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Home , 48 Crash, All the Young Dudes, Alvin Stardust, Amanda Lear, Andy Mackay, Antony Price

Glam Rock By Barney Hoskyns

There's a new sensation A fabulous creation, A danceable solution To teenage revolution

Roxy Music, 1973

1: : Dawn of the Teenage Rampage

Glamour – a word first used in the 18th Century as a Scottish term connoting "magic" or "enchantment" – has always been a part of . With his mascara and gold , pure glam. So was , with his pencil and towering . of the mid-to- late Sixties, swathed in scarves and furs, were unquestionably glam; the group even dressed in to push their 1966 single "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" But it wasn't until 1971 that "glam" as a term became the buzzword for a new teenage subculture that was reacting to the messianic, we-can-change-the-world rhetoric of late Sixties rock. When T. Rex's sprinkled glitter under his eyes for a TV taping of the group’s "Hot Love," it signaled a revolt into provocative style, an implicit rejection of the music to which stoned older siblings had swayed during the previous decade. "My brother’s back at home with his Beatles and his Stones," Mott 's Ian Hunter drawled on the anthemic "All the Young Dudes," "we never got it off on that revolution stuff..." As such, glam was a manifestation of pop's cyclical nature, its hedonism and surface show-business fizz offering a pointed contrast to the sometimes po-faced earnestness of the Woodstock era. rejected the Sixties longhair-and-denim that – fetishizing 's technical prowess as a player – anointed the Cream guitarist as "God." While it advanced beyond the infantile melodies of bubblegum, glam nevertheless rejected denim-wearing country rockers, acoustic singer-, and heavy or progressive-rock bands that believed themselves too important to mere singles. Like bubblegum, indeed, it was a reminder that pop was originally meant to be young and fun. "What caused glam rock?" says the infamous LA producer- manager . "Simple: sat on a stool and begat all kinds of men and women sitting on stools wearing overalls and flower-print dresses about Laurel Canyon. It was horrifying and it wasn't , and that's why glam rock entered the picture." Broadly, Glam rock was a mode of catchy electric pop played by young men wearing makeup and attired in glittery effeminate costume, appealing to adolescents and children who waited excitedly each week to see their idols on Britain's show – especially if their parents had invested in the new color TV sets that were becoming must-have accessories in all modern homes. Glam encompassed everything from the crassest Top 40 novelty-pop (Mud) at one extreme to the canniest () at the other. Its fancy-dress dandyism allowed a generation of adolescents not just to experiment with but to escape the socio-economic reality of the early-to-mid Seventies – a period characterized in Britain by inflation, unemployment, unrest in Northern Ireland, oil shortages and petrol panics, miners' strikes and unscheduled power cuts, and (most notoriously) the three-day working week. Writes Andy Beckett in When the Lights Went Out, his 2009 history of Seventies Britain, "the energy and color of British during the Sixties and early Seventies – the peacock rock stars, the outrageous boutiques – could not disguise the fact that much of everyday life took place on streets of worn-out brown and grey." Elected in 1970, Edward Heath's Conservative government had tried to grow the British economy by cutting interest rates, deregulating the banks, increasing public spending, and cutting taxes. For a period it worked, with gross national product rising by 3.5% in 1972 and then 5.4% in 1973. Yet in a foretaste of future recessions, the boom was too dependent on speculation to endure for long. Shortages of skilled labor and underinvestment in training and management meant that increased demand for goods and services could not be met. The result was higher inflation and a worsening of Britain's trade balance, with the pound falling drastically against other currencies. This was compounded by the oil crisis, brought about by the Yom Kippur war of late 1973, when Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal and invaded the Israeli- occupied Sinai Peninsula. By January 1974, oil cost over $11, five times what it had cost two years before. Offering a respite from such gloom and austerity, glam rock had a far-reaching sociological impact that's still felt in to this day. "I think glam has been undervalued critically because it didn't appear to take itself too seriously," says pop historian Jon Savage, author of Teenage: The Creation of Culture (2007). "It had that horror of pomposity. But it wasn't like some little ghetto – it was full of vigor and full of life, and it bossed English pop music for two or three years." Glam also impacted on American pop. "The Seventies seem to have been celebrated more for their silliness and hedonism than for their complexity and progressiveness," says , director of the 1998 glam-rock film . "For Americans, glam was a very exciting period, putting out images to kids that blurred sexual orientation." Glam rock took the more flamboyant aspects of culture (kaftans, bangles, floppy hats, crushed-velvet flares, Pre- Raphaelite ) and gave them a trashy, futuristic look. "Glam really segued out of the hippie thing," says English photographer , whose portraits of David Bowie, , , and Queen stand as iconic images of the glam era. "It started with all those old glammy clothes people would wear." The grooviest threads of all were found at Mr. Freedom on Chelsea's King's Road, or at Biba, which in 1971 took over Kensington's old Derry & Tom's department store – complete with a roof garden and the 500-seater Rainbow Room. Marc Bolan's decision to abandon cheesecloth and loon pants for tight satin jackets and women' shoes – many acquired at John Lloyd's shop Alkasura on the King's Road – was made in tandem with the decision to retool his late Sixties cosmic-folk sound for a younger audience. "There was a kind of gap in the market," recalled Nina Myskow, who edited the teen female bible Jackie. "We hadn't got our own Osmonds or Jackson Five, and yet the whole Beatles era was obviously over. Everyone was just waiting for something like T. Rex to happen." Ex-Beatle , who would direct Bolan in the 1972 film Born to , claimed he was "getting pretty bored with what was going on at the time," asserting that the T. Rex frontman was "the first one, whatever anybody says, to get the kids back out of their seats, jumping and screaming about." Just as crucial to glam was the influence on David Bowie of 's workspace , a hub of pop-art decadence in . Two years after the one-off novelty that was his 1969 hit "," Bowie flew across the Atlantic and met not only Warhol but two of his musical heroes, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. Importing the outrageous looks and stances of Warhol's polysexual underworld to the UK and combining them with his own training in theatre and mime, Bowie created a fascinating alter ego called Ziggy Stardust. He would later produce by both Reed (Transformer) and Iggy and (). By 1973 there were two main streams of glam rock. The first, represented by Bowie, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, and the nascent , was smart and arty, subverting orthodox ideas of entertainment and show business. The second, represented by Bolan, , Sweet, , and , was more shamelessly , appealing directly to the young teenagers who lived for the BBC's weekly half-hour show Top of the Pops. Somewhere between the two was , whose schlock- horror stage antics were widely dismissed by the glam cognoscenti but whose stage name – assumed in the late Sixties – was an interesting harbinger of glam's "gender-bending." Bowie and Roxy Music's visibly winced when they were lumped in with Sweet and Gary Glitter. "It actually became a sense of embarrassment," recalled Bowie. "I mean, in my feather boas and dresses, I certainly didn't want to be associated with the likes of Gary Glitter, who was obviously a charlatan." For Bowie and Ferry, glam rock was characterized by the kind of self- conscious intentionality that paved the way for such Eighties icons as and . These glam artists played with concepts like stardom and consumerism in precisely the way Pop Artists had done in the Fifties and Sixties. By contrast, for the more opportunistic likes of (producer of Gary Glitter) and and (producers of Sweet and Suzi Quatro), glam was supremely free of intellectual pretension. "We were very conscious of giving pop back to the kids, and giving them something to smile about and bop to and generally get off on," says Chinn. "Maybe this was part of the not having to interpret, of just having fun. There was no hidden agenda: pop should be fun and this is what we want you to have." To teenagers of the time, Ziggy Stardust and Gary Glitter were all part of the same heady excitement. Seeing Sweet sing "Blockbuster" on Top of the Pops was no less exciting than seeing Bowie sing "" on the same show. (Indeed, both shared a garage-rock borrowed from ' "I'm a Man."). "It was really interesting to see the whole Ziggy thing happening," says Lou Reed, whose Velvet Underground was a key Sixties influence on both Bowie and Roxy Music. "In some ways I took it for granted because of the Warhol . But on the other hand, this was not part of the Warhol scene, this was . So that's what was interesting about it: all these other people were running around like that. And I thought it was such fun. What people miss about it is the teenage rebellion and the fun, fun, fun." While glam rock never truly took root in the heartland of America, there were pockets of appreciation for the music – known more commonly in the US as "glitter rock" – across the country. "[It] was mostly a sham, but what a glorious one," wrote Ken Barnes approvingly in Bomp magazine. "Flashy costumes, strident , monolithic beats – glitter was exciting, records tailor-made for disinherited kids. Its fashions revolted against an overall denim dullness, while musically it was a vital reaction (lifesaving, it seemed at the time) against a deadly boring, prematurely matured music scene." Yet glitter still had to contend with an entrenched American suspicion of anything that blurred the differences between men and women. Even after the Stonewall riots of 1969, when men responded with to a heavy-handed police clampdown on a gay bar in Greenwich Village – and directly inspired the formation of the Gay Liberation Front – middle America remained generally homophobic, deeply uneasy about anything that hinted at effeminacy and . As all its stars knew, self-destruction was built into glam rock's bright arc. With Marc Bolan fading and David Bowie reinventing himself as the "plastic soul man" of 1975's , the acts who picked up glam's slack – Queen, Kiss, and others – were shrewder about the business of survival, their gazes fixed on far bigger prizes. And the kids who'd swooned to T. Rex grew up and moved into early adulthood. In 1977, just a week after taping an episode of his children's TV show Marc – an episode with David Bowie guesting, no less – Marc Bolan was killed when his purple Mini careered into a tree in southwest London. But the effects of glam's teenage rampage would be felt for years to come. "I always thought the glam part was the wrong idea to focus on," says of Roxy Music. "For it wasn't about glamour so much as the idea of changing identity or thinking up your own identity. Whether it was glamorous or not was actually accidental." Twenty years after glam rock had withered on the pop vine, Eno watched the outrageous transvestite performing at London's annual Alternative Miss World show. "It made me genuinely glad to be English," he wrote; "to see that much bizarreness and wit and kinkiness and inter-gender flirting."

