‘Obligatory Cosmopolitan Musical Viewpoint’?: Gender and Sexuality in the 1970s Music Press

Glen, Patrick

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91674-3_4

Patrick Glen¹⁰

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music ((PSHSPM))

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Abstract

This chapters concentrates upon how music papers in the mid-1970s approached key aspects of so-called permissiveness: gender, sexuality and sex. It finds that music papers were not only male dominated but also put forwards reductive and sexist representations of women. It argues that journalists were complicit in a culture of silence that contributed to sexual abuse and shows that feminism largely remained a taboo subject due to concerns about alienating male consumers. It then moves to male homosexuality starting with David Bowie coming out as bisexual. The chapter traces how he and others were understood by journalists to pre-1967 tropes created by heterosexuals to narrate gay men as deviants. The music press’s unease with homosexuality is then followed through to the later-1970s.

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Notes

1.
Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis ‘“A Field for Private Members”: The Wolfenden Committee and Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1950–67,’ Twentieth Century British History 15:2 (2004): 175–176; Frank Mort, ‘Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution 1954–57’, New Formations, 37 (1999): 95.
2.
Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (London: Yale University Press, 2010).
3.
ABC Circulation (IPC Media).
4.
Anna Gough-Yates, Understanding Women’s Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readerships (London: Routledge, 2003), 6–7.
5.
Val Wilmer, Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World (London: the Women’s Press, 1989), xii.
6.
Marion Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007): 181–190.
7.
National Police Chief’s Council, ‘Over 1400 suspects investigated for child sexual abuse by people of public prominence, or within institutions,’ https://news.npcc.police.uk/releases/over-1400-suspects-investigated-for-child-sexual-abuse-by-people-of-public-prominence-or-within-institutions (2015, accessed December 2015).
8.
‘Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 21 January 1967, 20.
9.
‘Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 2 March 1968, 28.
10.
‘Nothing like a bit of sex to… the Raver’s weekly tonic,’ Melody Maker 9 March 1968, 6.
11.
‘Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 9 March 1968, 28.
12.
Chris Welch, ‘Despite what you may think, the Move are really five nice guys – or so they say,’ Melody Maker 9 March 1968, 9.
13.
Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers?: Sex, Private Life, and the Popular Press in Britain (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011): 97–124.
14.
Chris Charlesworth, personal interview (2011).
15.
Mick Farren, personal interview (2011).
16.
Dick Meadows, ‘Sabbath Ready to Rejoin the Rock Machine,’ Sounds, 22 January 1972 (RB, accessed March 2017).
17.
Martin Hayman, ‘Steve Miller: Treat In Store For Miller’s Followers,’ Sounds 26 February 1972 (RB, accessed January 2017).
18.
Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga (New York: Boulevard Books, 1997).
19.
Steven Rosen, ‘Rodney B.’s Endless Party,’ Guitar World, July 1986 (RB, accessed January 2017).
20.
Nick Kent, ‘Led Zeppelin (part 1): A Whole Lotta Rock ‘N Roll,’ NME 23 December 1972; and, Nick Kent, ‘Led Zeppelin (part 2): Hail Hail Rock ‘N Roll,’ NME 30 December 1972 (RB, accessed February 2017).
21.
Nick Kent, ‘Led Zeppelin: The Zeppelin Road Test,’ NME 24 February 1973 (RB, accessed February 2017).
22.
Charles Shaar Murray, ‘Zeppin’ Out,’ NME 16 June 1973 (RB, accessed March 2017).
23.
Nick Kent, ‘A Limey in LA #3: What did Rod Stewart, Bobby Womack and Mick Jagger sing …,’ NME 12 April 1975 (RB, accessed March 2017).
24.
Ian MacDonald, ‘The Sexual Athlete,’ NME 1 September 1973 (RB, accessed January 2011).
25.
Nick Kent, ‘A Limey in LA #2: The Day I Shook Bob Dylan’s Hand And Other Weird Tales,’ NME 5 April 1975 (RB, accessed March 2017).
26.
Caroline Coon, personal interview (2011).
27.
Chris Charlesworth, personal interview (2011).
28.
Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) and Hyde, ‘Managing Bodies’; and, Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996).
29.
Similar was found of Rolling Stone, the US-based music paper, by Donnalyn Pompper, Suekyung Lee and Shana Lerner, ‘Gauging Outcomes of the 1960s Social Equality Movements: Nearly Four Decades of Gender and Ethnicity on the Cover of the Rolling Stone Magazine’ Popular Culture 42.2 (2009): 273–290.
30.
Melody Maker 10 November 1973, 36.
31.
Loraine Alterman, ‘Record World Forum: Three Artists on the New Consciousness,’ Record World 19 May 1973 (RB, accessed April 2011).
32.
