Glam rock’s history is clustered into two distinct eras: its initial early 70s glitter-pop boom (T.Rex, Sweet, Slade, Suzi, Bowie, New York Dolls) and its macho, chest-thumping 80s hair metal resurgence (Mötley Crüe, Poison, Ratt). If you’re looking for the connective tissue between the two, it’s very clearly KISS and Hanoi Rocks. But there was also a hazy and overlooked “art-glam” moment in the mid to late 1970s when bands like Roxy Music and Sparks stretched glam’s platform boot stomp into weird new musical life-forms. Art-glam’s pinnacle achievement, I think, was the first two albums by reluctant Brit glitter-kings Japan. Adolescent Sex and Obscure Alternatives were both released in 1978. By the time most people discovered them, the band had already abandoned their sound and vision, barreling straight-ahead into synth-driven pop, eventually becoming vanguards of the “New Romantic” movement. They were much happier being proto Duran Durans, and Japan frontman David Sylvian decided to just pretend 1978 never even happened.

But it did, man. And it was glorious.
 

Dandies in the underworld: Japan in 1978
 
Japan was formed in South London in 1974 by Sylvian and his brother, Steve Jansen. Sylvian’s tragic beauty was the band’s initial calling card and when early publicity photos wound their way to the band’s namesake country, they became instant sensations there. While virtually ignored back home, they were huge in Japan, even before releasing a lick of music. Their manager told the Japanese press that Sylvian was voted “most beautiful man in the world” (he wasn’t), and that was really all they needed. Initially, Japan’s sound was essentially blue-eyed funk, but by the time they hit the studio in 1977, an affection for the chunky hooks of the Dolls and T.Rex had kicked in. Their first two albums are low-budget wonders of post-punky jangle, alienated disco-funk, and slithery glitter rock. None of it should work, but it does. Perfectly. And looks-wise, the band was impeccable, like Hanoi Rocks in custom-fitted shark skin suits.
 

Racy sleeve for Japan’s debut 1978 single. Remind you of anything else?
 
But none of it mattered, really. 1978 had other things on its mind. Marc Bolan died in ‘77 and took glam rock with him. It was all about punk and disco and new-wave, and Japan’s funky glitter-rock seemed anachronistic to most, including the band themselves. In 1979 they met Euro disco king Giorgio Moroder who turned them on to dancier alternatives. He produced their hit single “Life in Tokyo” later that year and paved the way for their arty synth-pop makeover. They spent the next three years pioneering the new romantic movement before unceremoniously breaking up mid-stride. Sylvian has gotten the band back together here and there over the intervening decades, sometimes under the moniker Rain Tree Crow. But one thing he has never wavered on is how much he hates those first two albums.
 

Japan’s 1980 new-wave makeover.
 

“It doesn’t mean anything. That whole era of Japan was ....misguided,” Sylvian told NME in 1991. “If people want to somehow keep that period alive for themselves it’s really up to them but they’re fooling themselves. Maybe it’s a fantastic form of escapism for those people who build their existence around the fact that there was once a group called Japan. I think they’re missing so much in life. I feel totally detached from it. I don’t relate to it at all. If I felt complimented or flattered by that then I’d say so. I don’t. In fact most of the time I find it irritating, in that they’re highlighting an area of my work that I was involved in, in which I place no value myself.”

 

 
Well, sez you, dude. The fact of the matter is this: Japan’s 1978 albums are gorgeously disaffected glam rock gems well worth rediscovering.

And as these clips after the jump show, they looked as fantastic as they sounded.

 
In Britain during the 1970s live wrestling matches were broadcast every Saturday afternoon on the ITV channel. Millions of fans tuned in to watch such legendary British wrestlers as Mick McManus, Jackie Pallo, Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy. These men were working class heroes—no nonsense traditional wrestlers in trunks and boots. Though they looked like your Dad—a bit a chubby, with a liking for beer—in the ring they were ruthless. Each was a master of a particular wrestling technique with which they showed off their athletic prowess.

