The Met Gala last week, a troubled Venice Art Biennale began last week, and the Cannes Film Festival starts today: all events where how attendees look and what they wear becomes as important as the art medium being exhibited or shown, or in the case of the Met Gala, the money raised.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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So this week, /Tuesday Ten /634 turns on the glamour and style, as we look at songs either about or referencing these concepts, and thanks to a fantastically diverse set of suggestions – even by the standards of many that I get – there’s a bit of stylistic whiplash on the playlist.

Actually, talking of playlists, this week I’m experimenting with Deezer again instead of Spotify, as part of an attempt to move away from Spotify at last. Previous playlists will remain available – for now – on Spotify, but depending on how things go, everything else might move too. I’ll update if that happens.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/David Bowie
/Fashion
/Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

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Bowie was a striking chameleon, one who rarely stayed in one place with his music or image, and he entered the eighties reborn after his Berlin sojourn. Fashion is a song that takes influence from everywhere – but was originally based upon a reggae rhythm (that’s still in there somewhere) – and both celebrates and critiques those who follow fashion. It celebrates their sense of style and restless reinvention, of course, but takes on the slavish desire to impose those styles on others and also the gatekeeping that was – and still in – a feature of clubs from Studio 54 to Blitz to Berghain…

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/Roxette
/Dressed For Success
/Look Sharp!

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Amazingly, when you consider how huge internationally Roxette became in a short space of time, it took some time to get to that stage. Marie Fredriksson was already a successful solo artist in Sweden, and her longtime friend Per Gessle had been part of the band Gyllene Tider, and while their first few singles as Roxette had moderate success in Sweden, they weren’t released internationally – and it took until the mighty earworm of The Look (as the third single from the album!) before it all kicked off.

Dressed For Success was eventually an international hit too, but it took a second release for that, and looking back, it’s kinda mystifying why it took so long. It’s a big, brash and oh-so-80s pop-rock song about using how you look to get what you want, by power-dressing to ensure that your target remains in your sights.

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/Act
/Snobbery and Decay
/Laughter, Tears and Rage

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The short-lived collaboration between Thomas Leer and ex-Propaganda vocalist Claudia Brücken produced at least one remarkable song in Snobbery and Decay. A scorching takedown of the 80s rich and their conspicuous consumption, it reminds that even being rich goes out of style, no matter how good you look. As befits a song on the subject, too, the video is a sumptuous, stylish effort, with Leer and Brücken looking amazing in everything that they wear.

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/Senser
/What’s Going On
/Stacked Up

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Senser’s powerful debut Stacked Up turned thirty-two years old last week (excuse me a moment while I crumble into dust). One of the less well-remembered songs on the album, perhaps – partly because it’s the song that follows the incendiary opening four tracks and allows the first pause for breath – it still has a lot to recommend it. Among the near-thrash metal guitar sounds and the steady, rolling pace, Heitham Al-Sayed has a lot to say. But among his dismay at the state of the world, comes this one element that has always stuck in my head, on the subject of fashion and style:

“Fashion is something so ugly / It has to be changed every 15 minutes / But style is something versatile /
And in the way you move and in the way you smile”

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/Promenade Cinema
/She’s An Art
/Exit Guides

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The second PromCin album was unfortunate in release timing, arriving just as the world locked down and, perhaps, lost interest in new music for a short while. It was a crying shame, as the album was still very good, evolving their dramatic, unique take on synthpop, and one of the best songs on the album was this. One of their more uptempo songs, it was clearly aimed at the dancefloor and came armed with poisonous lyrics amid the glittering synths. Emma Barson’s lyrics take on the male gaze and their reduction of women to their looks and sexuality, as if their style and beauty was the only important thing: rammed home by the monologue that puts a woman on the auction block as if they were something to be bought and sold.

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/Pet Shop Boys
/Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin
/Elysium

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Played live for the first time in some time at their recent “Obscure” shows at the Ballroom, this song celebrates the memory of the band’s long-time make-up artist Lynne Easton, who died in 2006 aged just 46. Her brother Antony Easton wrote a fascinating obituary in the Guardian at the time that detailed a well-lived life, at the heart of the explosion of punk in London and swiftly becoming the choice of make-up artist for bands in the early days of music videos, most notably for Boy George, Culture Club and the Pet Shop Boys, and so helping create and cement the iconic images that some of these artists are still known for.

The song itself is a lovely elegy for a time gone, based around Easton’s funeral and the memories that it invoked, and a lost era of style and self-expression.

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/The Killers
/Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll
/Hot Fuss

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Indie and Alternative music has a lot of style, it’s just different from the norm: and some of the people who go out to such clubs can look very glamorous indeed. Particularly at some nights I’ve been to over the years, such as the legendary Monday night club Trash (a great reminiscence about it here) where DJs, bands and clubbers alike all looked cool as hell – even if my own memories of it are somewhat sketchy; or at the much-missed Britpop resurrection that was Nuis@nce in Camdem.

The Killers swept into the mid-2000s with a Vegas-swagger, and their first album Hot Fuss still resonates thanks to the remarkably long lives of the singles from it, but some of the other songs on it are just as notable, such as this one, where Brandon Flowers dredges up memories of what he thinks being in a band could be like. I suspect the reality might not have quite been the same…

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/Pulp
/Lipgloss
/His ‘n’ Hers

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Pulp were always one of the most stylish indie bands, led by Jarvis Cocker in his shabby chic that somehow looked cool while he was dressed like a geography teacher. Maybe it was that he had a sense of humour, a sense of how ridiculous this fame lark could be, and that he fully committed to everything that he did. But as well as that, many of his best songs were observations about what happens when those big hopes and dreams aren’t quite working out as hoped, and Lipgloss is one of the greatest and most cutting. Here, he’s observing someone that he either once fancied or had a thing with, who suddenly doesn’t look as amazing and as stylish as they once did, as their carefully planned life falls apart. A subject Jarvis has returned to time and again over the years, but he perhaps never nailed it again like this.

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/Peter Sarstedt
/Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?
/Peter Sarstedt

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Probably the one song the late Peter Sarstedt is remembered for above any other: a curious faux-French waltz – presumably cashing in on the popularity of French chanson at the time – where the narrator tells the story of a childhood friend who transcends the poverty they were born into to become a fabulously wealthy woman able to travel anywhere, and do anything they wish, amid the stylish European jet-set of the time. The underlying message, though, questioning whether all the wealth and glamour has actually made them happy…

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/Bobby Vinton
/Blue Velvet
/Blue on Blue

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A song about how a particular style or outfit can captivate beyond all measure – and let’s be honest, we’ve all been there – this song clearly resonated with artists and listeners alike: secondhandsongs.com records no less than 118 versions. Inspired by a holiday romance songwriter Bernie Wayne had with a woman whom he first saw wearing the titular fabric, it was fashioned into a gentle, awestruck ballad, most famously by Bobbie Vinton in 1963 (things I didn’t know: Vinton is backed by Burt Bacharach and his Orchestra on his take), which was the fifteenth version of it already!

The song gained a new lease of life in the eighties, thanks to Isabella Rossellini’s smouldering take in David Lynch’s film of the same name.