Oh, You Pretty Things: Queering Pop Music in the 70s & 80s
by Dr Louise
Chambers
If you think
you are starved of queer ‘role models’ in 2014, cast your minds back 45 years
and imagine what life was like at the end of the 1960s: we were still
experiencing the last vestiges of the Hays Code (1), so all lesbian and gay
characters in the cinema were condemned to die, go mad, or go to prison. TV was
no better, with the occasional camp, effeminate character appearing as a way of
laughing at gay men. Think of John Inman’s ‘Mr Humphries’ in Are You Being
Served, which began airing in 1972; Melvyn Hayes as ‘Gloria Beaumont’ in It
Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974); Larry Grayson’s talk show, Shut That Door, which
began life in 1972 (2). Elsewhere, however, something was stirring and that ‘something’
began to emerge at the beginning of the 1970s, as the optimism that accompanied
the seemingly endless ‘summer of love’ in the late 60s gave way to the depression
of the early 70s.
‘Lady Stardust’
I think the
first time I was aware of sexual ambiguity in pop music was when I listened to Lady
Stardust on David Bowie’s album, Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars. It
was 1972 and I was 15 years old.
The lyric
included the lines:
Femme
fatales emerged from shadows
To watch
this creature fair
Boys stood
upon their chairs
To make
their point of view
I smiled
sadly for a love I could not obey...
Marc Bolan |
The song was
about Marc Bolan - the singer and founder-member of hippy-turned-glitter band,
T.Rex - and I must say I felt similarly about the elfin-like singer with the
ethereal voice. It’s not often that I think of men as ‘beautiful’ but then I
don’t think Marc Bolan was really ‘a man’ in the conventional sense. He had
long, beautiful, ‘corkscrew’ hair, and fine, almost feline features; his feet
were so small that he wore women’s shoes and, in the fashion of the time, his
clothes could have been worn equally (but not, perhaps, equally as well) by
most women. Bowie’s love for Bolan was manifest, not just from the Ziggy sessions,
but also in the subsequent Aladdin Sane album, whose track Prettiest Star was
about Marc Bolan (3); any further doubts were removed by listening to the lyric
to All the Young Dudes, a song penned by Bowie for the then-struggling Mott the
Hoople. “Who needs TV when I got T.Rex?” sang Ian Hunter, although I was never
sure if the straight, white Hunter ever knew what he was singing about.
Of course,
Bowie went on to pen lyrics such as: ‘Got your mother in whirl/She’s not sure
if you’re a boy or a girl’ (Rebel, Rebel) and ‘If you want it, boys/Get it here
then’ (Sweet Thing), both of which appeared on the 1974 opus, Diamond Dogs, but
by then camp and sexual ambiguity had been well established through four years
of ‘glam’ rock bands.
As for Bowie
himself: if Bolan was from Middle-earth, Bowie came from another planet entirely;
with his differently-coloured eyes, other-worldly clothes and ambivalent
sexuality, we were left wondering: if the Spiders came from Mars, where in the
Universe did Bowie spring from? Bowie wore make-up, glitter and fabulous,
colourful costumes, whose designs negated any attempts at gendering. Some of my
favourite outfits (see below) were produced by Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto
for the Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane tours in 1972 and 1974.
Yamamoto costumes for the Ziggy Stardust & Aladdin Sane Tours |
Of course,
there was lots of conjecture at school (and in the press, of course) about Bowie’s
sexuality and my class broadly fell into two camps (if you’ll pardon the pun),
with some people expressing homophobic attitudes, whilst others embraced this
new attitude towards sex/uality by wearing make-up and trying to imitate
Bowie’s style. “I like people who are... AC/DC, know what I mean?”, as one fan
famously put it in the 1973 documentary, Cracked Actor (4), referring to
Bowie’s rumoured status as bisexual. Meanwhile, I stuck up Aladdin Sane posters
in my bedroom and fantasised about wearing those outfits in public... So, where
on earth did they come from?
The gods
only knew why Glam appeared when it did. I was dimly aware of a couple of songs
that had charted in 1971 because I had started to take an interest in the pop
charts. Jeepster by T.Rex had made the no.2 spot by the end of that year, and a
bunch of former skinheads, now glammed up with tons of glitter and calling
themselves Slade, had a no.1 hit with the deliberately misspelt, Cos I Luv You.