2: A Mixed-Up, Mumbled-Up, Shook-Up World: of Glam in Dandyism

The true roots of glam rock reach back several centuries, to the foppish dandyism of the English Restoration – or at least to Beau Brummell and his flamboyantly dressed friends in the Regency period of the 18th Century. Dandyism as a way of life, running counter to everything deemed "natural" and historically linked to homosexuality through figures such as , was destined to feed into 20th Century culture. "The importance of homosexuality to pop culture is… quite undeniable," wrote J. Marks-Highwater, an early biographer of the androgynous . "Camp, put-ons, and a special kind of grotesque self- mockery are indispensable elements of pop's basic sensibility." At the height of Sixties , even staunchly heterosexual rock stars like and Eric Clapton dolled themselves up in ruffled and crushed-velvet jackets. "Coming to London was pure culture shock," says the Brooklyn- born , producer of T. Rex and David Bowie. "I was actually seeing people walking around the streets of London looking like Austin Powers." ' Ray Davies took the temperature of in "Lola," his pioneering portrait of a transvestite. "Girls will be boys and boys will be girls," Davies sang; "It's a mixed-up, mumbled-up, shook-up world…" By the end of the Sixties, however, pop's sartorial flamboyance was cooling. 1969 and 1970 saw bands retreating from the political and narcotic turmoil, "getting it together in the country." Denim, facial , and hippie-ish dressing-down were suddenly everywhere. "The makeup and all that wasn't a brand- new idea," Bowie's guitarist said of glam. "But it had gone. Everybody was into looking authentic." With the start of the new decade, the tide turned yet again. In Britain, the most pointed reaction to hippie dress codes was that of , who shaved their hair and danced to soul and Jamaican "bluebeat" music. Skinheads were against everything wishy-washy and middle-class, symptomatic of a desire for teenage change in an ossifying world. Like the skins, emerging pop singers like Marc Bolan and David Bowie were attuned to the post-hippie mood of teen Britain. Both men had been mods and had played in electric bands in the mid-Sixties; both had undergone flower-power metamorphoses and come out the other side ready to blaze trails in the Seventies. When Bolan terminated his fey acoustic duo Tyrannosaurus Rex and assembled the electric four-piece T. Rex, it was because he wanted to be a star. Though it cost him his hippie fan base, 1970's snappy "Ride a White Swan" made his wish come true. As significant as T. Rex's newly commercial sound was Bolan's revamped look, put together with the help of publicist Chelita Secunda. "It was her idea to take Marc around town and hit the women's shops," says Tony Visconti. The Bolan look – embroidered satin jackets and feather boas – was completed the night Secunda sprinkled glitter under his eyes before he went on Top of the Pops to perform "Hot Love." At the 's next gig, with the song at No. 1, Bolan was greeted by the sight of hundreds of teenage girls wearing glitter. T Rexstacy was born. "To be honest, we didn't go out to target 15-year-olds," says David Enthoven, Bolan's then manager. "There wasn't any grand plan to start glam rock. All Marc really did was give pop some attitude. He made it glamorous and he made it different." In January 1972, T. Rex reached No. 10 in America with the mincing boogie of "Bang a Gong (Get It On)," recorded in with former Turtles Flo and Eddie on shrieking backing vocals. A stream of classic pop singles – "Jeepster," "," "" – followed in rapid succession. What Bolan stumbled onto almost by accident, David Bowie planned with more forethought, not to mention the help of Tony De Fries' tireless MainMan management company. Having long flirted with androgyny and gender-bending – he'd worn a dress on the cover of 1970's The Man Who Sold the World (though tellingly in the US the was replaced by a cartoon of a man in a cowboy hat) – Bowie and his wife Angie decided to take transgression to the limit after seeing Andy Warhol's Pork at London's Round House in August 1971. "He was coming from the same base as we were," said Pork actor Tony Zanetta. "Which is basically an inability to be oneself and constructing a new personality in which one could act out one's fantasies and desires." That new personality was Ziggy Stardust, first unleashed on teenage Britain in January 1972 with the catchy hit "Starman," and then with the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and . As with Bolan, there was a major change in both the sound and image Bowie projected, the creation of a persona that was far more freakish and futuristic. With the aid of engineer , Bowie and Mick Ronson fashioned the perfect Seventies pop-rock sound: plastic and -heavy, with compressed drums. Image-wise, Bowie/Ziggy resembled a kind of space invader, with carrot-colored hair and -tight costumes that exaggerated his skeletal physique. In addition, he gleefully fanned the flames of controversy by announcing to the music press that he was "gay and always had been." (He wasn't, but it had the desired effect.) "I found it easier to function through [Ziggy]," Bowie said later. "I felt like it was going to be easier living through an alternative self." For the average British teenager, the shock of seeing David Bowie on television was even greater than that of seeing Bolan. Where Bolan was a cute pixie of a performer, Bowie-as-Ziggy was disturbing, even mildly threatening. "The reason I got into rock and roll is because I saw David Bowie on Top Of The Pops with a bright blue acoustic guitar playing 'Starman,'" recalled Alan McGee, who signed Oasis to his Creation label in the Nineties. "And Mick Ronson on 10-inch platforms, bending over, giving the guitar fellatio. I was gobsmacked." "Here's a genuine married man," protested Fifties idol of Bowie, "dressing up as a woman. The impact is not on people like myself or those in my age group but on the youngsters who will be tomorrow's people. What will those ten- and eleven- year-olds think of someone who's a man dressing up as a woman at a pop show? He upsets me as a man." Ziggy Stardust became the spearhead of the new glam-rock phenomenon that swept Britain in 1972-3. After of being overshadowed by the stars of the previous decade, a new teen generation finally had its own icons to worship and imitate. As a Bowie or Girl, you were carving out your own made-to- shock identity in council-block, soccer-hooligan Britain. "There was a level at which being into glam was a big two-fingers to all the twats who used to beat me up," says writer Dave Rimmer, whose Tyneside classmates included future Pet Shop Boy . "My friends and I all took great delight in dyeing our hair orange and wearing make-up. We'd parade around making the most of what naive sexual ambiguity we could muster. There was a certain power in it – the power of belonging, but also the power of freaking people out." If mainstream British society had always been freaked out by youth cults – Teddy Boys, mods, , skinheads – never had the component of sexual ambiguity been so pronounced in a pop trend. If you actually were gay, like Tennant, you could multiply that newfound "power" by ten. "I'll never forget Bowie and Ronson with their arms round each other on Top of the Pops," says rock journalist Martin Aston. "It did feel like my life changed. Even though I hadn't come out at 15, it sparked off something in me – something which, sitting in my parents' living room, I couldn't exactly express. It was such a brilliant concept: this alien comes down and tells you it's all going to be different from now on. It really was a brave new world." Glam's seismic impact was felt even in Britain's privileged, stiff-upper-lip public schools. "Glam was the antithesis of the rugger-bugger image," says Christopher Edwards, alluding to the macho rugby culture of Harrow, the school he attended. "We used to be as camp as we possibly could. Suddenly being bisexual was cool among my friends. It was the rebellion we'd been looking for." Bowie's influence spread not just through Ziggymania but through his sponsoring of , Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed, and his strong endorsement of Roxy Music. Mott's 1972 version of Bowie's "All the Young Dudes" became the anthem of glam rock, while Iggy and the Stooges' storming Raw Power – its cover featuring Iggy Pop with silver hair and lipstick – was arguably the single biggest influence on the to come. Reed's 1973 album Transformer, meanwhile, might have been called Transformed. An 11-track hymn to deviant New York, it featured the slinky hit "Walk on the Wild Side" and the brilliantly camp "Vicious," whose title had been suggested by Warhol himself. "There's a lot of sexual ambiguity in the album," Reed said, "and two outright gay songs from me to them. But they're carefully worded so the straights can miss out on the implications and enjoy them without being offended." Years later, Reed attested that "the whole glam thing was great for me. It was something I'd already seen with Warhol, but I hadn't done it. The Seventies was a chance for me to get in on it, and since no one in knew me from Adam, I could say I was anything. I'd learned that from Andy: nobody knows. You could be anything."

