Wham! Bam! Thank you glam!

Once upon a time, there was David Bowie, Roxy Music, Slade, T Rex and The Sweet. Suckled on street fashion, sci fi, Euro art-house movies and 60s pop, these preening pioneers stripped back late 60s prog rock into an altogether artier, sexier beast in the early 70s.

They lathered on lippy, chucked glitter around, and their young male fans in particular outraged their elders by getting about grey English towns in platforms, feather boas and satin blouses borrowed from their mum. Behold: glam rock! It was mostly a British phenom at first, but before long there were glam bands springing up from New York to Estonia to Auckland.

A handful of spectacular records were made, and hundreds of crap ones. It was a lot of fun for a while there, and introduced a frisson of gender-bending theatricality that’s been central to pop music ever since. But then everyone got bored and moved on to the next thing. RIP glam. The End.

Or so I thought. British journalist Simon Reynolds has just written a far more in-depth overview on Glam, entitled Shock And Awe (Faber, RRP $55), running to an epic 704 pages.

Melody Maker, The Guardian, Village Voice, Spin, The Wire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times. This prolific Oxford-educated Londoner has written for them all, somehow also finding time to knock out weighty tomes on rave culture (1998’s Energy Flash), post-punk music (2005’s Rip It Up and Start Again ) and the nostalgia at the heart of contemporary pop culture (2011’s Retromania).

And now, glam. What can I say? I’m excited. At 53, Reynolds and I are of much the same vintage. Just like him, I grew up on this stuff.

I used to p... off my old man by hammering Slade’s Old New Borrowed and Blue on his ancient valve radiogram. Half a dozen Bowie posters gazed down on me in a decidely homoerotic way as I slept.

Before I biked off to high school, The Sweet’s Fox On The Run would come barrelling out of the kitchen radio.

During puberty, I spent any amount of time imagining my way into Suzi Quatro’s sweaty silver jumpsuit.

Top five glam songs in the history of the world? I’d choose David Bowie’s Queen Bitch, Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain, Iggy and The Stooges’ Search and Destroy ,T Rex’s 20th Century Boy and The New York Dolls’ Trash.

Hang on, I hear you say. What about The Sweet’s immortal Ballroom Blitz? OK, then, let’s make it six.

All of these artists get their own lengthy chapters in Reynolds’ book, amid a host of glam rock also-rans. It’s funny, thoughtful, and packed with historical detail, chin-stroking theorising and illuminating anecdotes.

Best of all, Reynolds interprets glam generously throughout, finding space within the tent for Alice Cooper, The Stooges, Velvet Underground, Morrissey, Prince and Beyonce plus shocking old stompy-drums sex offender Gary Glitter, who I once encountered in the dunnies of a motorway service station on England’s M1. Don’t ask.

During puberty, I spent any amount of time imagining my way into Suzi Quatro's sweaty silver jumpsuit.