Tag Archives: glam

481. fade to grey

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“Fashion victims, we called them. Also sophistos, or simply haircuts. But the correct term was New Romantic. And we could make all the fun we wanted, they had some of the best tunes for a while, with Fade To Grey particularly notable, because it was Visage, Steve Strange‘s group, the guy who’d started it all, shrugged off the ugly extremes of punk and replaced them with a more alluring and androgynous aesthetic – equal parts beautiful and absurd. Glam retro-fitted for the 1980s. And Fade To Grey was definitely beautiful.” (Philip Random)

Visage-steveStrange

592. needles in the camel’s eye

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“Sometimes I need to see a song used in a movie to truly get it. In the case of Needles in the Camel’s Eye (the first song on the first side of Brian Eno’s first solo album), that movie was Velvet Goldmine, the title sequence in which glam-rock fervour erupts through drab Britain circa 1971-72. As the story goes, David Bowie refused to let director Todd Haynes use any of his music in a movie that was a essentially about him. So Haynes scrambled, signed up everybody else that was relevant at the time, and the result was perhaps more confusing than originally intended, but probably better.” (Philip Random)

VelvetGoldmine-POPidol

607. Telegram Sam

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xl32HEJ8DE

“I did hear Telegram Sam at least once way back when, and my immediate teeny bop take was, ‘this sounds exactly like that other T-Rex song‘. And I was right. But ultimately, wrong. Because what I was really referring to was T-Rex‘s groovy, funky, rockin’ one in a trillion sound. Which I didn’t really get for at least another decade, which is when Bauhaus’s rather raucous take on Telegram Sam nudged me into paying attention again. Pop for the ages, glamorous and forever cool.” (Philip Random)

T-Rex-crowd-1972

639. the golden age of rock and roll

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“I hated the golden age of rock and roll when I was a young teen. Not the song, the era.  The Buddy Hollys, Chubby Checkers, Bill Haleys, Big Boppers, Elvis – the whole big deal 1950s-early-60s retro thing that was suddenly going down everywhere in the wake of American Graffiti (the movie). Which wasn’t bad at all. I just didn’t need the f***ing revival. I had Bowie, T-Rex, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, The Stones, Mott The Hoople, who, of course, wrote this song about it all, with the crucial line that the golden age of rock and roll wasn’t then, it was now. And it still is. It has to be. Believe otherwise and you might as well be dead.” (Philip Random)

Mott-1974

646. King of the Rumbling Spires

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Apparently this is the first time Marc Bolan really rocked out on record. The band was still called Tyrannosaurus Rex at the time, and despite the name, a comparatively lightweight outfit – too much flowers and fine herbs, not enough thunder and rumbling. But that had to change. The 1970s were looming, the acid was wearing off, the hippie dream was much further away than it had previously seemed. Maybe it had never been there at all. Just another storybook fantasy.

TyrannosaurusREX-1969

678. the slider

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“It seems that Motron and I are still arguing T-Rex . Electric Warrior (me) versus The Slider (him). And he’s not exactly losing with the title track, which, as with pretty much all T-Rexian gems, doesn’t make much sense lyrically until you decide it’s like those warnings you used to get on porn-films: completely concerned with sex. In other words, it was miles over my head when it was new. And so was I for that matter, glam being a strange and necessary thing to find lurking in the pubertal suburbs of the early 70s.” (Philip Random)

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