This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Rock’n’roll years are all the rage these days. Ever since Jon Savage published his monumental 1966 (in 2015), the anni, particularly the 1970s, have been going like hotcakes. David Browne took 1970, David Hepworth grabbed 1971. Ronald Brownstein laid claim to 1974, while former Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly is — as I write — ring-fencing the tipping-point year of 1975. Perhaps pop historians should bid for other available years: would 1979 be worth more than, say, 1985?

The latest annum to be bagged is 1972, which happens to be the year when this reviewer became a bopping consumer of records, magazines and badges, and when he officially saw his first live concert (Lindisfarne and Genesis at Lewisham Town Hall, he cringes to confess). But don’t worry, this review won’t be a pretext for more wallowing in false nostalgia for the days when we saved up our pocket money for the latest single by Slade or T. Rex. Although just typing that sentence fills me with false nostalgia. 

Peter Stanfield’s Pin-Ups 1972 isn’t about 1972 per se. In fact, the year in question seems rather spuriously bolted on to the hyphenated Pin-Ups, named after a David Bowie covers album that, as it happens, came out in 1973. It’s about “third generation rock’n’roll”, a phrase denoting music made in the slipstream of the Beatles and the Stones and The Who, of Cream and Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. 

The author, who last year published a snappy study of The Who entitled A Band with Built-In Hate, is interested in what happened after the Sixties had not simply ended but died as a dream of explosive societal change. Once the original “second-generation” icons were knocking on 30 (having failed to die before they got old), who was there to pick up the reins, and what did they do with the legacy left by the previous decade? To paraphrase the title of George Melly’s seminal 1970 book, how did they revolt into new styles?

Stanfield’s focus is on London before, during and after that year. Wading into the terrain of Simon Reynolds’s peerless Shock and Awe, the author devotes chapters to Bowie, Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music and the New York Dolls — white males all — and ties them loosely together as exemplars of a new sensibility that renounced the Sixties in favour of androgynous flash and teenage anthemics. 

His contention is that these figures, most of them half a generation younger than the Beatles and the Stones, were rejecting “rock” as a po-faced late Sixties art form by reconnecting to the original fizz and swagger of Elvis and his fellow Fifties hepcats. Despite their unavoidable immersion in the Sixties — Bolan’s warbling Tyrannosaurus Rex songs; Bowie’s fey “Memory of a Free Festival” — they seized their opportunity to make a fresh start and create music for the semi-feral children of Britain’s “teenage wasteland”, or what the great Nik Cohn called “the pubertal avant-garde”. 

As Bowie put it in “All the Young Dudes”, the masterful song he donated to oikish Hereford combo Mott the Hoople: “My brother’s back at home with his Beatles and his Stones/We never got it off on that revolution stuff … ” A genre that galvanised the UK but never gained traction in the more homophobic USA, glam rock was a pop revolt against bogus rock revolutionaries.

Slightly anachronistically, Stanfield’s first chapter concerns the hairy and wholly unglamorous Mick Farren, mainstay of London’s “rock “n” roll underground” and the pretty terrible lead singer for the (Social) Deviants. Farren was musically talentless but a terrific rabble-rouser — and a great rock writer. Committed to working-class upheaval, Mick was also in thrall to the big bang of Fifties rock “n” roll and scornful of anything that smacked of laid-back California (though he ended up living there). Stanfield seems to see him as a transitional figure, one foot in the world of Edgar Broughton’s “Out demons, out!” chant, the other in the new milieu of Bowie’s dudes and droogs.

Which is where the author’s key argument kicks in. For Pin-Ups 1972 really concerns a kind of retro-futurism: music and style that harked back to the raw innocence and sexual frenzy of Elvis and friends, but simultaneously pointed forward to a pre-punk sci-fi dystopia. Stanfield is good on Bolan’s brief but brilliant turn in the Top Of The Pops spotlight — corkscrew-haired Marc was my first televisual crush — and his nakedly ambitious self-reinvention as a pouting, glittery electric warrior. (It’s a coincidence but no surprise that Edsel recently released a box set consisting exclusively of T. Rex tracks from, yes, 1972.) 

He’s less good on the year of Bowie’s projected alter ego Ziggy Stardust, and on the ectomorphic alien’s patronage of key influences Lou and Iggy. Nor does he have much to say about the art-schooled Roxy Music that wasn’t said better in Shock and Awe or Michael Bracewell’s aptly-titled Remake/Remodel. His interpretations of glam style and iconography, with nods to Warhol, Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange and Nik Cohn/Guy Peellaert’s fabulous book Rock Dreams, intertwine with a slightly creepy absorption in porn mags such as Curious and Club International. Did we really need to see the breasts and pudenda of Roxy cover girl Marilyn Cole or the unidentified “Fuck Girls” [sic] from Men Only, especially when women are otherwise barely represented in the book?

But the real problem with Pin-Ups 1972 is that — for a study of a period that had so much to do with transgressive fun — it’s so rockademically cerebral and so over-reliant on contemporary critical responses. With Paul Gorman’s music-press history Totally Wired due out in September, you’d be forgiven for wondering if Pin-Ups 1972 wasn’t more about writers like the NME’s Nick Kent or Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth than about Bolan, Bowie, Ferry and Brian Eno. 

Unfortunately, 1973 has already been nabbed

There are scores of quotes from reviews and interviews of the time — most less arch than Stanfield’s own formulations — yet there’s almost no conveying of what the musicians were like or what drove them to, in Bowie’s words, “turn and face the strange”. The result is often irritatingly glib.

The author does redeem himself with a more coherent chapter about the New York Dolls, an androgynous glam parody of the Rolling Stones whose first album cover almost shocked me when I clapped eyes on it in the Virgin Records shop off Sloane Square. And there’s a splendid photo of the Dolls’ “brickie-in-eyeliner” bassist Arthur Harold Kane being made up backstage before a gig at Biba’s Rainbow Room. But those shows took place in 1973, the year of Iggy’s Raw Power and Roxy’s For Your Pleasure as well as the eponymous New York Dolls.

And unfortunately, 1973 has already been nabbed by a certain Andrew Grant Jackson.