AMBITION: to make the transition . . . How many questionnaires did Bolan complete over the years? By 1975 he was a past master at the game and this must be among the best (NME August 30, 1975). OCCUPATION: interior mental decorator. That’ll do me . . . HOBBY: Snurding. Yeah, mine too! And he was always THE Mod – CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS: Stealing a G.S (scooter). Go ahead and dig in while you chew on some alligator steak
Tyrannosaurus Rex – Debora/Deborah (Made in Japan)
I’m not in the habit of buying reproductions but as I’ll never be able to afford (or justify) the price of an original Japanese release of ‘Debora’, even if I could find one for sale. I had no option but to fall for this Summer 2023 repress. It is, apparently, an exact copy, and I can well believe that, quality of the printing and paper weight seem just right . . . and who could not love this sleeve? A real bonus is the cutting of the disc, which is superb – stunning MONO that is a very close to the UK issue, if not also exact. Kudos to Kenji Yoshino, mastering engineer, and Kazumi Tezuka, cutting engineer.
The single is part of a Japanese Universal series of rare sides. My sincere hope is that they now turn their attention to John’s Children’s ‘Desdemona’, even though Bolan doesn’t get pictured on the sleeve, MC5’s ‘Tonight’, black leather jackets, and a box set of The Who’s ‘60s Japanese releases . . .
Nik Cohn, Queen (May 8, 1968)
Chris Welch, Melody Maker (May 25, 1968)
Two short profiles of Marc and Steve promoting the single in Queen and Melody Maker, Nik Cohn providing what I think is a definitive appraisal, not a word I don’t agree with. Record Mirror’s colour shot of the band is damn near perfect too . . . Marc’s exaggerated Dylanesque haircut never bettered
Derek Johnson, New Musical Express (April 27, 1968)
Penny Valentine, Disc & Music Echo (April 27, 1968)
Marc Bölan Sounds like a Motorbike
October 30, 1965 and Marc Bolan, hyping his first single, ‘The Wizard’, appears in the society magazine, The Tatler/London Life. He looks Dirk Bogarde handsome in his Decca publicity pic by David Wedgbury . . . His disc has an ‘eerie lyric’ that he wrote himself. . .
His name was an invention of his manager, he was going to be called Bolam but Decca mispelled it and now he was Bolan and, then, four months later (February 19, 1966) in his second appearance in the journal he was Marc Bölan; the German umlaut added to his surname which, with the French spelling of his first name, created quite the picture of the modern cosmopolitan.
For an 18 year-old Marc was never less than precocious . . . with ambition to boot. He was, he said, a writer, poet, filmmaker and dramatist . . . who had four, count them, of his compositions under consideration by The Byrds. He hopes to live in Paris . . .
The magazine regularly asked musicians and celebrities to review the latest releases . . . Marc’s comments on the new discs are pitch perfect. Dylan is a ‘truly royal talent’ who makes his ‘guitar sound like a motorbike’, while Nina Simone plays piano like a motor-bike’, descriptions which I can buy. On the whole, The Who’s My Generation album is ‘bad’, he said, but the title track ‘swings’. He thinks that the Charlie Mingus album ‘sounds like everyone at this session was out of their heads’ and, pay attention Pete Townshend, ‘after one track you know where The Who got their sound from’. . . which nails it for me.
Lillian Roxon, Falling For Those Pale Skinny English Boys: Bowie and Bolan
As 1972 moved into the Spring, Lillian Roxon had fallen in love again with pop and the teenage dream. Marc Bolan was her first true love of the new season.
Sunday News (December 19, 1971)
Climbing out of her sick bed, Lillian sets off to meet her new teen idol. She is enchanted . . .
Sunday News (February 20, 1972)
She’ll make at least two trips to London in 1972, in February she was part of the media circus to witness Bowie’s coming out as Ziggy Stardust. The Garbo look has been replaced by short-hair and Star Trek jumpsuits. . . ‘restoring a little of the stud image he’d lost’. The Lou Reed influence on Bowie is pushed to the fore
Sunday News (February 27, 1972)
When in London, go shopping . . . This represents perhaps the earliest US press appearance of Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood’s Let It Rock. Lillian calls it Paradise Garage, which had ceased trading in November 1971. The confusion is understandable, as Paul Gorman reminded me the Let It Rock sign was not in place until March ‘72.
The salesmen have long hair, all right, but it is greased back into high shiny pompadours. When they’re not wearing motor cycle jackets they sport authentic drape shape coats with velvet lapels.
Sunday News (March 5, 1972)
Bad sound and the wrong audience spoilt Lillian’s enjoyment of T. Rex’s Carnegie Hall gig. In her two accounts of the show she mentioned Marc ad-libbing sexually explicit lyrics: ‘You could actually hear people asking each other in amazement if they’d heard right’. So, what was he singing? I need to know.
Sydney Morning Herald (March 5, 1972)
Sunday News (June 18, 1972)
In June she interviews Bowie during a 3 day promotional visit to NYC. Both watch Elvis. Bowie plays on the idea of being a fabricated pop star, imagining a doll in his own image with hair that grows and that can say things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I like to dress up’. Lillian hopes it will come with the full Ziggy wardrobe.
Sunday News (July 30, 1972)
And then she’s part of the press junket arranged for American critics with a Bowie show at Friars, Aylesbury and the Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges sets at King Sound, King’s Cross.
