The Glory of Glam
22.00, BBC Radio 2
Turkey and all that hasn’t the most eye-opening bit of Bygraves on our screens in recent times thanks to “DISCO MAX” on Sounds of the Seventies. The theory is that glam more or less died in the summer of 1974 when Top of the Pops was on strike and when it came back disco was the dominant force, though as we’re seeing on BBC4 the prime movers kept plugging in there, moving into new directions with The Rubettes going country, Slade turning more metal and Mud seemingly flinging every genre they could think of onto vinyl.
I’ve only been dipping into the 1977 TOTP repeats, but it did surprised me how many glam acts were getting on the show a couple of years after the style seemed to have peaked.
Glam didn’t really die out until 1975 when bands like The Bay City Rollers took over from Slade as the kids favourites. Also it was around this time The Sweet wanted to be more known as a hard rock band and Marc Bolan became more experimental and didn’t care about getting into the charts.