Clive Kennedy: Clive Kennedy (UK)
Glam was a peculiar time in popular music. It allowed the genuinely weird to posture, albeit briefly, whilst forcing the sadly mundane to look like trainee drag queens. The New York Dolls got it genuinely and alarmingly right, as did Marc Bolan. Bowie claimed the era as his pilfered kingdom, but the sad buffoonery of the Glitters and Stardusts were hot on his heels as also-ran competitors.
Early Roxy Music were divine Glam at its most arch. Eno, all feathers, finery and ambient soundtracks; Ferry like the decadent space-age spiv, a routine that would finally entomb him as a lounge lizard fossil. The scandalously pubescent Brett Smiley would have scandalized had the right level of management and indecent exposure fallen his way, whilst the sadly reviled Jobriath paid dearly for his faggy audacity. Freddie Mercury was far more interesting as a killer queen than a Castro Street Clone, and Elton John had yet to become the Queen Mother of rock and pop. The list of the wantonly perverse and deluded seems endless, but there is one odd absence, and there is always room for another spaced-out oddity.
Step forward Clive Kennedy, not a name one would necessarily know, or expect to find in such glittering company. So obscure that he could be the patron saint of the category, here is a man beyond the reaches of Google. Certainly his one album is a last gasp of effeteness from an era already in marked decline, but with the passage of time it is a venerable object. That it got made at all is a strange enough proposition.
When former Lush guitarist Phil King discovered a copy of the 1976 album sans sleeve in what remained of the offices of Jonathan King's UK Records, he realized he'd stumbled upon an artifact of significance from his favorite genre.
Garnering the interest of reissue specialists RPM, he learned that Kennedy had moved to New York in the late Seventies, where he fell victim to AIDS. King then found the sleeve, but instead of a swaggering Tim Curry or an elfin dandy, he discovered a bearded man with a piercing gaze, the kind that inhabited English country houses from the 1890s till the early 1950s. It struck down the chance of any Kennedy revival. With no charismatic freak at the vinyl rainbow's end with which to decorate a feature, the ordinariness of Kennedy's demeanor clashed with the Pandora's Box his vinyl undoubtedly contained.
Unlike the dandy in retirement that had been discovered in John Howard, Kennedy was plainly a difficult proposition. It had the same affect as the iceberg had on the Titanic, which is a massive shame as it is a work of quality which deserves wider attention. It is also a near perfect surmising of the Glam ethos, where artifice was all. Like John Howard's knowingly louche and worldly elder sibling, you can tell Kennedy has been around the decadent block numerous times, and been somewhere near the wild side.
Lyrically wise and witty, he kicks off the proceedings with "The Fabulous Invalid": It wouldn't be fair to blame Times Square For showing a pair of tits. We all enjoyed the celluloid And we're all to blame a bit... The flame goes out And Broadway goes dark. A meandering epic concerning the vulnerabilities of stardom, it sounds like early Queen with Noel Coward on vocals, but it also has echoes of Supertramp.
Kennedy exuded a deliciously fay and fruity delivery, part Tiny Tim meets Sparks, and his world is a walk along the seamier side, that sometimes can be terribly wild. "International Gypsy," a trawl through expensive decadence, smacks of an insider's knowledge and crosses "Where Do You Go to My Lovely" with "Killer Queen" and more than a dash of "You're So Vain": In the Bois de Boulogne in the back of a car Sipping champagne from a shoe. You International Gypsy You... Swing upside down from a chandelier In a private Venetian Galleon Which you hired for a month at the best time of year... And your caravan is a Pan Am flight for two... And your name has been linked to the Shah...' The wonderfully touching and tender "I Think I'm Falling in Love With You" is a palm court love song; released as a single, it failed to set the world aflame. There are also lines with a caustic flavor. On "The Demon Is a Liar," a wonderful piece of near evangelical Glam, he snaps in sarcastic sacrilege And tonight sweet Jesus takes a bride And another little virgin angel's crucified... Keep on reading the Good Book and praying "The Late, Late Show," also a single, is a fabulous, creeping song which extols the ghostly afterlife of movie stars on obscure channels, cribbing lines from Mae West and W.C. Fields; affectionate and caustic in equal measure, it has a neat and lingering nostalgia. "Solomon Gold" is the kind of pseudo-vaudevillian song Paul Williams made his own, except Kennedy mixes it with an answering machine message, which sounds rather menacing. "New York City Pretty" deals with lofty aspirations that generally crash and burn, and how the finery a city bestows seems absurd to those who live beyond the city limits.
"We were New York City Pretty
To all our many red-necked friends
Who had never seen a Bleecker Street
With such a bitter end
And we got no broken dreams to mend"
The album signs off in bonkers fashion with "The Great Red Rusty Robot in the Sky," which sounds like elements of Sparky's Magic Piano in tandem with Bowie's "Space Oddity" plus an array of homemade instruments Kennedy unveils on the back of the album, such as The Magic Mouth Machine, which look like Heath Robinson confections.
Authentic, arch, eccentric, and diverting, Clive Kennedy's sole album deserves another airing, even though he looks more at home in a weekend shooting party than in the company of Glam stars. A total one-off, it remains a befitting legacy for a forgotten man, and is a tremendously English affair.
Maybe one day we'll be able to listen without feeling that the image of the creator negates his right to a second chance. The strength of his personality arises from the ghostly grooves, and even though he resembles a naughty uncle from the country, you know he'd be fun, charmingly indiscreet, with the strange scent of scandal, and the suggestive noise of skeletons rattling around in a rickety closet.