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‘Children of the Revolution’: Glam Rock and the 70s

Toby Manning

October 16, 2021
Toby Manning

EDITION: ECOLOGIES.

Glam, in all its queer, communal, proletarian glory, is the soundtrack to a militant 70s that we must reclaim for the left.

It’s March 1973, and I’m in my neighbours’ caravan watching Top of the Pops for the first time. Slade’s ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ absolutely explodes out of the colour set: the singer seems about to pop something; with his mirror-spangled top hat and loud tartan suit, he’s a ringmaster to a circus that includes a man transported from Dr Who, somewhere between nun and spaceman, in silver platform boots. It’s celebratory, bursting with joy…and yet slightly scary: control-loss tightly reined. My friend’s father goes to the bathroom; his mother raises her paper higher over her eyes. But we feel like we’ve been beamed to a better planet, eyes wide, shoulder to shoulder on the floor. What on earth…?

My first memory of the news, on my parents’ swanky new orange portable, is Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath leaving 10 Downing Street to jeering crowds in March 1974. My parents explain Heath has asked who was running the country and the public has answered, “the unions” (and this is good). This time with hindsight: what on earth…?

These are not just personal snapshots but the early 70s’ essence: an ebullient, primary-coloured pop culture paralleling an explosive, play-at-maximum-volume politics. Slade are celebrating the potency of the crowd, of the collective that would drive Heath from power. Yet in the consensus narrative 70s pop and politics represent respectively: the rejection of 60s utopian communalism for 70s hedonistic individualism; a pyrrhic victory for political militancy in the grim decade that gave us Thatcher. . Even relatively recent revisionist accounts – Andy Beckett’s’ When the Lights Went Out (2009), Thane, Black and Pemberton’s Reassessing the 70s (2013), John Medhurst’s That Option No Longer Exists (2014) – still accept consensus notions of 70s industrial decline (rather than capitalist crisis) or union power being undemocratic, while the peak of popular music coinciding with the peak of popular militancy seems largely coincidental. The left needs to reclaim the 70s as a time when elites lost control and the working class was central and powerful. As part of such a project, this essay shows that glam – far from being a separate, let alone apolitical plane – was a key pop cultural expression of this political moment.

This is the early 70s’ essence: a primary-coloured pop culture paralleling an explosive, play-at-maximum-volume politics. Slade are celebrating the potency of the crowd, of the collective that would drive Heath from power.

Those revisionist histories do reframe 70s militancy as a continuation of 60s impulses, student radicalism now merging with working-class militancy in Beckett’s account of the 1972 miners’ strike.1 The 60s had loosened the Establishment’s grip: workers in the 70s were not ready for a restoration; to give up on the utopianism – or more materially, the standard of living – that the 60s had led everyone to expect. Thus Thatcher’s anti-60s social conservatism and anti-union neoliberalism are linked (she was in Heath’s administration). So why is there still an epistemological break between 60s and 70s pop culture? Still echoing Taylor and Wall2 or Hebdige,3 Reynolds declares: “Glam was … a retreat from the political and collective hopes of the sixties into a fantasy trip of individualized escape”.4 Post Death of the Author, we’re taking Bowie at his notoriously dubious word then: “My brother’s back at home, with his Beatles and his Stones/Never got it off on that revolution stuff/What a drag! Too many snags.” But, given both Bowie and Mott’s hippie phases, the ‘news’ these glam dudes are carrying is their own repackaging, their self-incorporation of late capitalism’s fetish for newness. To create this epistemological break, Reynolds creates a straw-man 60s from post-68 denim-clad rock. But it was psychedelic pop which glam was channelling (as if Sgt Pepper didn’t flag its own fabrication). This is how ‘postmodernism’ gets ahistorically framed as a clean break with modernity (Fisher’s work on 70s hauntology was beginning to unpick this). Jameson’s “depthlessness” and “ahistoricism”5 will come – but not yet: glam acts were taking an aggressive, Benjaminian “tiger’s leap” into the past to reclaim it from recuperation and its rewriting by history’s winners (the tiger’s leap “takes place in an arena where the ruling classes are in control”). Thus the 60s is used in glam not as dead time, as dressup, but as a reassertion that, either living through or following on from the counterculture, the glam generation were, as T.Rex told it, “children of the revolution”.6