According to Barney Hoskins (1998) Glam was the shot in the arm that music
needed, exploding into the vacuum left by the Beatles, but also (perhaps) as a
reaction to the pompous, po-faced, straight-laced art rock that typified bands
like Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake & Palmer and other
‘album bands’ that looked down on ‘singles bands’ as though they were the
lowest form of life. Glam was about stardom, celebrity, fame, superficiality,
plasticity and androgyny. It was also all those girlie things that the macho, ‘hard’
rock and prog bands seemed to despise: glitter, make-up, feather boas; bright,
pastel colours; flamboyant outfits, platform soles and stacked heels; boys
could wear their girlfriends’ clothes and make-up and vice versa. Most of all,
it was about producing cheap, disposable 45s: those gorgeous little black discs
that contained two songs, one on each side, both of which lasted less than
three minutes; they ran at 45 rpm and cost 45p. Glam put the gay in pop music,
before gay and camp became synonymous. As Hoskyns (1998: 6) put it: “[Glam]
said flaunt it if you’ve got it, and if you haven’t got it, fake it – make it
up with make-up, cover it up with stardust, reinvent yourself as a Martian
androgyne.”
“She could kill you with a wink of her eye” - Steve Priest (The Sweet) 1973 |
Of course,
from an historical perspective, it’s worth noting that the first gay march in
London took place in 1970 and the first Gay Pride Rally in the same city was in
the summer of 1972, when Glam was really getting established as a musical force
to be reckoned with.
A Walk on
the Wild Side
Maybe it
also had something to do with Andy Warhol: Bowie was certainly enamoured of the
Factory during the late ‘60s and a eulogy to Warhol himself appeared on the
Hunky Dory album in 1971. Glam certainly embraced the trash aesthetic, but it
did it with a smile and with the ‘wink of an eye’ and we loved it because it
entertained us in the way that pop music is supposed to. Furthermore it was incredibly
subversive: yes, there was that famous moment when Bowie went down on Mick
Ronson’s guitar on Top Of The Pops in 1973, but Glam was subversive in so many other
ways: it blurred the divide between straight and queer; it allowed us to play
with make-up and clothing in way that no other musical genre had allowed and it
introduced us to ‘chroniclers of perversion’ like Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. It may
be hard to believe now, but for this genderQueer teenager growing up in the
quiet seaside town of Worthing in the early ‘70s, Walk On The Wild Side, with
its stories of Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, was an absolutely revelation
and truly life altering. Changing sex was no longer a dream: Glam held out the
possibility of making it a reality.
It didn’t
last of course; Glam was very quickly commodified. Let’s be honest, it was designed for commodification, and by 1973, Bowie had already seen the writing on the wall, ‘killing’ his Ziggy persona and eventually developing a more rock-oriented sound on the 1974 album, Diamond Dogs. By 1975, he had abandoned rock music altogether, as he embraced disco and became the first white male singer to appear on the US TV show, Soul Train. Other bands, like the brilliant Roxy Music and the hugely popular Slade, were imploding, and even T.Rex were failing to reach the number one spot as 1974 drew to a close. In any event, one of the last of the Glam wannabies, the New York Dolls, were transmuting into Something Else as their manager and mentor, Malcolm McClaren, realised there was a new kid on the blockand its name was Punk.
Ballroom
Blitz to the Blitz Kids
‘There is
old wave, there is new wave and there is David Bowie.’ (5)
Now, if I
was still a Marxist, I could offer you a neat piece of dialectic materialism at
this point. If 60s Bubblegum Pop was the thesis and Hard Rock the anti-thesis,
then Glam would be the synthesis. If Hard Rock was the thesis and Glam the anti-thesis,
then Punk was the synthesis. And if Glam was the thesis, and Punk the
anti-thesis, then surely the New Romantics were the synthesis…or perhaps the synthesisers?
Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved punk with a passion, but gods, it was so depressing
and everyone was so badly dressed. Fortunately, a change was in the offing, as
we began to experience the first sounds of a movement that became known as ‘the
New Romantics’.
Marilyn |
Bowie was
hugely influential. By 1976, the Thin White Duke had decamped to Berlin and was
experimenting with electronic music (influenced himself no doubt by Krautrock
and bands like Kraftwerk, Can, Faust, Amon Düül and Tangerine Dream). In 1977
and 1978, Bowie released two entirely electronic albums (Low and Heroes
respectively) and toured them with huge success (I know because I was at one of
the sold out Earls Court gigs in 1978 and people loved the new music as well as
the old). At the same time, there were electronic stirrings on the margins of
punk, as bands like Ultravox!, Tubeway Army, The Human League, Dalek I Love
You, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark began to emerge. If Glam was
dominated by the sound of guitars, the New Romantic instrument of choice was
the synthesiser. According to legend, New Romanticism grew out of Bowie and
Roxy Music nights in London and Birmingham, with the London nights eventually
decamping to the Blitz Club in Covent Garden as they became more popular. Steve
Strange (later to form Visage) was on the door, encouraging would-be pundits to
dress as creatively and flamboyantly as possible, whilst two of the cloakroom attendants
would later re-model themselves as Boy George (George O’Dowd) and Marilyn
(Peter Robinson). As David Rimmer (2003: 12) noted:
“Strange is
working the door, as he does every Tuesday, changing his look week by week:
from leather jodhpurs and Nazi greatcoat to knee breeches, sash silver-topped
cane to clownish, white-faced Pierrot.”
