by Bob Stanley
Bowie had pushed the door ajar, and Roxy Music took full advantage. They were very much British art-school, but unlike the R&B acts of the sixties or the progressive smart alecks, they majored in British Pop. While the Who had bluffed their ‘pop art’ sound with reference to obscure auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger, Richard Hamilton and Joe Tilson taught Roxy Music – literally. And while they had an egghead on keyboards called Brian Eno, with a bank of synths straight out of Cape Canaveral, he was counterbalanced by louche front man Bryan Ferry. Old-time glamour was his angle, and Roxy Music – their name redolent of crimson Hollywood, suburban Vitralite and neon – was his band. Ferry wore tuxes, sometimes sequinned, and screwed his eyes right up tight when he sang, as if he was going to hiss very loudly. As the song progressed he’d perspire gently, and his brilliantined hair would fall over his forehead. He looked just like a coke fiend from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novella, which was entirely the idea.
Eno’s full name was Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno2 and, silver threads aside, his face betrayed a refined, arch and rather haughty man. While an art-school student he had pinned up a handwritten note outside the staff room: ‘Brian Eno will be conducting tutorials in his office today. Any staff member needing advice or guidance please feel free to come and see me.’ Eno, with a head full of ambient whirs and clicks, quit Roxy in ’73 as it became clear that Ferry was running the show. And Roxy just got better: their first two albums revealed a little too much of their art training, and Eno’s departure led to a finer, more unified sound. On ‘All I Want Is You’ (UK no. 12 ’74) the saxophone and guitar wheel-spins sounded like a souped-up Ford Capri, while ‘A Song for Europe’ basked in its continental drift, the finale of Death in Venice as imagined by Warhol and Spector.
Roxy Music were glamorous, in a slightly tortured way, and they plastered gorgeous models in unlikely poses – sweaty and wasted – on their album covers to ram home the point. Mud, on the other hand, were merely glam. How they got to be tagged glam in the first place was largely down to the hit-writing machine of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. Simply, they saw the adulation, the magazine covers, the cold hard cash that T. Rex generated in ’71 and ’72 and they wanted in. Up to this point, Chinnichap had worked on a Brit Building formula. Sweet were their most successful act with their Latin-soused bubblegum hits ‘Funny Funny’, ‘Poppa Joe’ and ‘Co Co’ (UK no. 2 ’71); beginning with ‘Little Willy’, they threw in recycled twelve-bar blues riffs, turned up their amps ever louder, and for the next three years produced the most taut, diamond-hard run of singles by any seventies band.
Sweet’s first single had come out in ’68. By ’72, when glam was reaching its full potential, they were a fearsomely tight live act. After the nudge and wink of ‘Little Willy’ and ‘Wig Wam Bam’ (‘Wham bam bam, gonna get you in my tent’), both of which reached number four in 1972, they moved in for the kill with ‘Block Buster’ in January ’73. Klaxons announced an important record; Chinn and Chapman had decided to fuse Sweet’s bubblegum to T. Rex’s glam muscle and Bowie’s theatre. It was camp as Christmas but, manipulated by backroom boys with an eye on the big prize, it was absolutely magical. Frenzied gibberish, the best since Little Richard. Buster was someone who had to be blocked, but the lyric didn’t suggest why, it just implied some kind of apocalypse: ‘you better watch out if you’ve got long black hair’.
Who the hell was Buster? Just the first in a line of preposterous glam characters. T. Rex (again) had got the ball rolling with Telegram Sam in ’72, who was soon joined by Mud’s Dynamite (‘Nobody knew her name but she turned up just the same/There was a knock on the door, a thump on the floor and the party turned insane’) and Kenny’s Fancy Pants (‘She’s a rocker, she’s a shocker … when she hears a beat she goes wild’). Following ‘Block Buster’, Sweet got two more cute little demons from Chinn and Chapman: the man at the back who said ‘Everyone attack and it turned into a Ballroom Blitz’, and the terrifying but irresistible sounding ‘Hell Raiser’: ‘Mama you don’t understand, every time I touch her hand it’s like I’m burning in the fires of hell!’ Wrong crushes, one and all. In Britain they were big; in Germany, Sweet were the biggest pop noise ever. They only began to stumble when they wrote their own songs and decided to be a second-rate Led Zep instead of a first-rate Sweet.
