Bisexual Brickies
I said I'd done loads of research on Glitter, but actually I just bought these CDs off Amazon. I wanted to check out Glam because scenius-wise it's up there with Ardkore and the best of them. It seems to make a lot more sense to reference Glam with regards to it than Nuggets-era proto-punk. It's hard to think of anything grubbier than Pop music which failed to be popular, another thing the arse-end of glitter shares with Ardkore, yet it's that alchemical mud-to-gold moment that fascinates, when the most unlikely of sonic circumstances fuse unexpectedly offering up sudden glimpses of the sublime. Granted, it doesn't happen terribly often. Wouldn't you say picking up bits and pieces of Glam from Oxfam seems about a thousand times more refreshing an activity than buying minimal-synth obscurities off eBay?
Velvet Tinmine (RPM, 2003)
The first of these compilations through the gate and the best. Something like Iron Virgin's "Rebels Rule" for instance is up there with the absolutely best of Glam Rock, namely Gary Glitter's "Hello! Hello! I'm Back Again", his "Rock and Roll Part Two", T.Rex pre-1973, Ziggy, and Slade's best (let's not forget Lester Bangs was a fan of Noddy's crew). Velvet Tinmine is also particularly good at taking on board the, shall we say, sexually complex. I'm in thrall of Shakane's "Love Machine" with it's wonderfully dejected chorus: "I am just your love machine, baby, you don't how hard it's been, you turn me on when you when you want me, when you don't I'm not your scene." Also oddities like "Morning Bird", with a drum machine that reminds me that it's the fuzzed-out bargain-basement glam-(gloom?)-stomp of some quarters of the forthcoming Focus Group LP that switched me on to this trip in the first case.
Glitter from the Litter Bin (Sanctuary 2003)
Like Velvet Tinmine, this involves St.Etienne's Bob Stanley again, though this is on the Sanctuary label, rather than RPM. RPM's Mark Stratford alluded to some friendly rivalry between the two in an email to me. Yes, ME. They talk, I listen. Unlike Velvet Tinmine which seems to have Stanley's quirky taste writ large all over it, this must have been a contract job for him. There are many good tracks, but it in general it's more straight-forwardly raunchy, notwithstanding Billy Hamon's hilariously camp "Butch Things". In his liner-notes Stanley amusingly thumbs Junk Shop Glam's defining moment: "Mud's performance of 'The Cat Crep In" from the film Never Too Young to Rock, in a transport cafe".
Glitterbest (RPM, 2004)
There's an amazing amount of music with pre-punk resonances being made under the auspices of Glam. It's where all the T.Rex-style talk of "Revolution" conjoins with Punk's barely less cosmetic revolt. A lot of it, like Trevor White's "Crazy Kids" off "Glitterbest" is all about, you know, brokking out in the playground. Dem grown-ups just don't unnerstan. The comic thing is that, lacking the venom of punk, this music sounds incredibly like Guitar-Indie circa 2007. The New York Dolls-ish swagger of it (Rolling Stones beaming back across the Atlantic) making the music sound even more like Razorlight. Quite a few transatlantic accents here as well. That's hardly a compliment is it? But it does give some historic perspective to current Indie Rock which sounds mostly like it was the virgin-birthed progeny of the marketing department. I suppose this kind of revisionism also serves to demolish any sort of idea of rupture in history at all. In some ways it'd be more fruitful to actually question what made something like Punk differ; though it's all quite fun in a sloppy, cheerfully crap sort of way, and the liner-notes are insanely thorough.
Boobs (RPM, 2005)
With all of RPM's comp's bleeding into each-other stylistically, the handclaps here must denote "disco", likewise there is an anthemic quality to the tracks selected for this particular CD (stand-up and stomp "Motor Boat" and "Natural Gas"), riffs strut. Occasionally it gets a little bit Freddie Mercury (those radio-frequency-compressed vocal harmonies on Angel's "Good Time Fanny") even a bit Rocky Horror Picture Show on Screemer's admittedly great "Interplanetary Twist". But there are maybe just enough touches of the improbable to compensate, like the insane, monocled, fox-hunting purr of the lead-vocalist of the Boston Boppers. You were conceived behind the speakers.