Hair we go again

The bands that once ruled rock may be making a return. But is there more to glam than loud riffs, spandex and debauchery?

- Alexis Petridis

A diving instructor called Perry Boyer is giving me a crash course in drumming stagecraft. If you're planning on playing with your sticks on fire, he advises, ties socks around them - they'll light more easily.

Boyer, speaking by Zoom from California, knows what he's talking about. Forty years ago he was Punky Peru, drummer in Witch, a fixture on the LA glam metal scene that bore Mötley Crüe, Wasp and Poison to stardom. Witch should probably have joined them - they had the songs, the spandex, and the theatricality. But it never worked out: the wrong record deals and the fact that, as Boyer puts it, "Me and Tommy Lee from Mötley were partying super hard."

Now Witch's career has been excavated as part of Bound for Hell: On the Sunset Strip, a lavish box set produced by reissue label Numero Group documenting the nascent glam metal scene. It's a world populated by bands that Katherine Turman, journalist, and co-author of definitive metal history Louder Than Hell, calls "outsiders". They shared a love for music that, in the early 80s, was either deeply unfashionable (Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy) or had never made much impact in the US. Boyer recalls scouring "tiny record stores" looking for early 70s British glam rock. Their influences accounted for glam metal's visual flamboyance and its sound - big on showboating guitar solos and pop-facing choruses.