No, no, says the centrist consensus – glam is haunted by the 1950s: ‘Summertime Blues’ flip to T. Rex’s calling card, ‘Ride a White Swan’; Slade’s first hit a Little Richard cover. But with the rebellious 50s being reframed by the right as a conservative utopia post-Nixon (1969-74) and American Graffiti (1973), glam’s 50s influence could often produce depthless kitsch, seen at its most grotesque in Gary Glitter (and yes that is Jimmy Saville introducing). Equally, the conservatism of macho denim rock was just as 50s-orientated as glam (Who, Status Quo, Allman Bros). At its best, glam took a tiger’s leap into both the 50s and 60s (seen at its most literal in Wizzard’s psychedelicised 50s), deriving its aggression and excitement from the racial and proletarian scandal of rock’n’roll, and its utopian elements from the 60s counterculture. So if Mud’s irresistibly frivolous ‘Tiger Feet’ is hardly a tiger’s leap into the 50s, Roxy’s and Bowie’s appropriation of the era – ripping apart and confounding its conservatism – certainly is.

This is neatly captured by Ziggy Stardust’s eleventh-hour displacement of Chuck Berry’s ‘Around and Around’ by Bowie’s own ‘Starman’. Beginning as product – RCA exec doesn’t hear a single; Bowie bloody-mindedly creates one with a la-la singalong for the kids and a lyric interpellating suburban teens – the result is transcendent; haunting. And what haunts it is: the jangle of hippie 12-string (pastoral utopianism); The Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ (racial utopianism); ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (queer utopianism; the 1969 Stonewall Riot that launched gay liberation was mourning Garland’s death); le Guin and Heinlein’s scifi utopianism; psychedelia’s veneration of the child (“let the children lose it”); and 60s communality (the ‘Hey Jude’ coda). The 50s though are invoked too by the jive-talking deejay and the transistor-hugging teens in their suburban bedrooms, both of whom are then possessed by the psychedelic starman. The 50s, the 60s, the 70s and the future merge here – not into meaninglessness but an overdetermination in which every element is clear. With all the young punks tuning in,‘Starman’ is a scifi hymn to utopia, with youth as its teleport.

Such utopianism is – contra the consensus – the essence of glam. What is ‘Life on Mars’ beyond its giddy glamour and swooping spectacle but a longing for a better world? Glam’s is a utopianism dented by defeat and deferral (Todd Rundgren’s ‘Just One Victory’ and consequently, like that of the subaltern classes, calcified, hardened (Roxy’s ‘Remake/Remodel’). So firstly, glam was a direct result of gay liberation, 1967’s Sexual Offences Act one of the counterculture’s (limited) legislative victories. Contradicting himself, Hebdige notes glam was “responsible for opening up questions of sexual identity […] repressed, ignored or merely hinted at in rock and youth culture”.7 Amongst those hints are Performance; the Stones’ concurrent 1968 Jumpin’ Jack Flash promo, and Warhol protégées, the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed’s Warhol scene montage, the Bowie-produced ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ is a copy of a copy of Bowie’s Velvetisms (‘Andy Warhol’, the overtly queer ‘Queen Bitch’, the flirtingly ambiguous ‘John I’m Only Dancing’). Very po-mo, but – while not universally trans-approved – top ten hit ‘Wild Side’ was a material incursion into the 1972 mainstream by queerness. Equally, Bowie’s ‘performance’ of homosexuality – declaring he was gay; mock-fellating guitarist Mick Ronson onstage – materialised the rumoured, the unthinkable. Contra the essentialism of Velvet Goldmine, the ‘reality’ of Bowie’s bisexuality is irrelevant. Historically upstaged by Bowie, T. Rex’s chart-conquering Marc Bolan avowed his bisexuality nonchalantly, while purring “I’m gonna suck you”, “take me”, and “I wanna be your toy” in an androgynous warble between Syd Barrett and Donovan. Even Slade’s love interest in ‘Take me Bak ‘Ome”, “said I could call you Sidney” (underlined by each member having a female doppelganger on Top of the Pops), while on the Kinks’ proto-glam ‘Lola’, “Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls/It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world”. Weimar’s queer utopianism was a key glam haunt: that Cabaret (1972) emerged concurrently is not coincidental; Alice Cooper channeling its camp melodrama for another glam carol to the crowd; Cockney Rebel’s swishily orchestrated ‘Sebastian’ matching content to form: “You oh so gay, with Parisian demands, you can run around/Your view of society screws up my mind”. A world away from denim riffing, for Hebdige this is “a form of resistance to the order which guarantees [queers’] continued subordination”.8

