Spectacle, Fashion and the Dancing Experience in Britain, 1960-1990

276 Pages·2022·5.023 MB·English

by  Jon Stratton

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
THE HISTORY OF SUBCULTURES
AND POPULAR MUSIC
Jon Stratton
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Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and
Popular Music
Series Editors
Keith Gildart
University of Wolverhampton
Wolverhampton, UK
Anna Gough-Yates
University of Roehampton
London, UK
Sian Lincoln
Liverpool John Moores University
Liverpool, UK
Bill Osgerby
London Metropolitan University
London, UK
Lucy Robinson
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
John Street
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK
Peter Webb
University of the West of England
Bristol, UK
Matthew Worley
University of Reading
Reading, UK
From 1940s zoot-suiters and hepcats through 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers, beat-
niks and Teddy boys; 1960s surfers, rude boys, mods, hippies and bikers;
1970s skinheads, soul boys, rastas, glam rockers, funksters and punks; on
to the heavy metal, hip-hop, casual, goth, rave and clubber styles of the
1980s, 90s, noughties and beyond, distinctive blends of fashion and music
have become a defining feature of the cultural landscape. The Subcultures
Network series is international in scope and designed to explore the social
and political implications of subcultural forms. Youth and subcultures will
be located in their historical, socio-economic and cultural context; the
motivations and meanings applied to the aesthetics, actions and manifesta-
tions of youth and subculture will be assessed. The objective is to facilitate
a genuinely cross-disciplinary and transnational outlet for a burgeoning
area of academic study.
Jon Stratton
Spectacle, Fashion and
the Dancing
Experience in Britain,
1960–1990
Jon Stratton
UniSA Creative
University of South Australia
Adelaide, SA, Australia
ISSN 2730-9517 ISSN 2730-9525 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music
ISBN 978-3-031-09011-0 ISBN 978-3-031-09012-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09012-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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A
cknowledgements
A big thank you goes to the members of UniSA Creative for the congenial
working environment they have created. A special thanks goes to the
members of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre for
their interest and engagement at seminars I have presented related to this
book. I particularly want to thank Professor Susan Luckman, who as
Director of the Centre has always been helpful and supportive, especially
during the time of the pandemic. Thanks to UniSA Creative and Professor
Luckman for granting me funds for the proofing and indexing of this book.
Thanks must go to Jess Taylor, who has done an extraordinary job
completing the referencing and formatting of this manuscript. Her work
is always amazing and this time more than usual. I am in her debt. Thanks
also to Mar Bucknell for his superlative proofing and indexing of this book.
My thanks go to Panizza Allmark, Professor of Visual and Cultural
Studies at Edith Cowan University, for her personal support through the
development and completion of this project. She has always had my back.
An earlier version of Chap. 4 appeared as an article in Contemporary
British History, vol. 35, no. 2, 2021. I would like to thank the journal edi-
tors for permission to republish from that article. Some material in Chaps.
3 and 4 derive from an article ‘Disco before Disco: Dancing and popular
music in the 1960s and 1970s in England’ published in Journal of Popular
Music Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, 2021.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Those Dancing Years 1
The Organisation of the Book 12
References 15
2 Dancing to Records in the 1960s 17
Going Dancing in the 1960s 18
Reproducing Music 25
From the Twist to the Beat 30
Conclusion 41
References 44
3 Music for Dancing in the 1960s 49
Stomping Beats 53
African Drums and British Feet 57
‘Rock And Roll’ and Mike Leander 63
The End of the Beginning 68
References 76
4 Glam Rock and the Society of the Spectacle 81
Glam Rock, Youth Culture and Neo-tribes 82
Glam Rock and the Rise of Consumerism 84
Redefining Glam Rock 87
Glam Rock as British 91
Glam Rock, Spectacle and Television 96
Britain Becomes a Consumption-Oriented Society 100
vii
viii CONTENTS
Conclusion 108
References 110
5 Glam Rock: Sexuality, Performance and Spectacle 115
The Women Behind Glam Rock 122
Performance and the Gay Experience 125
Gary Glitter, David Bowie and Jean Genet 129
The Gaze and Performance 132
Androgyny, Bowie and the Society of the Spectacle 134
Gary Glitter and Glam Camp 138
Conclusion 139
References 141
6 The New Romantics: Dancing in the Society