3: Teen Avenue: The Glam Rock Assembly Line

On the surface of it, there was a huge divide between David Bowie/Iggy Pop/Lou Reed/Roxy Music and Slade/Sweet/Gary Glitter/Mud. But the poles of glam rock weren't as far apart as one might think. "We didn't feel much connection with Sweet or Gary Glitter," admitted Roxy's Brian Eno. "But I think all of those things were a sort of reaction to what had happened immediately before, which was an idea of musicianship where you turned your back on the audience and got into your . I think all of those bands – us and Bowie and others – were turning round towards the audience and saying, 'We are doing a show.' In that sense there was a unity, though it wasn't very obvious at the time." Where the bands of the late Sixties had become overly serious and self- important, playing down any element of "show business" in order to emphasize their artistic and prowess, the new glam acts reveled in pop's narcissism, exhibitionism, and disposability. With hindsight it was inevitable that once Bolan and Bowie had given birth to glam, canny backroom svengalis would muscle in on this new phenomenon, shaping it to their own ends. But since glam was so contrived anyway, it didn't terribly matter. "Bolan was without doubt the start," says Nicky Chinn, who'd begun writing pop songs with Australian-born Mike Chapman in London in late 1969. "When 'Ride a White Swan' appeared on the scene, both Mike and I went, 'Hey, that is something unbelievable.' I don't think there was a sense at that point that glam could be a fully-fledged thing, but nor did we think it was a fad that would just come and go." Chinn and Chapman also took notice when the Birmingham band Slade – who formerly dressed as skinheads – reinvented itself as a quartet of glam-rock yobs with 1971's "." No Top of the Pops devotee ever forgot the first bizarre sight of Slade singer 's mutton-chop or guitarist 's daft fringed – or their first exposure to Holder's strangulated-Lennon voice. In a sense these ugly oafs were the opposite of Bolan and Bowie, glam clowns rather than gender- bending androgynes. "We're a working class band," Holder explained at the time. "Bolan has sort of a star quality on stage and he's not touchable. With us, the audience is part of . The music is just 50% of Slade. The dressing up and the humor and the audience involvement is the other 50%. That's the difference." Guided by former Jimi Hendrix manager Chas Chandler, Slade became an omnipresent fixture on the UK charts, scoring six No. 1s in just two years. If the gleefully illiterate "" and "" could hardly be counted as masterpieces, they were celebrations of teen community that teenagers could stomp to as they groped each other at the local community centre. "There's nobody working for the 14-year-olds now, no one giving them any excitement or anything fresh," Holder said at the time. "That's what we want to do." Since Chinn and Chapman had already notched up three bubblegum hits – including the No. 2 "Co-Co" – with a new group called Sweet, they figured it might be worth glamifying the band and beefing up its sound. Starting with "Little Willy" and "Wig- Wam Bam," the "Chinnichap" team – as the duo became known – cranked out six Top 10 UK hits for Sweet, including the mighty "Blockbuster" and "Ballroom Blitz." "We never said, 'Let's copy Marc Bolan,'" says Nicky Chinn, "but the fact that he happened opened a big door. By no means to be forgotten was the pushing of Sweet themselves, who were not that happy with [songs like] 'Co-Co.'" One could almost have described the new Sweet sound as "bubblepunk." "Although it wasn't to be taken too seriously," says Chinn, "this was pop that had an edge: there were hard guitars, there were crashing drums. There was some in there." There was also a large dollop of camp, particularly in the pouting of bass player , who would shamelessly play up to the camera on Top of the Pops. Chinn and Chapman were hitmakers not just for Sweet but for a number of artists on producer 's RAK label. (Most had produced a succession of hit acts in the Sixties – , Herman's Hermits, , the Jeff Group – but was tiring of the studio grind.) One RAK act in particular was an American girl singer Most had discovered in her native . Suzi Quatro was glam in reverse: dressed in a black leather catsuit, she was twice as butch as the male stars of the time. "Mickie made an album with Suzi, and it came to nothing," says Chinn. "So he called me up one day and asked if we would write a song for her. We wrote '' and it went to No. 1." Quatro followed up with "" (No. 3) and another No. 1, "." More cynical as a glam makeover than the RAK acts was the reinvention of failed Sixties star (né Gadd), who – under the aegis of Mike Leander – was reborn in 1972 as Gary Glitter. "Mike would get on the drums," Glitter remembered, "and I'd start shouting rubbish over it and then we'd put the drums down and then we'd build up the tracks just like they're doing now. We were quite avant-garde at the time." In its dumb way, Glitter's breakthrough single "Rock and Roll Part 2" was avant- garde. "Mike made this record with Gary called 'Rock and Roll,'" says Laurence Myers, whose Gem Toby Organization (GTO) represented both men. "Me being cheap, for the B-side we left track up, whacked on a bit of guitar, and called it 'Rock and Roll Part 2.'" Leander also came up with the idea of asking Alkasura's John Lloyd to design a Lurex space for Glitter, which was how the glam generation first witnessed the singer on TV in the summer of 1972. With his portly bulk, bulging eyes, and stacked platform boots, Glitter was part Elvis, part sci-fi rocker. "I suppose you could call it a bit of high camp," Glitter admitted in 1974, when he turned 30. "I was the first one with so much glitter who put it over slightly tongue-in-cheek. Younger kids get a great kick out of mimicking me, the eyes and the movements. That's a real compliment, because artists must have that bit more to be copied." Unlike David Bowie, Glitter tapped into Britain's hallowed tradition of pantomime: no one could take him too seriously. He even succeeded in America, where "Rock and Roll Part 2" was a Top 10 hit. "I've got the advantage of not being too dangerous or over-freaky for the Midwest, where they're still incredibly reactionary," he explained. "I can appeal to a wider audience, like Elton without going overboard." The thread connecting Gary Glitter to, say, Iggy Pop was not always obvious but it was there. "The thing that binds it all together is the androgyny, the camping it up," says GTO's Laurence Myers. "I've never seen such a heterosexual group as Sweet, but they all got into the makeup, with the stars on their faces and the pouting. It was this very camp thing, and it was the artists who did it. It wasn't some manager saying, 'You know what we need to do?' It was done in spite of the reservations, and even the horror, of managers and record companies." Between Myers' GTO, Most's RAK, and Dick Leahy's , the manufactured glitter-pop sound in London was pretty much sewn up. "It was good fun in that era," said Most. "We were buzzing, and at that time we were at No. 2 Charles Street, Mayfair, and next to us at No. 3 was Bell Records, who were also really buzzing because they had the , Gary Glitter, and . So it was like Teen Avenue, the place where all the teenybop groups were, in the middle of that glitter thing. It was good fun, because nobody was taking it seriously and were selling in millions, so it was really good." "The was enormous," says Nicky Chinn. "What was going on in those two offices was quite influential and very exciting." Mike Chapman was more Machiavellian in his outlook: "We were the people responsible for telling the kids what they were going to buy," he declared. "Not asking them, but telling them." The prefabricated aspect of glitter was, on reflection, part of its charm. "We don't go picking up products just for the sake of it," Dick Leahy said. "We always ask first, 'Who's going to buy it?' And if we can't answer that question, we don't release the record." Inevitably, the "Chinnichap" sound had its detractors: the duo had almost zero credibility among its peers, let alone among sneeringly hip writers on music weeklies like the New Musical Express. "Some ghastly things were said about us," says Chinn. "I think we were probably looked down on because our bands weren't writing their own songs, but on the other hand there might have been some envy involved because we were having bigger hits." "The press got into this trip of saying that Nicky and I were simply making records as if we were turning out sausages in a factory," Chapman said. "It was probably true, but as they were all hit records I don't see anything wrong with that. Unfortunately, that press attitude rubbed off on our artists, and eventually people like Sweet started to get very dissatisfied being what was called our puppets." Time has partially vindicated the Chinnichap sound. Where countless po-faced bands of the early Seventies have vanished into rock's black hole, Sweet and company live on, charming new generations with their formulaic pop anthems.

