Music Archives - Martin's Booklog

Shock and Awe — Simon Reynolds

Published on August 25, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Shock and Awe

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy
Simon Reynolds
687 pages including notes and index
published in 2016

Shock and Awe came out the same year David Bowie died, which seems fitting. Bowie after all being glam rock’s most enduring legacy. He had only been a one hit wonder with a couple of unsuccessful albums before he went glam. Ziggy Stardust was what made him famous. Playing a fictional rock star lead to becoming a real rock star, something of a theme in glam rock if Simon Reynolds is to believed. Fake till you make it, something Bowie’s biggest rival, Marc Bolan, also did. Glam rock as make believe, artificial, fake, camp and proud of it. Music for a new generation of pop fans, tired of their older brother’s “Beatles and the Stones” and looking for something more fashionable and cool than earnest long hairs in jeans doing interminable guitar solos. As its name implies, glam rock bought the glamour and excitement back to pop music, brought back a certain sophistication that was more rooted in European music traditions than American blues. An element of snobbery and intellectual disdain certainly was present too with Bowie and Bolan and especially with Bryan Fery’s Roxy Music.

Yet the defining image of glam rock is probably something like this: ugly old blokes in outlandish costumes doing well choreographed danceable foot stompers. Mud, Sweet, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter, Slade, Alvin Stardust and Wizzard all fit that profile. Artists that had been around the block already, plugging away with little or no success, markedly older than their audience unlike the previous generation of rock stars, who realised that what Bolan and Bowie were doing they could do as well. The image was as important as the music and the music was often somewhat interchangeable, not helped by the fact that e.g. Mud and Sweet shared the same song writers. Intensely popular in the early seventies, it all looked incredibly naff afterwards as punk hit the UK.

Yet there was more to glam rock than this, as Reynolds attempts to show in Shock and Awe. The starting gun for the whole glam rock movement was T.Rex’s first appearance on Top of the Pops in February 1971 and Reynolds also starts his book there, with Marc Bolan, chronicling how he evolved from a fairly standard hippie rocker into the most glamorous pop star of the seventies. Bolan started it, but it’s his friend and rival Bowie who is the red thread holding Shock and Awe together, his evolution as an artist driving the evolution of glam rock in a certain sense. Every third or fourth chapter he pops up again with the next stage in his development, from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke and finally his Berlin period.

In between there are chapters on the other strands of glam rock. Not just the foot stompers like Mud and Sweet, but also Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, Sparks, Queen, Roxy Music, Steve Harley and even The Sensational Alex Harvey Band are examined. There are also the David Bowie proteges: Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, already established artists getting a glam makeover courtesy of Bowie and finding some success through it they lacked before. A diverse bunch of artists, who outside of the Mud-Sweet-Glitter axis have little in common musically, yet certain elements can be found in all of them.

The fashion and the image consciousness of all of them is the most obvious of course. Each rejected the long hair and jeans looks of the older bands, going for a more glamorous, more outre look. A certain androgyny was part and parcel of this. Makeup and glitter, feminised clothing, a bit of sexual ambiguity can be found in most of these bands, though actual gay or even bisexual artists were rare. A sense of nostalgia, or looking back at older forms of rock music was also there, getting away from the ‘heaviness’ rock had evolved in by the early seventies. Ironically, this while their main audience was the so-called third generation of rock fans, young teenagers who hadn’t been alive for that first wave of rock they reached back to. There is also a heavy influence of older European music forms in many of these artists, especially with Roxy Music and of course Bowie.

Reynolds follows the story of glam rock until the late seventies, ending with David Bowie’s Berlin triology of albums: Heroes, Low and Lodger, in the process tracing the influences glam had on punk. The last chapter is a collection of moments in pop music showcasing glam’s continuing influence on pop and rock. This is the least convincing or interesting part of the book to be honest. At some point glam just becomes another part of the whole rock tradition and I’m not sure you could call Lady Gaga ‘glam’ just because she also dressed up or whatever.

The real test of any music book is always if it makes you want to listen to what it is about and Shock and Awe certainyl managed that. I’ve been on a Bowie/T.Rex/Roxy Music/New York Dolls kick ever since I started it. A good, very readable look at a perhaps still underestimated part of rock history.

More Simon Reynolds: Rip it Up and Start Again on the post-punk revolution.

