By the end of the sixties, as pop turned into rock and the three minute single morphed into the concept album and rock opera, the music scene was becoming increasingly drab and portentous.

Glam rock was the antidote to the prevailing greyness. While denim-clad singer-songwriters and bearded progressive rock musicians assured of us their sincerity and seriousness, extravagantly attired glam rock groups camped it up on Top of the Pops, parading their artificiality while delivering short, sharp bursts of energy.

As Simon Reynolds observes glam was a return to the performance flash and musical simplicity of original rock and roll with the added benefit of seventies studio technology. The prime movers of glam, or at least a certain and arguably dominant strand of it, were not the groups but producers, professional songwriters and record label owners. From the Beatles onwards it had become usual for bands to write their own songs. By the late sixties, with much talk of rock as the voice of youth and even revolution, doing so became pretty much a proof of authenticity.

The glam rockers, in contrast, moved backwards into the future. Back to Tin Pan Alley hacks churning out commercial fodder for hired hands, back to the days of the puppet master producer and the compliant marionette performer. The creative figures in what might be called bubblegum glam were songwriters like Chinn and Chapman who wrote the songs for the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud, label owners like Mickie Most with his roster of glam groups and writer/producer/instrumentalist Mike Leander, the man behind Gary Glitter. The main role of the groups was to look good, or utterly ridiculous depending on your point of view, and sell the product on Top of the Pops.

In addition to the overtly commercial fodder of these groups there was also an arty/intellectual strand to glam as exemplified by David Bowie and Roxy Music. This was glam rock for bright Grammar School boys and girls doing their ‘A’ levels. According to Reynolds, Roxy Music with their pick and mix approach to musical styles and eras, were the progenitors of a post-modernist approach to pop. But, as he has discussed at length elsewhere, what was fresh and exciting in 1972 subsequently turned stale as successive examples of ‘post-modernist’ pop turned out, on closer inspection, to be a triumph of style over content with a magpie approach to existing musical styles substituting for originality.

He’s a bit harsh on Bryan Ferry, lambasting him for social climbing and allegedly betraying his working class roots. There’s an element of truth to this but he does rather go on about it. Much the same could be said of almost any famous pop star from a humble background, but I’ve noticed that rock critics have a tendency to single out Ferry for special treatment in this regard. Oddly enough, one of the key concepts of glam was self re-invention - the idea that individuals didn’t have to passively fulfil what appeared to be their biological or social destiny. You might have thought that Ferry, a Geordie miner’s son who re-invented himself as Lord of the Manor, would be praised by a glam rock historian as an exemplar of self re-invention. You would be wrong.

Reynolds makes rather too much of the gender bending aspect of glam citing social changes, and even the abolition of National Service, as factors in the early seventies explosion of what often looked suspiciously like groups of bricklayers with badly applied eyeliner prancing about on Top of the Pops. Up to a point, Lord Copper. But there is also the more mundane fact that glam was essentially a British phenomenon and there is a long tradition in British popular entertainment of camp and cross dressing (think Carry On and pantomime dames). Much of the gender bending in glam rock was on this pretty harmless and trivial level, the only really serious contender being David Bowie with his ‘I’m gay’ pronouncement in Melody Maker. Bowie may have attempted to recant later, and people have argued endlessly about the authenticity of the statement, but there is no doubt that Bowie was experienced as a liberating force by many young gay people in the early seventies.

The chapter on Marc Bolan, the man who got the glam bandwagon rolling, is the highlight of the book and one of the best things I’ve ever read about him. Reynolds was besotted by the bopping elf at a very early age and writes about him with a touching mixture of adoring fan and sophisticated rock critic, displaying a warm understanding of his curious mixture of magic, intuition and calculation.

