Not CDs of the week: Shaun de Waal
It was reported a while ago that David Bowie had declined to be involved in Todd Haynes’s new glam rock movie, Velvet Goldmine. The reason given was Bowie’s desire to hang on to his seminal Seventies creation, Ziggy Stardust, for future exploitation by himself. I suspect, however, that Bowie had seen the script and realised that the film would not live up to expectations.
Velvet Goldmine is, indeed, deeply disappointing. Its recreation of Seventies glam gear, tweaked by a Nineties sensibility, is gorgeous to behold – but there is no grit or guts beneath the glitter. Apart from what seems to be a confused message about authenticity, Haynes just whisks the lives and legends of Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed into one big fancy-dress music-video. He entirely misses the dialectic between strutting cock-rock and vaudivillean androgyny that was Mick Jagger’s legacy to glam.
The film’s soundtrack (PolyGram), which should be one of its chief glories, fares no better. There are good ideas here, but they don’t come off.
It’s a good idea to create a couple of one- off bands, in the way the makers of the brilliant Backbeat used contemporary young musicians to recreate the early Beatles’ attack on songs like Twist and Shout and C’mon Everybody. For the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler joins members of The Verve and Radiohead to form the fictional band The Venus in Furs. Why, then, have them do no more than retread old Roxy Music numbers (three from their first album) with stultifying fidelity?
It’s also a good idea to use work by Nineties bands indebted to the glam-rockers of two decades ago, but the results are uneven. Pulp’s We Are the Boyz and Teenage Fanclub’s Personality Crisis have a driving energy that is lacking elsewhere, but the mock-retro works by others such as Placebo and Grant Lee Buffalo (chirping “Ecstasy’s the birthright of our gang,” for heaven’s sake) are just poor pastiche.
The songs that stand out on this soundtrack are the real 1972/3 originals, now sounding truly classic – Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain, Brian Eno’s Needle in the Camel’s Eye, Lou Reed’s Satellite of Love.
Also recycling the past is Marilyn Manson, the shock-rocker who has with some justice been called the Alice Cooper of the Nineties. Quick to spot a trend like the renewed interest in glam, Manson changes tack on his new album, Mechanical Animals (BMG), ditching the industrial sludge that was the sound of his previous record in favour of a sharper, punchier sound very reminiscent of early- Seventies Bowie.
He even has his band pretend to be a fictional group for half the CD, la Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The front cover is a clear allusion to or outright theft from Aladdin Sane, and Manson also poses in his best golden glam rags.
The music on this album is often tough and sparky, and there are some enjoyable lyrics: songs such as I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me) and Fundamentally Loathsome indicate that Manson is not entirely serious about all this.
The problem is his terribly narrow range as a singer. Manson seems to be suffering some permanent glottal constriction, and he will go for a post-punk sneer when what he really needs on this album is dynamic range and theatrical bravura.