Forthcoming books - part two

Out this autumn from V&A Publishing is my book Glam Rock: Dandies in the Underworld.

 

This has been a dream of mine for around two decades. I love the glam rock of the early-1970s. I regard it as the highest point of British popular culture, a fantastic collision of all the best bits of the previous century or more: experimental populism, proletarian pretentiousness, low budget theatricality, seasoned showmanship - it's all in there. Never has the avant-garde been so accessible.

 

It's long been a source of irritation to me that while the shelves of bookshops fill up with volumes about punk, glam has languished, neglected and ignored. But I was always keen that if I did finally get the chance to do a book on the subject, then it should be a beautiful object in its own right, as befitted the music. And - thanks to the good people at the V&A - I think we've achieved that.

 

So it's a large-format, heavily illustrated romp through the glory years of glam.

 

Perhaps I should add that this is glam as I define it, because there are acts covered that don't normally get included in discussions of the genre: not just David Bowie and Roxy Music but also Sailor and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. I think it all makes sense; others will disagree.

 

The Prettiest Stars II

And so the question arises: were Queen a glam act?

Well, not according to the All Music Guide, which claims 'they were at once too heavy and arty to be glam', though that suggests that the (presumably American) reviewer hasn't really got a grip of glam: nothing can be too arty.

But perhaps one should look back at the time they were releasing their first albums. And back then the critics did tend to lump them in, even if only on grounds of the group's name and Freddie Mercury's performances. The great Phil Hardy and Dave Laing, in their Encyclopedia of Rock, written in 1975 just after Bohemian Rhapsody had been released, referred to the way that 'earlier doubts that Queen were simply an androgynous glam-rock spin-off were dispelled.'

So let's look at Queen. This is their closest brush with glam, their Top of the Pops performance of Killer Queen:



And there's certainly something there: a camp little number delivered by a strutting Mercury flaunting his Biba-black fingernails.

But somehow it doesn't really cut the mustard. And to illustrate why I think it fails, here's some hardcore glam - Roxy Music performing Do the Strand on The Old Whistle Test (skip the first 1'20" if you're not interested in hearing why the programme was so damn awful most of the time):



Apart from anything else (wit, irony and so on) there's a key class difference in the lyrics. Killer Queen, as far as I can tell, is about a wealthy woman indulging her fantasies of prostitution; whereas Do the Strand, for all its name-dropping, is aspirational: when Ferry sings 'If you feel blue, look through Who's Who', you know that he's not actually in the book - he's dreaming of the impossible. His escape is also into fantasy, but there's no element here of slumming, as there is in Killer Queen. Roxy's position is closer to a literal version of the Oscar Wilde quote about how 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

Or to put it another way, Mercury's fur-coat gives the impression that he's part of the social world he's describing, while Ferry is lost in imagined rapture: 'Dance on moonbeams ... in furs or blue jeans.' As the All Music Guide goes on to say: 'they were hardly trashy enough to be glam.'

I know it's not exactly a conclusive argument, but at root there's simply a feeling: Queen weren't really very glam at all, were they?