Intro - [Play: "Space Oddity" by David Bowie] Musically, the start of the 1970s was a bit of a hippy hangover; but there was one lone voice that shone through this flat and tired soundscape, and this was the song to change it all. David Bowie was very British in the most eccentric and dandified way darling, but "Space Oddity" wasn't about Waterloo Sunsets, Lazy Sunday Afternoons or being a working class hero. This song, and its attendant cultural trimmings, came from a more other-worldy place, namely, outer-space dude! It eventually led to a music scene that was so British, glamorous and creative that it produced a generation of truck drivers wearing flares and platforms, teenage girls in glittery make-up and spikey-haired Dickensian youths roaming the city streets in search of revolution!
To give the music of the 1970s some perspective, Britain at this time was in economic toil. There was a lot of poverty and unrest, and above all else, strikes. There was a really bad fuel shortage, a lack of jobs, and for those that did work there was a three day working week, enforced by the government at the time. Whilst this may sound like an ideal working week to you or I, obviously people only got paid for their three days. Families in the UK were put under extreme pressure. The response of the mass populace to this somewhat depressing situation was to make extreme fashion gestures by donning things such as giant flares, mini skirts, platforms and boob tubes whilst boogieing-on-down to the riffs and grooves of Glam rock and Disco respectively. But for all this crazy posturing to come about, Bowie had to happen first, but he didn't exactly explode onto the scene in space capsule as you might imagine.
Possibly an excerpt of some of the original footage from British coverage of the landings
In the 1970s it seemed like everyone in music loved Bowie; pop girls, burly blokes, glam rockers and punks - whether they openly admitted to liking Bowie or not, could not deny just how good his songs were. This however, was most definitely not the case to begin with. In the late 1960s, Bowie was a folksy, long-haired type, strumming away on his acoustic guitar, cross-legged on the stage - and quite frankly, not many people were paying attention. But, something was to about to occur that was to turn around the musical fortunes of the "Thin White Duke" forever.
1969 is remembered by the most of humanity for one thing; the first time that man landed on the moon! And before you start trying to second guess me, the first man on the moon was not David Bowie, but Sir Neil Armstrong, and the Apollo space mission was basically, a big deal. At schools across the land children had their lessons cancelled so that they could watch the moon landings on great big tellies, people stayed home from work, and those who didn't have televisions, went in search of them - often standing outside of TV shop windows, en masse, to witness this once in a lifetime monumental first for humanity!
Before 1969, David Bowie was actually a man called David Jones, from Brixton in South London, who eventually changed his surname to Bowie, to sound more exotic, and more importantly, to avoid being confused with "Davy Jones" - one of the members of chirpy '60s pop puppets "The Monkees", (who charted with fab songs such as "I'm a believer") - obscure! Space Oddity was the song that was chosen by the BBC in conjunction with the televising of the moon landings. It was about a man called Major Tom who was being launched into space. The words are quite odd, but strangely poetic.
The original version of the song is very different to the sound clip that you've just heard. The song introduced the struggling Bowie to a much wider audience and it charted at number 5. But the milestone in Bowie's career was when he met with a guy called Tony Defries, who became his manager. Defries was a major factor in Bowie's stupendous rise to fame. He revolutionised the way the music industry worked with the publicity of acts with his company called Mainman.
Bowie's first major hit, Space Oddity was a glimpse into the creation of his later mind blowing alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust, who was a Alien that fell to earth, took on the human guise of a Rock n Roll singer, and achieved global fame and fortune with his band, the Spiders from Mars!
Bowie's cultural impact.
Bowie's UK success in the 1970s however didn't repeat itself Stateside. Ironically a band called Mott the Hoople were huge in the States with their laid back rock anthem - "All the Young Dudes" - written by, yep you guessed it, David Bowie. It wasn't until the 1980s though, after many years of trying to breakthrough in the States, Bowie actually made it, and many people in the UK thought he had lost his sparkle by then. This demonstates very clearly that whatever acts are successful in the UK do not neccesarily conquer America, and vice versa.
Dandy in the Underworld
Another act who were HUGE in the UK but left Americans scratching their heads (or they would've been if they had even heard of them), were Marc Bolan, and his band T-Rex. This band was a fab fusion of campery, '50s rock n roll, and pop energy. Many of the "serious" music press scoffed at the popular appeal of T-Rex with its legion of teen boppers, and branded the songs as a "rip off" of people like Chuck Berry. But in fact, Marc Bolan was really onto something with his rockabilly riffs, and later on when the punks exploded onto the music scene, they had a certain amount of respect for T- Rex - which they didn't really openly express about other acts - even Bowie. Marc Bloan and David Bowie were friends, collaborators and rivals - and they both had huge teen appeal too. As well as being very cools acts, you would get 9 year olds taken to concerts dressed as their heroes. They would have related to Bowie and Bolan in a slightly different way to a more mature audience, who would have homed in on certain aspects of their personas which probably would have went straight over the heads of their younger audience. There were a lot of what were called "Tenny Bopper" bands around this time. Acts such as the Bay City Rollers were very much targeted at children and young teens; the music wasn't all that great, and it was all about creating hype. There were a lot of American acts that were brought over here too to exploit the same cash rich audience.
