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
The Who Rave On With Alan Freeman (February 1966)
This late 1965 interview with Alan Freeman, published in the February 1966 edition of Rave, is the best contemporary summation of the breakneck speed of change in pop that the band were now pushing. The shift away from Mod and then Pop Art is discussed: ‘We found out Mods were just as conformist and reactionary as anyone else’ . . . ‘So far as The Who are concerned, the pop art image that stunned listeners last summer with things like “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” is already a dead carcass’ . . . staying ahead of the pack was the only consistent philosophy, innovation and renewal – ‘searching endlessly for newer musical forms that would reflect nobody’s ideas but their own’.
Townshend reiterates the importance of creative violence in the band’s acts of reinvention, comparing what they do to the everyday violence of bar-room fights, dance hall punch ups and war in Vietnam – all ignored by the man in the street. But ‘immediately a bit of property is smashed up he goes potty and cries out about senseless destruction’.
‘I reckon it’s this unfortunate national knack of putting higher value on things than on people that has made The Who the most unpopular group in pop’, wrote Freeman. And, as if to echo Kit Lambert’s claim that the band were involved in a ‘new form of crime’, one that attacked bourgeois propriety, he noted that the band were now starting to attract ‘quite a few gamblers and reformed villains who turn up at various parties and first nights. And I’ve heard some of them raving about the Who’s records’.
Townshend digs deeper into the art influences on his auto-destruction, including Metzger’s idea for ‘putting up statues with weak foundations so that they’d all fall down inside a year’, which was new to me. All this emphasis on violence and aggression was clearly understood to be the prelude that logically ends in the group’s own demise; its self-destruction: ‘It doesn’t matter in the long run. Eventually we’re going to destroy ourselves as a group. It has to happen sometime’.
Enjoy!
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 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 . . .
