Glam - Roxy Music

It's not like Roxy Music need any endorsement from the likes of me, but Lord were they great or what? The first two albums were magnificent, then Eno left the band in 1973 and everyone wondered whether they could survive with the same level of artistic genius. In response they released their best ever album in Stranded, whence comes this track, 'Psalm'.

There was always a strong vein of religious imagery in glam rock, from the leper messiah of Ziggy Stardust through to Cockney Rebel's debut single 'Sebastian', with its echoes of the early Christian martyr. And it did tend to be tied in with sex and death. 'It wasn't only Uncle Peter's airbrushed black and white dirty mags with enigmatic titles like Spick and Span that got me going,' remembered Richard Strange, singer with the Doctors of Madness. 'Talk of death or religious ecstasy would provoke exactly the same physical response.'

Roxy tended to be a bit more romantic than that, but the connections were still there to be made. Shortly after the release of Stranded, Bryan Ferry talked about his love of the metaphysical poet John Donne: 'All these gay blades getting up to this incredible hanky panky when they were young - but who at the same time wrote very moving love poetry until they ultimately approached religion with the same fanatical zeal.'

This live version of 'Psalm' is from a German television appearance, complete with false start. It lasts nine minutes and it has a hypnotic beauty.

And this brings us to the end of glam week, where we have previously enjoyed Cockney Rebel, Eno and the Winkies, Another Pretty Face, Space Waltz, the Glitter Band and the Sweet. But this has merely scratched a glittery surface - I shall return at some future point.

Glam - The Sweet

Like the Glitter Band, the Sweet were a very underrated band. They weren't the best songwriters, but they were a damn fine live act who could deliver the songs of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn with some conviction.

This is a live studio performance of 'Teenage Rampage', their 1974 hit single, which makes the point perfectly - aiming at heavy rock, they came out closer to garage punk.

Glam - The Glitter Band

The Glitter Band were a much better group than is generally credited. And they evolved rather splendidly. The first album, Hey! (1974) was the stomping one, with 'Angel Face' on it, while the second, Rock 'n' Roll Dudes (1975) was the power-pop one, with 'Goodbye My Love'. And the third, Listen to the Band (1975) was the confused masterpiece, a wonderfully diverse collection of styles from the Spector-esque ballad 'Alone Again' to the funk of 'Makes You Blind'. It also has the magnificent 'The Tears I Cried'.

Best of all, Listen to the Band opened with this song, 'Where Have You Been?', on which they try their luck with a five-and-a-half-minute multi-movement sci-fi space opera. It's far and away the most adventurous thing they tried and it's great fun. Really, it's very good. And the Glitter Band were a fantastic group.

Glam - Space Waltz

Glam rock was focused almost entirely in London and New York. The musicians may have originated elsewhere, but to be successful they pretty much had to migrate to the two big cities. Spare a thought then for the aspiring glamster in New Zealand, stranded about as far away as they could be from Glam Central.

Space Waltz were fronted by Alastair Riddell, a singer and songwriter who displayed more than a touch of Bowie in his swooning sci-fi lullabies. Potentially they were very good indeed, though no one noticed much at the time: it took thirty years for their solitary album to be released beyond their homeland.

This is their debut TV appearance, on New Zealand's New Faces show in 1974. I know they look a bit like a fictional rock group created by the director of a Play For Today, but stick with it and there's a killer chorus in there.

Glam - Another Pretty Face

When researching my book about glam, one of the great pleasures was discovering music I'd never heard before. And best of all was hearing Another Pretty Face. (Not to be confused with the later Another Pretty Face, who were British and featured a pre-Waterboys Mike Scott ).

I wrote about the original APF on my previous blog and shall repost below my original comments. Here they are with 'The Great American Candy Bar Debate' from 1973:

And here are my comments from 2013:

When I was going through some old music papers a few years back, I came across a couple of one-sentence mentions in 1974 editions of the Melody Maker to an American band called Another Pretty Face. The reports simply mentioned that they covered songs by T. Rex and Roxy Music and noted that 'The lead singer imitates David Bowie depresingly well.' As far as I'm aware, this was their sole coverage in the British music press.

And then I found their album 21st Century Rock. As a neglected work of glam genius, it's in a class of its own. Recorded in 1973, it wasn't even released until 2004. Which might make you worry that it's going to be a ragged collection of demos and lo-fi live recordings. It's nothing of the sort - it's a fully fledged, lavishly produced, perfectly sequenced nine-track masterpiece.

To start with, those Bowie comparisons are perhaps inevitable. Particularly if you're going to open proceedings with a seven-minute epic titled 'Planet Earth' that uses science fiction imagery to explore sexuality. But the singer and main writer Terry Roth (known throughout as T. Roth, maybe in tribute to Bolan's band) is no copyist. 

Nor does he sit on the fence. One of the stand-out songs is 'Little Boys', which spells out its agenda in unmistakeable fashion:

People always say I only do this for the money
or I do it for the mass adoration.
Then there are the ones who assume I'm crazy
or I'm doing it for gay liberation.
No, not me, I don't want these joys -
I only do it for the little boys.

This is accompanied, it should be said, by a wonderfully trashy bit of rock with early-1960s backing vocals of the 'bop-sho-wop' variety, in a way that the New York Dolls would recognize, had they not been so addicted to garage guitars and had they enjoyed the services of a more sympathetic producer. (The man responsible here is Ed Stasium, shortly to work with the likes of the Ramones and Talking Heads.)

Elsewhere the music veers between the swaggering horn-riffing Stones-rock of 'Stuck On You' to the Cockney Rebel posing of 'Girl Crazy'. Without deviating too far from the basic blueprint of classic rock, driven by the melodic guitar of Rob Nevitte, each song retains its own identity, assisted by guest musicians, so that there's always some variation on the keyboard textures.

I'm not sure about the Roxy Music connection mentioned in that Melody Maker reference, but the bonus tracks here (also produced by Stasium) include a cover of T. Rex's 'Get It On' (under its American title 'Bang a Gong'), which is fun if a little too faithful. The only other cover is 'Da Doo Ron Ron' with the gender of the subject unchanged.

This is as good as American rock got in the 1970s, dominated by Roth's arrogantly confident vocal performance. Perhaps, though, he was the problem. At a time when even Bowie was seen as too gay for mainstream America, Roth was never going to achieve the stardom he deserved. So, better late than never, this is the best glam album you never heard. And in case you don't take my word for it, the sleeve notes feature tributes by David Fricke and Lenny Kaye, who ought to know - 'cute and deadly,' says the latter.