In the UK., some time after the hippies came pub rocK; scruppy blues rockers with bad teeth.
The advent of disco lead to a merging of imagery and the faces bought platform heels, make up and skin tight everythings and with coke in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other hand lead the fashion vanguard to GLAM ROCK.
Because, honest, glam rock was a fashion not a musical movement.
You might think otherwise but Gary Glitter and Slade were not interchangeable with Bowie, T-Rex, Abba or the Faces.
But the look was.
A unisex, b-sex, sex tinged, sexy, twigged drug muffed ambi everything, glittery, glammy visage. By 1973, Prime Minister Jimmy Callaghan had the UK on a thre day working week so their were no jobs and it was getting worse (the net result would be the Fagin and his Lost boys punk rock five years later). But the working class were painting crayons on their dead end scene and singing their way to the discos. Howling to pop, rock, and disco, the songs were hedonistic calls to… well, to hedonism.
Glam hid itself in its own irrelevance: “Saturday Night At The Movies” morphed with “Stay With Me”: the battle cry of sex: “sit down, get up, get down”.
That was one side: Slade, Faces, the Stones, cockney rebel: borderline yobs in tights.
The other side was pop rock uber alles: bands like Sweet making bubblegum rock, alongside Abba and Gary Glitter, David Essex, Bay City rollers.
To the left: disco mainstreamers Tavares, Bee Gees, all those Saturday Night Fever guys.
And straddling all dimensions David Bowie.
The entire scene was like a cocaine waiting for a crash and crash it did. Bowie went off the deep end, the scene went up its own nose in a mess of self-indulgence and arrogance.
And punk swept everything away with one fell swoop.
Punk was less fun but much better.
And Glam came to a bad, bad end.