FOR THOSE who don’t believe pop and politics should ever share a bed, these are testing times. You’d expect an artist of the calibre of Ms Dynamite to confront a few issues in her lyrics, but Blue? The irksome boyband, incredibly, are readying an anti-war protest single. George Michael, a born-again Chartist, is more likely to be found hanging out in the Aslef canteen than Club Tropicana these days.

But back in 1973 Iron Virgin knew just how to blend protest and pop without looking worthy or daffy: “If you don’t like to be made to be sent to school,” they decreed, “just shout ‘rebels rule!’ ” Iron Virgin? No entry for them in the Guinness Book of Hit Singles. Instead they sit at the table with Bearded Lady, Brett Smiley, Boston Boppers and Tubthumper, all premier practitioners of junk-shop glam.

Glam rock is one of the most maligned and misunderstood genres in British pop. Rock snobs and historians have tended to focus on David Bowie (pictured below as Ziggy Stardust), Iggy Pop and Roxy Music, the art-school axis, with the odd, grudging, mention of Marc Bolan. The kids, the record buyers in the early Seventies, saw glam differently. They consumed pop in three-minute bursts, rarely buying albums, and they looked to Slade, Sweet, Mud and the Glitter Band for their plastic thrills. Looking back, it’s hard to deny that records such as Blockbuster and Mama Weer All Crazee Now were as vital and cheekily innovative as Virginia Plain or Starman. Brickies in make-up. Things don’t get much more ground-breaking in uptight Blighty.

Junk-shop glam is the term collectors have coined for the acts who had one, maybe two, stabs at becoming the new Bowie, before going back to labouring. The glam aficionado Tony Barber defines the junk-shop sound as “Ziggy Stardust after a big fry-up”. These groups made records bursting with a heightened sense of fun and ludicrous expectations. Take a look at the names: Plod, Spiv, Smiffy, Buster — more like members of the Fenn Street Gang than bisexual aliens. When you listen to the flailing ebullience of Bearded Lady’s Rock Star, it’s hard not to imagine that each member in some way resembles Robin Askwith.

The sounds, the solid thud of the glam 45, spill out of a clothes shop called Delta of Venus just round the back of Euston station. On the wall are custom-made Bowie dresses. Bearing the Streetcorner Luv label are T-shirts with the image of the “unisexual” Brett Smiley, veteran of a solitary single called Va Va Va Voom. Another T-shirt features the Sweet’s Steve Priest with “F*** Off” written around his face. “You get 18-year-old girls coming in with their Mums and they probably don’t know who he is, they just love the attitude,” says the shop’s owner, Leigh Wildman.

Suitably dressed, these kids then head to new glam clubs such as Stay Beautiful on Caledonian Road. If they want to buy the sounds, Wildman has a record corner in the shop, more often frequented by boys. “People always ask me what I’m playing. The girls really go for Ricky Wilde.”

Wilde is a junk-shop glam oddity in that he made at least three great singles, and all of them before his voice broke. The older brother of Kim, Ricky featured in a BBC Man Alive documentary in 1973 called Twinkle Twinkle Little Star about the weenybopper phenomenon started by the Osmonds. He looks effortlessly cool while his Dad, the Fifties rocker Marty Wilde, tells the camera: “He’s a groovy kid, he’s part of what I call ‘the now generation’. ”

Glam was British pop’s last throw of the dice before punk left a Post-Modern stamp on everything. The dressing up, the gay abandon, the sense that ridicule was nothing to be scared of created a rich seam which, star names aside, has only just begun to be appreciated. A junk-shop glam compilation called Velvet Tinmine has just been issued on RPM. The splendidly titled Litter from the Glitter Bin is due on Sanctuary next month.

This was music contrived from spare parts; discarded Bo Diddley riffs, super-primitive synths, tinsel, satin and tat. The end result has been an Oxfam staple ever since. Cheap, gaudy and gleeful, it’s not hard to see why glam’s time has come again. Time to turn another page on the teenage rampage.