The British Top 20 was entirely won over by glam’s frantic noise, to an extent not seen since Merseybeat. As the British music press tied themselves in knots over the moral issues raised by glam, or glitter rock, or ‘fag rock’ (thanks, Beat Instrumental), it dictated both the singles chart and, effectively, pop culture as lapels grew wider, cars looked flasher and Britain let its hair down and finally forgot the war. In the States, with the exception of Anglophile shock-tactic rocker Alice Cooper, glam meant less than zero.3 The 1973 number ones show two countries who – soul aside – were as far apart as they’d ever be in the modern pop era.
UK
Sweet ‘Block Buster’
Slade ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’
Donny Osmond ‘The Twelfth of Never’
Gilbert O’Sullivan ‘Get Down’
Dawn ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round
the Ole Oak Tree’
Wizzard ‘See My Baby Jive’
Suzi Quatro ‘Can the Can’
10cc ‘Rubber Bullets’
Slade ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’
Peters and Lee ‘Welcome Home’
Gary Glitter ‘I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)’
Donny Osmond ‘Young Love’
Wizzard ‘Angel Fingers’
The Simon Park Orchestra ‘Eye Level’
David Cassidy ‘Daydreamer’/‘The Puppy Song’
Gary Glitter ‘I Love You Love Me Love’
Slade ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’
USA
Billy Paul ‘Me and Mrs Jones’
Carly Simon ‘You’re So Vain’
Stevie Wonder ‘Superstition’
Elton John ‘Crocodile Rock’
Roberta Flack ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’
The O’Jays ‘Love Train’
Vicki Lawrence ‘The Night the Lights Went
Out in Georgia’
Dawn ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round
the Ole Oak Tree’
Stevie Wonder ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’
The Edgar Winter Group ‘Frankenstein’
Paul McCartney and Wings ‘My Love’
George Harrison ‘Give Me Love (Give Me
Peace on Earth)’
Billy Preston ‘Will It Go Round in Circles’
Jim Croce ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’
Maureen McGovern ‘The Morning After’
Diana Ross ‘Touch Me in the Morning’
Stories ‘Brother Louie’
Marvin Gaye ‘Let’s Get It On’
Helen Reddy ‘Delta Dawn’
Grand Funk Railroad ‘We’re an American Band’
Cher ‘Half-Breed’
The Rolling Stones ‘Angie’
Gladys Knight and the Pips ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’
Eddie Kendricks ‘Keep On Truckin’’
Ringo Starr ‘Photograph’
The Carpenters ‘Top of the World’
Charlie Rich ‘The Most Beautiful Girl’
Jim Croce ‘Time in a Bottle’
Glam schlam. There’s a lot of fine songs in that list but, essentially, the States were still pretending the Beatles hadn’t split – Lennon was the only ex-Fab not to score a US number one.
T. Rex had created a future, Bowie had painted it self-destructive (‘We’ve got five years’), and into their invention poured Detroit rocker Suzi Quatro – a girl in no make-up and Elvis ’68 leathers, the perfect mirror image to all the fey boys – and Roy Wood, formerly of the Move, given a fresh paint job as the leader of Wizzard. Beyond the Top 40 were wannabes and cash-in merchants, loaded with novelty and comic-character names, and all as disposable as gum: Spiv, Hector, Joo
k, Chunky, Crunch, Smiffy, Screemer, Zipper and Zappo. The sound most readily mimicked by these acts was Sweet’s, which also – for reasons that didn’t extend beyond outright snobbery – was the least applauded by the critics. ‘Block Buster’ (comic-book fun) had kept Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie’ (pop with pretensions) at number two – the songs shared the exact same Muddy Waters riff, but Bowie’s was deemed more acceptable by the NME and Sounds, presumably because he had written his own lyrics.