It was glam’s iconography that really queered the 70s however: Alice Cooper and Bowie in frocks; Bolan in yellow satin trousers and glitter-spangled cheeks on Top of the Pops; Bryan Ferry’s hand-trill on the Warhol-hymning ‘Virginia Plain’ as he hoots “we are flying down to Reee-oh!”; Slade’s Dave Hill’s flamboyant self-fashioning; Rob Davis’s femme customization of Mud’s 50s matching outfits. With seamwork trolling teamwork, such campness doesn’t just invoke homosexuality but the performativity of heterosexuality. Sweet’s effeminate Steve Priest queers the cock-rock bluster of ‘Blockbuster’ with the cock-blocked boyfriends’ whinny of “we haven’t got a clue what to do!” Sparks made queering heterosexuality an art form: Russell Mael’s demented falsetto and femininity; brother Ron trolling mael-ness with his leer and his lyrics. ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us’ is heterosexuality as fear of women, the macho bluster of the Hollywood cliché mauled by Mael’s archly hysterical delivery. From top 10 album Propaganda, ‘Reinforcements’ subverts military metaphor by pleading backup for the narrator’s flagging manhood; the female ‘other’ paranoidly evoked in invasion imagery (moving shrubberies!): second wave feminism’s impact at its most lateral.

It was glam’s iconography that really queered the 70s...With seamwork trolling teamwork, such campness doesn’t just invoke homosexuality but the performativity of heterosexuality.

Glam’s more limited feminist utopianism still upended gender conventions. Medhurst calls Suzi Quatro “bluecollar feminism”9 and the combination of her raucous vocals, iconic bass guitar (no prop; she was a session player) and butch leather catsuit queered conventional conceptions of femininity (“you’re supposed to be soft, you’re supposed to be cute and you’re supposed to be pretty” spat Quatro). Of course, like Honor Blackman in The Avengers, the leathers actually emphasized Quatro’s femininity, but as with contemporary Blaxploitation, capitalism can be liberatory at its most exploitative (says Sinfield not Paglia). The absurdly exciting ‘Can the Can’ is an inchoately gleeful bitch-slap, whilst ‘‘48 Crash’ gloriously uses capitalist collapse as metaphor for male menopause, while ‘Devil Gate Drive’ defines that dialectical relationship with the 50s, Quatro lunging at lyrics like, “I lead the angel pack on the road to sin/knock down the gates/let me in” with swaggeringly unsuburban abandon.

Suzi Quatro's ''48 Crash’ gloriously uses capitalist collapse as metaphor for male menopause, while ‘Devil Gate Drive’ defines that dialectical relationship with the 50s.

