Glam!: An Eyewitness Account

by Mark Paytress

Drawing on interviews with stars and musicians, producers and photographers, stylists, writers and celebrity fans, Glam chronicles the glam era from its origins in 1970, through its 1972/73 heyday to its mid-seventies collapse and the death of Marc Bolan in September 1977. Fully illustrated throughout, the book includes a wealth of visual material, be it band shots, record sleeves, and pin-up posters, or the era’s best clobber, magazines, and assorted memorabilia.

304 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2022

About the author

Mark Paytress is a journalist, author and broadcaster. A regular contributor to MOJO magazine, his work has also appeared in numerous publications including The Guardian, Radio Times, Q, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Maxim, La Repubblica and Record Collector.

His books include Bolan: The Rise & Fall Of A 20th Century Superstar (Omnibus Press), Break It Up: Patti Smith’s Horses And The Remaking Of Rock’n’Roll (Piatkus), I Was There: The Gigs That Changed The World (Cassell), BowieStyle (Omnibus Press), The Rolling Stones Files (Quadrillion), The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars (Schirmer), Siouxsie & The Banshees: The Authorised Biography, Vicious: The Art Of Dying Young and critical guides to the work of The Rolling Stones, Radiohead, Nirvana and the Sex Pistols.

Mark has contributed to various television and radio programmes (Night Waves, Front Row), and in winter 2008/09, researched and presented two documentaries for BBC Radio 4, Here’s Kenny (about DJ Kenny Everett) and Stash: The Dandy Aesthete Of Swinging London.

Reviews

[Ray Smillie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthy read and a great trip back in time. Glam, like Punk, covered several different types of styles of music and brought back the single big time. My first album was Ziggy Stardust but most of my record buying was singles rather than albums, purely because it was cheaper. Great times to be a teenager which was going to get greater with the advent of punk rock, but that is another story. It is no coincidence that most punks from the 70s had started out as fans of glam rock.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating history into the music of my early teenage years and the history behind the songs that made the glam era from 1970 to 1974 four short years of tremendous change and rises and falls of the first proper superstars

[Roy · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent book providing hundreds of pictures along with lots of text, covers all groups of the glam era.