Various - Oh! You Pretty Things: Glam Queens and Street Urchins

UK three CD set. In the teenage wastelands of grey early Seventies Britain, where the musical landscape was dominated by introspective singer-songwriters and dour rock bands, the emergence of the outrageous, androgynous, peacock-plumaged Glam Rock scene provided a vital spark in the dark. Sadly the genre was quickly hijacked by the backroom hustlers of the British music industry and their mutton-dressed-as-glam pop idol marionettes. However, Oh! You Pretty Things ignores such lightweight fripperies to concentrate on the real deal. We focus on the twin central strands of Glam Rock: the cerebral and the visceral, with the artier, experimental element of the scene joined by the Ladbroke Grove street rockers and the Steve Marriott-channelling chirpy Cockney geezer street urchins, many of whom had been to drama school and knew how to strike a pose. Big hits, inexplicable misses, seminal glam texts, cult classics, key album tracks, alternative versions and even a clutch of previously unreleased but essential recordings: Oh! You Pretty Things - housed in a clamshell box that contains a 40-page booklet of amazing photos and incredible stories - assembles all these and more to act as the definitive primer of a relatively short-lived but glorious musical and pop-cultural phenomenon.