60s shouter Lulu meanwhile donned a man’s suit and mobster fedora for a top 3 glam makeover by Bowie and Ronson, ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. Yet the forgotten glam femme is Lynsey de Paul: less iconoclastic in image, but refusing tradwife roles as a professional songwriter and party girl: ‘Central Park Arrest’ confronting a flasher (for all-female Thunderthighs, stars of ‘Walk on the Wild Side’); ‘Getting a Drag’ cleverly using gender performativity to queer gender roles (“I thought you were a brother but you turned out like my mother”). Susan Sontag claims “the androgyne” as camp,10 and ‘Notes on Camp’ often fits glam like a lamé glove – “Being-as-Playing-a-Role […] the farthest extension, in sensibility of the metaphor of life as theater”.11 However, Sontag’s lack of reference to Brecht is indicative of her lack of materialism – her ‘camp’ now sounds uncannily like ‘postmodernism’: “camp sees everything in quotation marks”12 summoning 1990s wipe-clean irony, signifier without signified (two words: ‘Chris’ and ‘Evans’). So Sontag’s contention that camp is apolitical and a “victory of ‘style’ over content” is stock liberal separation of politics and culture,13 a Blair-era shibboleth: so Britpop’s de-queered glam, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club (2001) and TV drama Life on Mars (2006-7) all retrofit depthlessness to the 70s via their smug postmodern gaze. In glam itself, however, the past is alive: Bowie’s use of kabuki costumes for the later Ziggy shows links directly to Brecht, thus materially connecting ‘camp’ to ‘alienation’, not just in the arena of sexuality but in the arena of class.

Class has been the hardest thing to coopt in neoliberalism’s “marketization of freedoms”.14 Paralleling the working class’s growing militancy in the 70s, the press acclaimed glam as more proletarian than previous pop.15 In adopting posh accents (Roxy, Bolan) and aristocratic dandyism (Slade, Sweet), glam stars weren’t ‘passing’ or aspiring – they paraded their plebeian backgrounds in interviews – they were invading the class hierarchy, trolling it: “style as a form of Refusal”16 as Hebdige puts it. With working class glam fans also dandying up, is it “curious”, as Reynolds claims, that in “the cities where trade unions were strongest … working class youths were most enthralled by a fantasy of aristocracy”?17 Rather, the two are directly connected, this type of dress-up being a “symbolic violation of the social order” (Hebdige again).18

In adopting posh accents (Roxy, Bolan) or aristocratic dandyism (Slade, Sweet), glam stars weren’t ‘passing’ or aspiring – they paraded their plebeian backgrounds in interviews – they were invading the class hierarchy, trolling it.

Glam’s class war wasn’t just a matter of style but content too. While Slade’s methodically mis-spelled titles (‘Look Wot You Dun’, ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’) risked caricaturing working class-ness, their ebullient defiance of bourgeois norms was as energizing as their music. With failing capitalism demanding ever more from workers, and unemployment the highest since World War II, glam lyrics downshifted from the Beatles’ and Kinks’ suburban strivers, even in art-schooled Bowie (“Tony went to fight in Belfast/Rudi stayed at home to starve”), though Bowie needed the rough-hewn Hoople to pull off ‘All the Young Dudes’’ kitchen sink realism (“is that concrete all around or is it in my head?”). Mott’s own “You look like a star but you’re really still on the dole” meanwhile is a glam fan’s manifesto, style as defiance of ‘economic’ – really political – ‘reality’; the subaltern classes picking up the bill for capitalism’s losses. Also under Bowie’s spell – or ‘glamour’ – Be Bop Deluxe’s ‘Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape’s smashed ballroom mirrors and “council house mystics” could be post-nuclear or just Leeds in 1974. Moreover, glam’s trash aesthetic (singles, scifi, doowop, glitter, manmade fibres) is itself a return of the repressed. With cultural hierarchies ordained by the elite and mirroring the material hierarchy, ‘disposable’ lower-class ‘trash’ via glam invaded ‘legitimate’ cultural space (thus Sweet’s disparagement; Slade’s writing out of history). This is spelled out on New York Dolls’ ‘Trash’ – recuperating and throwing back the slur; the song’s combination of queerness and threat (“don’t take my knife away”) a materialisation of bourgeois nightmares. Mott, similarly managed to make the threat of ‘Violence’ queer, via Hunter’s camp enunciation of the chorus, accompanied by a creamy violin. Indeed the common glam epithet of “builders in blusher” – “though he dresses like a queen/He can kick like a mule” – combines both queer and class threat.

