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Extended Work
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| The Glam Rock Behemoth | |
| By CarlHalling | ||
| 02 October 2009 | ||
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More from the large-scale work (in progress), "Tales from the Halling Valley".
The Glam Rock Behemoth
In the summer of 1972, I finally quit Pangbourne in consequence of a decision made between my father and those in authority over me at college to the effect that it was pointless my staying on for the final two years, presumably because "A" or Advanced level GCE - or General Certificate of Education - exams would be far beyond me. After all, I'd only succeeded in passing two GCE "O" Levels (in French and English Literature)...five being the minimum acceptable amount for entrance into university, together with two or more well-graded "A" Levels, depending on the university. GCE "O" levels were phased out in 1988, in favour of GCSEs. I was subsequently involved in the intensive hothouse program of academic, artistic, sporting and semi- professional activities outlined in my previous autobiographical work, "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child", which lasted for about five years.
A change came over me in the summer of '72 which I can trace back to a single incident taking place in a bar in the little former fishing town of Santiago de la Ribera in the province of Murcia, Spain, close by the Mar Menor, where I'd been vacationing with my parents and brother since the late 1960s, and which I'd like now to recount.
There was a young man of the pueblo I'd idolised for several years. He incarnated a kind of old-school Iberian macho cool, and was strikingly good-looking, and yet fair as I recall, rather than swarthy as might be expected, and quite stocky, with muscular arms...and if he'd worn a medallion and identity bracelet, he'd have been typical of his kind. That is how I remember him...but it was a long time ago.
What I am certain of is that by the summer of '72, he'd let his hair grow collar length as was the fashion of the day, even though it was still quite rare among young Spaniards, and taken to sporting colourful large-collared shirts - as opposed to standard issue Lacoste polos or whatever - which he elected not to tuck into his trousers. The style of these shirts meant that his long hair would occasionally get caught
between neck and collar which necessitated his flicking it out with an elegant sweep of his hand and coquettishly tossing his head.
While these gestures seemed perfectly in keeping to me with my idol's swaggering macho cool, another in the bar at the time expressed their disapproval under their breath. Rather than putting me off, this had the effect of making him even more fascinating than ever; and it may be that as a result of this episode, I came to covet the notoriety that had suddenly been afforded him. Furthermore, this incident may have marked the beginning of the end of my identification with the uncompromising masculinity of movie stars such as Steve McQueen, and the onset of a fascination with a more androgynous variety.
This was compounded by my witnessing a performance towards the end of the year on a long forgotten TV Pop show called Lift off with Ayesha of former Bubblegum band the Sweet performing their new single, "Blockbuster". I can remember being mesmerised where once I'd been disgusted, and the effect the spectacle of grown heterosexual men prancing around in make up and high heels must have had on my nascent sexual identity I can only imagine. That said, there was never any serious danger of my not being heterosexual, since my dad had been a strong male role model during my boyhood, which had been perfectly conventionally masculine. In fact, if anything I'd been a little too ruffianly given my relatively genteel surroundings.
My interest in girls was as healthy as any other 16 year old's. A propos of which...on the way back from Spain via Bilbao on the ship HMS Patricia, I fell in love by sight with a fellow passenger, a young Spanish girl I saw several times about the ship but never actually spoke to, and subsequently became obsessed by her, even to the point of roaming the streets of London for several days in succession in the vain hope of somehow bumping into her. This wasn't the first time I'd become so paralysed with shyness around a woman towards whom I felt a deep romantic attraction that I became incapable of decisive action, nor would it be the last.
Several songs served as the soundtrack to this irrational spell of romantic madness, including Betcha by Golly Wow by the Stylistics, written by Thom Bell and Linda Creed, and Last Night I Didn't Get To Sleep At All by the 5th Dimension, written by British songwriter Tony Macauley. The former kick-started a love affair on my part with the romantic Philadelphia-based Soul known as the Philly sound, and remains my favourite ever example of the genre apart from La La la Means I love You by the Delphonics, also written by Bell and Creed, and one of the most extravagantly romantic expressions of unrequited love in the history of recorded music.
My relationship with women in the early '70s was so intense and yet fraught with fear that if a pretty girl happened to speak to me, I could barely utter a sound in return, and was in immediate danger of falling in love on the spot. I was in a desperate state... and an isolated one, what's more...for when I wasn't pursuing the hothouse programme specially arranged for me by my father, I sequestered myself in my parents' house, where I fantasised about the kind of fame enjoyed on one hand by Glam Rock icons such as Marc Bolan and David Bowie, and on the other, by the new breed of teen idol that included David Cassidy, Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson. Like them, I wanted to be adored and endlessly mobbed by hordes of lovelorn teenyboppers. I was supposed to be studying, and study I did, but I also spent untold hours in idle contemplation of the glamour of the Rock star lifestyle.
