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"

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

Glam Raiders / Glitter Ravers

Sampling from Kenny's "The Bump"

(ooh and right at the end a tiny bit of Steppenwolf)

Space Raiders almost seem like a belated belch from the back of Paul Oldfield's brain

Or like the runty lovechild of World of Twist and Denim

Space Raiders recorded for Skint and were thus aligned with Big Beat.

 

More glam-raiding -  "Monster Munch" samples the riff from "Teenage Rampage" - and further in, the chorus -  ensuring a flood of royalties into the coffers of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman (possibly also to surviving members of The Sweet, since its their performance). Well, more like a trickle of royalties. 

The opening track on the Space Raiders debut album Don't Be Daft

is  called "Raiders Rock the Nation" and the track's credit says "written by Marc Bolan".

 I can't work out the T.Rex  track it's drawing on, though.

It also features someone called Scraggy Pee.

A nod to Marc also in the title to this tune "Middlesboogie (U Gimme Hot Love)" (as well as a nod to their hometown Middleborough)

Now this grebo trudger from the second album Hot Cakes sounds very glam and so does the title with its echo of "Truck on (Tyke)"

An odd choice for a single, this - sort of ambient big beat

I used the word "grebo" above and it turns out aptly because my favorite act on Skint - well apart from Norman Cook - was Bentley Rhythm Ace and one of them, I discover, was in Pop Will Eat Itself. 

(Big Beat is all about about picnicking on pop history and regurgitating it entertainingly )

Adding to the rockdance provincial lumpen-ness, another person involved in BRA - on a guest level - had once in been in EMF. 

Although Bentley Rhythm Ace derive all their samples from the lowest strata of vinyl (car boot sales etc), they don't appear to have scooped up any scrags and scrap from the glam 'n ' glitter era. 

They did do a track called  "Kenny Beats (Part One)", though. 

This was my favorite BRA - it struck me as sort of Professor Branestawm version of plunderphonics. 

But also like a Spike Milligan version of freakbeat. 

Or perhaps I'm really thinking of The Alberts and "Professor" Bruce Lacey. 

"As a small boy Bruce Lacey was fascinated by junk.... No one in this world can convince him anything is useless in his" 

Talking of the Midlands - and of glam intersections with dance -  I once described Stafford's Altern 8 as the Slade of techno. Not really sonically but more in the overall daftness, image-gimmickry, and mis-spelled song titles. 

Mind you, Slade did say of their back-to-basics / rock-made-for-dance stance:

"The kids don't want to sit down and think about music.... 

"The kids want to rave". 

lost in the schaffel

 

Minimal house was in such a rut by the early 2000s they tried to juice it up with some glammish boogie swing in the form of the "schaffel" fad  pushed by Kompakt.  

Born of Wolfgang Voigt's formative adoration of Marc Bolan - as evidenced much earlier in the 1996 Love Inc. track "Life's A Gas" (which samples you-guessed-it). 

Schaffel - a moment so minor that I clean forgot to mention it in this 2011 archaeology of the term and the rhythm-feel known as boogie  via a Soul Jazz compilation of Southern Rock titled Delta Swamp Rock

As it seems to languish behind a registrants-only wall at the Graun, here is the relevant portion of the piece:

... Southern Rock overlaps with that broad strip of Seventies blues-tinged rock called boogie, which ranges from ZZ Top to Brit combos such as Humble Pie who toiled on the US arena circuit and became vastly more popular in America than in their homeland. Boogie has a technical definition: a musician friend explains that it has to do with 4/4 being subdivided by 12 rather than 16 notes, with syncopations on the third subdivision of each beat. 

But the best way of conveying it is to just point at examples: "Get It On" by T.Rex (Bolan's 1972 T.Rextasy-exploitation flick was titled  Born To Boogie), "Slow Ride" by Foghat, "Whatever You Want" by those dependable boys in blue denim Status Quo (who then got parodied by Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias on "Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie").

"Boogie" originally comes from "boogie-woogie", a piano-oriented style of blues designed for dancing, which emerged in the 1930s and filtered into numerous corners of American popular and roots music.  As adopted in rock, it signifies a black-and-bluesy swing, a funky shuffle feel.  What's odd is that boogie today has a third, completely different meaning: it is used by DJs and collectors to refer to an early Eighties postdisco style whose slick, synthetic funk couldn't be further from the low-down earthiness of Southern rock.

The origins of this other boogie go back to the late Seventies when the word started cropping up in the titles of disco-funk tunes like Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie", Earth Wind and Fire's "Boogie Wonderland", The Jacksons's "Blame It On the Boogie" and Heatwave's "Boogie Nights". The week before Delta Swamp Rock arrived in the mail, I received a boogie CD-mix from a deejay friend, Paul Kennedy, which he'd titled Juicy Nights and crammed with postdisco gems by outfits like Change and BB & Q Band.  A few of the names were familiar to me from the Eighties, when another deejay pal of mine used to buy U.S import 12 inches, an outlandish concept to someone on a student grant.