4: Tainted Showbiz: Glitter hits America

One of the biggest hits of 1972 was Alice Cooper's "School's Out." Exciting and implicitly corrupting, it caught the frenzy of adolescent rebellion at a crucial moment: "No more pencils, no more rule books/No more teacher's dirty looks…" Cooper didn't look like a glam rocker, nor was he ever really accepted by glam's leading lights. Ultimately he was less interested in androgyny or transvestism than in horror and gore: his stage spectacle involved snakes, mutilated dolls, and an infamous guillotine sequence in which he appeared to be beheaded. But one shouldn't underestimate the impact Cooper had in America, where he was the most shocking entertainer that most teenagers had ever seen. "I liked the whole theatrical glitter thing Alice was doing," said , "and [the fact] that he was very primal, like Iggy and the Stooges, which brought out the beast in me. I really believed in Alice until I found out he wasn't really a necrophiliac." Cooper was also a huge influence on the young John Lydon, who auditioned for the by miming to Alice's Stooges-esque single "I'm Eighteen." Looking back, genuine androgyny and/or were always going to face an uphill climb in America, where tough-guy masculinity was seemingly prized above all other values. "Sexual ambiguity was more acceptable in England, where there's always been this camp tradition," said , who'd signed the Stooges and later managed the . "In America it was all horrifying, deep-seated righteousness and Biblical homophobia." Yet, given that New York and Los Angeles were set apart from Middle and Bible-belt America, it was perhaps inevitable that glam or "glitter" would take root in those cities. "This was the dawn of feminism and gay politics," remembered the New York Dolls' . "All this stuff was coming through me – all this radical thought, not just about overthrowing the government but about what sexuality was, what maleness was and what femaleness was. There were certain guys, either of a hetero or homo or bisexual persuasion, who were kind of morphing into this androgyny thing." Five such guys, led by Johansen, combined to form the Dolls in early 1972. A Stones-meets-Faces amalgam of R&B, girl-group pop, and garage-band rock and roll, the Dolls took the swishiness of the UK glam acts to an extreme of trashy cross-dressing. Johansen himself resembled a debauched cupidon, a cross between Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits and Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Playing a Tuesday night residency in the Oscar Wilde Room at the Mercer Arts Center in downtown NYC, the Dolls soon became the best of a number of local bands – Teenage Lust, Eric Emerson's Magic Tramps, Wayne County's Queen Elizabeth, the Harlots of 42nd Street – who were all partial to wearing women's clothes. "It's a fact," English journalist reported of Wayne County, "that LA soft-rock has been stomped on by glittering lurid day-glo platform shoes worn by a female- impersonating posturing hard-rock singer." In this sense glam was a gleefully posy New York reaction to the mellow tendencies of 's singer-songwriters and bands. "The Dolls created a huge scene," said , another veteran of the Pork ensemble. "It became extremely fashionable to go see them. Everybody in the audience was just as outlandish as the Dolls were. There was Wayne County, the Harlots… and then of course David Bowie and Lou Reed, watching and learning." Bowie in due course acknowledged Johansen as an equal, someone who "was part of a Warhol crowd and knew exactly what he was doing." Like Bowie – and indeed like Andy Warhol – Johansen saw rock and roll as a platform for artistic subversion. On one level the New York Dolls were a great rock band, but on another they were as much an artistic concept as Roxy Music. Produced by the maverick singer- , The New York Dolls (1973) was an impossibly exciting record, crammed with squalling guitars and inspired about the flotsam and jetsam of delivered in David Johansen's gargled roar of a voice. It was, said manager , "ghetto music about girls, sex, drugs, loneliness, heartbreak and the rites of teenage romance." But that was nothing compared to the outrage of the album's sleeve, with the Dolls posed in their finest gladrags by New York designer Betsy Johnson. "At that time I was really into the androgyny thing," Johansen says. "I really thought that that was where it was at – that there should be no difference between men and women. But I don't want to make us sound like saints of androgyny or anything, because we were pretty rough around the edges and definitely exploiting it for all it was worth." Ironically, Glam's androgyny provided a kind of disguise for anyone genuinely struggling with their sexuality at the time. "In such a topsy-turvy sliver of time," Daily News pop critic Jim Farber would write years later of his teen years in the New York suburbs, "no one had to know that I was precisely as gay as my clothes might inform anyone from a later, or earlier, generation. In fact, with my attachment to glitter, as a nervous, virginal midteen I wasn't announcing my coming out but insuring my staying in." Although Los Angeles produced few bands to rival the New York Dolls – gutter svengali Kim Fowley tried and failed with a band called the Stars – it did nurture a thriving glitter- rock club scene. It was David Bowie who recommended that his West Coast publicist, , open a venue in Hollywood. He was even present when Bingenheimer launched the E Club one night in October 1972. "[Rodney] knew British singles and bands that I wasn't aware of," Bowie later recalled. "[He] single-handedly cut a path through the treacle of the Sixties, allowing all us 'avants' to parade our sounds of tomorrow dressed in our clothes of derision." Three months later, rechristened the English , the club moved to 7561 Sunset Boulevard and became a magnet for every teen in town. The music was all British, and mostly records. "People didn't really want to hear bands," Bingenheimer says. "They liked the records. It was a rock disco." The emphasis on playing 45s took glam still further away from the virtuosity of Sixties rock. Future Runaways guitarist remembered hearing Gary Glitter, Slade, Sweet, and T. Rex singles at the English Disco, plus "a lot of obscure stuff you never heard on the radio." (Later she would base her entire image on Suzi Quatro.) For her, glam was "such a unique sound, melodic but with lots of emphasis on the drums and loud guitars and those big chanting choruses." Bingenheimer particularly favored what he called "the mechanical stomp" of the great Chinnichap hits. "By definition it was all kind of tragic," recalled , singer with LA glamsters Silverhead and an English Disco regular. "But so what? There wasn't the pressure we have today. Rock and roll had yet to become corporate. What was so great about the glam era was that it was showbiz, but it was tainted showbiz." When the New York Dolls arrived in LA, the teen went into overdrive. "There was this wild scene out there just waiting for us," says David Johansen. "It was like kids in the candy store and the owner was asleep. I don't think I slept for a week." Not long after that week, the Dolls made their second visit to London to play the Rainbow Room at Biba. "We have come to England to redeem the social outcasts," Johansen declared at a press conference. "Everyone here seems to be… homosexual. Kids are finding out there isn't much difference between them sexually. They're finding out that the sexual terms – homo, bi, hetero – are just words in front of sexual." Johansen was paradoxically proposing himself as the liberator of "kids" who were already, in the loosest sense, "coming out." "We loved the New York Dolls," remembered Nicky Chinn. "They were everything we were doing, but much darker. The Americans were a little more extreme – they would take things that extra mile, and we were watching that a lot." Watching the Dolls on BBC television's Old Grey Whistle Test – whose presenter Bob Harris famously dismissed them as "mock rock" – was Mancunian teenager Steven . "I was thirteen, and it was my first emotional experience," the future Smith would write, adding that " I was twenty one." Clearly the experience was so profound for Morrissey that it literally fast- forwarded him into adulthood. The Dolls may have "taken things that extra mile," but it didn't mean America was any more receptive to an explicitly gay artist when such a creature finally happened along. Born Bruce Campbell, Jobriath was a classically-trained pianist who'd played a gay teenager in the Hollywood production of Sixties hippie musical Hair. Discovered by rock impresario Jerry Brandt, who thought he'd unearthed the American Bowie, Jobriath was signed to by its president, . The singer's 1973 debut, drawing heavily on the melodic piano-based rock of Elton John and Bowie's , was promoted with a giant Times Square billboard reproducing its nude cover portrait. "Jobriath," Brandt drooled, "is a combination of Dietrich, Marceau, Nureyev, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Nijinksy, Bernhardt, an astronaut, the best of Jagger, Bowie, Dylan, with the glamour of Garbo." Though the hype did him no favors, Jobriath was actually rather talented – a Bowie derivative, certainly, but not a charlatan. More to the point, America was simply not ready to embrace a kind of polymorphous satyr who, on songs such as "I'maman," was so frank about his homosexuality. When the PR overkill after the release of second album Creatures of the Street, Brandt tired of the boy from and dropped him like a hot potato. By 1975, Jobriath had all but retired from rock. He reinvented himself as lounge singer Cole and lived alone in New York's Chelsea Hotel, dying there of AIDS in 1983.

