Metal Jacket Guru

I have this sort of pop primal scene to do with seeing T. Rex on T. Vee.  A personal creation-myth based on Marc Bolan's audio-visual impact on my fragile eggshell child-mind. 

I first referred to this memory scar  as early as the introduction to Blissed Out - where it is described as  an early encounter with the Pop Sublime, a sensation that scared and spooked me as much as astonished and excited. 

There's a more developed account of how it blew my eyes in Shock and Awe's intro.  

"One of my absolute earliest pop memories is being shaken by the sight-and-sound of Marc Bolan on Top of The Pops singing  “Children of the Revolution,” or maybe “Solid Gold Easy Action” . It was the look of Bolan even more than the ominous sensuality of T.Rex’s sound that transfixed me. That electric frizz of hair, the glitter-speckled cheeks, a coat that appeared to be made of metal—Marc seemed like a warlord from outer space." 

"Children of the Revolution" was just a guess. It's a memory that is no doubt distorted and constructed to some degree. 

Mind you, when I saw this advert - circulated on Twitter by someone calling themselves Glam Rock Chris - I thought: actually that could be the very garment I saw as a nine-year-old -  the metallicized jacket.

 So "Children of the Revolution" could have been the song. 

 

Here's another startling contender - a coat of many colours, all of them ultra-glossy.  

Then again, some of the effect could have come from Top of the Pops loving to use these particular effects all the time - howlround was the name of one, if I recall right, a kind of video feedback effect I think. The whole screen would go a kind of metallic purple or pink or yellow, with the performers shrouded in this electric haze. Except that because we were watching on a black and white TV for the whole 1970s, what reached my retina would have been more like a solarized silver. So that could be the "metallic guru" effect right there. 

The Top of the Pops studio crew seemed to know that these FX were especially suited to glam and glitter groops - The Sweet, Gary Glitter et al - although you would get them on other types of groop sometimes and I have seen the FX used as late as X Ray Spex when they did "The Day The World Turned Day-glo" (where the plastique-fantastique aura would suit Poly Styrene's whole vision to a tee). The effect seems especially right for T.Rex because it is psychedelic yet also plastic and artificial in the 1970s vibe. 

Here in fact are  T. Rex doing "Children of the Revolution" on Top of the Pops, intermittently irradiated with a scarlet rinse (at 1.48 first). However the garment is a sort of tasselled, open-at-the-chest shirt. 

Okay, I think I've found it - and it's actually my other guess: "Solid Gold Easy Action" on Top of the Pops.

Marc's got a silver jacket and there's some howlround (I think) FX with a fierce turquoise hue. 

I think as a 9-year old I would have found the jolting rhythm of this song perturbating:  a Dionysian initiation.   

Today it's probably my favorite T. Rex song although "20th Century Boy", "Children of the Revolution" and "Get It On" are hard on its heels. 

On another subject - my feeds have been flooded with Marc Bolan images recently. It started with the 47th anniversary of his death. But because I always slow down and look and often save them (see below) the algorithm is inevitably shoving more and more at me. 

This is nice but I still think it's odd to

a/ commemorate someone's deathday

b/ do it on an odd-number anniversary. 

September 30th Update: and of course now there's even more images flooding the socials, because it's the anniversary of Marc's birthday today

An offcut from an early draft of the T. Rex chapter in S+A

The party was going to be legendary.  It was being thrown by a friend whose parents ran a boarding school near Ipswich and were away on their summer vacation.  The idea of this place of education being so deserted  and divested of  authority was powerful enough to pull us a considerable distance across England. Excitement mounted on the coach journey and the long walk through fields from the bus stop to the school.

But the build-up turned out to be more thrilling than the party itself. It took place in the headmaster’s house, as opposed to spilling riotously through the classrooms and into the gym (how I imagined it, a sort of sequel to If....). And while the party was packed, it consisted mostly of people milling around and drinking. Nothing  really ever happened. Certainly nothing like mayhem.  

Only two things stick in my memory about the night. 

One was attempting to sleep in a bath tub, like I’d seen in the movies, and discovering how  it doesn't work, how it's too uncomfortable. 

And the other was the boy dancing to T. Rex.

We were sat in some kind of side-room,  a little bored and not nearly drunk enough. And  then this young man, in his early twenties probably, put “Get It On” on the record-player and danced, sinuously and seductively.