It could be
argued that Steve Strange and the Blitz Kids’ appearance in the video to
Bowie’s 1980 hit, Ashes to Ashes propelled the ‘Blitz Kids’ (later the New
Romantics) into the mainstream, but by then the Human League, Ultravox, Classix
Nouveaux, Visage (the band fronted by Steve Strange), and Orchestral Manoeuvres
were all achieving some success with singles and album releases. At the end of 1980,
Phil Oakey had replaced two of the guys in the Human League with two female
singers and switched from a fairly dour sound to a much lighter and more
accessible synthpop. The Blitz Kids had also been featured in Stepping Out in
London, a documentary about the club, produced by Lyndall Hobbs. The film supported
Alien in British cinemas, so it had a guaranteed audience. Meanwhile, Malcom McLaren
(yes, him again) persuaded failed punk band Adam & the Ants to redefine themselves
and adopt a more Romantic style (Lord Byron being the primary point of reference),
and then enticed the band away to form Bow Wow Wow, leaving Adam himself (now
sporting the outfit of a slightly effete pirate) to recreate the Ants as
New-Romantics- With-More-Than-A-Soupcon-Of-Native American. He enjoyed 3
consecutive hit singles in 1981, together with a number album (Kings of the
Wild Frontier).
Another
factor, I think, was the establishment of MTV in 1981. Queen (themselves
jumping rather belatedly on the Glamwagon) had pioneered pop videos and,
arguably, the phenomenon that was Bohemian Rhapsody, was both the first and
probably one of the greatest pop videos of all time. By 1981, music videos
(many created to look like short films), produced to accompany newly-released singles,
were almost de rigueur. Adam & the Ants, Eurhythmics, Culture Club, Duran
Duran all had videos featured on MTV and Adam Ant, Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon
(the latter from Duran Duran) were invited in as guest ‘VJs’ on the channel.
There’s no doubting the importance of MTV: whilst radio stations might promote
the music, MTV promoted The Look.
The Blitz
Club did not just attract people who liked dressing up and dancing to
synth-pop. On any night you might see Zandra Rhodes or Nicky Halsam, whilst
Derek Jarman and Jasper Conran ‘might be upstairs in the restaurant’ (Rimmer,
2003). The Club was a magnet for every wannabe fashion designer and art student
in London. Furthermore, if gender confusion was one of the ‘hallmarks’ of Glam
rock, cross-dressing was undoubtedly a hallmark for the New Romantics: “When
New Romantic finally made its move from margins to pop mainstream, Top Of The Pops
was once again full of gender benders... But in a way New Romantic never
strayed too far from pantomime and the staples of drag performance... As Boy
George would eventually put it, accepting an American Grammy award when Culture
Club were voted Best Newcomers in 1984: ‘Thank you, America. You have taste,
style and you know a good drag queen when you see one’." (Rimmer, 2003)
Ok, so the
clothes were flamboyant, the powder and paint was laid on thick and androgyny
was once again the position of choice, but there was one big difference between
Glam Rock and the New Romantics: many of the people fronting bands belonging to
the latter category were no longer faking their sexuality. There was always
rumour and conjecture around the sexualities of Bowie, Bolan and others on the
Glamwagon, but there was less need for rumour when singers like Marc Almond
(Soft Cell), Boy George (Culture Club), Steve Strange (Visage) and others were more
open about adopting queer sexualities. For me (and no doubt for many others)
Boy George’s first appearance on Top Of the Pops in 1982, performing Do You
Really Wanna Hurt Me? was a complete wonder: Lou Reed may have sang about
someone who ‘Shaved her legs/Then he was a she’, but Boy George was actually
doing it. And so was Marilyn, whose Calling Your Name single reached no.4 in 1983.
And for me, searching with my friends around the myriad boutiques and
secondhand clothes shops in Brighton, for something glamorous enough to wear to
the weekly New Romantics Night at Sherry’s Showbar, I finally had the chance to
go out in full make-up and fancy clothes without worrying about getting beaten
up. For a couple of years, I was free to wear pretty much anything I wanted.
But alas, the Scene was short-lived and reminded me of a line from a movie
(Blade Runner, 1982) released during those enlightened times:
“The light
that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very,
very brightly.”
