My brother was a big glam fan, and amongst my first hazy memories are him religiously tuning in to Top Of The Pops every week to see Bowie, The Glitter Band, or Slade. It used to disturb me to see these hairy men wearing badly-applied make-up and tight costumes, prancing about in platform heels and asking me if I wanted to be in their gang. Even at such a tender age I sensed there was something inherently WRONG about all of this, and time and experience has done little to change that opinion. You can count the decent songs that glam produced on one industrially-damaged hand, and the rest was either art-school camp gone wrong or football terrace chants wrapped up in feather boas. Even through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia it’s hard to make a strong case for glam, but I suppose it served its purpose in paving the way for punk and for that I guess we should be thankful – but did it really deserve a film? Todd Haynes seemed to think so, and in 1998 released Velvet Goldmine to a largely indifferent public. Alright, it won a few awards – the kind that no-one outside of the film industry gives a toss about – but it seemed to suffer from what were perceived to be the overwhelming burdens of its own pretensions – which is pretty much what happened to glam in the first place.
I held off watching the film for a long time, as I always do, until I felt I was ready to tackle the insufferable smugness of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but to give him his credit he does an excellent job as Brian Slade, the fallen star whose rise to fame and sudden ignoble disappearance is at the heart of the film. Clearly based on David Bowie – not so much the facts of his life as the popular myths surrounding his heyday – Slade’s career is witnessed in flashbacks detailed by those who knew him best, including his first manager and his wife – with every Popbitch rumour and myth about what went off backstage thrown in for maximum decadence. Slade’s transition from effete folkie to alien rock fiend is attributed directly to the influence of Curt Wild, a blatant pastiche of Iggy Pop played with relish by Ewan McGregor. The sight of him dancing on a burning stage with his cock out and the Wyld Ratttz blasting out a corking version of TV Eye is a useful reminder of how radical an act the Stooges were, and their immediate influence on Bowie’s ideas is mirrored in Slade’s immediate transformation into ‘Maxwell Demon’, an even-camper version of Ziggy Stardust.
At the height of glam’s appeal, Slade stages his own death whilst live on stage, and then disappears from the public gaze. By the mid-80’s he’s almost completely forgotten but on the 10th anniversary of his once-notorious exit Arthur Stewart, a journalist and former teenage fan, is commissioned by his editor to follow up on the story. Christian Bale plays Arthur, and there’s plenty of flashbacks of him mooning over Brian Slade in his bedroom and seeing in him an expression of his own repressed bi/homo leanings. The grey and monotonous urban landscape that he now exists in is constantly juxtaposed with the flash and glitter of the glam era, emphasising that what had now become immediately apparent was there all along but there was perhaps in the 1970’s a greater propensity for delusion. “The shittier the circumstances, the bigger the dream.”
Bale, who went on to play Patrick Bale (American Psycho), Bruce Wayne (Batman) and is soon to be seen as the adult John Connor (Terminator), is not all that convincing as a sexually-conflicted teenager but does the adult haunted by his past very well. Meyers does himself proud as the deluded rock dreamer that you yearn to see stranded on the rocks on the his own vanity, and Toni Collette does a fine pastiche of a berserk-then-bitter “Angie Bowie”. The best performance for me though comes from Eddie Izzard, who plays the Mephistophelean manager Jerry Devine as if he’d been doing it all his life.
When interviewed by Alan Moore on Radio 4, Brian Eno said of the glam rock scene he’d been so instrumental in creating: “It was fun while it lasted, but it didn’t stay fun for very long.” In his film Todd Haynes captured that sense of brevity, of the moment to enjoy it being a fleeting one, and along the way created a useful cautionary tale for anyone thinking of digging their own velvet goldmine. I’m personally glad I didn’t come of age during this era as it would have meant all my nostalgic reveries would be accompanied by some of the worst music ever recorded. The soundtrack for the film cherry picks the best of the era, but we should remember that for every decent Roxy Music song, there was a ‘Ballroom Blitz’, for every ‘Jean Genie’ an ‘I Love You Love Me Love.’ And, lest we forget…
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