Glam!

Bowie, Bolan, Bryan Ferry and Iggy Pop are the icons that defined the particular type of music that came to be known as glam rock in the early 1970s. It was a period characterized by visual excess and ambisexual confrontation, where performance came to be as important as the music. Glam gave pop back to disaffected teenagers who lapped it up and reinvented themselves as space-age androgynes. Tying in with the release of Todd Haynes' film, Velvet Goldmine, Barney Hoskyns' Glam! is a trenchant survey of a thrilling, thoroughly over-the-top time in pop's life. From Oscar Wilde to Ziggy Stardust, from Liberace to Lou Reed, Hoskyns explores the flamboyant decadence, the bisexuality, and the sheer unadulterated fun of the early seventies. 'It was a brilliant pop era, wasn't it? The last proper pop era, probably.' Mickie Most 'I think rock should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the pierrot medium.' David Bowie 'Our function really is to relieve adolescents of their ills, of all the mental cruelty that's been bestowed on them.' David Johansen, New York Dolls