On the evening of 6 July 1972 the BBC's weekly chart programme, Top of the Pops, broadcast three minutes that a generation of British teenagers would later swear had rearranged their lives. The singer in a quilted jumpsuit with his hair dyed the colour of a fox, who draped an arm round his guitarist's shoulder in front of the cameras and sang "Starman" straight down the lens at the nation's living rooms, was David Bowie.
Everything in the argument over glam rock vs glam metal is already in that clip, and none of it is volume. The song is a pop single with a chorus lifted high enough to be sung by children, the guitar is a colour laid under the voice rather than a weapon aimed over it, and the arm round the shoulder is the whole provocation, a gesture that did more damage to the parlour furniture of 1972 than any amplifier could have done.
A prop maker's bottle of sugar glass and a real bottle from behind the bar stand on the same shelf looking exactly alike, the same green, the same label, the same shine. Only when each one is swung and smashed across a stuntman's back does the difference come out: the first bursts into sweet, harmless crystals and a laugh from the crew, the second splits the jacket along the seam and leaves splinters in the lining. Glam rock and glam metal came off the same shelf. They break differently.
Which of the two belongs where in the family, and how the border with hard rock was drawn, is set out in where it sits in the story. The narrower tests are the ones a record answers without anybody looking at the sleeve.
Glam rock vs glam metal, test by test
Start with the drummer. Glam rock ran on the stomp, a heavy four on the floor toms with hand claps laid across the backbeat, a rhythm built for a school disco and a crowd of twelve year olds stamping on a sprung floor until the boards bounced. The Wolverhampton four who rode it straight into the British chart in March 1973, entering at number one in its first week with "Cum On Feel the Noize", a feat British chart-watchers had not seen since the Beatles, were Slade. Glam metal threw the stomp out. Its drummers played the straight rock backbeat, harder and with the snare pushed forward.
Then the guitar. In glam rock it was a texture, a riff under the chorus and a short break where a solo might have been, and in glam metal it was the second singer, handed a solo in the middle of every single whatever the song, where on a three minute glam rock single a full solo had been close to anathema. That one difference sorts most records in a few bars. The costume sorts nothing.
Then the singer. Glam rock's front men shouted like Noddy Holder of Slade, crooned and yelped like Marc Bolan of T. Rex, or acted a part like Bowie, and almost none of them tried to climb above the band, because the band never stood in the way. Glam metal inherited the heavy metal problem along with the heavy metal guitar, two stacks of amplifiers roaring behind the microphone, and answered it the heavy metal way, by sending the voice up into the tenor range and holding it there.
| Test | Glam rock | Glam metal |
|---|---|---|
| The drummer | The stomp, floor toms and hand claps | A straight rock backbeat |
| The guitar | Riff and colour, a short break | Riff plus a solo in every single |
| The singer | A shout, a croon or a character | A tenor pushed above the guitars |
| The format | The seven inch single | The album, sold by the video |
| The screen | Top of the Pops | MTV |
| The paint | Androgyny as the act itself | Make-up worn over a hard rock band |
The songwriters' office
The London songwriting pair who wrote the A-sides that made the reputation of Sweet, "Block Buster!", "Hell Raiser", "The Ballroom Blitz" and "Teenage Rampage" among them, and who kept Suzi Quatro and Mud at the top of the same chart in the same years, were Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, known to the trade by the single word Chinnichap.
They built singles the way a milliner builds hats over a wooden block, steaming the felt soft, dragging it down over the crown by main force, pinning it hard at the brim and leaving it to set, so that every hat that comes off the block fits exactly the same head. The heads they were fitting were twelve years old. The block was a chorus and a stomp, and a band that wanted anything else had to get it past the pins.
The band that wanted something else was Sweet itself, and by common consent its members chafed for years at the teen material handed to them while they wanted to play heavy rock. The proof is on their own B-sides and in the songs they finally wrote for themselves, heavier and harder than the singles, and in 1975, with the song credited to all four of Brian Connolly, Andy Scott, Steve Priest and Mick Tucker, they cut the one that crossed the border on its own.
Recorded at Kingsway Studios in London, the room Ian Gillan of Deep Purple owned, and released in 1975 ahead of the album Strung Up, "Action" reached number fifteen in Britain that July with a riff that owes nothing to the stomp and a chorus built for a hall rather than a playground. It is still glam rock, in its satin and its harmonies. It is also the song the lineage of glam metal would come back for.
The Sheffield band that took "Action" into its own set, recorded it for the 1993 compilation Retro Active and released it as a single that reached number fourteen in Britain in January 1994, one place higher than the original, was Def Leppard. The song was not rewritten. The drums were heavier, the guitars thicker and the harmonies stacked higher, and a glam rock single turned out to have been a heavy rock song waiting nineteen years for a band to admit it.
A glam rock single turned out to have been a heavy rock song waiting nineteen years for a band to admit it.
The screen and the paint
Glam rock was a television music, and so was its heir. Top of the Pops went out once a week to a whole country at teatime, and a band had three minutes on a studio floor to make an impression, which is why the Bowie clip turned on one gesture and one look down the lens. The androgyny was the act. Take the jumpsuit and the arm off "Starman" and there is a fine pop song and nothing to talk about in the playground.
The American bands of the next decade had a channel that played all day and videos that ran as long as the song. The songwriter who co-wrote Kiss's "I Was Made for Lovin' You" in 1979 and then Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name", a number one on the Hot 100 in 1986, was Desmond Child, and his career is the Chinnichap trade carried across the Atlantic and fitted with a whammy bar. The block was different. The pins were the same.
That era, its clubs, its spray cans and its video budgets, belongs to 80s hair metal, and the paint it wore meant something else from the paint of 1972. On the Sunset Strip the make-up was the forebear's uniform worn over a hard rock band, a spectacle sold to the same teenagers who bought the guitar solos. It was not the argument. It was the invitation.
Where the line falls
Put a record to the tests and it answers quickly. A stomp and a single, a guitar that colours rather than solos, and paint that is the point of the exercise: glam rock, whatever the volume. A backbeat and an album, a solo in the middle of the single, and paint worn over a band that would still be a heavy band without it: glam metal, whatever the shade of lipstick.
The same questions, asked of a later and angrier music, split the family again in the nineties, when the paint came off entirely and the argument moved to heavy metal vs nu metal. Glam never had that fight. Its two halves shared a wardrobe and parted company at the drum stool.