Sunday News (August 6, 1972)
Sunday News (September 24, 1972)
Bolan is back and playing at the Academy of Music, but it’s still not working:
this is a man who should never be allowed to work without at least two hundred screaming young girls crammed into the first ten rows . . . Playing to the torpid mob at the Academy of Music, he was like Raquel Welch trying to do a strip for the Daughters of the American Revolution. Namely, not fully appreciated.
Meanwhile, Bowie is about to make his debut US appearance . . .
Daily News (September 30, 1972)
A star is born . . . whose ‘carefully stylized movements give us an updated (though deceptively frail) ‘70s version of the ‘50s teenage hood’.
Sunday News (October 8, 1972)
Sydney Morning Herald (October 8, 1972)
Sydney Morning Herald (December 10, 1972)
Lou Reed given the ultimate plug for his forthcoming Transformer . . . evil
Glam! When Superstars Rocked the World, 1970–74
Mark Paytress is among the best sleeve note writers, just a notch or two below the master, Bill Millar. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve bought a new package of T. Rex recordings because I wanted, most of all, to read what he had to say. The duplication of Bolan recordings in my collection can take care of themselves but Paytress, despite the familiarity of the material he is annotating and contextualising, is never repetitious. His observations are diamond bright and sharp. He never resorts to cliché. He has always found something new to say and a novel way to approach his story. His writing has added greatly to an appreciation of Bolan’s music.
His Bolan biography stands head and shoulders over any other, by whatever measure Paytress is a fabulous writer and a great story teller.
Glam! When Superstars Rocked the World, 1970–74 doesn’t disappoint. The topic is as familiar as any trend in post-first generation rock ’n’ roll – you already know the story and all its twists and turns. With Glam!, Paytress has not been as inclusive as Simon Reynolds with Shock and Awe (2016) but he is considerably less exclusive than Barney Hoskyns was with Glam! (also with an exclamation mark that promises MORE!), published in 1998 to coincide with Todd Haynes Velvet Goldmine, and my own Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ’n’ Roll (2022). The key figures are of course, Bolan, Bowie and Roxy Music, but he gives generous space to Roy Wood, Slade, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Alice Cooper, Mott the Hoople, Gary Glitter and, I think, most significantly to The Sweet.
Extensively illustrated with a superbly curated mix of agency photographs and pop ephemera, especially the long lost essential Seventies’ adornment of the faux silk scarf, a fashion accessory that crossed-over effortlessly with football culture (I yearn for its return). Glam! is a joy to idly flick through and a pleasure to read. Paytress holds to a rough chronology, beginning with the withdrawal of the promises of the Sixties with the Isle of Wight festival. That event is figured as a moment of death and rebirth: Hendrix’s overdose and festival dj Jeff Dexter playing, again and again to the huddled masses, a test pressing of ‘Ride a White Swan’. The book’s coda refigures the trope with the death of Bolan and a rebirth with punk.
In between, even the most jaded of readers will find much to amuse, ponder over and debate. You might argue that, because Paytress is telling the story, T. Rex has been given the dominant role. This might be true, but I also think he makes the case for continuing to weave Bolan into the narrative after the rise of Ziggy. The fall of T. Rex is as important as any contender, any bright new challenger on the scene. It also works quite brilliantly alongside the travails of The Sweet: their acceptance that being the puppets of Mike Chapman, Nicky Chinn and producer Phil Wainman will give them the success they couldn’t earn on their own and their bid for autonomy, just as the train they rode on was about to run out of track, is the stuff of pathos. Someone really does need to write a pop history of The Sweet, Chinnichap and the British 70s pop machine. . . Step up, step up right up!.
Footnote:
I’ve always cherished Bolan’s wilful, creative acts of plagiarism in his song writing, ‘Beltane Walk’ as a rewrite of Jimmy McCracklin’s ‘The Walk’ and Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘You’ll Be Mine’ for ‘Jeepster’ being the two most egregious or brilliant of the many. Mark Paytress has brought a new one to my attention, Johnny Burnette Trio’s ‘Honey Hush’ as the basis for ‘Jewel’, the second track on side one of the first T. Rex album. Play the two recordings back-to-back to know this to be true, but also to realise just how inventive Bolan has been in making an abstract out of his source material. Marc Bolan – pop genius.
This beautiful original courtesy of The Seth Man
Twenty-Five Times Around the World with Marc Bolan
Three Marc Bolan related things recently encountered and that I think are worth sharing:
First is from November 1971 Beat Instrumental mag with Bolan as the cover star.
Second is from Simon Reynolds’ Shock and Awe Blog (link here)
Third is an interview with Tony Visconti from the April 2022 edition of Record Collector
‘Marc Bolan – Hot Rods and Hot Love’ . . . A title primed for the time, not a hint of the mystical, instead shiny hard chromium heat and flash. Mirrored shades reflecting back trashy American automobiles customised to go go go . . . Steve Turner’s piece promised to get inside Bolan’s fixation on car imagery, but it hardly starts the quarter mile. I’d hoped for a little more on the car/sex conflation but pickings are meager. You’d do better to head off to YouTube and watch Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos once more (link here) and switch ‘Dream Lover’ with ‘Hot Love’ . . . What you do get, however, is a splended kiss-off line: ‘I’ve been round the world 25 times faster than anyone else.’ Pure Bolan that. . .
The cover image of Bolan staring back at the camera is the counterpoint to the photographs Simon Reynolds looks at, each belong to that moment where Bolan thought of himself as occuppying the middleground between Led Zeppelin and Eddie Cochran . . .