The common glam epithet of “builders in blusher” – “though he dresses like a queen/He can kick like a mule” – combines both queer and class threat.

Class threat is central to the consensus concept of the 70s as dystopian: the Cold War; Vietnam; Opec; stagflation; strikes; power cuts, unemployment. For in such lists for whom are strikes dystopian? Glam is seen as exemplifying this endtimes decadence but surely, say, Alice Cooper’s tastelessness doesn’t just ‘reflect’ a sick society but – via his patented theatricality– satirises it (art as hammer not mirror): the cruelty of capitalist individualism; the death cult derived from its normalization of nuclear war (‘I Love the Dead’). With communism what made atomic war thinkable, collectives were feared and loathed by the establishment as communism’s echo. Thus via its apocalyptic, violent imagery and championing of the crowd – “the mass”; “the mob” – glam deploys bourgeois dystopian paranoia to channel revolutionary utopianism. On Cooper’s 1972 smash, ‘School’s Out’, Vietnam-era patriotism is rejected (“we can’t salute ya/can’t find a flag”), while school isn’t just out, it’s been “blown to pieces”. So “we got no class/And we got no principals” isn’t just a schoolyard pun: “class” is also etiquette, the class system; “principals” the boss class, but playing on ‘ruthless’. Regardless of Cooper’s later reactionary views, that Reynolds posits the song as nihilistic despite noting the song’s adoption by the British Pupil Power movement and its relationship to union militancy, is baffling.19 The Sweet upped the ante of this generational threat over the course of their 1973 smash hits: the paranoid police siren on‘Blockbuster’; their heckling vocabulary (“She’s like a live bomb shell/Like a flash out of hell”) on ‘Hell Raiser’; the delirious celebration of the crowd’s destructive potential (as good as any of Bowie’s glam-era rockers) on ‘Ballroom Blitz’; ‘Teenage Rampage’ finally spelling all this out: “So come join the revolution”: “All over the land the kids are finally startin’ to get the upper hand/They’re out in the streets they turn on the heat/And soon they could be completely in command”.20 Of course ‘revolution’ is being used cynically here: Chinn and Chapman called ‘Teenage’ a fans’ Nuremberg; the invocation of the counterculture by Cockney Rebel’s ‘Death Trip’ is telling but daft (“Can you hear the walrus offering a sad solution to teenage revolution?”); while Roxy even b-b-boredly suggest an aristocratic dance is a “solution to teenage revolution”! Yet these songs demonstrate the currency of civil unrest in 1973: and, after the Battle of Saltley Gate,21 with mass strikes ongoing, such a lexicon is a combustible choice, especially egged on by such aggressive music. So Bowie’s ‘Panic in Detroit’ may be a liberal fret about countercultural ‘extremism’ but with the Bo Diddley beat a byword for excitement (racial, proletarian excitement specifically) and Ronson at his provocative best, makes revolution sound like a party you wouldn’t want to miss.22