Whiskey in the Jar O.
Not everything on the British music scene at this time was shiny or androgynous. Pub-rock was a much more gritty realist movement which was mainly live, but went on to produce some very successful and original acts. It was not a movement as such against Bowie and glam, but it didn't really want to go down that road. The acts were blues based and the lyrics were very blokey masculine song for having a good time to and generally being a geezer. There were acts though that took this starting point and took it to a more interesting place. Dr Feelgood, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Ian Dury (who later formed the wonderful Ian Dury and the Blockheads) wrote songs that were almost modern day working class poetry...and there was a rawness in the sound which was to have a big influence on later British sounds, most notably Punk. Pub-rock wasn't exactly the godfather of Punk - rather consider it more of a slightly rebellious beer-drinking uncle - but its impact on later bands like the Pistols was undeniable. This kind of music was never going to appeal to music writers in the same way that David Bowie, Roxy Music and the new emerging American groups like the Ramones however, and so it eventually petered out as a movement, or morphed into punk - depends which way you see it!
By the first half of the 70's, there were a growing amount of disperate but highly individual musicians that felt that progressive rock had gone way too far! Teenagers and the music press began to tire of the endless guitar and drum solos of what had now become mainstream stadium rock. Artists such as Rod Stewart and the Stones, who were usually respected for their musical integrity, were by now raising eyebrows with their increasingly lavish and extravagant behaviour - they were becoming rock n roll royalty, and many young people found that they could no longer identify with these musical heroes of olden yore! Later on these acts were to branded as old news or "dinosaurs", by the under 25's, but later on, even though punks slammed the Rolling Stones, actually they secretly loved the Stones (why go into rock n roll if you don't like the Stones?!)
In the economy things went from bad to worse; an oil crisis in 1973 added to the already fragile problems with fuel supply. Young people in Britain were fed up. There were hardly any job prospects, and they had no money to spend and nothing to do. The soundtrack to their lives were songs like "Boogie Wonderland", which really had very little to do with their actual lives, plus there were really bad 70's novelty songs which were becoming very popular on programmes such as Top of the Pops with the older audiences. At the other end of the scale, prog rock, which started in earnest as a blues-based celebration of skilled musicianship had become this kind of self indulgent freak show put on for disillusioned hippies who hadn't worked out that their dream project had failed. The main result of this across many musical genres was for a very stripped down sound, which meant going back to the very beginnings of rock "n" roll itself from the early 50's!
Despite popular opinion, Punk didn't really come from one place all at the same time. It's actually quite difficult to pinpoint EXACTLY where it originated. It really does depend on how far back you want to go. But in terms of the music iteself, it's pretty safe to say that the music become simplified and stripped down; it went back to the rock n roll and rockabilly roots of the early 1950's, but at the same time it was also something readically new. And it is widely recognised as starting over in the States especially with bands like the Ramones and the New York Dolls on the CBGBs nightclub scene. More about CBGBs.
Rock On
One of the main trends to come headbanging its way out of the '70s was Heavy Metal. Really it started with late ‘60s rockers “Black Sabbath”. They took prog rock, and changed the sentiments of the songs; so instead of singing about elves, pixies etc, they sung about the darker things in life. Their frontman Ozzy Osbourne waxed lyrically about graveyards, demons and the occult etc; and skulls, skeletons and other such paraphanalia were used in their artwork. This new type of music also saw the reliance on the “power chord”, and loud guitar solos. Most teenage boys were to come to like this type of music. It's true, there are more women and girls that listen to the genre now (and its variants), but it still remains a fairly male music type.
The music press were pretty dismissive of Heavy Metal in the early '70's (and for some time after). They saw bands such as Black Sabbath as slightly ridiculous with their cartoonish theatrics, and schlock-horror lyrics. But it was a mistake to just write this genre off outright, as it was to become hugely popular, and is still so to this day. It is also somewhat unfair to dismiss bands as great as Black Sabbath, who may have been all of these slightly mad things, but as well as the occult etc, they also wrote songs about very intelligent subjects. For example "Paranoid", contained songs about the horrors of war ("War Pigs" ), and apocolypic visions of the future - such as the famous "Iron Man". The Sabbath track "Iron Man", and the undeniable fact that the music was hard like metal, probably contributed towards the title "Heavy Metal". Many other bands were from Sheffield (Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Motorhead), a city associated with making steel, and this probably added weight to the name, making it very super heavy indeed!!
Apart from Bowie, Art-house glam, and some rather bored articles about Prog rock, the music press didn't really see that they had much to write about at this time, but there was a new type of popular music which was about to hit British ears and music journalist's pens, and it was called Reggae...
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