5: Remake/Remodel: The Roxy Music Revolution For Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry, "glamour" was not simply a means of attracting attention as a pop star: it was a conceptual strategy. "I certainly felt a need to present music in a glamorous way," Ferry says. "Maybe I was watching the wrong movies when I was brought up, liking that kind of showiness." Though Ferry's father had been a miner, he himself had grown in the English northeast with a deep appreciation for art and for clothes. As for many British "Mods" of the early Sixties, dandyism for Ferry was an attitude that set itself against the self-effacing, dressed-down drabness of postwar Britain. It also evolved in parallel with the generation of young working-class and lower- middle-class kids who studied at the new art colleges and subsequently went on to work in media, design, fashion, advertising, and of course music. Studying at the University of Newcastle with the Pop Artist Richard Hamilton, Ferry began to see "pop culture" as a response to the changing nature of modern consumerism – an ironic embrace of capitalist marketing techniques and the increasing fakeness of Sixties style. "My memory," said Ferry's fellow student Nick de Ville, "is that when we were at Newcastle we were very interested in personae – that things didn't have to be an authentic reflection of your personality… this was a moment of self-conscious realization: that being a rock star, or being an artist, was a pose that could be manipulated." De Ville would go on to design Roxy Music's album . Growing out of Bryan Ferry's meeting with player Brian Eno (Winchester School of Art) and saxophonist (Reading University) in 1970, Roxy Music were glam rock for grownups – or at least for clever students. "All the other glam was a bit cheesy," said of the Sex Pistols. "Roxy were classy glam." Signed to , home to such progressive bands as King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Roxy started out essentially as an art rock band. "We're not a singles group, really," Ferry claimed. "I certainly don't want to find myself sliding down that Slade/T. Rex corridor of horror." Roxy's music and image embodied a kind of retro-futurism that combined Thirties glamour with Fifties grease and 21st Century plasticity. "There was a lot of history, looking backwards as well as backwards," Ferry says. "There was more affinity with Bowie than with Bolan, but we felt very different even from him." Bowie himself responded as positively to Roxy Music as he had to the New York Dolls. As with David Johansen, Bowie saw that both Ferry and Eno were "very aware of what they were doing… [and] very aware of breaking down the barriers between high and low art." For Roxy, as for Richard Hamilton, art could no longer dwell in some rarified academic sphere that pretended the populist world of commerce and consumerism did not exist. "I saw the songs in the context of Pop Art," Eno admitted of the music he heard when Ferry recruited him for the group. "That was the period when pop music became sort of self-conscious, in that it started to look at its own history as material that could be used. We wanted to say, 'We know we're working in pop music, we know there's a history to it and we know it's a showbiz game. And knowing all that, we're still going to try to do something new.'" David Bowie, with whom Eno would later work closely, had said much the same thing in 1971. "I think [pop] should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself," he'd told . "It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium. The music is the mask the message wears – music is the Pierrot and I, the performer, am the message." Working with Nick de Ville and tailor , Roxy Music developed a look that was light years away from hippie regalia: big quiffs, suits with tight trousers, patent-leather shoes and outlandish platforms, a mix of matinee-idol chic and science- fiction kitsch. Eno himself preferred mascara and Rocky Horror ostrich feathers. Where Ferry looked like Humphrey Bogart as Dracula, Eno could have been the cross-dressing kid sister of Yes' keyboard player . "For me there was no sexual aspect to it," Eno says. "I was not gay, but I wanted to look great, and that meant dressing as a woman – or at least as some kind of weird new hybrid of male and female. I still think anything which erodes that easy distinction between male and female is a good thing. There was a whole negative movement at the time saying either men were terrible or women were pathetic, and I thought, 'Why not just be neither of them?'" Brett Smiley, the closest Britain came to spawning its own Jobriath, piped the same tune in a 1974 interview. "The line between male and female," said this pretty-boy protégé of former Rolling Stones manager , "is practically nonexistent." Roxy Music's first album, recorded quickly in March 1972 and followed up by the stunning debut single "," was a collage of Ferry's inspirations: movies, Fifties rock and roll, even German "." From the hectic opener "Re-make/Re-model" to the stylized balladry of "Chance Meeting," Roxy Music was a breathless ride along Pop Art Boulevard, propelled along by Eno's crazed synths and Andy Mackay's squawking rock and roll . A year later, the group's second album was shimmering glam rock that moved beyond Pop Art to create a futuristic sound of elegant gloom, from the strident "" to the eerily beautiful "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (whose title recalled Richard Hamilton's Fifties photomontage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?) Both albums boasted superb covers, the first with anxiously lustful model Kari-Ann posing as if for a Victoria's Secret ad, the second with walking a panther against a neon-lit nighttime skyline. Neither, however, made much impact in the US, where the Roxy aesthetic was too knowing and too European to appeal to middle-American teenagers. Too great a talent to remain a mere foil to Ferry, Brian Eno quit Roxy Music after For Your Pleasure. On 1973's he took the raw spirit of the first Roxy album and turned it into music of spirited whimsy, ploughing a middle ground between glam and the more cerebral music of his later work. Without Eno, Roxy became a more orthodox rock band, though 1973's Stranded – stretching from the surging "Street Life" to the melancholy coda of "Sunset" – was arguably Ferry's best collection of songs.