Robert Partridge, ‘Dialogue Melody Maker Special on Women in Rock’, Melody Maker, 27 October 1973, 36–38.
33.
‘Mailbag’, Melody Maker, 3 November 1975, 31.
34.
Ray Coleman, ‘Woman is No Longer Nigger of the World,’ Melody Maker 3 January 1976, 2.
35.
Vivian Goldman, ‘The Bush Doctor’s Dilemma’, Melody Maker 9 December 1978 (RB, accessed August 2011).
36.
Phil McNeill, ‘Women are Strange when you’re a Strangler’, NME 30 April 1977, 35.
37.
Nick Kent, ‘London’s Burning Out’, NME 19 March 1977, 41.
38.
Laurie Henshaw, ‘Lynsey, separating the men from the .. er…’, Melody Maker 2 December 1972, 3. Kris Needs, ZigZag August 1977 (RB, September 2011).
39.
Phil Sutcliffe, ‘The Delta of Venus: Delta 5’, Sounds 2 August 1980 (RB, accessed October 2011).
40.
Eccentric Sleeve Notes July 1981, 1–10.
41.
Vivien Goldman, ‘New Raincoats Don’t Let You Down,’ Melody Maker, 1 December 1979 (RB, accessed November 2017).
42.
National Readership Survey (1983). The Face’s readership was not studied by the National Readership Survey in the years this books covers, the estimate is made by its former editor Paul Rambali in a personal interview (2011).
43.
Paul Rambali, personal interview (2011).
44.
Dave Rimmer, ‘Eurhythmics’, Smash Hits 3 March 1983 (RB, accessed February 2012).
45.
Peter Silverton, ‘Girltalk’, Smash Hits 30 April 1981 (RB, accessed February 2012).
46.
Johnny Black, ‘Wilde Life’, Smash Hits 28 May 1981 (RB, accessed February 2012).
47.
Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–57 (London: Chicago University Press, 2005): 3. Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 7–11. H.G. Cocks, ‘Saucy stories: Pornography, sexology and the marketing of sexual knowledge in Britain, c. 1918–70,’ Social History, 465; and Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 1–7.
48.
Mort, Capital Affairs, 352–353.
49.
Judith Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven: Yale, 2012): 3.
50.
Marty Roth, ‘Homosexual Expression and Homosexual Censorship: the Situation of the Text,’ in David Bergman ed., Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993): 268.
51.
Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996): 6.
52.
Alexandra Carter, Dance and Dancers in Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005): 22. Houlbrook, Queer London: 56–57.
53.
Houlbrook, Queer London: 80–83.
54.
Bingham, Family Newspapers?: 106, 159–160.
55.
H.G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003): 144.
56.
Justin Bengry, ‘Queer Profits: Homosexual Scandal and the Origins of Legal Reform in Britain,’ in Heike Bauer and Matt Cook eds, Queer 1950s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 168; and Bingham, Family Newspapers?: 181.
57.
Bingham, Family Newspapers?: 160–161; Frank Pearce, ‘The British Press and the “Placing” of Male Homosexuality,’ in Stan Cohen and Jock Young eds, The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media (London, Sage: 1973): 303–316. Jeffrey Poulter, Peers, Queers and Commons: the Struggle for Gay Law (London: Routledge, 1993). Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship (London: Forth Estate, 1996): 265–280. ‘Disorders of the Mind.’ Daily Mirror 5 December 1957, 9.
58.
Daily Mirror 27 May 1958, 6, and 13 December 1958, 9.
59.
Daily Mirror 26 September 1956, 6.
60.
Ruth Dudley-Edwards, Newspapermen (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003): 250.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Hugh Cudlipp, At Your Peril (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1962): 235.
63.
‘Liberace is Back,’ Melody Maker 6 June 1959, 1.
64.
Jon Savage quoted in Petridis, The Guardian G2 4 July 2006, 22.
65.
Andy Medhurst, A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007): 99.
66.
Vincent Stephens, ‘Shaking the Closet: Analyzing Johnny Mathis’s Sexual Elusiveness, 1956–82,’ Popular Music and Society 33.5 (2010): 597–623. Patricia Smith, The Queer Sixties (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999). Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-war Britain: How the Personal Got Political (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011): 45–46. Annie J. Randall, Dusty! Queen of the Postmods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): ch 1.
67.
George Melly, Owning Up (London: Penguin, 1970): 204. Ray Connolly, London Evening Standard, 5 September 1970. Ray Connolly, ‘Dusty Springfield told me the Sex Secret’ Daily Mail Online, 21 June 2014.
68.
Chris Charlesworth, personal interview (2011).
69.
‘Oh You Pretty Thing!’ Melody Maker 22 January 1972, 19.
70.
Judith Halberstram In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 5.
71.
Although many of his confidants and contemporaries have speculated: Angie Bowie and Patrick Carr, Backstage Passes: Life On the Wild Side with David Bowie (New York: Cooper Square, 2000): 93 and134–136. Nick Kent, Apathy for the Devil: A 1970s Memoir (London: Faber & Faber, 2011): 108–109. Cynthia Foxe-Tyler and Danny Fields, Dream On: Livin’ on the Edge with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith (New York: Dove Books, 1997): 61–70.