I recognize the boy now as a type:  darkly luscious, willowy, imp-of-the-perverse glint in the eye. An English archetype, running from Syd Barrett and Mark Bolan, through Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash and other Goth male singers..... through the singer in Placebo... and then onto Noel Fielding.   

This boy wasn’t dancing as encouragement for us to join him, he wasn’t trying to get the stalled party started. He was dancing purely for display – splaying himself as an object for visual delectation, a plaything for our gaze.

I wasn’t turned on exactly, but I was entranced: at once admiring and envying the feline self-confidence it took to preen, prance and pose like that. 

A dance done in a mirror of people, the performance spoke to something inside me, in much the same way as the strange shapes thrown by another charming man, Morrissey, would, a year or two later on Top of The Pops.  

I knew “Get It On,” of course, but it felt like years since I’d heard it. 

T. Rex had been so massive for three years in the early Seventies that, like the Beatles and The Stones, they’d  never faded from pop consciousness altogether. 

But in the early Eighties, Marc Bolan wasn’t really present as a reference point or resource for current musicians, unlike David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, pervasive influences  throughout  New Pop and New Romanticism, from their vocal style and hair to their strategies and sensibility.  

Just about the only glimpse of Bolan-reverence in those days was when Bauhaus, the band fronted by Peter Murphy, covered “Telegram Sam”. But that was just a prequel to their more famous cover of “Ziggy Stardust”, which got them on Top of the Pops. 

 In 1983, singles by T. Rex and other glam groups were deejay favorites at The Batcave, the hub of the germinal Goth scene.  

But really, that was about it until later in the decade, when The Smiths put out some blatantly T.Rexy-sounding singles - "Panic" in particular -  while house producer Baby Ford attempted to refurbish “Children of the Revolution” as a rave anthem....

More 1980s T. Rexy vibes:

suggested by Tyler, horrid cover of "Children of the Revolution" by Violent Femmes

Love and Rockets pay homage with "So Alive"

Sounds like a sister song to the Sopranos theme

Okay this is more like 1991

"filthy cute and baby you know it"

antitheatricality and pop ("what a hell of a show" / hardcore pawn)

"Cocker had been watching a lot of porn movies in various deluxe hotel suites around the world, finding himself with a lot of dead time on his hands (and all over his body) during the longeurs of long tours. Beyond their prurient use value, Jarvis typically homed in on the pathos: the emptied-out eyes of the veteran porno performer going through the chafing motions, that same dead look you see with croupiers in Las Vegas.  “I found it fascinating wondering what happened to these porn stars…. what happens to the older people when they've been used up and had everything done to them? … I wondered about the people and whether there's any way back into normal life for them.”  You can why Cocker might have felt a twinge of solidarity: isn’t the pop singer a kind of sex worker, a strip-tease artist, an exhibitionist acting out a pantomime of erotic excitement and yearning? No wonder that in olden times, entertainment of any kind was disreputable, the distinction between the actor and the prostitute moot at best."

- from the director's cut of my essay for I'm With Pulp, Are You? 

You are hardcore, you make me hard

You name the drama and I'll play the part

It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream

I like your get-up, if you know what I mean

I want it bad

I want it now

Oh, can't you see I'm ready now?

I've seen all the pictures, I've studied them forever

I want to make a movie, so let's star in it together

Don't make a move till I say "action"

Oh, here comes the hardcore life

Put your money where your mouth is tonight

Leave your make-up on and I'll leave on the light

Come over here, babe, and talk in the mic

Oh yeah, I hear you now

It's gonna be one hell of a night

You can't be a spectator, oh no

You got to take these dreams and make them whole

Oh, this is hardcore

There is no way back for you

Oh, this is hardcore

This is me on top of you

And I can't believe it took me this long

That it took me this long

This is the eye of the storm

It's what men in stained raincoats pay for

But in here it is pure, yeah

This is the end of the line

I've seen the storyline played out so many times before

Oh, that goes in there

Then that goes in there

Then that goes in there

Then that goes in there

And then it's over

Oh, what a hell of a show

But what I want to know

What exactly do you do for an encore?

'Cause this is hardcore

The video was filmed at Pinewood Studios, with scenes redolent of scenes shot there for Peeping Tom.