6: Too Much Too Soon: Glam Burns Out

By 1974, Roxy Music had all but abandoned glam as an artistic strategy. After the Country Life album, Bryan Ferry would opt for mere costumery by wearing tuxedos or safari outfits. "I remember that there was this great jacket Antony Price made with black sequins and a green chevron that I wore on Top of the Pops," he recalled. "But shortly after that you saw Gary Glitter wearing the same kind of things, and that's when I started wearing tuxedos." By 1974, indeed, the Glam Rock fad in Britain was on the wane. The signs had been there the year before, when Marc Bolan declared that "glam rock is sham rock." Unlike the far more talented David Bowie, however, Bolan failed to move beyond glam. "Marc would never develop beyond the three-minute single," says Tony Visconti. "I wish he had. With David, the glam rock smoothly segued into a kind of art rock." Where Visconti would work with Bowie as his sound matured through to the Berlin period of Low and 'Heroes', Bolan gave up on a planned called Children of Rarn, content (in Visconti's words) with "knocking out these three-minute ditties as he'd done previously." Bowie's desire to shrug off glam had much to do with a similar disdain for glam's gatecrashers, his snobbery leading to the auto-assassination of Ziggy Stardust during a famous show at London's Hammersmith Odeon. "Like a leper messiah," he had sung on "Ziggy Stardust," "when the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band…" Exhausted by 18 months of Ziggymania and MainMan hype, Bowie announced that the Odeon gig was "the last show we'll ever do" before with the song "Rock'n'Roll Suicide." It wasn't Bowie's last performance but it was Ziggy's. A little over a year later, Bowie was unveiling the new image of Young Americans – an anorexic movie idol in a tight jacket and trousers. US mega-success would duly follow, with 1975's "Fame" reaching No. 1. The "death" of Ziggy Stardust was symbolic of the end of a heady period in British pop. "It was a brilliant pop era, wasn't it," said Mickie Most. "The last proper pop era, probably." Commercially, 1973 was the peak of the glam sound and style, with a plethora of hits by Slade ("Cum on Feel the Noize," "Skweeze Me Pleeze Me," "," ""), Sweet ("Blockbuster," "Hell Raiser," "Ballroom Blitz"), Gary Glitter ("," "Hello Hello I'm Back Again," "I'm the Leader of the Gang," ""), and Suzi Quatro ("Can the Can," "48 Crash," "") – not to mention such canny opportunists as Mud ("Dyna-Mite," originally written for Sweet), ("See My Baby Jive," "Angel Fingers"), and the comically-named ("My Coo-Ca- Choo"). In time would follow Hello, the Arrows, , and Gary Glitter spin-offs . It could be argued that the waning of glam roughly paralleled the decline of the British economy, with the FTSE index plunging from 54 in May 1972 to 146 in December 1974. "Declinism," Andy Beckett wrote in When the Lights Went Out, "was an established British state of mind, but during the mid-Seventies it truly began to pervade the national consciousness… [darkening] the work of artists, novelists, dramatists, film-makers and pop musicians." Look no further than David Bowie's 1974 album for a document of apocalyptic angst. By the following year, Bowie was notoriously flirting with fascism, claiming that "you've got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up…" A sign that the initial "shock" of glam rock was dissipating was its appropriation – and dilution – by such mainstream pop- rock acts as Elton John. Elton's giant red platforms on the cover of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road were, for example, as derivative of Bowie and Bolan as his song "Bennie and the Jets." In a 1974 piece entitled "Rock Goes Hol-ly-wooood!", Elvis and Lennon biographer Albert Goldman noted that rock was becoming "pure entertainment" and harking back to the campy glamour of Liberace and Busby Berkeley. Even the black stars of soul and – from to Funkadelic – were going into high-fashion overdrive. With even the Rolling Stones self-consciously glamming themselves up circa It's Only Rock'n'Roll (1974), there was increasingly less need for groups like the New York Dolls. Rival bands such as took the Dolls template but dispensed with the overt transvestism. Kiss took the same template and spliced it with the Gothic-horror schtick of Alice Cooper. Too Much, Too Soon, the second Dolls album, was a fitting title for a band whose amateurish swagger was being undone by the familiar snags of drugs and drinking. "The Dolls failed because they lived their rock and roll fantasy," observed Kiss' . Despite the best efforts of Malcolm McLaren – who patched the group up and garbed them in red leather before disappearing to dream up the Sex Pistols instead – the New York Dolls would implode. While David Johansen embarked on a solo career with the sassy, knowing New York rock of "Frenchette" and "Funky But Chic," assumed a role as skuzzy punk icon in his new band . Effectively, punk killed off glam. "Glitter rock was about decadence," wrote Legs McNeil, author of the oral punk history Please Kill Me!. "[It was about] platform shoes and boys in eye makeup, David Bowie and androgyny…" In his book Subculture, Dick Hebdidge noted that "the punk aesthetic… can be read as an attempt to expose glam rock's implicit contradictions" – pop vs. art, fashion vs. revolution – and that punk's "working classness" counter to "the arrogance, elegance, and verbosity of the glam-rock superstars." Yet Hebdidge also conceded that punk was in some ways more of a footnote to glam than an outright attack on it, since dog collars, safety pins, and bondage trousers were really just a new kind of costume. Even the Ramones had come out of glam rock. "I had a black satin jumpsuit made of stretch material and pink- lavender boots with six-inch platform heels," said Joey Ramone, who'd once fronted a glam band called Sniper. "I was definitely the black sheep of Queens, always walking around on the defensive. Like, 'What are you lookin' at?' It was a very macho neighborhood. I can remember going into this record store where everybody was into Led Zeppelin and , and they really wanted to kick my ass for buying a Gary Glitter record. I felt like a total outcast." When Jeffrey Hyman finally put his mother's makeup back in her boudoir, bought some skinny ripped Levi's, and renamed himself Joey Ramone, 's romance with glam was – temporarily anyway – over.

