NC Radio Glam Rock Hour
Scheduled on
| Thursday | 21:00 | 22:00 |
|---|
Does anyone know the way? There's got to be a way To block Buster
Glam Rock laughed in the face of the pompous pseudo-intellectualism that was becoming prevalent in the music world in the early seventies. It declared war on seriousness.
You want three day weeks? We want Can The Can. You want Tales From Topographic Oceans? We want Tiger Feet.
It is, of course, the sweetest of all ironies that Marc Bolan – the man who it could be argued invented the Glam Rock genre, took himself more seriously than a hundred Topographic Oceans. He probably thought he was a Topographic Ocean . . .
Glam picked up on the hippie ideal of showing off and took it to a new level. The hippies blew it when they started to take themselves seriously – always the death knell of any movement – and that was a trap that the Glamsters couldn’t fall into. After all, how could you take yourself seriously when you were wearing metallic blue and silver platform boots with a five-inch heel?
Actually, some of them did – most of them did – and as soon as they did, they were finished. Apart from the aforementioned Grand-daddy of the scene – yes, Mr Bolan – most of the Glamsters played with the idea of being sensible, looked at it and laughed at it.
Any self-respecting Glam rocker needed ten basic things. You’ve got to remember. That first Top of the Pops appearance was all-important. Make the right impression, and Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman might take notice. Get it wrong, and you would be back to doing Beatles and Stones covers at the Greyhound in East Grinstead.
After five glorious Glam years, the world changed forever.
A different style of dressing up caught on, a new movement was born – the boy looked at Johnny, and liked what he saw. Clothes were ripped, make-up was plastered on eyes with a trowel, cheeks were pierced with safety pins, nobody smiled. Punk had arrived and the simple pleasures of glitter and gloss were all too quickly forgotten.
Flares and big hair stayed in fashion for a while, enjoying a wild time in discos around the world until well into the 1980s, but the Glam bands of Britain woke up one morning in February 1976 and found that they had been confined to endless nostalgia tours around seaside piers, holiday camps and bingo halls.
Many of them are still doing the scampi-in-a-basket circuit, enjoying the beer and laughs, even if the new band members get younger than the audience by the week.
Of course, Glam didn’t change the world. It just felt as though it did for all those starry-eyed boys and girls who wrecked their foot arches on gigantic heels and are now worrying about their own daughters doing the same in those daft-looking platform trainers.
Ultimately, it was a bloody good laugh. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
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