When self-absorption mixed with cocaine and champagne at the Chateau. . . but before that you could go around the world with T. Rex 25 times faster than with anyone else . . .
The Hard Sell: Pin-Ups 1972
‘This intensely researched, vividly detailed book plunges you into the electric moment of 1972 – as year as revolutionary in rock history as 1967 or 1977.’
Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy and Rip It Up and Start Again
‘Peter Stanfield has scavenged the ruins – foxed paperbacks, illegible underground press layouts, yellowed national newspaper cuttings, tatty pages from Disc and NME and creased copies of curious sex magazines (including Curious) – to join the dots between art and artifice, from avant-garde interiors and anti-fashion boutiques to wayward rockers, glam-Mods and anachronistic Teds. Pin-Ups 1972 is an exhilarating ride through po-mo popular culture at its peak.’
Paul Gorman, The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren and The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion
I Wanna Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star
Marc Bolan in his Little Venice flat, 1971. Photo by Kieron ‘Spud’ Murphy (but I coud be wrong about that and everything else)
A random post on Twitter caught my interest, not because of the picture of Bolan posing in his Little Venice flat but because a comment by @StuartPenney1 drew my attention to the album partly obscured by the guitar and to the left of the inner sleeve of Electric Warrior and Sticky Fingers. It’s an Elvis bootleg – I Wanna Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star – released like the other two albums in 1971.
Around the time the photograph was taken, Pete Frame, in Zigzag #21, visits Bolan at home where he finds him on the balcony with his earphones on listening to 1956 Elvis. The crux of the interview is concerned with Bolan’s new found fame, the shift from being a Freak in the Underground to being a star on Top of the Pops. At this moment in time, then, the Elvis album must have been a kind of totem for him, representing a similar pivot point when Presley shifted from Memphis to Hollywood. Well, maybe . . .
My interest in the record is that it looks like the kind of platter that The Firm, Ian Sippen and Pete Shertser, would put out on the Union Pacific label a year later. I wrote about those albums here (and their early Red Lightning blues albums here). It’s on Viktorie (RCA Victor geddit?) with sleeve notes by the immortal Vincent Lust. His older brother designed the sleeve, a raw cut n’ paste job.
Even if the bootleg has nothing to do with The Firm, it’s still getting filed next to UP003 their Little Richard album. That album’s sleeve notes are partly dedicated to a review of the Wembley appearance by the Georgia Peach, his very self, at the 1972 London Rock n Roll Show, which is described as his ‘darkest hour . . . Richard failed for the first time ever to communicate with his audience.’ Oh well, Ian and Pete have a stack of old records of his they wanna share regardless, so on with the ‘healing music that makes the blind see, the lame walk, and the dead rise up!’
You don’t get sleeve notes like that anymore . . .
Eugene Lust, Vincent’s bastard son
Marsha Hunt Sings the Marc Bolan Songbook
Performing at the IoW Festival with her band using The Who’s gear
In June 1973 Marsha Hunt went to court for an affiliation order that cited Mick Jagger as the father of her two year-old daughter, Karis. Before flying from Heathrow to Rome with his wife and their 18 month-old daughter Jade, Jagger was asked by reporters for his view on the matter, somewhat quizzically he said: ‘What’s the title of her latest record?’. Jagger was too subtle for the reporter for the Daily Mail who didn’t follow up his line of enquiry, but just let the question hang in the air. The answer was ‘Medusa’ a heavy glam rocker on Vertigo. The single was her first release since the run of three singles released on Track between April 1969 and March 1970.
Vogue January 1, 1969
Back then her afro was not girded with serpents, but it was the nation’s most talked about head of hair. It was discussed nearly as much as her TOTP’s performance of Dr John’s ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’ where she momentarily held viewers in thrall with her barely concealed bosom. Such were the days.
Vogue January 1, 1969
The child of a psychiatrist, she had been an undergraduate at Berkeley but quit her studies to travel to London in 1966. She hung around the rock scene, putting herself into Alexis Korner’s sphere, becoming part of Long John Baldry’s show and getting a bit part in Blow Up. In between she married Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, but the union didn’t last.
July 1967 part of the Long John Baldry Show
She’d achieved some notoriety for her part in the cast of the London presentation of the ‘American tribal love-rock musical’ Hair. The show opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968, Robert Stigwood was among the producers. It was the first new production to be staged following the abolition of theatre censorship, which meant more than the usual fuss was made over its celebrated nude scene. The Stage reported positively on its premier though it also noted the show was greeted with ‘cheers and boos’. It made no attempt to explain just why there was such consternation in the audience, but then they’d not previously encountered Mick Farren who was living above the theatre at the time:
When the wretched show first opened we gullibly took the advertised nudity and audience participation as an open invitation to stroll into the auditorium and maybe even play an impromptu part in the proceedings. We discovered the error of our assumptions the first time we tried it, when we were immediately and bodily ejected by the burly commissionaires who hadn’t been told about the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
– Give the Anarchist A Cigarette
Track ad in Zigzag for ‘Walk On Gilded Splinters’ with David Bailey photo credit
In April of the following year, Billboard reported that Track were rush releasing her debut single, produced by Tony Visconti for Tony Hall Enterprises. It entered the Record Retailer charts at 46, earning her the TOTP’s appearance, but didn’t get any higher. In September Rave magazine reported she would shortly have an LP released and was ‘spending her time modelling and making live bookings’. She was among the acts who appeared that month at the Isle of Wight Festival. The Daily Mirror reported she would perform ‘topless’. She didn’t, but the tabloids ran pictures of her regardless. Who could doubt she was a better prospect than the festival’s headliner, Bob Dylan?
