Simon Reynolds

Like so many vital figures in British pop history, from Pete Townshend to Paul Weller, Bowie came from a blurry region of British society that encompasses the educated working class, the socially precarious petite bourgeoisie and what could be called the uncomfortably-off middle class, i.e. professional or office workers whose income didn’t quite match their aspirations.

The tense domestic atmosphere, along with the family’s uncertain place in the class structure and Bromley’s peripheral location in relation to Greater London, must all have contributed to his feeling of growing up ‘on the outside of everything’.

‘Serious rock’ has never been so white, mainstream pop so black, so exclusively based in R&B, soul and disco.

Green once described the music of indie groups like The Smiths as ‘racist’, and, in a sense, he’s right – there’s a hopeless lack of exchange or communication between hip white rock and black pop.

The irony is that these indie hipsters tend to be more politically aware than most, more keen to align themselves with anti-racism, yet are totally estranged from black culture.

Moreover, latent in our indie scene are ideas that echo the concerns of the sexual/psychoanalytical politics of the sixties. The flirtation with androgyny and camp, the prevalence of love songs with genderless love objects and free of fixed sexual protocol, the defence of sensitivity and ‘the wimp’, the refusal of performance-oriented sex – all these connect not just with feminism but with radical psychoanalysis’s project of a return to the ‘polymorphous perversity’ of the child (an undirected and limitless sensuality).

In The Smiths, for instance, the refusal of maturity is as much a rejection of the strictures of adult sexuality as of work.

If The Smiths had only produced sunny, cuddly stuff like ‘Heaven Knows’, ‘Ask’, ‘Vicar in a Tutu’, they would have merely presaged the perky negligibility of The Housemartins, the sound that grins itself to death.

All year, the US alternative scene has been dominated by bands who take their cues from the early seventies, when groups like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Mountain, etc. bastardized and brutalized the blues.

As one real-life teenager in the book says, ‘no job is worth cutting your hair for’.