“Everybody’s getting so heavily into nostalgia,” wrote the NME journalist Charles Shaar Murray of the then newly minted pop postmodernists Roxy Music and their elaborately dressed fans, “that if the Seventies don’t get into gear, there ain’t gonna be anything for people to get nostalgic about in the Eighties and Nineties.” Thankfully, the Boswell of Bowie was wrong. The uptight Thatcher years might have treated the Seventies as a no-go area, a frivolous dressing-up box, but surely now we can accept that the bacofoiled planet of Bowie, Marc Bolan, Roxy and Suzi Quatro – alongside its equally flamboyant binary sister, disco – forms pop culture’s true centre of gravity.
In archetypes that recur as Grace Jones or Lady Gaga, in spangled pop mutants such as Ke$ha or Adam Lambert, in asexual electroclash and queer pop and the styling-as-totalitarian-power videos of Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, pop keeps returning to glam rock’s foamy, artificial brew, getting high on the glitter and the decadence, the make-up, the wardrobe, the wigs. The death of David Bowie in January 2016 brought it all into sharper focus, and perhaps also marked the passing of the mantle of Ultimate Creative Fountainhead from the Beatles to “the Dame”. We live in David’s world now and, in truth, we’ve lived there for some time.
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