In the summer of '72, I signed up for five years service with the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve, based at HMS President on the Embankment of the Thames. Within a short time of doing so, I discovered that I was seen by several of the older seamen as the division's token pretty boy, and my reputation as such was destined to grow to sometimes quite uncomfortable proportions throughout my time with the RNR, but at first I was flattered rather than insulted to be seen in this way, because it was all new to me, given that I'd been seen as something of a disreputable scruff at Pangbourne.
To a degree then, it was a case of an ugly duckling suddenly finding themselves to be a swan, and enjoying the attention, or rather...notoriety, just like that of the young Spaniard of Bar Castilla, and I loved every second of it...as if I'd turned into a narcissist in the space of a few months.
I'd been seduced by the androgyny that was everywhere in Britain in the early '70s...not just among Rock stars, but actors...models...even authors. It was as if we young were being conditioned to view androgynous beauty not just as acceptable, but desirable. It certainly worked for me...and the fact that the face that started back at me from the mirror was no longer that of an oily-haired scruff but a fully fledged beautiful boy made it even more effective. I can't help but reiterate that the effect this must have had on my psyche can only have been disastrous. Since becoming a Christian in 1993, I've had to effectively rediscover my lost masculinity, and learn how to be a real manly man as decreed by God after decades of crazed irresponsibility spurred by the Rock and Roll circus.
Talking of which...'73 was the year in which Glam became a national craze throughout Britain and other Western countries, although it had been carried into the Pop mainstream several years earlier by Marc Bolan, who'd been featured - as Mark Feld - in 1962 in a magazine called Town, as one of the faces, or leading Mods of his area of North East London, Stamford Hill, although by then he'd moved with his family to a council house in Summerstown in West London.
He went on to become a darling of the Hippie Underground as one half of the acoustic duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex, the other being multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took, whose tastes inclined more towards the avant garde than Bolan, and who was eventually replaced by Mickey Finn. In 1970, Bolan shortened the name of the band to T.Rex and soon after enjoying his first major hit single in the autumn of that year, became the biggest British teen sensation since the heydey of Beatlemania.
In truth though, Glam was hardly new, because extreme androgyny had been pioneered in the '60s, notably by the Rolling Stones, although it could be said that its true founding father had been Rhythm and Blues shouter Richard Pennington, better known as Little Richard. When it comes to Rock, everything can be traced back to early Rock and Roll and the Blues.
As a boy, Richard attended the New Hope Baptist Church in his native Macon, Georgia, and sang Gospel songs with his family as The Penniman Singers, his favourite singers being Gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He joined Sister Rosetta onstage in Macon at the age of 13, in 1945 after she heard him singing before the concert. What's more, he had serious ambitions of becoming a preacher.
By 1951, however, the world had begun to beckon, and he won a talent contest in Atlanta that led to a recording contract with RCA Victor, but the four records he subsequently released all flopped. Around about the same time, he came under the sway of an outrageous Rhythm and Blues musician by the name of Esquerita, who shaped his unique piano style. Esquerita is also believed to have influenced his increasingly flamboyant image, although self-styled King of the Blues Billy Wright, who piled his pomaded hair high on his head - as did Esquerita - and wore eye liner and face powder, was also an influence in this respect. Real success came for Richard in 1955 with Tutti Frutti, which has been cited as the true starting point for the Rock and Roll revolution; but within two years, he'd quit the business and returned to his faith.
Whether Richard is saved or not no one knows except God, but one thing that is certain is that few Rock stars have been as vocal in their condemnation of Rock and Roll as Little Richard Penniman. He has been quoted as saying that Rock and Roll "is driving people from Christ", and that he himself "was directed and commanded by another power. The power of darkness". Strong talk.
Gilded Youth at The Guildhall School
By the end of '73, the first wave of Glam Rock had all but dispersed, although it was to experience repeated periodic revivals, notably in the '80s through the New Romantic movement in the UK, and the Glam Metal scene in the US. It still exists to some degree, although its power to shock has long dwindled to nothing. Within three years, it had been supplanted by a movement which - if that were at all possible - was even more outrageous. I'm referring of course to Punk.
By the time I left the RNR in '77 as an Able Seaman - and armed with a character report that was only a little shy of glowing - Punk was in full swing, and within a few months, I was a fellow traveller myself, my hair dyed and spiked, and favouring black drainpipes, usually worn with black leather winklepicker boots and other provocative items of clothing.
