Daevid Allan and the one album that “flabbergasted” David Bowie and invented glam rock
David Bowie was never interested in repeating himself all that often.
The greatest artists are the ones that take chances, and he figured it was better for him to keep moving into new areas whenever he had the chance. While ‘The Starman’ was ahead of the curve in many respects when looking at his output, not everything that he made was exactly the first of its kind or anything.
I mean, look at an album like Station to Station. Hearing Bowie making a kraut rock album would have been incredibly innovative for the time, but that was only down to the fact that he was listening to bands like Kraftwerk at the time. He was trying on new musical costumes, and while some fit him better than others, he was never claiming to be one of the originators of any genre he pulled from.
Young Americans was a blatant homage to Philly soul, and there were plenty of industrial artists making glitchy beats before Bowie started making records like Earthling. If there is one album that Bowie should get the credit for starting properly, though, it’s glam rock. There had been dangerous rock and roll before, but it’s easy to paint a clear line from the video for ‘Space Oddity’ all the way to Sweet, T Rex, and even the beginning of The New York Dolls with the way that Bowie is dressed and how he’s singing.
The beauty of glam was that it became an amalgam of everything that Bowie had been listening to. There was a lot of flamboyance to go around, but the guitars were crunchy like The Velvet Underground, the lyrics were poetic like Bob Dylan, and even Bowie’s vocal performances are reminiscent of the kind of showstopping divas from the age when rock and roll was still a figment of everyone’s imaginations.
Then again, even Bowie could admit that Daevid Allen had him beat by a few years when talking about the album Banana Moon, saying, “It’s possible, just possibly maybe, that strands of the embryonic Glam style started here. I replayed this just this morning and was flabbergasted to hear something that sounds like Brian Ferry and the Spiders from Mars (together, at last!!) on track one, recorded a full two years before the ‘official’ Glam releases from either of the two above mentioned protagonists.”
But for an album that was released as the 1960s were coming to a close, it’s not exactly glam down to its core, either. Allen would have probably not categorised the record as such, and given the strange production tricks going into everything, there’s a lot more in common with what the Flower Children were doing at the height of psychedelia, only this time with a more glamorous sheen to it.
Glam simply wasn’t a term that was used at that point, but a lot of the production tricks that most people take for granted in glam start here as well. Though the strands of Allen’s old band, Soft Machine, did have the kind of glam aesthetic with a more straight-ahead rock edge to them, this was the first time it truly felt like the genre had a blueprint for what it would become years later.
‘Space Oddity’ was already released in the days before Banana Moon came out, but that was still Bowie trying to figure out what he wanted to be. He knew he couldn’t be a folksy balladeer for long, and if it was suddenly acceptable to have songs of this calibre on the charts, surely something like ‘Queen Bitch’ could have a fair shot as well.