7: Killer Queens: The Metamorphosis of Glam Back in London, a new band called Cockney Rebel fused Hunky Dory Bowie-isms with Ray Davies touches on singles such as "Sebastian," "" and "Mr. Soft." Nobody could quite decide whether the band's frontman and songwriter was rebellious or merely camp, but there was genuine Clockwork Orange theatre in the albums and The . Other mavericks who rode in on glam's coattails were Sparks, whose camp histrionics were best heard on (1974), and the Sensational Band, fronted by an ageing Glaswegian who dubbed himself "The Last of the Teenage Idols" and specialized in covers of songs by . No act could quite rival Queen, however. 's sexuality – like the band's name – was so in your face that many people failed to see it. "They were so obviously the extremity of camp," says photographer Mick Rock. "And yet in a way they weren't. Even Freddie at that point lived with a girlfriend." "Even to talk about being gay used to be obnoxious and unheard of," Mercury said, though he refrained from overtly outing himself. "But gone are those days. There's a lot of freedom today and you can put yourself across anyway you want to. But I haven't chosen this image. I'm myself and in fact half the time I let the wind take me." Though EMI signed Queen in 1973, it wasn't until the following year that the band broke through with "" and the glorious "." It was Mercury's influence that steered the band away from their Led Zeppelin foundations and towards a kind of glam-prog style. "They were almost glam rock," said their publicist Tony Brainsby. "They had elements of it, but it was on a higher, much more sophisticated level." The musical complexity and sophisticated production of Queen's albums were light years beyond the Chinnichap sound. In the studio, Queen were ambitious to the point of grandiosity, with rococo orchestral and elaborately stacked vocal harmonies. In 1975, they recorded "," a six-minute operetta that still ranks as one of the most outré No. 1s in pop history. Effectively it was the swansong of glam rock: here was all the music's swishy mannerisms, compressed histrionics, and swooning excess, but raised to a fever pitch it would be impossible to top. Glam had other swansongs: T. Rex's "(Whatever Happened to the) Teenage Dream?", Alice Cooper's "Teenage Lament '74," Mott the Hoople's "," even Bowie's "." At Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, where "Rebel Rebel" was the National Anthem, the writing was on the wall for glam by the fall of 1974. "The really great scenes die," said Bingenheimer's partner Tom Ayres, who'd hosted a party for Bowie on his first visit to LA in 1971. "Besides, [glam] never really took hold in the US. Slade never had a hit. Suzi Quatro and Gary Glitter had one apiece. And David Bowie? He put on a suit and went funk." At a "Death of Glitter" show at the Hollywood Palladium on 11 October, 1974, local scenester Chuckie Star was borne on to the stage in a lidless glitter coffin. "Everyone in LA knew it was their last chance to wear platform shoes and eyeshadow," said Star of the gig, which was headlined by Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. "Surfers from Malibu were there in midriff shirts, silver space boots, and blue eye makeup, hugging their girlfriends as they waited to get in." "The had been fun, and I'd heard some great music," journalist wrote of the show. "But it seemed to me that if this was meant to be the Woodstock of the glitter generation, it had come a good year too late. […] Something had clearly died, but slowly, almost unnoticed, without a bang and only a few dazed whimpers from those stuck with hope chests full of fading, leftover glitter." "I got bored with wearing all that makeup," Lou Reed said of glam rock. "I actually played three gigs wearing it – pancake makeup, green lipstick, you know. But I gave it up because it wasn't me. I'm the kind of person who'd comment on that, but I'm not into make-up. All that glamour scene will run its course. The only one who'll come out of that fully intact will be Bowie, and maybe he's going too far. But the rest are all in his wake." The glam scene in England was never decadent enough to stage anything like the "Death of Glitter" event. Nonetheless it was dying. "Subconsciously it was if we anticipated the end of glam," says Nicky Chinn. "Musically, the transition for us was quite easy, but as a lifestyle transition, I think we missed glam quite a lot." Parting company with Sweet and Mud, Chinn and Chapman instead enjoyed soft-rock hits with a group called Smokie. Chapman then moved to America and began scoring even bigger hits with the likes of Exile, , Blondie, and . "I was getting bored," the Australian said. "I saw the inevitable death of glitter rock and that whole era in England. I knew that if I didn't get the hell out of it, I was going to go down with the ship." "Glam sort of faded out, didn't it," says Brian Eno. "I can't remember a moment when I thought, 'That's not really happening anymore,' but I can remember getting my hair cut, and that was quite a big moment. for me had been a big sign of something – it had all those connotations of rebellion. But by the end of 1974 it didn't have those connotations at all." Punks would soon be shearing off their locks as a rebellion against longhaired hippies and rock stars. When Richard O'Brien's celebrated musical began packing them in at London's Royal Court theatre, the taming of glam rock was complete. Where Lou Reed singing "Walk on the Wild Side" was subversive, Tim Curry belting out Rocky Horror's "Sweet Transvestite" was a self-conscious travesty of glam's shock effect. The same might have been said for band , fronted by the absurd . "The Tubes and Rocky Horror," wrote Phil Dellio and Scott Woods, "dealt the genre a serious blow by trying to satirize something that was partly conceived as satire from the outset." The teen sensation of 1975, Scotland's Bay City Rollers, was a neutered version of glam androgyny packaged by astute gay manager Tam Paton, who instinctively understood that what 14- year-old girls now required was – in the words of recovering Rollermaniac Sheryl Garratt – "slim, unthreatening, baby-faced types who looked more like themselves." Had pop – in the five years that separated T. Rex's "Ride a White Swan" from the Bay City Rollers' "Bye Bye Baby" – really become so unadventurous? If so, it didn't help that Marc Bolan had become such a self-parody, churning out such limp singles as "" (1974) and such desperate-sounding albums as Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow (1974). Terrified of the way fame had deserted him, Bolan became increasingly defensive. "I haven't slipped, not in my chart," he protested. "I'm still number one." "I'd be doing interviews and even I would deny that Marc wasn't copying himself," Tony Visconti admits. "I was too involved, I wasn't outside the picture, but by Zinc Alloy I finally realized that we'd done this thing over and over again. You could wake me up in the middle of the night, and I could set up a Marc Bolan sound for you on the desk… within five minutes." In the last years of life, Bolan was saved by television, fronting the shows Supersonic and Marc. He even aligned himself with punk rock, touring with the Damned and proclaiming himself to be the genre's "elder statesman" and "godfather." Watching Marc, wrote fan Paul Morley, "it was as if he was masochistically rubbing in the fact that, as a pop person, he was essentially passé…" In 1977, a week after no less a star than David Bowie guested on Marc – performing his new song "'Heroes'" – Bolan was killed when his lover swerved into a tree on a railway bridge in Barnes. "I'd hate to go now," he'd told Steve Harley only a short while before. "I'd only get a paragraph on Page Three." How wrong he was. The tree remains festooned with tributes – flowers and poems and photographs – to this very day.