What defines this  boogie is that it's disco but slower and funkier: 110 to 116 beats-per-minute is the prime range, says Paul, with a strong accent on the second and fourth beats rather than disco's straight stomping four-to-the-floor. It's mostly played by bands, as opposed to being the creation of a producer, but synth-bass, electronic keyboards and drum machines get more prominent the deeper you get into the Eighties. Some of the most famous examples of the style are hits like D-Train's "You're the One For Me", Peech Boys "Don’t Make Me Wait", and Yarborough & People's "Don’t Stop the Music", while pioneers and exemplars include Kleer and Leroy Burgess  (of Black Ivory and Aleem).

Thing is, I don't recall anybody calling this stuff "boogie" back then; they'd just have talked about "club tracks" or  "discofunk".  In deejay Greg Wilson's exhaustive etymological history of the genre,  the word "boogie" crops up as  a vague reference in the occasional club flyer or record shop section, or as a verb equivalent to "get on down" . But boogie only really becomes a genre tag retrospectively, to describe a kind of music no longer made, and even then only by a small number of London-based soul cognoscenti.  It's really only in the last decade that the term has achieved serious currency as a record dealer and collector buzz-word.

Boogie is a prime example of the creative remapping of the musical past that is rife today, with DJs and compilers retroactively inventing genres that had only the most tenuous existence in their original heyday (see "acid folk, "junkshop glam", etc)....

a beard of star's (glammy xmas to one and all)

 

(via Chris Roberts)

guru versus guru

 

Heard this and suddenly thought maybe the title lodged in Marc Bolan's brain

After all, Tyrannosaurus Rex were a Underground band -  beloved and supported by Peel, who also  loved and supported Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. His playing of the record on Top Gear probably had something to do with Trout Mask Replica actually making the UK albums chart - it got to #21, would you believe!  (The next album Lick My Decals Off, Baby did even better - #20)

There's even a sort of once-removed connection - Beefheart was an old schoolfriend of Frank Zappa's and recorded for Zappa's label and was part of that whole LA freak scene. For quite a while the Mothers of Invention included Flo & Eddie - aka Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman -  the ex-Turtles who went down a sort of rock-parodic path not unlike Zappa's own mock-it-all tendencies. And it's Flo & Eddie of course who did those creamy near-hysteria backing vocals on "Hot Love", "Get It On" and many other T.Rex hits. 

Flo & Eddie star in Zappa's frightful film 200 Motels.

Completely unconnected, but there's also the ridiculously groovy second-division Krautrock Guru Guru. 

Not forgetting rave-era buffoon Guru Josh.

Briefly buoyed by a fad for live-performing keyboard whizzes on the rave scene (Adamski was the other one) 

The Bölan beat

 

Bolan - or Bölan  - reviewing the pop singles for The Tatler, February 19 1966

(via Peter Stanfield)

An earlier micro-profile on Marc in The Tatler, as part of "ones to watch" package 

 

"I would have been lost without a mirror" - the mod > glam continuum

 

"I'd say that Mod was mentally a very homosexual thing, though not in any physical sense. I was too hung up on myself to be interested in anyone else" - Mark Feld aka Marc Bolan 

"I was completely knocked out by my own image, by the idea of Mark Feld" - Feld / Bolan

"... they danced by themselves, lost in narcissistic dreams and, wherever there was a mirror, they formed queues. Often, they would wear make-up - eye-liner and mascara - but that didn't mean they were queer, or not necessarily; it was just a symbol of strangeness..." - Nik Cohn.


From Today There Are No Gentlemen (1971)

Oddly, Marc and crew look very much like gentlemen in this photo for the Town spread. 

Oh yea we're the London boys

Do you remember

Going to Petticoat Lane

With all the conceptions

Moving in your brain

Oh yea we're the London boys

Don't you remember that we're just the London boys

Oh yea we're the London boys

Mighty mean mod king

Dressed like fame

London to Brighton

And then back again

Changing life's patterns

To get to the top

And when you get up there

You don't know if you're there or what

Bright lights, Soho, Wardour street

You hope you make friends with the guys that you meet

Somebody shows you round

Now you've met the London boys

Things seem good again, someone cares about you

Oh, the first time that you tried a pill

You feel a little queasy, decidedly ill

You're gonna be sick, but you mustn't lose faith

To let yourself down would be a big disgrace

With the London boys, with the London boys

You're only seventeen, but you think you've grown

In the month you've been away from your parents' home

You take the pills too much

You don't give a damn about that jobs you've got

So long as you're with the London boys

A London boy, oh a London boy

Your flashy clothes are your pride and joy

A London boy, a London boy

You're crying out loud that you're a London boy

You think you've had a lot of fun

But you ain't got nothing, you're on the run

It's too late now, cause you're out there boy

You've got it made with the rest of the toys

Now you wish you'd never left your home

You've got what you wanted but you're on your own

With the London boys

Now you've met the London boys 

66 in 73 - Bowie revisiting his mod 'n Marquee days on Pin Ups.

Ghastly turgid rendition

"Shipes... things before my eyes"