If revolution evokes the communist ‘other’, consumerism is the Cold War’s liberal familiar. Glam’s very self-selling is self-reflexive, its proclamation as ‘product’ exposure rather than celebration. Glam specialized in fourth-wall breaking songs about the music industry – emerging again from the 60s (Warhol and pop art; The Who Sell Out’s between-song commercials). This deconstruction’s effect is less to show the star “wasn’t a real person but a constructed persona”23 than to reveal music as capitalist enterprise. Mott’s ‘Ballad of Mott the Hoople’ (“The rock n’ roll circus is in town”) and ‘Saturday Gigs’ with Ronson (“it’s all a game”); all those glam fake bands; Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars; ‘Jet Silver and the Dolls of Venus’, Wizzard’s Introducing Eddy and the Falcons, T. Rex’s Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow (a declining Bolan demanding, “Do they have sickness in society/Do they have glitter crap gaiety?”); Elton John’s opportunistic ‘Bennie and the Jets’ a rare US glam smash. If David Essex’s bubbleglam ‘Gonna Make You a Star’ (1974) is flippant fourth-wall breaking (“He just doesn’t seem to understand the rock media”), his film Stardust is a surprisingly mordant exploration of the music industry, its title song a doomily future-psyche doozy. Sweet freed themselves from their puppet masters with the cutting ‘Action’ (“you bled me dry with your insatiable greed”) – shame they equated this with denim and leather ‘authenticity’. Slade’s own film, Flame (1975) was an even more cynical depiction of the industry (“Every haunt has a hustler an’ bustler born with the tongue of a snake/Every haunt has a muscler on the make”), producing the Bowie-esque melancholy of ‘How Does it Feel’. The double entendre of Slade’s ‘Bangin’ Man’ depicts the relentlessness of the pop production-line; Queen’s ‘Killer Queen’ (backing vocals outcamping Mercury), and Be Bop Deluxe’s ‘Axe Victim’ (“you hoped we’d dress like tarts”) link prostitution with the pop industry’s hype and spectacle respectively.

“Sex sells” is capitalist jouissance, “the perfect metaphor for the potential of commodities”,24 but in glam it’s a dry hump. In Sparks’ ‘Something for the Girl With Everything’ consumption is a distraction from sexual exploitation – a ready metaphor for capitalism’s social exploitation. In Roxy’s doomily psychedelic ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache the beloved blowup doll is not just the solution to consumer emptiness (“Penthouse perfection/But what goes on/What to do there?”) it’s a metaphor for it. In the marketization of everything, sex becomes product; women become product (“disposable darling”), denatured and inert as a plastic sex doll. Roxy’s schtik is not just a trolling of conservative 50s utopianism; 50s glamour – that tiger’s leap into the past again – but of fear of second-wave feminism. Roxy’s retro possesses retrograde 50s notions of femininity, seemingly revelling in them but distending them, caricaturing them. Cooper’s ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ reruns this as glamsploitation, the duetting Donovan the ghost of hippie nature-reverence at glam’s engorged last supper. For Adorno and Horkheimer capitalist technology aims to conquer “mythical fear”,25 which Holly Lewis glosses as “fear of nature, fear of the untamed, fear of women; of colonized people” – and we might add, the masses. The aim is not just to contain, but via the atomic death-drive, to destroy. So in Bowie’s written-out-of-history top 3 1973 hit, ‘Drive in Saturday’ capitalism rules over the ashes after nuclear war, denaturing landscape (“the sea that raged no more”) and humans (unable to have sex; tethered to the machine). Survivors seek sex-tips in 60s films at nostalgic 50s drive-ins: “people stared at Jagger’s eyes and scored/like the video films we saw” – Performance offering a brilliantly perverse manual. This is perfectly mirrored formally: the machine evoked in the swooshing synths; the yearning for what’s lost in the organic 50s doowop chords and backing vocals. ‘Drive-in Saturday’ is an ur-glam song, incorporating everything that made the genre radical – queerness (“he’s crashing out with Sylvian”), the cooption of the same (“the bureau supplies for ageing men”); second wave feminism (women desexualised); class (foreman keeping drones in formation in the “fallout saturation”); and the exposure of capitalism, depicted here as carceral death cult.

‘Drive-in Saturday’ is an ur-glam song, incorporating everything that made the genre radical – queerness, the cooption of the same; second wave feminism; class; and the exposure of capitalism, depicted here as carceral death cult.