Daily Mail ‘wriggles and writhes’ over Marsha Hunt
The Daily Express gets in on the action . . .
Two further singles followed, in November and then in March 1970, but the album remained in the vaults, perhaps because of her pregnancy. It would eventually be released in December 1971, too late to build on all the publicity she garnered over the previous two years. It was also too late to exploit her return to public performances when she shared the stage with P. J. Proby in Jack Good’s Catch My Soul – a rock musical version of Othello, which she joined 12 months earlier.
What Josephine Baker was for Parisians in the 1920s Marsha Hunt was for Londoners in the 1960s/1970s.
To tie-in with her appearance in the show, The Guardian ran a short profile of the single mother, the interview was overripe with racist and sexist tropes of the kind that had been a staple of her media profile since her role in Hair. The reporter described her afro as a ‘black golliwog fuzzball’ and thought that she ‘resembled ‘a cross between a Hottentot and a 50oz ball of wool’. She was to the mainstream media and to the Underground as Josephine Baker had earlier been for Parisian sophisticates – an exotic American delight. In the editorial that accompanied her Patrick Litchfield images for Vogue, she was described as a ‘jungle cat, cave-girl kitten, all-American girl’. She was extraordinarily beautiful but, like Jimi Hendrix before her, she was expected to play to British racial stereotypes.
IT advert which beggar’s belief . . . In the following issue they apologised. Didn’t Track provide their own print ready materials?
Those prejudices undoubtedly filtered into the decisions made with regard of the type of music she would record for Track; it would certainly have been a factor in her cover of Dr. John’s ‘I Walk On Gilded Splinters’ from his celebrated 1968 debut Gris-Gris. The New Orleans voodoo schtick worked easily with the image of her as a sexual primitive doing the ‘danse sauvage’ for the counterculture. Tony Visconti tightens up the extended meandering of the original, which ran just over seven minutes, to construct a more concise, pop orientated three minute potion. Hunt doesn’t sing the song as someone in thrall to the needle, which is how Dr. John positioned himself, but as the enchantress Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen, casting spells. There’s no ‘I’ in the title of Hunt’s version. Otherwise, Visconti’s production is remarkable true to the original’s arrangement. The congas pattering out the rhythm.
Daily Express review: ‘she looks like a delicious golliwog’
Track ad in Melody Maker
The blueprint for the single was taken up again and used for what would become the album’s title track, Bobby Goldsboro and Kenny O’Dell’s ‘Woman Child’. The two tracks echo with a taint of the bayou and French Quarter, with Cajun accents and voices that have breathed in the same foul air as Buddy Bolden. The single’s flipside swaps Louisiana witchery for the more materialist interests of Marc Bolan’s ‘Hot Rod Poppa’. It is a liberating switch. The shift from ‘Mama’ to ‘Poppa’ somewhat effaced Bolan’s conflation of gender and sexual positions, with his greased up Levi’s and baseball boots above his head, to make the song much less ambiguous. Hunt’s version has a revved-up phallic charge; a propulsive glide that was already there on the much earlier John’s Children’s version. As the lead track on My People Were Fair . . . album, ‘Hot Rod Mama’ sounded more a rattling T-Model struggling to make the quarter-mile on the long drag down Ladbroke Grove. Hunt’s version put it back into the race.
An International Times editorial assistant plays the park bench perv . . .
Given Visconti’s close relationship with Bolan, it’s not particularly remarkable that he would offer his songs to Hunt, but it is surprising that she recorded so many and did them so well. Track followed ‘Gilded Splinters’ with a Bolan double-header of ‘Desdemona’ and ‘Hippy Gumbo’. The latter more a drift through Little Venice than a walk down Bourbon Street.
Kit Lambert and Vicki Wickham (co-writer with Simon Napier-Bell of ‘You Don’t Have to say You Love Me’ and producer on Ready Steady Go!) get the production credit for ‘Desdemona’. They stay pretty true to the John’s Children original with their arrangement but bring in an electronic piano that bounces things along and has Hunt chasing after the tune. The effect is to leave the punk sneer of Andy Ellison’s vocal, backed by Bolan and The Who inspired psychedelics of over-amped guitars and cymbal splashes, a long way behind.
Zigzag #6 front page pin-up of Marsha in the graveyard
‘Hippy Gumbo’ didn’t make it to the album with ‘Hot Rod Poppa’ and ‘Desdemona’, which is a shame, but a fourth Bolan cover was included, ‘Stacey Grove’ from the album Prophets Seers and Sages. The Tyrannosaurus Rex version is a whirling incantation about a man, a nice cat with a hat full of wine, who picks ticks off his dog, Hunt’s recording is gifted a fuller arrangement with wind instruments and a harmonium creating a rich texture, but leaves out the quirks.
Though Bolan and Hunt had a romantic fling, he didn’t participate in the recording of his own songs but did provide a screeching back up vocal to her cover of The Supremes’ ‘My World Is Empty Without You’, which is from the same school as Vanilla Fudge’s overblown ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ .
Track ad in Zigzag for ‘Desdemona’ or is it ‘DesdAmona’?
