Glam Rock - A Personal Reflection by Stephen Palmer

It is with great sadness that I dedicate this site to man who's writings made it possible. The reflections desciribed herein are of Stephen Palmer, born in 1961 and
brought up in Berks and Bucks. He always loved music and always claimed that from
his first Queen concert (about 77-78) to the mid 80s he averaged a gig a month.
Concerts have been few and far between over the last few years due to his health
but he still kept up to date with what was happening and didnt want to be stuck in
the past. He was a great writer and I always looked forward to receiving his work for both of my 70s sites. He will be sadly missed but his love for music will always be here to read and hopefully inspire others.


 

Glam Rock had a major influence on my life as I was growing up – not that I fully realised it at the time. It formed my outlook on life as well as my taste in music and, I would argue, it influenced society as a whole. Whether you liked the music or not it helped kick start society into a more colourful state of dress and mind.

Walk through most towns nowadays and you will be exposed to a wide variety of fashions that have become incorporated into mainstream clothing. With the Goth line becoming a major seller at Top Shop, Jonathan Ross parading around in bondage trousers (amongst many other outfits), bare midriffs & short skirts regardless of weather, boxer shorts coupled with jeans worn below ass level it would be fair to say that we have become a society that allows us to demonstrate our, attempt at, individuality through our clothes. It’s the same with music. Following on from the deregulation of radio and the advent of the internet there is an outlet for every type of music from classical to rock, from death metal to soul, from trance to pop.............

It wasn’t always like this; my memories of growing up in the late sixties are monotone. Don’t get me wrong I had a perfect childhood, the Corona van used to come around once a week and we’d buy a bottle of lemonade (if we’d been good we might get cherryade or limeade), the knife man used to turn up and scare us as he sharpened our knives on the grind stone, the brush man always failed to sell us anything and on a Sunday we used to sit down as a family for lunch and listen to Family Favourites, hoping they might link up with the armed forces in Germany where my uncle was stationed, (I still can’t listen to Mary Hopkin singing “Those Were The Days” without remembering those lunchtimes).

A perfect childhood, but when there was no real example of rebellion on children’s TV and excitement came in the form of “The Flashing Blade”, “Champion, The Wonder Horse” and “Casey Jones” it would be fair to say that everything was safe there was no ‘edge’. Meanwhile in music, psychedelia, flower power and the hippy movement were all happening but they were always happening somewhere else, away from your average town in middle England. Interesting things seemed to happen, and belong, to other people - “long-haired layabouts, university dropouts and leftist weirdos” if you believed the grown ups. And that was the catch. The grown ups (who were younger than I am now) belonged to a generation that had first hand experience of Work War II, rationing and ‘making do’ but this didn’t fit with what I wanted. In fact I didn’t know what I wanted I just knew that life needed to be more colourful.

With this background it was inevitable that something would come along and fill the void.

The first I’d been aware of something happening that interested me in the pop world was with The Sweet playing “Co-Co” and “Little Willy”. It wasn’t the songs, even though “Little Willy” sounded a bit ‘rude’, and it wasn’t the image, wearing a red indian headdress around Berkshire was never going to catch on, it was just that they were having fun and didn’t seem to be taking themselves too seriously. I didn’t know it at the time but I was ready for the launch of Glam Rock, I liked the attitude I just needed the music and image to change.

And change they did. It seemed like it happened overnight, suddenly the charts were full of songs with a heavy beat and chantable lyrics coupled with fashion excess and a ‘we’re having a good time, are you?’ attitude. Glam Rock had arrived and, after years of watching monotone TV shows (both metaphorically and literally, we didn’t get a colour TV until the early 70s), I was catapulted into a world of colour, noise and, most importantly, fun. And while my parents still complained about the “weirdos” their complaints were less intense than those kept for “hippies”, after all this music came directly from what they enjoyed, Rock and Roll, it didn’t belong to other people it belonged to all of us.

I took to Glam Rock straight away, it made me feel alive, as if I was living in a country where life was ‘on the up’. I no longer felt that the UK was a second class citizen in comparison to the US. In retrospect I couldn’t have been more wrong about the state of the country, remember I was growing up I didn’t read the newspapers, but the music made me feel positive and, I believe, this was one of the reasons Glam took off like it did. For 3 minutes it didn’t matter about the state of the country or economy you just felt good, hopeful maybe.

Of course not everyone liked Glam Rock.