Then one Saturday there arrived Adrian Street—a peroxide blonde, in lipstick and mascara, nail polish and pantyhose. He was the most glamorous wrestler on the planet. Street was camp, outrageous, a glam rock wrestling superstar who dispatched his opponents without chipping a fingernail. He was the “merchant of menace,” the “sweet transvestite with a broken nose.” A herald of the social and sexual changes happening at full tilt across the country. He was loved and loathed in equal measure—an older generation feared what he represented; a younger generation embraced it.
 

 
Each week Adrian turned up in more elaborate costumes, more glittering makeup and a selection of moves that brought the crowds to their feet. His trademark was to kiss his opponent. While they reeled from the shock of being kissed by another man, Adrian flattened them with a forearm smash, a drop kick, or his favorite the sleeper hold.

Adrian Street was born into a mining family in Brynmawr, Wales in 1940.  As a child he fantasized about running away with a tribe of Native American Indians. He wandered neighboring fields dreaming he was Tarzan and picking bluebells to give to his mother. In his teens he started body-building and briefly worked with his father down the mines. He then moved to London where he began his wrestling career in 1957. He was trained by Chic Osmond and fought under the name Kid Tarzan. During his time in London Adrian had his first taste of bohemia life hanging out with artists and writers most notably Francis Bacon. By the late sixties, Adrian reinvented himself as the androgynous wrestler “The Exotic One.” He went on to fight an estimated 15,000 bouts over a seven decade career.
 

 
In 2010 the artist Jeremy Deller made a documentary on Adrian Street called So Many Ways To Hurt You. Deller had been inspired to make his film by a photograph of the wrestler.

I first became aware of [Adrian] through a photograph showing him with his father in 1973, which seemed to me possibly the most important photograph taken post-war. It encapsulates the whole history of Britain in that period – of our uneasy transition from being a centre of heavy industry to a producer of entertainment and services. It’s a rather bizarre and disturbing photograph, taken when Adrian went back to Wales, to the mine that he had worked in as a young man, to meet his father. Adrian’s still very much alive and still wrestling in Florida, where he has settled. He’s an incredible person, who has tremendous willpower and a great sense of his own worth. His story has an epic quality to it, he has basically reinvented himself for the late twentieth century.

As much of an influence as all the pop artists who liberated teenage minds during the 1970s, Adrian Street opened up a world of rich diversity to an older generation who had been shaped by the austerity and hardship of post-War Britain.

Keep reading after the jump…

1974 NME Sparks cover - uploaded by Sparksmael.
 
Yes, it’s an original 1974 promo clip for Sparks’ classic glam-era chart topper! Not enough people know that this video exists, which includes even a lot of Sparks fans - I only discovered it myself quite recently. It’s not amazing but it is fun, and is worth a watch to see Russel’s uber-camp flying leap at 0:35. Not to be too down on Queen, but a lot of people assume that “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both Of Us” was a cash in on the opera-pop of “Bohmenian Rhapsody”, which is not the case. “This Town…” was released a whole year before Queen’s smash, and this video pre-dates their “Bohemian Rhapsody” promo too - in fact Queen supported the Mael brothers on some of their first ever UK dates in 1973, so it’s pretty safe to assume the influence was the other way around. But, hey, this isn’t a competition, both bands were high-class acts, I’m sure Queen fans will find a lot to like in this clip:
 

 
Ah, the delights of hair metal. Marc, you have really opened up a can of glam worms with that post on vintage Poison! Here in its engorged entirety is still the best document of the mid-80s spandex metal years I have seen, though how most of these bands qualify as “metal” is beyond me, as is the fact that most of these men were considered red-blooded, macho heterosexuals! This whole world has been undergoing a re-appraisal in recent years, possibly as being the last time mainstream rock was this fun, stupid and thoroughly enjoyable. To quote Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler “And then that pussy Cobain came along and ruined everything”.

Decline… Pt 2 has lots of recognisable faces (Kiss without their make-up, a surprisingly lucid Ozzy Osbourne, the Toxic Twins from Aerosmith, wisened elder Lemmy) but the real stars of the film are the musicians and fans plucked straight from the Sunset Strip who we have never heard from again. The “where are they now” pathos, especially at the end, is almost heart-breaking. But don’t let that detract from the fun, especially the sight of Paul Stanley on a bed full of groupies, and Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. pouring fake vodka into his own face while floating in a swimming pool and shouting at his mother: