul cognoscenti.  It's really only in the last decade that the term has achieved serious currency as a record dealer and collector buzz-word.

Boogie is a prime example of the creative remapping of the musical past that is rife today, with DJs and compilers retroactively inventing genres that had only the most tenuous existence in their original heyday (see "acid folk, "junkshop glam", etc)....

Oh, Geneva

 

Huysmans and Her

Liquid Skyjuice

Vince Noir's twisted sister

Romo's Romo

Tuxedomoonstruck

Drunk on Duchampagne

Nina Hagendaaz

Maldororable

Fischerspoonerisms

More maximalist thriftstore glam faves 

An old favorite 

An interview

Breadown of influences

Marc's fingerprints

 

Videogame Killed the Radio Star

 

An interesting short film about David Bowie's co-creation of the 1999 game Omikron: The Nomad Soul. 

Which the album Hours was the soundtrack to, an attempt to give the game "a heart"

I confess this was new to me... my interest in his activities really flags from the late '80s onwards. 

A couple of things that struck me watching the film

A/ Omikron's co-creator David Cage is described as a games auteur, someone respected more than enjoyed, written about more than played... "Edgy". Now, granted,  I know next to nothing about games but it struck me that from what I could see there, in terms of look it is looks much like every other game... the way the camera moves... the fight scenes ... and as the mini-film concedes, it is an adventure game. 

B/ the film makes great play about how ahead-of-his-time, advanced in his thinking, Bowie was when it came to all things digital... First pop star to have his own online music retail system, long before iTunes and Apple... many other internet-innovative things I've already forgotten since watching this short video...  And you've probably already seen elsewhere the clip they use of the Dame (with terrible hair and awful shades) proselytizing about how the Internet is going to change all our preconceptions about  media - "for better or worse" - and with it human consciousness...  He sounds like a wide-eyed Silicon Valley tech-guru... jacked up on issues of Mondo 2000 and one too many smart drinks. 

Thing is, all this modish, modem-ish stuff he did... none of it had any lasting impact, nobody remembers it...  It's all just trendy piss down the latrine gutter of history. 

If Bowie endures, if he'll be remembered in a hundred years, it'll be for those creaky, analogue things known as words-and-music...  Oh, and a few images: the costumes, the albums covers, iconic photographer's shots, some of the videos or TV appearances... 

It'll be for the human yearnings disguised artfully behind his various masks and costumes.