"The inspiration for this video was a book entitled Still Life, edited by Diane Keaton and Marvin Heiferman (Calloway, New York, 1983). This beautiful book contains photographs of stills and publicity shots of films produced in Hollywood between 1940 and 1969. All possess a fantastic, super-real quality, reproduced very accurately in the Pulp video. Many of the scenes in the video reproduced specific stills, substituting members of Pulp for actors."  - Pulpwiki

Interview with Cocker, Peter Saville and John Currin on the artwork of the This Is Hardcore album 

Piece on the book Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp

Everybody’s In Showbiz

Bob Fosse stylizations

 

"The New Romantic"!

antitheatricality and politics (the Truth about Cats and Dogs and Geese)

 Cats! Dogs! Geese! Laura Loomer! Look, now he’s attacking Taylor!

 Like the last season before a show gets canceled for getting over-the-top and, at the same time, boring.

 This election is about jobs, wages, climate, health care, abortion. Not his show. Your life.

- Pete Buttegieg 

Mike Johnson will not shut down the government.

This is just the humiliating failure theater that Trump drags his most loyal supporters into before they have to surrender.

And surrender he will.

- Ron Filipkowski

"Failure theater" - love it. 

This is a trope-meme they used against AOC, that she was just an actress, mouthing lines written for her by shadowy behind-the-stage-curtain figures. 

The Oi! of Glam

Cockney Rejects rough up The Sweet

 

Long thought there was something glitterstomp about this tune

Never liked them at the time, now I do.

The convergence of glam and Oi! four years ahead of schedule - The Jook's "bovver rock" from 1974

The Jook carried on long enough to almost be Oi! - this is from 1978

Waving the class war banner  - a bit, anyway

Aggro rock - except they mean "aggravation" more than aggression

Heavy Metal Kids had the thematics and the accent - and sort of the image - but not the sound at all

Again, with Hustler, the music is rough-arsed boogie but the voice and the imagery is proto-Oi! Well, perhaps more Chas N' Dave, "Gertcha". 

However the persecuted character in the song is a longhair with a trench coat - a prog rock fan, "a scruffy little 'ippie" 

Good Lord actual footage of the band

"the geezer upstairs'll take me in" 

Another convergence - the sharpies down Under - aka the Bogan Boogie

The song here is by Rose Tattoo - more AC/DC meets Oi! than glam meets Oi! - but lyrics referencing "working class streets" and factory life. 

And yet more - Third World War (not really glam but meaty beefy stompy and class-war conscious)

Slade matured to full ideological consciousness

Also Slaughter and the Dogs, who started out as a glam band

I wrote about the bootboy glam / terrace stompers / punk-before-punk thing in this review of a junkshop glam compilation - also the idea of a 1970s hard rock continuum in which the once-crucial differences melt away into indistinguishability as the era recedes further into history

Various Artists - All the Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s

(Pitchfork, 2019)

The title of this glam rock box set is a cute twist on “All the Young Dudes,” the hit 1972 song Bowie gifted to Mott the Hoople. People, then and since, took it as an anthem for rock’s third generation—the kids who were babies when rock’n’roll first arrived, missed out on most of the ’60s, but craved a sound of their own in the ’70s. The Bowie/Mott/Roxy Music side of glam—literate and musically sophisticated—is not really what this collection is about, though. “Droog” is the true clue, a slang term for a teenage thug from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of the Anthony Burgess novel. Scandalous upon its 1971 release, the film was blamed for a spate of copycat “ultraviolence” and chimed with existing UK anxieties about feral youth and rising crime: soccer hooliganism, skinhead “bovver boys” in steel-capped Doc Martens brutalizing hippies and immigrants, subcultural tribes warring on the streets.

All the Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s largely celebrates the music that sublimated and safely vented the disorderly impulses of working-class kids in the not-so-Great Britain of the early ’70s. It’s packed with the coarse, rowdy rock whose shout-along choruses and stomp-along drums shook concert halls from foundations to rafters. Compiler Phil King’s focus, though, is not the huge-selling glitter bands like Slade or the Sweet, but the nearly-made-its and the never-stood-a-chancers: “Junkshop glam,” as collectors and dealers call this stuff, a term that exudes the musty aroma of digging through cardboard boxes of dirt-cheap singles.

