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If you look as if you've just crawled out from under a stone, there's fresh hope. '78 is the Year of the Ugly Looking Bleeder...
So you wanna be a rock 'n' roll star — but you've a problem. You can't see your hand in front of your face without your National Health horn-rims, your complexion looks like the "Before" picture in the spots adverts, and your posture's so bad you make Wreckless Eric look like Prince Charles!
Well, take heart ugly mush, because the message is coming through loud and clear: You no longer need to be young and pretty to break into the big time.
Today's model rock star can look as weedy and undistinguished as former computer operator Elvis Costello, or have braces on their teeth like Poly Styrene. They can even start out with the handicaps of someone like Ian Dury and still have the world queueing at the stage door.
Good looks, in fact, may not even be a help in 1978. For instance, how much did his bopper-mag smoothness hold back David Essex when he made a futile attempt to woo the rock audience? And would poor old Marc Bolan's valiant comeback attempt have clicked a lot quicker if he hadn't been born with such infernally cute features?
There's no getting away from it: Ugly is beautiful in 1978. It's the freaks who get the breaks.
You could say that it all starts and ends with Ian Dury. Apart from being the wrong side of 35, a short-ass to boot, and with the sort of evil/ugly looks which could turn a Princess into a toad, Dury has been a cripple since an attack of polio at the age of seven. Yet Ian Dury is currently rock's newest solo hot property. Though this success has come only in recent times, Dury was in at the start of the swing away from stereotyped pretty boy good looks as far back as 1973 with his first group, Kilburn & The High Roads.
At a time when Donny Osmond and The Carpenters ruled the charts and David Bowie was the closest thing there was to a rock "eccentric", the original Kilburns were the ugliest, motliest assembly of characters you ever saw. Dressed in ill-fitting jumble sale suits, and with expressions mean enough to clear the roughest public bar, they looked like they'd just shuffled in from some seedy back alley.
They had a black drummer who lowered himself onto his drum stool from a pair of crutches, a giant of a bassist with absurd Robert Mitchum shoulders, a pianist who appeared to have been left behind from the beatnik age, and to cap it all off there at the front was crippled, dwarf-like Ian Duty, clutching the microphone like it was somebody's throat—with a shrivelled hand in a black leather glove.
Shortly after, Dr Feelgood appeared on the same pub/club circuit and, though it might be hard to believe now that we're all familiar with their kind of band, they looked almost as bizarre.
On guitar was Wilko Johnson with his pudding-bowl, Borstal boy haircut. On vocals, hardnut Lee Brilleaux who might well have had a cut-throat razor slipped in the pocket of his mohair suit.
The pub rock bands such as the Kilburns and the Feelgoods paved the way for the punk bands, and punk bands in turn opened up a route to stardom for all manner of new acts.
Suddenly the music business is open to all comers like it has never been before. Record contracts are up for grabs because these days there's a record company on every street corner.
Take Stiff for instance. They were one of the first of the new, independent labels and their roster of acts has sometimes looked like a freak circus.
Stiff signed Ian Dury and Elvis Costello, the unlikely lads of their day. They also have Wreckless Eric—he of the gormless expressions, demented college boy haircut, and shirt cuffs hanging out of jackets two sizes too small. Wreckless looks a prize twit if ever there was one! Even if he does have the talent to make up for appearances, it would be hard to imagine a record company pre-1977 giving him the time of day, let alone a record contract.
Stiff also have Larry Wallis, a '60s hippie renegade who they sent out on the Greatest Stiffs package tour to play to punks. More recently they've had the bizarre Devo, who look like cashiers from some extra-terrestrial High Street bank, and are unquestionably the weirdest of the weird.
In the latter half of the 1970s rock stars come in all shapes and sizes—new wave or otherwise. From gangling Mick Fleetwood, skyscraper drummer with Fleetwood Mac... to short-assed, short-sighted Graham Parker... to fat boy-made-good Meat Loaf.
Then there's Poly Styrene and Tom Petty proving that deficiencies in the dental zone are no barrier to stardom. And Dee Dee Ramone of the brothers Ramone giving hope to acne sufferers everywhere.
Age, too, needn't stand in your way. There's Ian Dury again, veteran Brummie gunslinger Steve Gibbons, and old man Jet Black of The Stranglers who admits to being 39 but who could be into his 40s. For all-round antiquity there's no beating The Pirates who last year, despite their wives, kids, steady jobs and mortgages, re-formed and went back on the road alongside groups half their age.
So you're worried about premature baldness? A receding hairline is holding you back? Well, it hasn't stopped Howard Devoto of Magazine, or old friend Graham Parker—and Ed Cassidy, the veteran drummer with American band Spirit, hasn't got a single hair on his head!
There's usually a way to turn handicaps to your advantage. If in doubt, choose your own personal weirdness!
Split Enz look like something out of a public schoolboy's nightmare, and they sell records. So does Angus Young of AC/DC who comes on like a retarded fifth. former. From New York there's oddball Wayne County, who favours togging up in ladies clothes. County's a nightmare in anybody's language.
And so on...
But before you decide that your blotched visage could be a thing of beauty... before you aim your pidgeon-toes in the direction of your neighbourhood record company... remember one thing: ugliness,. freakishness, isn't enough in itself. You've got to have some talent for starters, and your freakishness has to be charismatic and photogenic.
As Ian Dury says: "I'm charismatic, and I'm not ashamed about by physical appearance, whereas most people are. Luckily I'm quite interesting to look at." Just because you're the ugliest geezer on your block, and people cross the road when they see you on the street, doesn't mean that you're going to have the charisma to carry off a Rock On! cover photo.
P.S. Consolation for the pretty boys. The Rich Kids and Generation X haven't done too bad either.
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