of the Spectacle 147
The New Romantics Were Not a Youth Culture 148
Naming and Clubbing 154
New Romantic Style 157
The Fashion Industry 161
Music Videos 167
Mirrors Become Screens 172
Conclusion 180
References 181
7 Learning to Rave: The Construction of Rave in the UK in
the 1980s 187
The Historicity of the Temporary Autonomous Zone 188
The New York Clubs 193
The New Dancing Experience 197
The Ibiza Myth 201
Dance Music 206
Ecstasy 210
The Mainstreaming of Dance Music 215
Conclusion 217
References 218
References 225
Index 249
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Those Dancing Years
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution
Attributed to Emma Goldman (c. 1934)
Between the 1960s and the 1980s popular music consumption in Britain
changed in fundamental ways. What gave it continuity was dancing,
though the context for this and even the dancing itself also changed radi-
cally. From young people dancing to groups like the Dave Clark Five to
DJs like Paul Oakenfold playing techno and trance tracks (electronic dance
music) in lengthy sequences to which young people, sometimes on Ecstasy,
would dance until exhausted, there is seemingly an unbridgeable gulf.
This is not the case. The pounding bass drum offered by the Dave Clark
Five and other beat groups provided a clear, stomping beat to which
young British, for which also read white, people could move their feet.
There is a lineage from this to the minimal feet movement of punks, who
in the late 1970s would move vertically to a rapid drum and bass beat, a
dance known as the pogo, and on to the increasingly freestyle, individual-
ised dancing at raves, which nevertheless focused on the feet as the source
of connection to the beat. The bass drum stomp itself carried through into
the 1990s in the pounding beats of artists like the Chemical Brothers,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
J. Stratton, Spectacle, Fashion and the Dancing Experience in Britain,
1960–1990, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and
Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09012-7_1
2 J. STRATTON
Fatboy Slim and the Prodigy, who are sometimes known generically, in
America at least, as part of the Big Beat (Coleman 2016).
At the same time, the means of transmission of music for dancing
changed from live groups, often utilising the PA sound systems of ball-
rooms or church halls or similar venues, to records played on record play-
ers at parties, and to the use of increasingly sophisticated amplification
systems through which records would be played in the new custom-built
clubs, alternatively called discos. These clubs employed DJs to play
recorded music for young people to dance to. It wasn’t until the late
1960s that it became generally accepted to dance to records and at this
time this practice ceased to be thought of as a cheap and unsatisfactory
alternative to dancing to live music. It was around the same time that
some strains of rock music morphed into what came to be called prog rock
(prog standing for progressive), which included artists like Genesis
(founded 1967), Caravan (founded 1968) and Yes (founded 1968). With
its varying time signatures and uneven beats, and often played on instru-
ments not usually found in the make-up of mainstream groups, this music
was designed for listening to rather than dancing to. It became common
to sit down at live music gigs in order to appreciate critically what was
being played rather than finding the beat and communing with the group
in the joint experience of the music. The people who appreciated this
music, mostly middle-class youth, often students, tended to look down on
dance music and those who danced to it.
The changes that were occurring in dancing to popular music in the
late 1960s coincided with a fundamental transformation in British society.
This is best captured in Guy Debord’s theorisation of the society of the
spectacle in his book, published in French in 1967 as La societe du spectacle
and in English in 1970 as The society of the spectacle. The French theorist
was a leading member of the social revolutionary group, the Situationist
International, whose critique of the social order was founded in libertarian
Marxism and avant-garde movements like Dada and Surrealism (see Plant
1992; Wark 2015). The Situationist International played a large part in
fomenting the uprising against the French state in 1968. Some of the slo-
gans graffitied on walls in Paris at this time came from Debord’s book.
Debord elaborated the concept of the society of the spectacle as a critique
of what he understood to be happening in France.
France was transforming from a society based on production capitalism
to one based on consumption. This was compounded by the spread of
mass media, in particular television, which, with the concurrent