Kit Lambert produced the two sides of Hunt’s final Track single, the top-side a cover of Paul Simon’s ‘Keep The Customer Satisfied’. On the downside was an undistinguished original, ‘Lonesome Holy Roller’. Both tracks a let-down after the pop frenzy of the predecessors. The Simon and Garfunkel tune made it to the album, a 12 track affair pulled together from various sessions by Track staffers Mike Shaw and Bill Curbishley — it’s a hodgepodge. If Visconti had been left to bring it to fruition the LP would have been a whole lot more coherent, I’d wager. The Americana of ‘Long Black Veil’, Dylan’s ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, the pastiche spiritual ‘Moan You Moaners’ and even Traffic’s ‘No Face, No Name, No Number’ are all unremarkable, plodding vamps that distract from the pop urgency of Bolan’s songs and the witchery of ‘Gilded Splinters’ and ‘Woman Child’.
The album finishes with ‘Wild Thing’ making that Hendrix/primitive connection. Ron Wood, Ian Maclagan and Kenny Jones are said to be the key players, and I can believe that as I can the rumour that Pete Townshend laid down the slashing guitar. Apart from listing the producers, the album doesn’t give any credits other than a mysterious thanks to ‘“George” at Apple Studios’; The Faces no doubt remained anonymous for contractual reasons. It’s a shame they didn’t do more with Ms Hunt.
Marsha Hunt as The Seeker or a Storyville chippy. Track ad in Zigzag
Were other Bolan songs recorded by her? Probably not, but I like the fantasy of a ‘Marsha Hunt Sings the Marc Bolan Songbook’ album. What we do have are the four tracks which would make for a superfine 12” EP, with ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’, ‘Woman Child’, ‘My World Is Empty Without You’ and ‘Wild Thing’ as a bonus disc. Whatever the format and track running order, Marsha Hunt’s sessions with Visconti, Lambert and Gus Dudgeon deserve a decent reissue.
Bolan’s songs from before the golden age of his big hits are all highly idiosyncratic and personal, intimate turns, performed as if he were playing in a cramped and damp parlour in some Notting Hill dump of a house. To hear them appropriated by someone else, even with the continuity that Visconti provides, is to realise just how deceptively well-crafted his songs are – perfect pop vignettes, like no others.
German Polydor and UK Track releases. The latter has a very cheap flmsey card cover, same as the label’s Backtrack budget releases. The Polydor is full laminated so that’s the one to get!!!!
German reissue of Woman Child retitled Dedemona and German and French pic sleeves
Reverse of German reissue and French, Norwegian and German pic sleeves
Keith Moon does his bit for Marsha and Track Records . . . Club (January 1971)
Cheese cake for the men’s mags. Club July 1970
Skinhead Apocalypse – The Charlie George Disco Spins on Forever
1971, 13 years-old. I wore Doc Martens, monkey boots sometimes, tonik trousers and orange tag Levi’s, but not a Crombie. My mates had Crombie imitations but I had a Millets parka (what was that about? Some shallow echo of Mod fashion?). I wasn’t a Skinhead or a Suedehead not even a Bovver Boy, though I followed Chelsea as much as any suburban, New Town teen might. We lived for football; at school we played it in the breaks and in PE. We played in the park after school and at weekends we played more football or we played Subbuteo. And we went to football matches; Spurs, Arsenal, OPR and Watford were who my closest friends supported. I went with them to see their teams as much as I went to see mine.
At the youth club we kicked footballs about and watched the girls dance in formation. At my mate’s house, after school, after the kick about, we listened to his older sister’s records, Max Romeo’s ‘Wet Dream’ and Prince Buster’s ‘Big Five’ over and over again. Out of reach, a distant figure, his sister seemed impossibly hip. There was no one in my family like her. But these things soon passed, as orange tag Levi’s were exchanged for Skinner jeans and Sta-Prest for channel-seamed flares. That was the sum of it for me, a fleeting moment before my interest switched from football to music – to Roxy, Lou Reed, Bowie, Alice and Slade.
Illustration by Malcolm Harrison, NTA, that accompanied Basil George’s ‘Let’s Dance’ Game v.1, n.12 (1974)
Late 1974 and Skinheads are figures of the past not only for me but also for Game magazine’s Basil George. 1974 was a long way from the point in time when Skinheads joined youth culture’s ‘long line of apocalyptic syndromes’, he wrote in his introduction to a lurid story about the contemporary dance scene. Since his Mod days at the Flamingo and Marquee, George hadn’t spent much time in the clubs, his last memorable experience on the dance floor had been at another Soho dive as the 60s turned into the 70s:
There in a dingy, smoky tomb I fumbled through a few half-hearted and fearful dances with a succession of apathetic girls with hair so short even the dim, bloodshot light failed to conceal horrifying glimpses of feminine scalp . . . Even more extreme than the short hair of the girls were skinny, but none-the-less menacing boys with their hair shaved to the point of baldness. And the boys all wore check Ben Sherman shirts, old fashioned braces, jeans cut short as much as six inches above the ankle and the mandatory ‘bovver boots’.
This scene was not for him, but the dancers held his fascination. Along one wall, the boys lent back and moved only their hips to the music. In touching distance, the girls faced the boys and moved in time. ‘Sure enough the girls dresses were pushed high up at the front and here and there was the glint of an open fly.’ The dance of sex played on.
Paul ‘Smiler’ Anderson and Mark Baxter, Scorcha! Skins, Suedes and Style From The Streets 1967-1973 (Omnibus Press, 2021)
In Paul Anderson and Mark Baxter’s Scorcha!, a sumptuously illustrated history of Skins, Suedeheads and street style, 1967-1973, you can find numerous examples of the scene described by Basil George, though the prurient aspect, the hitched skirts and open jeans are not on show. Decorated throughout by literally hundreds of record labels, this is a book about music, fashion and dancing. The football side of things is a backdrop, not the centre of the action, which wasn’t quite how some saw it at the time.
