The actor (aka David Bowie, David Jones, Ziggy Stardust) is starting to crack here. We all were in retrospect. Even if you were a thickheaded suburban kid barely into puberty – the whole 60s thing just wasn’t playing out as anticipated. Revolution in our time? Maybe. But by 1973, it was clear it wouldn’t be an old-fashioned political revolution. No, it was all going to be much weirder than that.
Sweeny Todd were mostly a Vancouver thing, though they did have one big deal hit. But then singer Nick Gilder split, leaving a gap in the lineup for an androgynous glam male voice. Enter local teenager Bryan Guy Adams, but only for one album, because then he also split, cutting his hair and dropping the middle part of his name (and all of the glam), bound as he was for Bruce Springsteen lite world domination. Which is a pity, because If Wishes Were Horses (the song and the album) had some genuine pixie dust in its veins, and there’s nothing wrong with pixies.
The Undead (a fake movie band) tear things up with a little ditty about the construction of the perfect satanic rock star. From Phantom of the Paradise (the greatest rock and roll movie ever released in 1974) wherein the Faust legend gets mixed up with the Phantom of the Opera with a healthy dollop of glam rock sleaze thrown in for roughage. If you haven’t seen it, you’re incomplete, or you’re just not from Winnipeg.
The band known as Japan may have started out as a second rate (late to the game) glam outfit more famous for looking good than sounding good, but by the time the time they called it quits (for the first time), they were making a music that was entirely their own, as elegant as it was mysterious. Which perhaps speaks to Life Without Buildings being relegated to a limited edition flexi-disc and b-side, until finally showing up on 1984’s Exorcising Ghosts, one of the better compilation albums of any era.
T-Rex from the peak of their almost absurd success (in Britain anyway where they had no less than eleven top ten hits in less than four years; over here in the Americas, they barely had one). And anyway, Life’s A Gas was only ever a b-side, and an album cut, which is perhaps more important. Because, it speaks to the depth of what Marc Bolan had going at the time of Electric Warrior. The only thing cooler at the time was Bowie.
Randophonic 