Power in the Darkness — Wiebren Rijkeboer

Published on February 5, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Power in the Darkness

Power in the Darkness: Britse Postpunk en New Wave
Wiebren Rijkeboer
213 pages
published in 2022

If you judge a book about music on how much it makes you want to listen to the music it’s talking about, Power in the Darkness was a huge success. After reading it I spent weeks going through my post-punk and new wave album, while also looking for some of the artists that were new to me Wiebren championed in its pages. Not that I needed much encouragement: this is part of the music I grew up with, background noise growing up as a kid in the eighties. If I wasn’t old enough nor cool enough to have bought the singles myself, at least I knew them from their appearances on the Dutch equivalent of Radio 2. Wiebren Rijkeboer, born in 1959, a decade and a half before me, on the other hand is old enough to know the bands covered first hand and that comes through in the book.

Power in the Darkness‘s structure is quite simple: a short introduction that lays out the parameters of the project, followed by a chronological look at some eighty-five post-punk and new wave albums released between 1978 and 1993, each by a different band. It starts in 1978 with the Buzzcocks’ Another Music in a Different Kitchen because punk’s definitively dead by then and ends in 1993 with East Village’s Drop Out for less obvious reasons, roughly where Britpop took over. Geographically Wiebren’s focus is limited to the UK and Ireland (and forgive the Dutch habit of calling this all British in the title). He also limits himself to bands, so no Elvis Costello or Ian Dury here. This is very much a personal project, a sampler of what post-punk and new wave have to offer, not the ultimate guide. As you may expect, the emphasis is on the years 1979 to 1982, with a long tail through the rest of the eighties and early nineties.

Each album discussion is only a few pages long, in which Wiebren introduces the band and context in which it was made, gives a quick impression of what it sounds like and takes a quick look at the band’s other noteworthy releases. Most of postpunk’s usual suspects are there: Buzzcocks, the Fall, Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, but there are also some much less well known bands mentioned. Doll by Doll, The Records, Cowboys International, Random Hold: all new to me. Always a good thing when a book can introduce you to new to you artists and give you enough context to know whether or not you’ll enjoy them.

Genre wise, the boundaries of post-punk are not very strictly guarded here. A lot of gothic acts like The Mission, Sex Gang Children and Sisters of Mercy creep in here as well, though Wiebren calls them ‘positive punk’ which, no. Post 1985 as well what makes the featured acts post-punk or new wave becomes a bit less clear too. The Stone Roses or Primal Scream don’t quite fit in here, if obviously inspired by the earlier bands.

In all, if you can read Dutch and have a limited knowledge about post-punk and the period in which it was dominant, this is a good introduction. There are no obvious omissions nor anything included that clearly shouldn’t have been. You could listen to worse music than the albums featured here.

The Dark Reign of Gothic Rock — Dave Thompson

Published on February 3, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Dark Reign of Gothic Rock

The Dark Reign of Gothic Rock
Dave Thompson
283 pages including chronology
published in 2002

The mark of a good book about any kind of music to me is if it makes me want to listen to the music it’s about. In the case of The Dark Reign of Gothic Rock, I started listening to a lot more Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy and Love and Rockets. Genre overviews are always hard to write, but Dave Thompson managed to do quite well, largely by sticking to the original wave of goth bands.

Gothic rock has always had a bit of a naff reputation, but in the early eighties, when bands like the Cure and Bauhaus started to develop the genre, it made sense as a logical extension of punk and post-punk. The use of synthesisers, dark lyrics and a sombre, depressing musical style fitted the times perfectly. This was after all at the height of the Cold War, when any moment could see the annihilation of human civilisation, while in the UK Thatcher was busy dismantling the welfare state and the country’s industry while three million were already on the dole.

Of course goth rock didn’t spring fully formed from Zeus’ brow in 1982 and Dave Thompson does a good job showing some of the deep roots of the genre, as well as providing the context in which it came to fruition in the early eighties. He makes clear just where a post punk band like Joy Division, which had some of the elements that would pop up in gothic rock, differs from actual gothic bands. You may not always agree with him of course, but I don’t think he made too many controversal choices.

That done, he sets out to follow the core goth bands through the eighties. There’s of course the Cure and Bauhaus, as well as the successor projects once Bauhaus ended, not to mention The Mission and the Sisters of Mercy. Beside those, there are also slightly lesser known bands like The Birthday Party, Gene Loves Jezebel, Love and Rockets, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and Alien Sex Fiend, amongst others. Perhaps the most controversial inclusion here might be Southern Death Cult/The Cult, which did start out Gothic but may be judged not to stay Gothic. Personally I don’t mind their inclusion as I would’ve done the same myself.

