Glamorous Ghost

 Truly one of the immaculate TOTP appearances

The Subotnick-level electronics, the haunting refrain, the xylo tingles... the drumlessness  .... the hair... the white mask of Sylvian's face... the beauty of the other Japaneers....  even the shirt Sylvian is wearing

and the incredible video FX, still futuristic after all these years

It's quite amazing the way that the Top of the Pops camera crew and lighting people responded to the song, rose to the occasion... it feels like they knew something extraordinary was required for this appearance, or should I say, apparition. Every angle, every shot, enhances the song and cordons off the Japan performance in a special heightened pocket of the program, so different is the approach to how the other bands in that edition are presented. 

No wonder Mark Fisher, aged 14, was chilled in his bones, harrowed in his marrow * 

Appearances like these are one of the reasons why the late 80s UK Hit Parade felt so disappointing - such a fall from Associates, Japan, et al. 

Although the rot started as early as 1983 - the year after this was broadcast.

The whole 1982 episode is a good one

Imagination - their best song maybe, although the video is corny

The Gary Numan track, funnily enough, is from when he starts copying Japan - the fretless Karn-atic bass. A solid effort although nothing tops the Replicas / Pleasure Principle era material.

Alongside "Fade To Grey", this - "The Damned Don't Cry" is Visage's equal-first best tune. Is the video inspired by the Visconti movie?. Although a clothes horse, as a singer Steve Strange does pretty good job with the ashen Bowie-Low style. 

Even the tune from Classic Nouveaux - godawful group, I thought at the time - is quite diverting. Those strange drums.

(Forgot to mention ABC, "Poison Arrow" - discussed in the comments)

Tight Fit is good honest British tack.

The only real slop is the Leo Sayer tune. 

And then the incongruity of Derek and the Dominoes's "Layla" receiving a dance routine from one of Zoo. A flashback to a completely different rock zeitgeist. From a funny moment in the early '80s when various classic rock singles were reissued for reasons unknown and made the pop charts: Black Sabbath "Paranoid", Lynyrd Skynyrd "Freebird".

But Japan cut through it all with the astonishing stillness, the grace and gravity of Sylvian's performance

* my response to Mark's paean to Japan / The Tin Drum / "Ghosts" is in some ways the seed, or a seed, of Shock and Awe

As mentioned by Ed in comments, another apparition of "Ghosts" on BBC teevee - The Old Grey Whistle Test.

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"