Oh! You Pretty Things: Glam Queens & Street Urchins 1970-1976 / Various

In the teenage wastelands of grey early Seventies Britain, where the musical landscape was dominated by introspective singer-songwriters and dour rock bands, the emergence of the outrageous, androgynous, peacock-plumaged Glam Rock scene provided a vital spark in the dark. Sadly the genre was quickly hijacked by the backroom hustlers of the British music industry and their mutton-dressed-as-glam pop idol marionettes. However, Oh! You Pretty Things ignores such lightweight fripperies to concentrate on the real deal. We focus on the twin central strands of Glam Rock: the cerebral and the visceral, with the artier, experimental element of the scene joined by the Ladbroke Grove street rockers and the Steve Marriott-channelling chirpy Cockney geezer street urchins, many of whom had been to drama school and knew how to strike a pose. We examine the trash-aesthetic fault line that joined the seedy, no-longer-swinging London of the early Seventies with New York's sleazy demi-monde and the incorrigible hucksters of Hollywood. The latter were led by Kim Fowley, ably assisted by LA scenester Rodney Bingenheimer, who opened Rodney's English Disco (allegedly at Bowie's suggestion), where the underage groupies, teenage runaways and glitter queens of Sunset Strip hung out with visiting British rock royalty and the likes of Alice Cooper and a wasted Iggy Pop. Incorporating huge British bands (Roxy Music, Slade, Sweet etc) and the leading US acts on the scene (New York Dolls, Jobriath, Lou Reed, Iggy & The Stooges), our four-hour anthology of prettiest stars, prima ballerinas and real cool traders covers all bases. Some acts were defined purely by glam, others (ELO, Strawbs, Thin Lizzy) merely paid the neighbourhood a fleeting visit, while the likes of Despair and England's Glory would only find their niche after the more streetwise element of glam mutated into punk. Big hits, inexplicable misses, seminal glam texts, cult classics, key album tracks, alternative versions and even a clutch of previously unreleased but essential recordings: Oh! You Pretty Things - housed in a clamshell box that contains a 40-page booklet of amazing photos and incredible stories - assembles all these and more to act as the definitive primer of a relatively short-lived but glorious musical and pop-cultural phenomenon