Suggs and Paul Weller provide endorsements for the book, not Alan Hudson or Charlie George. Both musicians were old enough to be aware of Skin and Suedehead fashion but, like me, just a little too young to be fully a part of it. Suggs was 11 years old in 1971 when Suedeheads took hold of his imagination, a ‘mind-blowing’ encounter. For Paul Weller, two-years older than Suggs, this style evolution was his formative experience: ‘The music, the look, they’re the things that shaped who I am’.
The fantasy of self-determination that Weller and Suggs longed to emulate, that they sensed belonged to the older style leaders, they will take with them into their respective bands, The Jam and Madness. In turn, what these two do with that fantasy will form the doctrine the book’s authors follow. ‘It was probably around 1970 or 1971, I would have only been 5 or 6 years old’ writes Anderson of his first memory of Skinheads. “I can see them now’ writes Baxter, ‘I was only 8 or 9, but boy, did they make an impression’. Both came of age for the Mod and Skinhead revival. Each generation carried within itself that frisson of envy. With their Mod older brothers, the original Skinheads also shared that yearning desire to have been part of that which is always, tantalisingly just out of reach; a time that seems more exciting, more vital, more alive than the present.
Anderson and Baxter have pulled together a fascinating array of first-hand accounts and primary source material, published and private, that makes Scorcha! easily the most important text on the topic – as definitive in its own way as Richard Barnes’ Mods and Johnny Stuart’s Rockers are with their subjects
According to the co-authors, one of the earliest media reports on Skinheads was carried in Rolling Stone (#38 July 26, 1969) of all places. This is somewhat less surprising if you know that the feature appeared in the short-lived UK edition and not in the American version. It was published early enough in the scheme of things that the youth cult hadn’t yet been fixed to the point where its name could be agreed on. In ‘Skinheads and Cherry Reds’, Gerry Stimson wrote:
They are the people you may see on the fringe of things, at free concerts shouting out for their favourite football team when everyone else wants to listen to the music, hanging around outside the Roundhouse trying to annoy people with long hair, or you may see them just hanging around on the street. They are the kids who have short cropped hair, wear boots and levis with braces. They don’t really have a name, bullet-heads, spike-heads, thin-heads, bother boys, or agro boys.
In February of the following year, American Rolling Stone (#52) did get around to covering Britain’s latest youth craze, by then it had been named. Like Stimson, Jan Holdenfield focused on the Skinhead’s antipathy to Rock culture and their identification with football, but also provides some class analysis. In ‘Skinheads: Working Class Gladiators’, he wrote:
British football has a glamour of its own, provided by often-pretty/always-tough players from the working class who have made it on grit and physical style. Rock stars are heroes for the middle classes.
That’s a cultural shift, from music to football, that Pete Fowler, writing at the height of T. Rextasy, thinks tells a tale worth listening to in order to demolish the idea that Marc Bolan, third-generation rock ‘n’ roller, had universal teen appeal like Elvis and the Beatles had with their respective audiences. Bolan doesn’t compete with them in terms of sales and is, anyway, Fowler thought, a ‘self-made Fabian’ rather than Elvis’ heir. More significant than any of this was the schism in teen culture, which meant T. Rex could never compete with those who went before. The Rock/Pop audience had fragmented, a division that was exposed by the cult of the Skinhead.
Fowler reckoned the Skins to be ‘by far the biggest single group among this country’s teenagers . . . For every one little middle-class girl with sequins around her eyes, there must be two-dozen in their two-tone Mohair suits. It’s a walk-over’. The Skins predecessors were the Mods but unlike them that culture was intimately linked to pop music: ‘If the Mods idolised their Faces, the Rock stars in return loved the Mods – it was this dialectic that was responsible for all the good things that happened in British Rock in the mid-60s’. Except for The Beatles, the Mods’ favourite groups were all accessible, you could see them at ‘your local Big Beat Club’. My generation was a united generation. The international success of British groups destroyed that intimacy as did the internationalisation of rock music with the shift in focus to the West Coast sound, all indicative of the fact that Rock had been ‘taken over by students’. ‘1967 was the great divide for Rock’, it became music for the court of intellectuals and stopped being accessible and meaningful to all. The arrival of the Skinhead in 1969 symbolised the backlash to this state of affairs.
The rejection of Rock’s new community of long-haired students is mirrored in the Skinhead’s embrace of black American and West Indian music. This was not self-indulgent music, but music for dancing. The scene is not the live gig but the club disco. When the key venues for Rock shifted from clubs to university halls the audience changed, working-class kids were shut out.
Music, Fowler convincingly argued, was not central to Skinhead culture as it was for the Mods, it was peripheral; football was at the core of their style. The distinction, Fowler suggested, is similar to that between George Best, who personified a Mod’s consumerist instincts, and, Charlie George, who despite his long hair, embodied the Skinhead’s attitude that was best displayed when he raised a two-finger retort to Derby fans after he scored for Arsenal: ‘When the Skins root for Charlie George at Highbury – they are rooting for themselves’, wrote Fowler. Just as the Mods who danced in front of The Who at the Railway Hotel were doing it for themselves.