Glam as punk-before-punk is an argument convincingly made on the first disc of Droogs, titled “Rock Off!” Ray Owen’s Moon’s “Hey Sweety” launches things with a stinging attack and pummeling power just a notch behind the Stooges, although the oddly phrased title-chorus diminishes the menace slightly. Most Droogs inclusions are fairly frivolous affairs lyrically—anthems of lust, celebrations of rocking out—but Third World War anticipate punk themes with the proletarian plaint and Strummer-like sandpaper vocals of “Working Class Man.” Hustler forge a link between the Faces and Cockney Rejects with “Get Outta My ’Ouse,” which is like Magic’s “Rude” recast as pub boogie: the hilarious lament of a longhair hassled by his girl’s disapproving Dad. In Supernaut’s “I Like It Both Ways,” the bisexual protagonist is confused by stereophonic propositions from a girl in the left speaker and a boy in the right. Other highlights include the chrome-glistening grind of James Hogg’s “Lovely Lady Rock” and the grating lurch of Ning’s “Machine,” akin to being run over by a bulldozer driven by a caveman.

Things stay stompy and simplistic on the second disc, titled “Tubthumpers & Hellraisers,” but with a slight shift towards pop. On Harpo’s “My Teenage Queen,” a lithe, corkscrewing melody contrasts with a relentless beat, which is interrupted by an unexpected outbreak of hand-percussion like a belly-dancer abruptly jumping onstage to join the band. Frenzy’s “Poser” sneers sweetly and Simon Turner’s “Sex Appeal” is a delicious bounce of bubblegum. Compared with the ferocious first disc, though, this radio-friendly fare often feels flimsier, stirring those doubts familiar with similar archival enterprises: Is this really lost treasure? Or is it deservedly obscure?

Shrewdly, on the final disc “Elegance & Decadence,” King switches gears and zooms in on what some call “high glam”: the Bowie-besotted, Bryan Ferry-infatuated side of the genre, which appealed to older teenagers and middle-class students with its thoughtful lyrics, witty cultural references, and the exquisite styling of the clothes and record packaging. The backings favored by performers like John Howard, Paul St John, and Alastair Riddell are svelte and lissome, shunning the beefy power-chords and leaden kick drums in favor of strummed acoustic guitar and swaying rhythms. The vocal presence on these songs is likewise willowy and androgynous: sometimes an unearthly soar above the mundane, other times highly-strung and histrionic.

The most fetching specimens here in this post-Hunky Dory mode are Steve Elgin’s “Don’t Leave Your Lover Lying Around (Dear),” with its saucy asides about how “trade is looking good,” and Brian Wells’ archly enunciated “Paper Party.” Themes of fame and fantasy abound, with many owing a sizable debt to Bowie. “Criminal World,” by the debonair Metro—who described their style as “English rock music, but influenced by a hundred years of European culture… Baudelaire and Kurt Weill”—would be later covered by Bowie himself on 1983’s Let’s Dance, a well-deserved compliment. Even more genteel-sounding is “New York City Pretty,” which could be an outtake from Rocky Horror Picture Show, so closely does Clive Kennedy mirror Tim Curry’s phrasing.

Like other retroactively invented genres such as freakbeat, part of the appeal of junkshop glam is its generic-ness: the closeness with which artists conform to the rules of rock at that precise moment. In many cases, these performers were opportunists: a year or two earlier, they’d been prog or bluesy-rock artists. Some would later adopt New Wave mannerisms, swapping escapism and decadence for lyrics about unemployment and urban deprivation. Droogs does contain an example of glam juvenilia from a future prime-mover of punk: “Showbiz Kid” by Sleaze, the early band of TV Smith of the Adverts.

Although this kind of aesthetic flexibility seems suspect and unprincipled, it reveals a couple of things about rock. First, it points to a sameness persisting underneath all the style changes. From today’s remote vantage point, the differences—once so significant and divisive—between ’60s beat groups, bluesy boogie, heavy metal, glam, pub rock, and punk start to fade and a continuum of hard rock emerges. The dominant sound on Droogs is situated somewhere between the Pretty Things, Ten Years After, the Groundhogs, on one side, and the Count Bishops, Sham 69, Motörhead, on the other. I’ve picked British names but you could just as easily throw Steppenwolf, Grand Funk Railroad, and Black Flag in there, or for that matter, AC/DC.

The other thing that Droogs shows is that originality is both uncommon and overrated. Herd mentality, which is to say the willingness of the horde of proficient but not necessarily creative performers to be influenced by the rare innovators in their midst, is what actually changes the sound of the radio. It’s the arrival of the copyists that definitively establishes a new set of musical characteristics, performance gestures, and lyrical fixtures, as the defining sound of an era. Send in the clones, then, because sometimes you can’t get enough of a good thing.

Raw Mirror

 The classic Iggy-glam-phase photograph would be this one from the back of Raw Power 

Silver lame pants, silver hair, lipstick, eyeshade

Also this one from the front  

But in some ways the archetypal glam photograph would be this other one from the back of Raw Power - although he's less glammed up looking, it's the look - the looking into the mirror - that is pure glam. 

