Of postmodernism, Marie, fish fingers, sperm, a royal cow, Bolan and blasphemy

RIP Sir Terry Farrell, architect of two of my fave postmodern buildings on the Thames - the MI6 Building and Charing Cross Station (Embankment House)

More snippets today, dear reader:

• Unbridled luxury news: Hot on the (bejewelled) heels of - and overlapping with - the breathtaking Cartier exhibition we went to see in August, the newest showcase at the magnificent Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) is Marie Antoinette Style, an exploration of the life and luxurious lifestyle of one of the most notorious (and certainly most famous, even if only for her fate) Queens that France ever had. We're making plans for our visit as we speak...
• Favourite food of children everywhere news: Happy 70th birthday to the humble BirdsEye [other brands are available] Fish Finger! I doubt there's a freezer anywhere up and down the country that doesn't have a box of these in it...
• Frankenstein science news: Scientists in the USA have made embryos from human skin DNA and sperm. If that's all it took, I'm surprised my face didn't get pregnant - many times - when I was younger😋!
• Never appear with children or animals news: King Charles III looked on as a prize cow trampled his hedges and peed on the path at a reception at Clarence House.

• Glam icon "returns from the dead" news: On what would have been his 78th birthday, not only has a blue plaque been unveiled at Marc Bolan's former home in Maida Vale in London, but also a new, previously unheard T.Rex track from fifty years ago has been released! - hear I'm Dazed on YouTube.
• And finally: Happy Blasphemy Day! I'll leave the last word on that to the magnificently erudite and much-missed Mr Christopher Hitchens, one of my idols:

  “I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually true... There may be people who wish to live their lives under cradle-to-grave divine supervision, a permanent surveillance and monitoring. But I cannot imagine anything more horrible or grotesque.”

And the weather? Warm and sunny for a change! Love it.

I can't get no satisfaction; all I want is easy action

Such - erm - interesting fashions Mr Bolan wore...

Timeslip moment again...

This time, we've hitched a ride in Jon Pertwee's TARDIS waaaaaay back to ancient history, or what might as well be! It's 1972 - the year of the Watergate scandal, Bloody Sunday and the Troubles, expulsion by Idi Amin of Asians from Uganda, the new Poet Laureate John Betjeman, Under Milk Wood, the Munich Olympics massacre, Black Panthers, Nixon in China, Are You Being Served?, CND's Aldermaston march, Ken Russell's The Boy Friend, miners' strikes, dock-worker strikes, The Godfather, the first official gay pride march in London, Olga Korbut, Mark Spitz, Jesus Christ Superstar, Vietnam, Vicky Leandros, A Clockwork Orange, The Chancellor of the Exchequer Anthony Barber, What's Up, Doc?, The Joy of Sex, Willy Brandt, Graham Hill, Dirty Harry, Bobby Fischer, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Cod Wars, and the discovery of a Japanese soldier who had spent 28 years in the jungles of Guam still believing WW2 was on; the births of Geri Halliwell, Ben Affleck, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, Dita Von Teese, Jonny Lee Miller, Idris Elba, Sakis Rouvas, Claudia Winkleman, Atari, Shaquille O'Neal, Jimmy Carr, Home Secretary Priti Patel, Mark Owen of Take That, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vanessa Paradis, Liam Gallagher, Gwyneth Paltrow, Eminem, Dana International, DNA molecular science and the fast-food doner kebab; and the year that Margaret Rutherford, Maurice Chevalier, The Duke of Windsor, the Brighton Belle Pullman car train, Louella Parsons, the Ford Zephyr, Mahalia Jackson, Charles Atlas, J. Edgar Hoover, Ezra Pound, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Esma Cannon and Britain's last trolleybus/tram system all died.

In the headlines almost half a century [eek!] hence, in December 1972: the famous "Blue Planet" photograph arrived from Apollo 17, Gough Whitlam was elected as Prime Minister of Australia, the death of former US President Harry S. Truman was announced, and news of the horrendous circumstances of the survival of passengers of the Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes shocked the world. In our cinemas: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, The Pied Piper, Dracula A.D. 1972. On telly: Mastermind with Magnus Magnusson, Emmerdale Farm, Doctor Who: The Three Doctors and Pebble Mill at One.