Bowie gets no less than four chapters charting his career right from the beginning all the way up to his Berlin period (so way beyond his glam years). He also gets an obituary as Reynolds was still writing the book when Bowie died. He doesn’t say anything startlingly original about Bowie but provides a solid enough partial biography. What does become clear is that it took the best part of a decade for Bowie’s talent to come into focus. His constant changes of musical styles throughout the sixties seem at once aimless and desperate, but once he had achieved the success he clearly craved, through the creation of his glam rock alter ego Ziggy Stardust, the same chameleonic abilities would prove to be his strength and ensure a longevity that would elude his friend and rival Bolan.

Bowie may have become famous as a glam rock star, but he transcends glam in a way that few, if any, of his contemporaries do. The Sweet, Slade, Suzi Quatro and Mud made great singles which, though much derided by rock critics at the time, retain their energy and power fifty years on, but they are nonetheless all frozen in the early seventies. Still, these groups are proof that in pop music you never can tell what will stand the test of time and also that great pop is not necessarily the result of the purest of motives. Most of these records were made with no higher ambition than the making of a fast buck and yet they have endured while much of the supposedly more serious music of the time has disappeared without trace.

At over 650 pages Shock and Awe is an exhaustive, and indeed exhausting, survey of glam rock. In these pages you will find every glam era band you have ever heard of plus a few I certainly hadn’t. Reynolds takes as wide a definition of glam as possible including a number of bands and artists I’ve never really thought of as glam rock (The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and even David Essex!). He doesn’t stop at bands either and also looks at The Rock Horror Picture Show, the Warhol scene and the TV series Rock Follies. The massive final chapter chronicling every pop star allegedly influenced by glam rock from 1975 to 2016 suggests he didn’t quite know when to stop.

I can’t help feeling that there is a slimmer and more sharply focused book bursting to get out of this sprawling epic. Glam rock certainly added to the gaiety of nations and also gave us a fair amount to think about, but it’s a subject requiring a light touch, and that doesn’t seem to be Reynolds forte. His meticulous research, however, can’t be denied - even if he has put every last bit of it into the finished book.

Shock and Awe is informative and enjoyable, but perhaps best read a chapter or two at a time, as trying to devour this monster in one gulp may result in chronic indigestion. ( )

I found "Shock and Awe" to be compulsively readable, which is strange considering I don't have a ton of interest in the music style that it talks about. But Simon Reynolds isn't your average rockwriter: he's sort of a critic and a historian and a cultural theorist and a archivist all rolled into one, which might make anything he writes worth reading. As a historian, he's meticulous and careful to avoid the "everything at once" narratives that streaming culture seems to inspire. He describes the various swings between more grounded forms of performance (sixties rock, grunge) and more blatantly theatrical modes, but he's also very attuned to how performers themselves shift easily between these ways of self-presentation. He seems to have interviewed a lot of the people who oiled the gears of what was -- for a while at least -- a hugely prolific and profitable genre, or to have read every interview the big players in the glam scene have ever given. Considering how completely some of these bands have been forgotten, that in itself deserves some recognition. "Shock and Awe" also changed my ideas about what was going on in the rock scene in the dead years between the eclipse of hippie rock and the punk explosion. Apparently, there was a lot more out there than boring prog rock double albums: who knew that British mobile discos were full of hormonal teens stomping along to now-forgotten guitar-driven floor fillers? And he nimbly puts the New York Dolls -- perhaps the only really significant act to come out of New York's mid-seventies trash-glam scene -- in context, connecting them with both the drag and cruising scenes that informed their doomy, sleazy songs. As the this book's other reviewer has noted, David Bowie -- as artist, cultural chameleon, actor and creative force -- is really this book's center, the sort of complex cultural figure that seems to have inspired a small library's worth of interpretation even before he passed. I got the feeling that Reynolds himself resolved some of his own questions about Bowie while writing this book. The author presents him as a subject that gave scores of interviews but remained unknowable, was driven by the need to be extraordinary and someone constantly on the brink of exhaustion, and someone who ping-ponged between thrillingly ambitious experimental and frankly fascist impulses. Reynolds also attributes what he describes as a fundamental English decency to him -- Bowie, he writes, never stopped having his own heroes and his own fascinations. I don't know about that last bit, but "Shock and Awe" makes a convincing case for Bowie as cultural linchpin and artistic weather vane -- a key figure in late-twentieth century culture.