8: Cum on Feel the Noize: Glam's Eternal Return

Though Glam faded away, it never quite expired. Outmoded as much by blue-collar messiahs like Bruce Springsteen as by punk's monochrome nihilists, it reared its colorful head in pop culture again in the early Eighties. The most innovative pop star of that often-disparaged decade, Prince, referenced glam explicitly in songs such as "Glam Slam." The bisexual kinkiness of his 1980 album Dirty Mind came directly from glam, as did the song "Controversy," which asked, "Am I ? Am I straight or gay?" Prince's androgynous narcissism was the most titillating thing anyone had seen since the Top of the Pops heyday of Bolan and Bowie. Like them, indeed, he seemed to be half man, half woman. In England it was the turn of the generation who'd grown up worshipping Bolan and Bowie to strike their own poses. "Such a new Puritanism has grown up of late," sighed recovering punk . "I'd rather dress up like Liberace." Dress up – like pirate and a highwayman – he did. "Looking around," observed Dave Rimmer of a night at London's legendary Blitz club in early 1980, "you can see punks and art students and soul boys and transvestites and freelance oddballs all dressed, not necessarily to kill but definitely to be noticed." Out of the scene came a school of bands known as "the "New Romantics," stretching from Spandau Ballet to . The scene's chief peacock, , would appear in Bowie's celebrated for "Ashes to Ashes" that summer. "Glam is back," Jon Savage could write in 1983, after several acts had had hits not just in Britain but in America. "Much of it is, like a decade ago, the surface style for a new age of frivolity… and musical soma." This time, at least, gay artists like and were not obliged to veil their sexual preferences. America never produced true counterparts to these invading Brits. "America will never develop a Boy George," said Kim Fowley. "It needs to have John Wayne masculinity in everything it does." What it did produce – eventually – was an array of "glam-metal" or "hairtree" bands who invariably got their first breaks on LA's . "It wasn't the same as the glitter movement in the Seventies," Fowley said of . "The only things that were the same were the lipstick, the eyeliner, the female makeup on males. It took ten years from the end of Rodney's English Disco for makeup to come back in LA. And then Poison begat a giant list of men wearing makeup. Even Guns N' Roses wore makeup." From the Finnish band to LA clowns like , who had a Top 5 hit with a cover of Slade's "Cum On Feel the Noize," hairtree metal was a bastardized form of New York Dolls androgyny that completely bypassed genuine deviance. And in the end, Guns 'N Roses notwithstanding, a two-pronged assault from and killed off even that sub-species of glam. The truth is, glam comes and goes – and then comes back again. In the early Nineties, the Bowie-esque band Suede kick- started five years of with a single, "The Drowners," that sounded like a perfect amalgam of "Starman" and "All the Young Dudes." In Suede's wake came the usual mediocrities – groups like Fabulous and Nancy Boy – and the histrionic gothic glam of Placebo's "Teenage Angst" (1996). Todd Haynes' 1998 film Velvet Goldmine was based explicitly on the relationship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop, while the glam satire Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a big off-Broadway hit. Even – a diabolical Alice Cooper for the Nineties – flirted heavily with glam rock on the Ziggy-Stardust-influenced . In the early Noughties, British synthpop duo got in touch with their inner glam rockers, recording thumping teen- disco songs ("Ooh La La," "Lovely to See You," "Ride a White Horse") that fused the pout of Marc Bolan with the drum-machine -groove of . "I got into the glam rock thing because I'm kind of drawn to that theatricality and fantasy," says . "And I really like those thick, layered voices with loads of slap-back on them. That kind of method of recording, with layers of instruments, was the kind of inspiration for how we recorded some of the sounds and voices." "Hello hello, I'm back again!" Gary Glitter sang in 1973. He might have been speaking for glam rock itself: an effervescent strand in pop music history that seems destined to return – and return again.