72.
Matthew Bannister, ‘“I’m Set Free…”: The Velvet Underground, 1960s Counterculture, and Michel Foucault,’ Popular Music and Society 33.2 (2010): 175.
73.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990): 187.
74.
Taylor, ‘Scenes and sexualities: Queerly reframing the music scenes perspective,’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26.1 (2012): 7.
75.
Jeremy, January 1970, 7–9.
76.
‘News,’ International Times 1 (112), 27 January 1972, 3.
77.
Robinson, Gay Men and the Left, 104.
78.
Michael Watts, ‘Rock Giants from A–Z, Bowie; the Darling who put Glam into Rock,’ Melody Maker (19 August 1972), 37.
79.
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1980): 3.
80.
Christopher Sandford, Bowie: Loving the Alien (London: Da Capo, 1996): 97–98.
81.
Ibid.: 73–74.
82.
Paul Gorman, In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press (London: Sanctuary, 2001): 156.
83.
Richard Williams, personal interview (2011).
84.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume Two (New York: Vintage Books, 1985): 43.
85.
Chris Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual.’ In Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964, Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters eds (Rivers Oram Press: London, 1999): 137–139.
86.
Watts, ‘Oh You Pretty Thing!’
87.
Amanda Udis-Kessler, “Identity/Politics: A History of the Bisexual Movement,” in Naomi Tucker ed., Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queeries, and Visions, (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1995), 19.
88.
Gay News 13, December 1973, 12.
89.
Gay News 8, August 1973, 4.
90.
Ibid.
91.
Chris Welch, Melody Maker 2 September 1972, 20.
92.
Ibid.
93.
Ron Ross, ‘Phallus in Pigtails, or the Music of the Spheres Considered as Cosmic Boogie,’ Words & Music July 1972 (RB, accessed March 2014).
94.
Rosalind Russell, Disk and Music Echo, 6 May 1972 (RB, accessed March 2014).
95.
Daily Mirror 20 January 1973, 22.
96.
‘Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 12 February 1972, 78, and 4 November 1972, 72.
97.
‘Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 12 February 1972, 15.
98.
Rob Randall, ‘Yob Number One!’ NME, 16 June 1973, 26–27.
99.
Mick Farren, ‘Reg is Out of the Closet,’ NME 25 September 1976, 9.
100.
‘Elton Owns Up,’ Daily Mirror 6 November 1978, 22–23.
101.
‘Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 16 December 1972, 64
102.
‘Mailbag,’ Melody Maker 19 February 1972, 15.
103.
Charles Shaar Murray, ‘David at the Dorchester: Bowie on Ziggy and other matters,’ NME, 22 July 1972 (RB, accessed March 2014).
104.
Charles Shaar Murray, ‘Gay Guerrillas & Private Movies,’ NME, 24 February 1973 (RB, accessed March 2014).
105.
Michael Watts, Melody Maker, 1 July 1972.
106.
Bucks Herald, 20 July 1972.
107.
Joe Moran, Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (London: Profile, 2013): 212.
108.
Mick Farren, personal interview 2011.
109.
Roy Hollingsworth, ‘Bowie: Waiting for the Man,’ Melody Maker 19 May 1973, 28.
110.
Fred Vermorel, Starlust (London: Faber and Faber, 1985): 182–183.
111.
Ibid.
112.
David Hancock, ‘King Queer or Joker?’ National Rock Star 22 January 1977 (LAGNA).
113.
Lyndall Stein, ‘Who’s Scared of Bowie,’ Melody Maker 4 August 1973, 64.
114.
Ibid.
115.
Mark Perry, Sniffin’ Glue (London: Omnibus, 2009), 1.
116.
Eve Brown, ‘Definitive Gaze – A Fairy Tale,’ City Fun c. 1980, 8–9.
117.
Max Bell, ‘The Dictators: The Handsomest Man in Rock and Roll,’ NME 16 October 1976 (RB, accessed July 2014).
118.
Chris Charlesworth, ‘CBGBs, Max’s etc.: Underground Overground’ Melody Maker 27 November 1976 (RB, accessed July 2014).
119.
‘This is the Modern Bag,’ NME 10 June 1978, 62.
120.
‘The Brian B Bag,’ NME 17 June 1976, 62.
121.
Michael Watts, ‘The Rise and Fall of Malcolm McLaren Part One,’ Melody Maker 16 June 1979 (RB, accessed March 2014).
122.
Kris Needs, ‘Return of the Giant Slits,’ ZigZag November 1981 (RB, accessed March 2014).
123.
Barney Hoskyns, The Rock Yearbook (1984, London, Virgin).
124.
Jon Savage, ‘Marc Almond: The Whip Hand,’ The Face January 1982 (RB).
125.
Jodie Taylor, ‘Scenes and sexualities’: 7.
126.
Hoskyns, The Rock Yearbook.
127.
Judith Halberstram, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 83.
128.
Marc Almond, In Search of the Pleasure Palace: Disreputable Travels (London: Pan, 2013), 27.
129.
Mike Stand, ‘Bedsitting with Marc Almond,’ Smash Hits 12 November 1981 (RB).

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Glen, P. (2019). ‘Obligatory Cosmopolitan Musical Viewpoint’?: Gender and Sexuality in the 1970s Music Press. In: Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91674-3_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91674-3_4
Published: 12 December 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91673-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91674-3
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