The Bowie/Roxy glam axis – short on custard pies, high on Genet references – fitted the seventies rock critic’s post-Sgt Pepper world more comfortably than Sweet and Mud, whose It’s Better than Working album title didn’t suggest much familiarity with Lorca. Nobody came in for a tougher time than a portly blue-eyed soul singer known as Paul Raven until glam’s sequinned glove beckoned. Born Paul Gadd, he was, like Bolan and Bowie, another sixties refugee, though his first single had appeared as far back as 1960. Teaming up with producer Mike Leander, Gadd produced the bone-crunching ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Parts 1 & 2’ (UK no. 2, US no. 7 ’72), all caveman grunts, guitars like hornets and drums treated with echoes that Joe Meek might literally have killed for. Thinking of a suitable name for this studio project, Gadd and Leander discarded Horace Hydrogen and Terry Tinsel before settling on Gary Glitter. What seemed a one-off eulogy to primal noise and dancehall action (you weren’t meant to dance to James Taylor or Genesis) became one of pop’s unlikeliest pin-ups. Even the neanderthal backing group, the Glitter Band, had hits of their own (‘Angel Face’, UK no. 4 ’74; ‘Goodbye My Love’, UK no. 2 ’75) and – with Rock ’n’ Roll Dudes – turned out one of the half dozen best albums of the genre.
The oikish end of glam was taken to an extreme by a band who were Sweet’s only rivals in the post-T. Rex world – Slade. A Wolverhampton group guided by Jimi Hendrix’s former manager Chas Chandler, they were unlikely superstars but, as Bolan’s star faded in ’73, they became the most beloved group in the country. Dickensian singer Noddy Holder had a voice like John Lennon screaming down the chimney of the QE2; rosy-cheeked bassist Jim Lea looked as if he lived with his mum and bred homing pigeons; Dave Hill on guitar had the most rabbity face in the world; while drummer Don Powell chewed gum and stared into space – even after he’d been in a horrific car crash and lost most of his memory, he looked exactly the same. With no hint or possibility of pin-up potential, they saw the Titus Groans and the Amazing Blondels, the prog noodlers, the folk archaeologists and the questing space rockers and thought, sod this, let’s get pissed and have a really, really good time.
Chas Chandler’s Slade productions were simultaneously airtight, fierce and murky – they contain an insane amount of energy. And they revitalised the UK singles chart. No one had gone straight in at number one since the Beatles with ‘Get Back’ in 1969, but Slade managed it three times – ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’, ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ – in 1973. Very much in the premier league, they made a miserabilist movie about the industry called Flame in ’74, cut their most varied album (Old New Borrowed and Blue), then tried to turn America on to their beer ’n’ cigs power pop. But like T. Rex, they didn’t click. By the time they got home, the scene was greyer, their profile had wizened, and they called their 1976 album Whatever Happened to Slade? It seemed that nobody knew.
Since then there have been many pratfalls, regrettable stabs at metal (‘Lock Up Your Daughters’), stadium ballads (‘My Oh My’), would-be football anthems (‘Give Us a Goal’) and even Celtic rock (‘Run Runaway’) to counter the odd stellar moment (‘Radio Wall of Sound’). But ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ has kept Slade on the radio, at least once a year, and reminded everyone how much dunderheaded, giddy fun they had been in the first place. If you took a survey tomorrow, Slade could well be the best-loved band in English pop history.
Only two groups could rival Slade in nailing the Blitz spirit that pervaded Britain’s seventies slough. A notable fan of Mott the Hoople in their early days was a London-based student by the name of Benazir Bhutto. Another was David Bowie. They were from the hinterland between Wolverhampton and the Welsh border, and were a pleasant enough band without suggesting they’d ever catch fire. Three albums in, they called it a day in 1972. Enter Bowie. He pleaded with them not to split. Singer Ian Hunter – a Dylan freak and ale drinker from way back – laughed, ‘Give us a hit and we’ll think about it, Dave.’ So Bowie gave them ‘All the Young Dudes’ (UK no. 3 ’72). It was the equivalent of Brian Wilson giving Jan and Dean ‘Surf City’ (US no. 1 ’63), handing over the secret manifesto of the movement. Hunter screamed out lines like ‘I don’t need TV when I’ve got T. Rex’ with such openness, his voice crackling with mirth, knowing this song would make their career: ‘I’ve wanted to do this for years and years,’ he cackled over the fade and, true to their word, Mott stuck together and got ten times better.
They self-mythologised to a ridiculous degree. Giving themselves nicknames like rock ’n’ roll action heroes – Overend Watts,4 Ariel Bender – they aimed for the sky and hit the pub ceiling. Their albums tended towards drunken introspection, yet they understood and celebrated pop’s magic on 45s, getting it across merrily as tears of joy watered down their pints and filled their ashtrays on ‘All the Way from Memphis’ (UK no. 10 ’73), ‘Roll Away the Stone’ (UK no. 8 ’73), ‘The Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll’ (UK no. 16 ’74). Every one was a pocket pop-history chapter. And just when it was about to get boring, just as glam had run its course, they split in 1975.