Glam’s own death paralleled the decade it channelled, with the guts going out of class resistance and a right-shifting Labour government from 1974. Both rock and resistance would revive later in the decade; and even when neoliberalism made postmodernism hegemonic in the late 80s, it would not simply produce a neoliberal culture, but a haunted culture – alive with the past. That glam would prove so endlessly revenant – from punk through synthpop, New Romanticism, hair metal, Morrissey, Prince, Britpop and Lady Gaga – is an indicator, paradoxically, of its substance. Again contrary to the liberal consensus that wishfully declares glam depthless, music is about the politics it emerges from, and – via hauntology – the politics it encounters. However reprocessed, however spectralised, the outrage of glam still outs, still haunts, in all its queer, communal, proletarian glory: it is the soundtrack to a militant 70s that we must reclaim for the left. Cum on feel the noize.

  1. Andy Beckett. 2009. When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies. London: Faber. p. 64 ↩

  2. Ian Taylor and Dave Wall. 1976. ‘Beyond the Skinheads’, in G. Mungham and G. Pearson (eds). Working Class Youth Culture. London: Routledge. ↩

  3. Dick Hebdige. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge: “devoid of any any obvious political or countercultural significance”. p. 77. ↩

  4. Simon Reynolds. 2016. Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy. London: Faber. p. 11 ↩

  5. Fredric Jameson. 1984. ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, I/146 July/Aug: 60. p. 8 ↩

  6. Arguably hauntology is a condition of culture. Psychedelia was haunted by the Edwardian era, the Edwardians by the Romantics, while the Romantics’ gothic revival is about as hauntological as you can get. ↩

  7. Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. p.61 ↩

  8. Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. p. 19 ↩

  9. John Medhurst. 2016. That Option No Longer Exists Winchester: Zer0 Books. p. 85 ↩

  10. Susan Sontag. [1961] 1994. ‘Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation London: Vintage Books. p. 279. ↩

  11. Sontag. ‘Notes on Camp’. p. 280 ↩

  12. Sontag. ‘Notes on Camp’. p. 280 ↩

  13. Sontag. ‘Notes on Camp’. p. 287 ↩

  14. David Alderson. 2016. Sex, Needs and Queer Culture: From Liberation to the Post-Gay. London: Zed Books. p. 92 ↩

  15. Reynolds. Shock and Awe. p. 165 ↩

  16. Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. p. 2 ↩

  17. Reynolds. Shock and Awe. p. 341 ↩

  18. Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. p. 19 ↩

  19. Reynolds. Shock and Awe. pp. 139-41 ↩

  20. Reynolds. Shock and Awe. pp. 139-40 ↩

  21. Beckett. When the Lights went out. pp. 66-86 ↩

  22. Prompting much finger-wagging from Chris O’Leary. 2015. Rebel Rebel: All the Songs of David Bowie from ‘64 to ‘76. Winchester: Zer0 Books. pp. 261-2. ↩

  23. Reynolds. Shock and Awe. p. 5 ↩

  24. Alderson. Sex Needs and Queer Culture. p. 78 ↩

  25. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. trans. Edmund Jephcot. Stanford: Stanford University Press. p. 11 ↩

KEYWORDS: Culture Is Ordinary

Author:

Toby Manning (@TobyManning)

Toby Manning is a writer on popular culture and popular music, and has written for Red Pepper, NME, The Big Issue, The Guardian, The Word, The Independent, Q, New Statesman and The Quietus. He is the author of the Rough Guide to Pink Floyd (Penguin, 2006), John le Carre and the Cold War (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Mixing Pop and Politics (Repeater, 2024). He has contributed chapters to Sean Albiez and David Pattie’s The Velvet Underground: What’s Going On (Bloomsbury, 2022) and the forthcoming Talking Heads (Bloomsbury, 2025), and essays to the journals Key Words, College Literature and Red Wedge. He has taught at the University of Birmingham, Brunel and Queen Mary University, and given talks at the Barbican, the Victoria and Albert Museum and at St George’s Hall, Blackburn.