2 September 1972: Bowie is the central figure in the new glamour-based musical style that fuses 1950s nostalgia and the superstar image
Britain’s first purpose-built rock arena will open in Manchester today. It cost £250,000 to build, can be converted from a concert hall for 3,000 to a discotheque for 1,500, includes five bars and a restaurant and will be called the Hard Rock.
But the normal brouhaha for the opening of such a place has been completely submerged by the sudden wave of fame which has enveloped the singer who will top the bill on the first night. David Bowie is not just a singer. He is a trained mime-artist, a songwriter, one of the most gifted musical producers who ever mixed a tape and is perhaps the central figure in the new glamour-based musical style which is known as glam rock. It involves sequined, gleaming suits, spiky hair, and high-heeled boots; a stage presentation which ranges from Rod Stewart’s hypnotic swinging of a 6ft chrome microphone stand, to Alice Cooper’s destruction of doll babies on stage to the balletic rock event which Mancunians will see tonight.
Three sell-out concerts at the Rainbow in August stunned and enthralled a crowd which had gone to hear music and were presented with a mime troupe, light show, film backdrop and scaffolded stage through which Bowie moved in an astronaut suit of sequins and later in a red T-shirt which buttoned discreetly at the crotch. It could be seen that although he had the skinny, hairless chest of the modern superstar, he sported the wide muscled legs of a professional dancer.
All this was conducted in an aura of camp; wings of sparkling eye makeup, lipstick and sullen, butch looks at the audience whose own parade was a show in itself. A self-avowed bisexual, Bowie has become the showbiz standard-bearer for the gay and drag scene in London, and they came, a parade of queens to celebrate the crown prince of glam rock. But Bowie’s audience is wider than that, so much wider that he and the glam rock movement have become a sociological phenomenon of major significance for those who still use the flagging phrase, “the Youth Movement.”
Back in 1969 and early 1970, the youth and musical cultures in Britain were dominated by a middle-class student-oriented, peace and revolution style for which Woodstock was the psychic Camelot. And then came the skinheads, a genuine proletarian manifestation which brought real violence, not the vicarious heroisms of the Vietcong, to the youth culture. The British youth movement went into something of a catatonic trance at this point – a trance paralleled in America after the savagery of the Altamont concert of December, 1969, and the awareness and fear of domestic death at Kent State in May, 1970.
The music market splintered into several different styles, representing the break-up of the youth coalition. Some, prodded by the apocalyptic implications of the ecology boom, dropped out into the country and listened to country rock. Pioneered by Dylan with Nashville Skyline, the country life, working boots and dungarees and primitive grubbiness of the dropout scene was reflected in the success of groups like The Band and quiet singers like James Taylor. In Britain, the skinheads and the young blacks pushed their own reggae sound and the intellectuals stayed with their cerebral, electronic moon-rock which had bid fair to become the norm since Sergeant Pepper and the Pink Floyd’s first hit, Arnold Layne.
But glam rock is fusing these disparate groups back together, Jagger, diabolic superstar, had always pointed this way. But others followed the path on – and perhaps back – to glamour, to showbiz. Elvis himself appeared this year in Las Vegas, white jumpsuits or skin-fitting black leather, wooing the mic and falling to his knees, recalling the tearful crooner Johnny Ray. Rod Stewart, bovver-boy hair and high heels, the new Flash Harry who used a stage for strutting, became big in Britain. Entertainment was back, after years when the synthesised studio performance had held sway, live, visible concerts, small affairs where the artist could be seen, became the rock arena.
And suddenly the 45rpm singles record market revived. Every expert had said it could not happen, that with affluence and stereos, the long playing albums and the tapes would take over the record shops completely. But the bovver-boys knew different. And so did the teenyboppers. The rock intellectuals with their headphones and £2 albums had held an unwarranted control for too long. Singles, style, and superstars came back. Marc Bolan upped and out of the underground with its small but appreciative market to have his face silk-screened on to pillowcases as the teenyboppers’ heart throb. Yes, heart throb. Even the word had been revived. The romantic magazine True Confessions and True Romance became camp. The intellectuals gave up and joined in the celebration of the 1950s, the glamour of the stars. The Hard Rock Cafe, with the decor of a 1950s drug store, was the trendy place to go and Last Picture Show was the film to see.
And now to put this all together, the nostalgia for the 1950s and the superstar image, came the exotic cheap thrills of David Bowie. He knows them all, all the sectors of culture. He used to be a mod in the early 1960s, flashing around south London like Marc Bolan, all the new clothes and the dancing alone. You had to be cool in those days. Then came his time in mime, he got to know the intellectuals, listened to the songs of Jacques Brel.
But now he has found the message to go along with the media he is starting to dominate. Technology, spacemen, the stars and some exotic apocalyptic culture. “Five years, that is all we’ve got,” he sings on his album which joggles for the number one spot with those other glam rock artists, Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper and Roxy Music. The album is called The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the spiders from Mars and he throws in lines from Brel, from Judy Garland. He plays a 12-string acoustic guitar for a chunkier sound and tells us that there is a “Starman waiting in the sky,” while ramming home the realities of Earth. “Tony went to fight in Belfast, Rudi stayed at home to starve.”
And after Manchester, and after producing more records for a former underground group called Mott the Hoople, whose latest Bowie-written, Bowie produced single has zoomed into the charts, he will try out his 1950s style and camp technology on the Americans. “I’m not content to be a rock and roll star all my life,” he says. “I’ve got on to other things, great massive plans for the future.” The confidence of the superstar, but as Ziggy Stardust, he sings of the doubts as well as the pride: “He was the nazz with God-given ass, he took it all too far but boy could he play guitar.”