Like rock ’n’ roll, and rave to come, glam’s lack of a manifesto allowed all kinds of oddballs a stab at glory. Not glam at all but somehow the epitome of where British pop was at in 1972, this seems a good place to bring in Stavely Makepeace. Led by ex-navy man Nigel Fletcher and pianist Rob Woodward, they recorded in Woodward’s front room in Coventry allegedly under the influence of Gene Vincent and Elvis: their two dozen singles sound precious little like either of them, or anyone else for that matter. What they did sound like was Dada, and they took their clumsy noise all the way to number one.
Their 1969 debut – ‘(I Wanna Love You Like a) Mad Dog’ – sounded like a one-man oompah band, phased to simulate a psychedelic experience, peddling the kind of nudge-wink sexual filth Marie Lloyd had once been up in court for. Three years later they penned a woozy pub instrumental called ‘Mouldy Old Dough’. It wasn’t up to Stavely Makepeace’s ‘serious’ attempts on the chart, like ‘Mad Dog’ or ‘Tarzan Harvey’, they reckoned, so they released it under the pseudonym Lieutenant Pigeon, and gave themselves a parallel career. Woodward’s mum Edna was drafted in as a second pianist, and when it made number one in 1972 she became the oldest person to appear on Top of the Pops. If it weren’t for the Makepeace/Pigeon delineation, nobody other than Woodward and Fletcher could tell which of their records were meant to be novelties. Lieutenant Pigeon cut three albums in short order – Mouldy Old Music, Pigeon Pie, Pigeon Party – while ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ topped the charts from Belgium to Australia, taking the sound of a country in severe depression around the world. Miners’ strikes? Rampant inflation? Crack open a Party Seven. Grin and bear it. ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ is the brownest record ever made.
As glam counted for so little in the States, brothers Ron and Russell Mael decided to move to the UK and test their helium rock ’n’ roll on a British audience. Sparks made no sense whatsoever: Ron had a Hitler moustache and scared children; Russell had a curly mop and piercing eyes; their breakthrough hit, ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us’ (UK no. 2 ’74) sounded like Sweet playing a Chinese folk melody and featured glam’s loudest, most exciting instrumental break (gunfire, Russell’s screams, dive-bombing power chords). The Maels picked a crack British backing group who they inexplicably sacked after one fine album, Kimono My House. They would survive into the twenty-first century and – after experiments with swing-band revivals, Giorgio Moroder and ambient minimalism – remained just as impenetrable.
It’s one of the more obscure puzzl
es of pop as to why so many stars of glam (and metal) came from the Midlands. I still can’t work it out. Birmingham’s Roy Wood wasn’t first out of the blocks, not even third or fourth, but in his own way he was as significant to glam’s long-term influence as Bolan or Bowie. They introduced otherness via androgyny and sexual confusion; Roy Wood – musically and physically – showed how you could change who you were entirely. Bowie invented characters, but you had a handle on who David Bowie was behind the mask. Who on earth was Roy Wood?
Unlike his glam contemporaries, Roy Wood had been a star in the sixties. The Move were a distillation of Birmingham beat groups under the aegis of manager Tony Secunda, and Wood was their chief songwriter. They began as a Who knockoff (debut 45, ‘Night of Fear’, a UK number two at the end of ’66; ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’, UK number five in ’67), with power-pop riffs and gigs that ended in fireworks, but within a year they had gone hippy-dippy with ‘Flowers in the Rain’, another number two, and then started ’68 with a switch into Duane Eddy basslines and Buddy Holly melodies on ‘Fire Brigade’, a number three. This was largely seen as bandwagon-jumping at the time – they also went ‘heavy’ with the dreadful ‘Brontosaurus’ in 1970 – but Roy Wood was not one to sit still. By 1972 he was not only in the Move but had formed the pseudo-classical Electric Light Orchestra with Jeff Lynne and started the glam-leaning Wizzard. He also found time to release his first solo album. This wasn’t the CV of a dilettante – Roy Wood loved pop. He was a super-fan. He wanted to be all of pop, all at the same time.