Steve Priest: the outrageous Sweet bassist who presaged heavy metal

He was cartoonish – once warned by David Bowie to tone down his makeup – and ‘built like a hod-carrier’, but Priest’s camped-up performances defined glam rock It’s not an exact science, but British glam rock can broadly be divided into two categories. There was what’s come to be known as “high glam”, the genre’s originators and most artful practitioners: Bowie and his acolytes, Roxy Music, T Rex – album artists who could expect serious critical consideration and the space in interviews to expound on their thoughts about the influence of literature, theatre and the visual arts on their work. And there was “low glam”: singles artists aimed squarely at the teenyboppers, critically reviled opportunists (as if anyone could reasonably be tarred with that brush in a world dominated by Marc Bolan and the former David Jones, who’d both spent the 60s desperately trying to become famous by any means necessary). The musicians who had leapt on the gaudier aspects of Bolan and Bowie’s image and sound – the glitter, satin and tat; the crunching, distorted guitars – but were less inclined to publish books of poetry, or discuss Richard Hamilton, William Burroughs and Japanese kabuki theatre in front of journalists. Continue reading...
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