What I found most impressive, and perhaps most interesting, about Reynolds's book is how well the author defined the genre and divined its hidden motivations. Glam is something of an atypical rock genre in that it's exactly what many people think that rock isn't: obsessed with image, anti-natural, culturally conservative, largely white, reactionary, decadent, androgynous, theatrical, wary of black American rhythms, and, occasionally, emotionally hollow. The author does a good job of sussing all this out and explaining how glam differed from -- and occasionally connected with -- the hippie rock that preceded it and the punk and new wave that followed it. I'd recommend "Shock and Awe" to punk fans just for the "Ultraviolence" chapter, which digs up some ridiculously obscure proto-punk acts I'd never even heard of. Also, as a person who kind of agrees with Dave Marsh's assessment that Queen came close to being a fascist rock band but could never quite explain why, it was good to see a really skilled writer analyze the places where totalitarian spectacle and glam spectacle intersected. For a music writer, Reynolds isn't afraid to pose some difficult questions here: a lot of "Shock and Awe" considers glam in a broad -- almost world-historical -- economic and social context. What changes, he asks, made glam's development possible, and what does the glam sensibility look like, fifty years on? The book ends with a timeline-cum-essay in which Amazing Grace Jones, Lady Gaga, Kanye West and Drake are given their own places in the glam canon. Even if you don't agree with Reynolds's assessments, this extended closing riff should provide fodder for more than a couple of good dorm room arguments. Recommended to Bowie fans, survivors of the early-seventies mobile disco scene, rock history nerds in general, and anyone who has half a bag of glitter and half a tube of eyeliner stashed away in an old shoe box somewhere. ( )

In this sprawling work the noted rock critic tries to give a comprehensive account of the whole "glam" phenomena and probably comes as close as one is going to get in a single book that challenges the limits of paperback technology! That said about 45% of this history is devoted to David Bowie in his prime, ranging from Bowie's pre-glitter career while trying to find an image (with the exception of the hit "Space Oddity") and essentially finishing with Bowie in Berlin after which he himself was basically done with glam (if not success). In between a wide variety of bands and personalities are dealt with, ranging from significant players who are still beloved like Mark Bolan & Roxy Music, to the successful but now almost forgotten like Slade & Sweet, to the mostly-marginal denizens who made up the scene in New York & Los Angeles. Reynolds then winds up with an extended overview of the influence of glam rock before finishing with an elegy to David Bowie; having been wrapping up this book when the great man died.

Was Bowie a great man? Reynolds certainly thinks so, with the mark of Bowie's greatness being his enthusiasm for new and innovative concepts and how he transmitted those enthusiasms to his fans, not to mention the way Bowie maintained a certain level of character and decency through most of his life, so long as you disregard the 'Slough of Despond' that L.A. represented for Bowie. Even Reynolds displays a certain level of exasperation with his subject at this point. That this could have turned out otherwise is represented by examples such as Gary Glitter (in jail for his moral degradation), Bryan Ferry (who became uninteresting after achieving social success) or the band Slade (who failed to develop as an enterprise and became irrelevant). I myself know that I was taken aback at the out-pouring of affection for Bowie back in 2016; as I could vividly remember the figure of menace he seemed to be, as opposed to becoming the clarion prophet of the right to define one's self as one saw fit.

As for why I don't rate this book a bit higher partly that is due to how it's suffused with some of Reynolds' own world-weariness, as one of his main concerns in the last few years is the tendency of pop to be on a constant "wash, rinse, repeat" cycle and the dearth of actual artistic innovation. Also, it is to be kept in mind that this is a history of glam rock, not glitter pop. For example, Iggy Pop (who Bowie took under his wing) gets much more attention than Elton John. ( )