This, really, is why Marc Bolan isn’t as popular as he likes to make out. He’s made no positive impression on the Skins at all. Bolan is popular . . . but the basis for his support is very narrowly confined. To be accurate, Marc Bolan is idolised by Grammar School girls between the ages of 11 and 14. (Skins who might buy T Rex records to dance to, don’t idolise or identify with Bolan at all).
. . .
The bovver boys look like becoming the first major sub-cultural group not to produce any major rock stars! They, for Rock, are the lost generation . . . The survival of Rock has depended on its position as the core of Male Teen Culture. But the bovver boys have rejected Rock’s traditional status which explains the lack of vitality in British Rock in the early 70s.
If this is true, and I think it is, then the significance of The Jam and Madness lies less in their role leading a Mod and Skinhead revival than in the idea that they put bands, not football, at the centre of that resurgence. In doing so they created a circuit with the original Mod movement that Skinhead culture had broken. Audience and bands were reunited, music was at the very heart of the revival’s subcultural activities and interests. Scorcha! reflects this aspect of revivalism in the way in constructs its history of Skins and Suedeheads as foremost a music and fashion phenomena when some might well argue it was really all about Charlie George.
Pete Fowler’s essay ’Skins Rule’ was first published in Charlie Gillett (ed.) Rock File (NEL, 1972)
Pretties For You: Marc Bolan – King of the Stamford Hill Mods
Iain Stewart’s interview with Bolan for Honey begins in medias res, the ‘Revolution is everywhere’, he wrote. But the routine forms of sedition, acted out by the Underground in Ladbroke Grove and its satellites, are momentarily stilled by focusing on what the ‘prettiest little thing you ever did see’ is wearing.
Marc is dressed in velvet trousers, a little jumper which ties at the front and shoes with straps. Against the desires fomented by the dreamers of revolution, Bolan’s small revolt against masculine display – his girlish garb – may appear insignificant but it would have a bigger role in creating change than any form of insurrection that the Underground was then more loudly advocating.
A cornerstone in many of Bolan’s interviews of the period, and for a year or two after, was a section that reflected back over his Mod roots. In Honey it is used it to suggest his present distance from a base materialistic past.
Clothes were then, I suppose, wisdom and knowledge and getting satisfaction as a human being. In those days all I really cared about was creating a sort of material vision of what I wanted to be like.
But he can’t quite let go of his Mod beginnings. He may be rhetorically dismissing a materialistic Mod philosophy, but he is not rejecting it out of hand. In its place he offered a more positive form of consumerism – acquisition that has a greater purpose.
If I go out and buy clothes now, it’s either because I feel down or because something looks nice. And if I wear that to do something it’ll make me do it better. But it is not the goal anymore you see.
Consumption as a solipsistic act is spurned, yet the Mod in Bolan remained unrepressed even as he saw the hopelessness of remaining true to its ideal.
if you designed a new suit or a pair of light green shoes with buckles all over them, it was like you conceived it and saved up for it – which might take you three months – and then you got the shoes, and those shoes were, for three months, the only thing that made you go. Whereas now it’s just a day . .
Buying clothes is a creative act, an act of Mod-ish discrimination, but keeping up with the pace of fashion is now near impossible; a vogue or an infatuation that once might have lasted a few months now collapses into a day.
The cost of things, a £400 guitar he has just bought, which with inflation is about £5,500 today, is not the criteria by which value is judged. The guitar is a necessity, the expense doesn’t blow his mind, but ‘a pair of shoes was like meeting God – it was a very strong buzz’.
Bolan never lost his Mod attitude to style, the drive to look good, to be an Ace Face, but something else was going on here in this interview from mid-to-late 1970. Even though he is ostensibly promoting A Beard of Stars, and is still some weeks away from Tyrannosaurus Rex’s transformation into T. Rex and the release of ‘Ride A White Swan’, Bolan has started talking directly to what will soon become his primary audience of teenage girls, readers of Honey. He spoke in the same codes they used, which made fashion a measure in their everyday transformation of self. Very prescient that and very Mod.
More on Marc Bolan’s Toilette
Back in October ‘20 I posted a piece on Marc Bolan’s brief appearance in a December 1971 edition of Club magazine where he talked about buying clothes and his preference for Onyx aftershave and Fenjal bath oil. If he came across as a little fastidious then at least he was being consistent. Nik Cohn made good use of all of this fussiness in his The Who Generation (see previous post) where he gleaned from his old notebooks the perfect quote from Bolan on Mod bathing habits:
When I was in my mod phase, I used to bathe three or four times a day, change my clothes each time and, when I went out, if I splashed my drink on my shirt-cuff or got the slightest stain anywhere, the whole night was ruined, I had to go straight home and rebuild myself piece by piece. It was my duty to myself. I was a superior being, and I couldn’t fall down.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Bolan sphere, Wintergarden publishing, fronting for the Official Marc Bolan Merchandise Company at Easy Action Records, have delivered on a long promised volume of photographs of Stamford Hill’s top face. It is a superlative collection, beautifully produced and designed. See here.
Marc Bolan Likes Chet Baker
A 1972 Record Mirror Special introduces the ‘real Marc Bolan’, and interviews his mum and dad to boot. Tracking through his biography, from his appearances in Town magazine to around the release of Electric Warrior, the Special offers a fine selection of archive photographs and titbits from old press releases, including the following used to promote ‘Hippy Gumbo’:
Marc Likes: £9000 cars. Marc Dislikes: £8,000 cars. Taste in Music: Rock and roll and Chet Baker. ‘I’ve never heard Chet Baker, but he looks great. I have all his album covers’.
Spoken like a true Mod.