Punk's origins lay in the US among the so-called Garage bands of the 1960s, who attempted to emulate the rougher acts of the British Invasion, such as the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Troggs, the Pretty Things, who were themselves heavily indebted to American Rhythm and Blues. But it was the distinct New York variant that exerted the greatest influence on the British Punk uprising...easily the most momentous of them all...and largely through the influence of a brilliant young London entrepreneur by the name of Malcolm Mclaren.
Mclaren, whose Jewish mother had owned a shmatte (clothing) factory in London's East End was a former art student who'd graduated to designing his own clothes with his then wife Vivienne Westwood in the early '70s, which he them sold through his own Kings Road boutique known in 1972 as Let it Rock, and attracted mainly Teddy Boys, which is to say young working class men who'd revived the clothing styles of the Edwardians or Teds. The Teds were young men - and later also women - from various tough areas of London such as Tottenham and Shepherds Bush, who in the early 1950s, adopted the neo-Edwardian look that had originally attracted the favour of certain well-heeled men about town, but which became associated with delinquency once it had filtered down to the working class.
In the late 1960s, he'd been drawn to the subversive ideas of the Paris Situationists, believed to have played a part in fometing the '68 riots, themselves offshoots of the previously mentioned post-war Lettrists, who were very much precursors of the British Punk variant. He brought them to bear as he set about developing the Punk look in mid '70s London.
In 1975 he became the manager of the disintegrating Glam Rock band the New York Dolls, designing red leather outfits for them in tandem with a new pseudo-Communist image, which proved a disastrous move and they split up soon afterwards. Yet, while in NYC, he came across a fledgling Punk outfit by the name of the Neon Boys, and featuring two young former Sandford School students by the name of Tom Verlaine - named after the French Symbolist poet Paul - and Richard Hell... born Thomas Miller and Richard Meyers in New Jersey and Kentucky respectively. He was especially impressed by Hell's unique image of spiky hair - allegedly inspired by the famous tousle-haired photograph of Rimbaud by the photographer Carjat - and torn tee-shirt held together with safety pins.
He attempted to persuade Hell to return with him to London, but the poet and musician demurred, so Mclaren returned alone in mid 1975. Some time afterwards, he renamed his Kings Road boutique Sex and set himself up as the manager of a group known as the Strand (after a song by Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music). The Strand had originally been formed by three working class denizens of the Hammersmith - Shepherds Bush - Acton area of West London, allegedly at the urging of guitarist Warwick "Wally" Nightingale, and were later joined by bassist Glen Matlock from Paddington.
Mclaren agreed to be their manager only on the condition that founder member Wally - deemed "too nice" by the entrepreneur - be ejected from the band, and so he was. Then, when a charismatic young London Irishman by the name of Johnny Rotten - born John Lydon in Finsbury Park, N4 - came onboard as lead singer, and the band was renamed the Sex Pistols, they were set to spearhead the most infamous and influential Punk insurrection of them all.
I was more than happy to be caught up in it all...although when I auditioned for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in late '77, none of my auditioners would have suspected anything of the sort. I think these included the handsome patrician John Cadell of the Cadell acting dynasty, and that it was he who told someone something to the effect that while I was chaotic onstage, I was also mesmeric, and so he believed something could be done with me at the Guildhall...and told me so. As it turned out he was wrong, but he wanted to give me a chance, and so, where I had failed three RADA auditions, Guildhall offered me a place on the three-year Drama course beginning in the autumn of 1978.
Once I started at Guildhall, I made it pretty clear than the nice clean-cut Carl who'd auditioned the previous year had been a curveball, as I was making no further attempts to conceal my Punk image. This was compounded by a bizarre hyperactivity that occasionally degenerated into outrageous and even disruptive behaviour. It was as if I was determined to convince the world that I was an Artist with a capital A and therefore entitled to incessantly attract attention to myself with aberrant behaviour and clothing.
With regard to the latter, among the items I favoured in '78-'79 were slim jim ties, drainpipe jeans, flourescent Teddy Boy socks, and white leather brothel creepers, but my favourite of all was a pair of tight plastic snakeskin trousers, which I can only actually remember wearing once. As if my manic behaviour and bizarre clothing weren't enough to cause eyebrows to raise among the Guildhall authorities, I insisted on wearing make-up even in classes, although to be fair it was subtly applied, except for on certain occasions such as parties when I really piled on the slap, silver eye shadow, rouge, lipstick, the works...I was a right old sight.
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