It's part of a genre of mirror based glam / post-glam / neo-glam photography. 

And mirror-themed songs ("Mirror Freak", "The Hall of Mirrors").

An alternative shot from the same session 

As an extension to the genre - its antithetical inversion - Andrew Parker points to the iconic cover of Black Flag's Damaged

It's the anti-glam mirror. Where glam is about high esteem, inflated ego, narcissism, then this is low self esteem, fractured ego, self-hatred. 

It's also where Iggy-of-Dirt-and-No-Fun collides with Iggy-as-briefly-Bowie-creature

Andrew also points to this cover to Sabotage by Black Sabbath (an influence on Black Flag)

What an odd image - backs to the mirror fits their unglam despondent 'heavy' vision, but if they looked in the mirror they might also see how ghastly their clothes are.

Also in the genre - the inner sleeve of Scritti Politti's Cupid and Psyche 85

My take on this is that the image dramatises the internal hierarchy of "the band" which is that Gamson and Maher are looking at Green's image in the mirror, Green is looking at his own image. 

Can't remember if I used this in previous mirror-theme posts - but a very knowing bit of fun from Adam Ant here as image-obsessed Dick Turpin in "Stand and Deliver"

Stand and deliver / Your money or your life

Try and use a mirror /No bullet or a knife

We're the dandy highwaymen / So tired of excuses

Of deep meaning philosophies  / Where only showbiz loses

Oh and I never noticed the back sleeve of the single before

Looking glass look-alikes 

As Steve Pafford reveals in this blogpost, Adam Ant was the inspiration for "Mirror Man" by The Human League. Phil Oakey was genuinely concerned that Adam was getting lost in his image. 

“We’ve kept this quiet for years but it’s actually about Adam Ant" he told Tracks in 1989, when the League and the insect warrior shared a manager, Miles Copeand (Sting, The Police). “It’s not anti Adam Ant and we didn’t want to offend him, but he was having to respond to his public more than was good for him.”

This puts the song (which I never much cared for - too clumpily Motown-redux) in the tradition of Cockney Rebel's "Mirror Freak", which Steve Harley wrote about his friend Marc Bolan but also about all wannabe stars. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A suggestion from Asif  - by an offshoot of the very glammy-Goth Bauhaus.

RIP Herbie Flowers

 

THE glam bassist.

"Oddity" might be the first time I registered the existence of the bass as an instrument - for those strange detonations 

(Although there was the B-line in "Summertime Blues")

Although I think he didn't actually play on the record, just mimed for TOTP

But he's in the band for Marc's last TV series. 

Some of his best work was Mr Essex and Jeff Wayne

He didn't just play on glam records though, Herb was in demand session bassman all over the first-half-70s shop.

Check out this amazing performance

Less salubriously, he wrote this monstrosity with Kenny Pickett

There is also this questionable song, as later interpolated by the Happy Mondays (and sung by Alan Partridge in one of his series, in an idle, mooching around sort of way). 

I mean, they meant well, I'm sure. 

At any rate, Herbie didn't write it, so that's okay.

Herbie was in a heavy rock band called Rumpelstiltskin.

And a blues-jazz collective alongside Alexis Korner, called Collective Consciousness Society - aka CCS.

The latter's version of "Whole Lotta Love" was the Top of the Pops intro theme when I was a kid. 

And post-glam, as Phil points out in the comments, he was a member of Sky - a classical rock supergroop also including Francis Monkman ex-Curved Air and the dude who did the triffic snazzy OST to The Long Good Friday. 

Talking about classical meets rock - Herbie played on Variations, the Andrew Lloyd-Weber and Julian Lloyd-Weber Paganini-rocked-up album. One of which ended up as this famous TV intro theme. I don't know if Herbie played on this track though as there was another bassist involved on the record.

Herbie Flowers also put out a solo album, Plant Life.

And another one called Potty.

Herbie Flowers - the name is quite close the gangster boss in Performance, Harry Flowers - was  also adept at playing the tuba. He did that as a bandsman in the RAF, during which he time he also picked up double bass.

Before he got involved in rock, he had been in trad jazz bands, then a more modern jazz band, and then switched to electric bass and started becoming an in-demand session man.

But let's remember Mr. Herbie Flowers this way

Glamourgeddon versus the Glitter Louts