Marc Bolan Uses Fenjal Bath Oil
Marc is wearing a print crépe shirt, £6; satin print blazer, £20; satin stripe trousers, £5.50, all from Alkasura. He uses Onyx aftershave, £1.20 and Onyx shaving foam, 95p., by Lentheric. Fenjal bath oil, 49p.
Club ( a ‘gentleman’s magazine’) ran a feature called ‘Who Wears What’ in their December 1971 edition, Kenny Everett, Legs Larry Smith, David Hockney and Chelsea stiker Chris Garland found themselves pitted against Marc Bolan. They didn’t stand a chance. . . Bolan, still philosphically a Mod, said ‘The way I dress is only for me . . . Sometimes I spend a couple of thousand pounds on clothes . . .’
Mod RIP: Nik Cohn – Ready Steady Gone.
Outside of Pete Townshend and the Who, Nik Cohn’s favourite topic in the 1960s was the Mod phenomenon, so it was a buzz to find this August 1967 article on the death of the youth cult, freshly killed by 10,000 flower-children.
Cohn thought Mod was an entirely new concept of youth, unlike Teds, for example, they owed nothing to past generations; ithey weren’t concerned with adult opinion. Teds revolted against their parents because they wanted to claim a masculinity; boys wanting to be men. Mod wasn’t rebellious in this way, because the boys were ‘unmasculine’. They wore make up, constantly changed their clothes and ‘completely rejected women’. Anyone over the age of 25 wasn’t alive and they weren’t inspired by Hollywood, which is to say America.
They had no heroes but themselves and they produced their whole litany out of nothing. . . They were exquisite, self-involved and undemonstrative.
‘Mod was a ‘very homosexual thing’, a 19 year-old Marc Bolan said of the scene he helped make happen five years earlier:
The music and the dancing and the scooters and pills came later. I’d say that Mod was mentally a very homosexual thing, though not in a physical sense. I was too hung up on myself to be interested in anyone else and, anyhow, I was still very young.
But Cohn doesn’t leave it there, he thinks the homosexual element was a working-class co-option of the old public school attitude to sex . . . ‘Later, it became very fashionable for Mods to go to bed with famous show-business queers and take money for it. . . Homosexuality was accepted, respected and completely assimilated into Mod life.’
Marc Bolan aka Mark Feld was among the prototypes, Chris Covill, 21, from Shepherd’s Bush, is a second generation Mod, (pictured top right). He told Cohn about the Crawdaddy Club and seeing the Stones every week, about money spent on clothes, on going out and on pills. He spoke about the action on Hastings’ beach and the emergence of the false Mod.
You can imagine Covill as a kind of model for Cohn’s hero in Saturday Night Fever:
Mod used to be something serious – now it’s been taken over by a lot of silly children. You see them in their old leather coats, green or red, and they’re all sick. Everything stands still and the point is gone.
Covill said he been working hard and had ‘met a lot of people in pop and I’ve got myself on to a good scene.’ Cohn doesn’t let on who in pop Covill is making out with, nor is there much about Feld’s transformation into Bolan, except to say in passing that he is a singer and songwriter who has made a few records but not had any hits.
By August 1967 Bolan had quit John’s Children and had formed Tyrannosaurus Rex (see Cohn on their first single and Bolan’s history here) . I haven’t found much on Covill, but Andy Ellison, in an interview published on the John’s Children website, says he was one of their roadies and hung out with them. And Cohn once had a ten percent share in John’s Children. The rest was owned by Simon Napier-Bell, or at least a large portion. He is thus the absent-presence in all of this.
A month earlier, in a July 1967 survey of the ‘Love Generation’ in Queen magazine, Napier-Bell had told Cohn:
One lives from day to day trying not to be bored. The things one does to avoid this boredom depend on one’s degree of intelligence. Intelligent and creative people have to do the most extreme things and, therefore they often seem outrageous.
17 year-old Geoff McGill, another Mod from Shepherd’s Bush, stood in for Cohn’s third generation of Mods, he ‘represents the Face at its most bored.’ Meanwhile, no one is listening to Covill’s ‘nostalgic stories about the battles of Brighton and Hastings, the 15-years-olds don’t understand and aren’t interested. Already, the fanatic young days of Mod have become as distant as past wars are always bound to be.’
Boredom, boredom, b’dum b’dum . . .
Marc Bolan – Let Me Sleep Beside You
‘All the lunacy and merchandising things going on around me are seldom anything to do with me. I mean, Bolan pillows! Please, people, it’s nothing to do with me.’
Marc Bolan to Keith Altham, NME (September 30, 1972)
I’m guessing then that Bolan didn’t have shares in the Jeepster Jean Co. . . Satin loons. . . and he effectively nixed the release of Simon Napier-Bell’s set of old demos, Hard On Love, for Track. Great poster, however, which uses John’s Children era images. The single, ‘Jasper C. Debussy’ saw the light of day in 1974, along with the album that was subsequently retitled as The Beginning of Doves. Hard On Love was the better title, I reckon . . . I get the double-entendre of the original but I haven’t got a clue what ‘beginning of doves’ means . . .
Fallin' Again: Steve Took – Ladbroke Grove's James Taylor
Falling over (again), Frendz #17 (December 23, 1971)
John's Children on Marc Bolan: Cosmic Dancer (BBC4)
The story stays the same, but the tellers of the tale get older. In the decomposing footage of John’s Children - green mould over the ghosts of teenage delinquency - Bolan and band can no longer escape the ravages of time.
