Glam decadence: 1970s Britain and fin-de-siecle Paris

This is a continuation of our retronauting back to the 70s with Bernhard’s Correction (’75), Eno’s Ambient 1 (’78) with the glam roots of the decade.

This is what really kicked it off:

Men wearing makeup? Do well to note that this is what life in the early 70s was like:

While glam rock just looks old-fashioned and silly to most people now, underlying its outward daftness is the desire not even twenty years after the creation of rock n roll to lionise stardom and to play with the concept of it. It wasn’t enough simply to be the star, to play the music, to sell out Shea Stadium – you had to differentiate yourself from the ordinary people and give vent to their (supposedly) subconscious desires to break free and live as if you had the money to do it. Like this:

So glam was born, the next rebellion of the slightly-younger of the same generation (Bolan and Bowie were only 7 years younger than Lennon). T-Rex were the first and best and Bolan even did the courtesy of dying before he was thirty, cementing his legend as the leader of his pack, but Ziggy Stardust is the real hero of glam rock, and his roots are much, much older than rock n roll.

The writers J-K Husymans, Octave Mirbeau and Wilde had long satirised the hedonistic bent of fin-de-siècle France and Victorian Britain; glam was a recrudescence of this kind of flared-cuff-and-top-hats approach to aesthetics and desire, indulging as far as possible in all the bad taste glitter and glitz that could be found in a still-industrial Britain. Bowie/ Ziggy’s Rock n Roll Suicide even incorporated the same moral resolution that Wilde adopted in The Portrait of Dorian Gray - a debauched Ziggy is torn to pieces by his fans - although admittedly Jones/Bowie/Ziggy’s influence was a melange inspired by the youthful demise of Buddy Holly, Brian Jones, Morrison, Joplin and Hendrix. And the Americans landing on the moon. And Vince Taylor.

That glam was a revival of older music there can be no doubt: listen to the blues and 50s rock n roll riffs in T-Rex, cribbed from the States and cranked up to 10, and songs like Cadillac and Thunderwing (these aren’t British cars), they’re all poses (Bolan couldn’t even drive). The smooth ballading of Ziggy, cribbed from Sinatra and the 60s (and the 30s’ Wizard of Oz, in the case of Starman) and his rockers, which sound like Hendrix wrapped in foil and without the wah-wah and fuzzbox pyrotechnics, hark back to a simpler, purer era, stripped down to an essence bottled in prior decades.

The point here isn’t that pop will eat itself; glam was original, for all its references to aesthetic history. It’s that it was the first successful ‘heroising’ sub-genre of music, to permit a coinage. The rock n roll star as hero, as alien. Recall Baudelaire’s casting the role of poet in L’Albatross from the Flowers of Evil:

Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.

Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.


That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!

The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.

The poet as self-conscious outsider, raised above the common mass by his idealism and his sensitivity, alienated by the crude materialism of an increasingly affluent everyday life (the ahistorical amongst our readers will be shocked to read that pockets of Western Europeans in the 1860s thought their civilisation 'too affluent' prior to mass electrification, pre-radio, pre-TV, pre-Space Invaders, pre-Xbox, pre-Iphone, pre-Google glasses, but there it is). The sidereal hero of Bowie’s Starman, who instructs Ziggy to spread the message of love and hope on earth, is glam rock's classic exemplar. It is not the same kind of peace and love spread in the 60s, by a generation who thought they were changing the world:

Admittedly, Jim Morrison was of the same ilk, and the influence of Rimbaud and the Imagists is less oblique in his lyrics than in glam. The Doors were literary, to be sure, but they differ ideologically from glam in that Morrison wasn't interested in the idea of the rock star; he was interested in the idea of the mage, the writer and the dark poet, but happened to be a rock star in a rock band.

The colour TV - introduced into Britain in 1967- helped glam's cause immensely, as it had the psychedelic movement. Ziggy Stardust in monochrome would have looked like a bird shat on him, like a bad character from Dr Who; that would confuse the public, not enrage and inspire it:

Within a year, Roxy Music's Brian Eno had chinned Bowie sonically with Here Come the Warm Jets, at times redolent of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and their Carollian whimsy, in fact awash with clues about the aural horizon and the invention of ambient music (see previous posts). But Ziggy played guitar, and the kids saw it – and that’s what counted, in this decade of oil crises, failure of the greatest Western power to bring down a nation of peasant-communists and growing social unrest. Tune in, turn on and drop out had failed, apparently stabbed to death at Altamont in December '69 and vapourised in Britain by increasingly virulent bombings by the IRA. The communal hippy dream had faded; the decadent dream of glamour rock n roll heroism is what replaced it. Baudelaire would have approved.