And in our charts this week forty-seven years ago? Chuck Berry's smutty sing-a-long My Ding-A-Ling ruled the roost (as it would for the next few weeks), holding at bay both The Osmonds and Slade in the process, as well as Rod Stewart, Elton John, Donny Osmond, Michael Jackson and his brothers The Jackson 5. Ironically, among all these Jacksons and Osmonds, it was "Little Jimmy" [groan] who was destined to topple dirty ol' Chuck in time for Xmas. However, there was one more megastar of the moment who gave it a try...

...Mr Marc Bolan (of course)!

T. Rex - Solid Gold Easy Action

I was nine years old that year, sitting in front of Top of the Pops, in awe...

On the Buses

For 48 hours at the end of last week, the greedy bastards of the RMT union decided to pull another strike, affecting the Piccadilly Line - serving a huge swathe of London from Heathrow via the West End to our neighbourhood in North London. Usually, this kind of petulance causes huge disruption to everyone else trying to get to (their far lower-paid than anyone working on the Tube, for sure) work, as the buses (particularly in this Northerly stretch) become dangerously overcrowded. I have had to walk to work on previous occasions, which was not too horrendous from our previous locale, but now we are two miles further North would have been problematic.

However, the far-sighted management at Transport for London had the genius idea of hiring/bringing back into service a whole fleet of classic Routemasters and similarly vintage vehicles to take the strain. So, over a three-day stretch, we were treated to the most fabulously nostalgic commute. It took me right back to my youth - I almost sparked up a cigarette (as was traditional) on the top deck!

Continuing the nostalgia, here's an appropriate song for the occasion, courtesy of today's birthday boy, the sadly-missed Marc Bolan and T. Rex:

T. Rex - 20th Century Boy

Friends say it's fine
Friends say it's good
Everybody says it's just like rock and roll

Well, it certainly felt like being back the the 1960s.

Well you can bump and grind if it's good for your mind

Still coping with the gloom after our fab Amsterdam trip, even a short working week such as this and a Bank Holiday weekend to come cannot lift the spirits.

Time for a light musical interlude, methinks...

How about James Last and his Orchestra with their truly faboo Hawkwind-T-Rex-Alice-Cooper medley?

James Last and his Orchestra - Silver Machine / Children Of The Revolution / Schools' Out

Ah, that's better!

Well it's plain to see you were meant for me

The glam icon that was Marc Bolan would have been 65 years old today. This month it was also 35 years since the singer was killed in that infamous car crash, just two weeks before his 30th birthday.

At the recent star-studded tribute concert to Mr Bolan in London - at which such luminaries as Noddy Holder, Glen Matlock, Sandie Shaw, Lyndsey De Paul, Alvin Stardust, Steve Harley, Linda Lewis and Boy George all performed - none other than namesake Marc Almond did this rather fab version of Till Dawn with the tribute act T-Rextasy:

Marc Almond with T-Rexstasy - Till Dawn

But there is only one Marc Bolan, and here is possibly my favourite tune of his - 20th Century Boy:

T-Rex - 20th Century Boy

Oow
Friends say it's fine, friends say it's good
Ev'rybody says it's just like Rock and Roll
I move like a cat, charge like a ram
Sting like a bee, babe I wanna be your man
Well it's plain to see you were meant for me, yeah
I'm your boy, your 20th century toy

Friends say it's fine, my friends say it's good
Everybody says it's just like rock and roll
Fly like a plane, drive like a car
Ball like a hound, babe I wanna be your man - oh
Well it's plain to see you were meant for me, yeah
I'm your toy, your 20th century boy

20th century toy, I wanna be your boy
20th century toy, I wanna be your boy
20th century toy, I wanna be your boy
20th century toy, I wanna be your boy

Friends say it's fine, friends say it's good
Ev'rybody says it's just like Rock and Roll
Move like a cat, charge like a ram
Sting like a bee, babe I wanna be your man
Well it's plain to see you were meant for me, yeah
I'm your toy, your 20th century boy

20th century toy, I wanna be your boy
20th century toy, I wanna be your boy
20th century toy, I wanna be your toy
20th century boy, I wanna be your toy

Eternally missed...

