Glam may have been just a brief moment in the history of pop, but it has had a more lasting influence. The New Romantics of the early 1980s were its most obvious inheritors, but one can also detect strong elements of glam in later performers such as Prince and Madonna, and in bands like Suede. Lady Gaga would have been unthinkable without glam. While glam mutated into other musical genres – such as the ‘hair metal’ of the 1980s (especially in the form of Kiss) – it was also an important influence on disco (Earth, Wind and Fire, Parliament/Funkadelic) and on punk (Siouxie and the Banshees, X-Ray Specs). Although punk was keen to present itself as a rejection of the commercial music industry, the music and performance style owed a good deal to the theatricality of glam – and indeed, shared its reaction against the counter-cultural progressive rock of the time.

While glam may have contributed to a growing flexibility in terms of gender and sexuality, its legacy here is more ambivalent. For some male fans, it might have allowed different ways of being masculine – or at least contributed to a broader repertoire of possibilities in that respect. For young people growing up gay, it might have offered role models that reflected their emerging sexual identities. However, I’m not sure I would see these possibilities and role models as unambiguously positive. With the dubious exception of Bowie, glam performers were not openly or unambiguously gay; and it’s doubtful whether the cause of gay liberation was really furthered by the outrageous public exhibition of an array of flamboyant drag queens.

Perhaps the most difficult question here is what any of this might have meant for the teenyboppers – the girl fans who were almost certainly the most numerous followers of glam. As I have implied, much of the discussion of girls’ fandom has been over-politicised, and (at least in recent years) has become unduly celebratory. Quite how girls’ interests might have been served by following a group of men acting out an absurd and exaggerated caricature of conventional femininity is far from clear. While it might not have been preparing them for a lifetime of subordination, it is also hard to see it as a matter of empowerment. It would be tempting to conclude that glam wasn’t political at all, but simply a matter of fun – although, as we all know, fun is rarely completely innocent…

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