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 The Garbo look has been replaced by short-hair and Star Trek jumpsuits.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

Any Wild Yahoo British Group – The Rock 'n' Roll AllStars

I was not very generous toward The Rock ‘n’ Roll Allstars in Pin-Ups 1972, in all fairness to them my issue was as much to do with Max ‘Waxie Maxie’ Needham using his porn connections to drag them into the degrading (for everyone involved) scenario in Curious magazine’s Pillow Book as it was for their insipid cover version of T. Rex’s ‘Get It On’. Small amends then, but here’s some extra observations, a few images and cuttings.

The band’s recorded output was pretty meagre, one LP, one single, one EP, and appearances on two compilations all put out by budget label B&C where they were joined by The Wild Angels and fellow Curious magazine freaks, Arnold Corns. The label was an off-shoot of Trojan. The initials stood for ‘Beat” and ‘Commerical’, which is naming things as they are I reckon.

Their debut 45 is a fair effort at pitching themselves as both true to the Teddy Boy Rock ‘n’ Roll ethos and to the novelty pop market (Philips in Germany released it in a neat picture sleeve). ‘Baby Can You Feel It’ nicely foreshadows the hits of Showaddywaddy, but completely lacks Mike Hurst’s production ability (and budget). The Fats Domino cover ‘It Keeps Raining’ was their real statement of intent. In a Beat Instrumental feature from November 1971 they explained that they had ‘gone for the New Orleans type of rock and roll’. Lots of saxs ‘is the sound we have and I feel we could confidently back Little Richard or Fats Domino if they ever came over here. Our sound is what these men are used to’. Not the Gene Vincent sound that drummer Billy Williams’ previous band The Houseshakers trade in then. Regardless of these fine points of distinction between the bands on the circuit, ‘The Allstars are not just a bunch of fellows jumping on a rock and roll revival bandwagon, or a band aiming at sending it up. They are truly dedicated Teddy boys with a great deal of experience in the R&R field.’

Needham, who was the band’s manager, made sure they got maximum coverage in his Record Mirror column ‘Waxie’s World’. The thing with Max, however, was he had trouble remembering whether he was writing for the Soho skin trade or the pop press.

I can forgive him his peccadilloes when the link is this crazy: ‘Shelia was twenty-nine years of age, married with three children all skinheads’. Caught by her husband in bed with Jailhose Jim Bennett, she’s now staying at her mum’s where she can play the best of the wild Yahoo British groups as she rubs up against Jailhouse Jim.

His readers held a debate about the merits of Waxie’s approach. Here’s their verdict (below the great pic of the Sunsets)

Both the Curious and Beat Instrumental pieces were promoting their Party EP, which is 14 minutes of standard covers with crowd noises and, I think, Waxie doing the cheerleading. It is just about the worst thing that came out under the Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival of 1969–73, and there is plenty of competition for that accalade. It’s not just that their versions are no better than a budget TOTPs album, and ‘Get It On’ is an absolute travesty, it is the fact it is all done without any style and zero attitude, not even the frisson of a sexual fumble in the dark. Cut on the cheap, the EP didn’t even come with a picture sleeve FFS! Most of the tracks are scattered across the Rock ‘n’ Roll Party compilation, the louder mastering doesn’t help much.

Someone must have liked the crowd noises between the songs on the EP because they are back on their sole album Red China Rocks, which does have one of the period’s great sleeves as compensation. . . Chairman Mao in drape and creepers . . . and, as my mate Eddie says, a Clash bootleg sleeve before the fact. Rather than develop the New Orleans side of things the album retreats back to Houseshakers’ territory. The world did not need another cover of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ but, that said, it is all a significant improvement on the Party EP and with Perkins’ ‘Dixie Fried’ and, what must be one of the first British covers of a Charlie Feather’s number, ‘One Hand Loose’, I do believe I can hear Crazy Cavan coming down the line. . . . cut loose!!!

Bush Hollyhead’s illustration for a 1972 Club International special on Fifties revivalism goes places the Rock n Roll Allstars led by Waxie Maxie were never going to get

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

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 – 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 . . .