Boy George, Culture Club - Top of the Pops, 1982 |
So, our
enlightenment may have been shortlived, and of course many bands (Ultravox, Adam
& The Ants, Depeche Mode, Japan, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, to name but a
few) jumped on the Glamwagon, but for a moment there, we were all free to wear
what we liked (provided it was sufficiently ‘creative’), drink what we liked,
wear as much make-up as we liked and - to some extent - have sex with whomever
we liked, and no-one cared. Oh, and we all had a great time because, like Glam rock
before it, the music was fun, entertaining and we could dance to it.
Now, I
should finish with a note of caution. For all its celebration of androgyny and ‘gender-bending’,
both Glam and the New Romantics were about the boys. There isn’t one single
example – in either genre – of women enjoying the kinds of success enjoyed by
the boys. What about Suzi Quatro? You cry... or Alison Moyet (Yazoo) and Annie Lennox
(Eurhythmics)? Well, ok, there are a couple of exceptions, but for the most
part, this is about boys challenging norms about masculinity in general and
heteronormative masculinity in particular – lesbian and bisexual women are
almost completely absent from these Scenes.
Where do we
look for the next wave of Glam and androgyny?
Crossplaying ‘The Joker’ |
If you were
looking for a new ‘scene’ at the beginning of 1990, you would be looking in vain.
Nothing happened in 2000 either – in fact, with the exception of a few radical
bands (like the Riot Grrrl and Queercore lesbian scenes) there’s precious
little queerness to celebrate in mainstream music. So where have all the Pretty
Things gone? I was having a conversation with a student (Martine) about this
the other day: she was telling me about ‘Cosplay’ and suddenly it struck me: if
you want to look for gender-bending, cross-dressing, androgyny and fluid
sexualities, forget pop music, which has become soooo conventionally heteronormative
– look elsewhere. ‘Cosplay’ (costume play) is an activity that used to be enjoyed
by a handful of people – usually dismissed as ‘geeks’ or freaks – and often
seen only at comic book conventions and other gatherings of fans of super
heroes and SF television and movies. However, Cosplay these days seems to be a
broader mix of fangirls and boys, plus people who write fan fiction or slash
fiction (6), plus (of course) the geeks of legend. Martine said that both girls
and boys enjoy dressing, and cross-dressing (aka ‘crossplay’), as their favourite
(super)heroes, regardless of gender and, when they are dressed, ‘anything
goes’. She says that most of her friends identify as bisexual and part of the
fun of Cosplay is acting out slash fiction scenarios with other ‘characters’.
Cosplay has also gone beyond superheroes, embracing any form of fiction, including
characters from fantasy (Game of Thrones and the Harry Potter franchise are very
popular), video games (Supermario, World Of Warcraft, Skyrim, Fallout etc), anime/manga,
as well as science fiction and comic books.
From the Gaultier Collection, 2013 |
Meanwhile, Bowie’s
influence can still be seen in 2013... The Victoria & Albert Museum in London
recently curated a hugely successful exhibition of Bowie’s clothes and other paraphernalia
and this has now gone out on a World Tour. Also, check out the Spring/Summer
2013 collection by Jean Paul Gaultier!. If you live in the UK, you’ve missed
the V&A exhibition, so you might need to travel somewhere else (maybe catch
the next Virgin flight to the Moon?) to relive those old glam memories.
Sources:
Camille
Bacon-Smith (1991) Enterprising Women.
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Barney
Hoskyns (1998) Glam! Faber & Faber.
Dave Rimmer
(2003) The Look. Omnibus Press.
Carola
Katharina Bauer (2012) Naughty Girls & Gay Male Romance/Porn. Anchor
Academic Publishing.
Notes:
1. A ‘voluntary code’, introduced in 1929, that effectively banned any and all ‘positive portrayals’ of lesbian/gay characters and storylines in the movie industry in general and Hollywood in particular.
2. For some reason, the folks that make TV chat shows seem to like fronting them with gay men – Graham Norton and Alan Carr are at the end of a long line of gay talkshow hosts...
3. In fact, Bolan played on the original recording of the song back in 1970. The producer Tony Visconti later said, “David…loved Marc – he was probably more in love with Marc than Marc was in love with him.” (Hoskyns, 1998: 10)
4. You can watch the documentary here, if you have time: http://vimeo.com/63032664 (it's just over 53 mins long).
5. RCA marketing strapline advertising Bowie’s Heroes album in 1978.
2. For some reason, the folks that make TV chat shows seem to like fronting them with gay men – Graham Norton and Alan Carr are at the end of a long line of gay talkshow hosts...
3. In fact, Bolan played on the original recording of the song back in 1970. The producer Tony Visconti later said, “David…loved Marc – he was probably more in love with Marc than Marc was in love with him.” (Hoskyns, 1998: 10)
4. You can watch the documentary here, if you have time: http://vimeo.com/63032664 (it's just over 53 mins long).
5. RCA marketing strapline advertising Bowie’s Heroes album in 1978.
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