For somebody like me, fond of Gothic music but not that knowledgeable about the genre or its history, this was an interesting introduction, but I can see that it was no more than that. Thompson’s decision to largely stick to the British Gothic bands of the eighties and not look further means that a lot hasn’t been covered, but also gave this book a coherence it might otherwise have lacked.

Rip it Up and Start Again – Simon Reynolds

Published on January 26, 2008

Cover of Rip it Up and Start Again

Rip it Up and Start Again
Simon Reynolds
416 pages including index
published in 2005

I’ve been looking for Rip it Up and Start Again in my local library ever since I got seriously interested in the whole post-punk phenomenon some two, three years ago. It had been namechecked by a lot of post-punk enthusiasts on music blogs and the like, so it was with some anticipation that I started reading. Fortunately, it didn’ disappoint me. Rip it Up and Start Again is an excellent overview of the response to punk in the half decade after the first wave of punk bands had crashed and burned.

Punk itself had gotten started around 1975, evolving out of raw rock bands like The Stooges, New York Dolls and MC5, through the New York club scene that produced the Ramones and finally landing in the UK where punk was embraced as a backlash against the dinosaur rock and prog rock indulgences of the mid-seventies. By the end of ’77, ’78 however, just as the general public became aware of it, punk had already exploded, with the Sex Pistols disbanding, The Clash selling out to Columbia and the Buzzcocks losing their lead singer. In the meantime a whole host of imitators had sprung up, with lesser and greater talent, mostly imitating what these three bands had done a year earlier, stultifying punk. But there were also other artists who took inspiration from the energy and d.i.y. approach of punk to go their own way: these were the artists that would make post-punk.

Post-punk as a label for a particular kind of music is therefore almost meaningless. For an approach to music however, it makes more sense. This of course makes it harder to define what is and isn’t post-punk. Reynolds sensibly limits himself to roughly half a decade, 1978-1984 of music, which he divides into two parts, post-punk proper and the rise of “new pop” and “new rock”. New pop and new rock being what happened when more commercially minded groups took post-punk music and adapted it for Top of the Pops. There are twentytwo chapters in total, each cataloguing a slightly different sort of rock or pop music.

Such an approach does not make for a good, chronological overview, but might be the only practical way of dealing with a field of music as ill defined as post-punk. Within its limits, Reynolds does his best to make clear how the groups and scenes related to each other and who influenced who. It helps that Reynolds is genuinely enthusiastic and knowledgeable about it all. Nevertheless, an increbible number of bands and artists are paraded in front of the reader, introduced, dissected and left behind as Reynolds moves on to the next chapter. In the end, it was all a bit much; both Reynolds and the reader start flagging.

Before that happens though, you get a good introduction to what happened in Britain and the US in the late seventies and eighties, after punk had crested but the energy it had freed was still present. The post-punk era gave us an incredible variety of good bands –to name just some of my own favourites, Gang of Four, The Pop Group, Joy Division/New Order, The Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen, etc. — and Reynolds does a good job of establishing the key points of each one. A great book to be inspired by, to seek out new bands. Recommended for anybody interested in post-punk.

Head-on – Julian Cope

Published on January 19, 2008

Cover of Head-on

Head-on
Julian Cope
203 pages including index
published in 1994

So this Julian Cope is a bit of a character. For about two years in 1980-81 he was one of Britain’s pop idols, having hordes of 13 year old fangirls following his band, The Teardrop Explodes from concert to concert, fullfilling almost the same role as bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet would fill a little bit later. All this while the band started as a serious, proper grim post-punk band. No wonder Cope went of his rocker and the band disbanded. It wasn’t the end for Julian Cope though, as he would start a succesful solo career in the mid-eighties, become a cult figure in later life and even find the time to write two big, influential books on the surviving prehistoric monuments of Britain and Europe. Head-on is his autobiography.

Well, the first part of his autobiography, the story of his life from childhood to fame with The Teardrop Explodes to the point that it all went south. The rest he’s written about in another volume, Repossessed, which I haven’t read yet. I was a bit Coped-out after reading Head-on, which wasn’t an easy read, especially in the second half of the story.