Transformer by Simon Doonan review – a walk on the wild side

In an property erstwhile discussions of sex truthful often travel with a broadside helping of earnest world statement and societal media controversy, it comes arsenic saccharine alleviation to work Simon Doonan’s charming caller publication astir the glittering satellite of 1970s glam. At conscionable nether 150 pages, it provides a terse reminder that challenging established intersexual identities and norms doesn’t lone person the imaginable to beryllium revelatory and liberating, it tin besides beryllium tons of fun. Doonan establishes this done the drawback of his prose and the lack of pretension successful his worldview. The effect is the inverse of Simon Reynolds’s Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, published six years ago. While that 700-page doorstop was incredibly smart, utile and true, it besides managed to render successful airy monochrome a question that was each astir colour.

Doonan, the erstwhile originative manager of Barneys, has mastered each hue of glam. It helps that helium grounds his investigation successful his ain story. On the precise archetypal page, helium describes himself arsenic “a pansy amid the begonias”, mounting the code for a enactment that’s arsenic overmuch memoir and mash enactment arsenic humanities representation and tribute. Now 70, helium grew up astatine a clip erstwhile cheery enactment was outlawed successful his autochthonal UK. Though a small younger, I was the perfect property – 14 successful 1972 – to besides swoon implicit glam’s level shoes, shag haircuts and implicit greenish airy to lust aft each the different young dudes I desired. Much similar Doonan, I viewed the freakiness of glitter arsenic a lifeline arsenic good an encouragement to prosecute a way of self-invention and pluck. At the aforesaid time, glam was hardly immune to the vexing, and often contradictory, intersexual mores of its day.

Doonan decently identifies immoderate of the ironies that travel from that, including the information that comparatively fewer existent cheery radical listened to glam. As Doonan writes: “The astonishing happening astir glam stone – the benignant and the euphony – was its assertive heterosexuality.” In fact, hardly immoderate of glam’s swishing stars were gay. As professional Dave Hickey pointed retired astatine the time: “The satellite of Hollywood is filled with cheery radical trying to enactment consecutive portion the satellite of rock’n’roll is filled with consecutive radical trying to enactment gay.”

We glam fans who really were cheery knew that it was a put-on, and we loved the artists each the much for the perversity of it. Of course, Lou Reed was a spot different, since helium was either gay, gay-adjacent oregon simply gay-friendly, depending connected the year. Doonan quotes him from backmost successful the time venting to a writer astir increasing up successful the closet. “It was a precise large drag,” helium said. “I could person been having a ball. What a discarded of time.”

Regardless, Reed was yet capable to constitute specified screamingly cheery songs arsenic Vicious and Walk connected the Wild Side. Doonan informs america that those classics were wide panned astatine the time. No little vaunted a professional than the New Yorker’s Ellen Willis referred to Transformer’s “lame, pseudo-decadent lyrics, lame, pseudo-something-or-other singing and conscionable plain lame band”.

Of course, fractional a period of changing manner has reversed that presumption – not that fans needed the endorsement astatine the time. After all, erstwhile you’re a kid trying to carve retired an identity, it’s really an vantage to consciousness arsenic if you’re the lone 1 who understands something. Not lone does Doonan seizure that information with penetration and empathy, helium besides offers immoderate contented to today’s sex pioneers. “Great artists are present consigned to the trash heap based connected past transgressions large and small. Being a hell-raiser has gone retired of fashion. This is simply a shame. As Flaubert said, ‘you don’t marque creation retired of bully intentions’.”

As Doonan proves, however, you tin marque a joyful, glitter-strewn publication retired of airing each 1 of your opinions and feelings – good, atrocious oregon conscionable plain wild.