Marc Bolan official fansite

Bang a gong

On this, the 40th anniversary of the utterly brilliant, the all-conquering and seminal Electric Warrior album by T-Rex - at Number 1 in the UK charts on this date in 1971 - I thought it worth revisiting this succinct tribute by Chris Jones from 2003:

Hot on the heels of its 30th anniversary re-release, T.Rex's most consistent album still deserves to have its praises sung. Think of glam and you probably focus on the 1972-4 heyday with acts veering from the sublime (Bowie, Roxy etc) to the ridiculous (Mud, Gary Glitter...Jobriath anyone?). Yet this slice of pop heaven was on the shelves by autumn 1971, making it officially the first glam album in the world. What's even more amazing is how fresh it still sounds.

Bolan himself was never one to avoid a trend. In his own mind he was always a star: Stories abound of his early days as a persistent chancer in mod/psychedelic London. Yet, if John's Children and Tyrannosaurus Rex didn't hold the keys to his inevitable stardom they certainly allowed him to learn the tricks that would flower on his first hit Ride A White Swan. This was the point at which he and long-term producer Tony Visconti took the hippy-dippy lyrics and 'Larry the Lamb' vocal stylings and bolted them on to good old stripped-down, four-to-the-floor rock 'n' roll. For four glorious years they never looked back...

With superb sleeve notes by Visconti himself, it must never be forgotten that this is as much his album as Bolan's (not forgetting Mickey Finn's radical bongos, ho ho). Visconti was behind so much of the glam-defining process that his name becomes synonymous with the genre. On this and Bowie's early work (Space Oddity, Man Who Sold The World) he creates a warm, spacey reverb-drenched world full of hip-thrusting libido and pouty tongue-twisting. Bolan's lyrics often approach 'back of a bus ticket' status in their throw-away couplets (Girl, Motivator etc.), but what shines through is the irrepressible fun the whole team seem to be having. The two monster hits (Get It On and Jeepster) still stand as monuments to pop concision. Nonsensical rhyme riding on swaggering guitar and drums.

Add to this at least two other utter classics (the frenzied funk of Rip Off and the touching ballad Life's A Gas) and not one real filler and you've got an album that's always going to sound box fresh: 5.1 surround sound just adds a little icing on the cake. Life's still a gas...

I couldn't agree more!

Here's the tracklist, for your delectation:

1 Mambo Sun

T. Rex - Mambo Sun

2 Cosmic Dancer

T. Rex - Cosmic Dancer

3 Jeepster

T. Rex - Jeepster

4 Monolith

T. Rex - Monolith

5 Lean Woman Blues

T. Rex - Lean Woman Blues

6 Get It On

T. Rex - Get It On

7 Planet Queen

T. Rex - Planet Queen

8 Girl

T. Rex - Girl

9 The Motivator

T. Rex - The Motivator

10 Life's a Gas

T. Rex - Life's a Gas

11 Rip Off

T. Rex - Rip Off

Electric Warrior on Amazon

Well she ain't no witch and I love the way she twitch

Would you believe? It is forty years since the magnificent Marc Bolan and T-Rex first hit the Number One spot in the UK, and Glam was their legacy...

Enjoy!

T. Rex - Hot Love

Marc Bolan and T Rex profile on the BBC

I move like a cat, charge like a ram. Sting like a bee, babe I wanna be your man!

I have had a bugger of a day today battling with a hijack virus that apart from giving me pop-up pages every thirty seconds seems to think that my homepage is not good enough (it's the BBC) and should be substituted with something else, and that Google is not good enough as a search engine so keeps flashing up AskJeeves pages... It still hasn't gone, but the number of virus checks and anti-spyware runs I have had to do means I have hardly had a chance to do what I like best - web surfing and posting blogs - before the damn Trojan pops up again and I have to log off.



Anyhow, I had a fabulous evening yesterday in the company of our fave drag icon Trindy (whose 50th birthday it is tomorrow), and her outrageous "Bowie Night"! It all started well, with the "lady" herself arriving on stage resplendent in black feather headdress to perform the classic Diamond Dogs.

Then all of a sudden, the crowd of middle-European lesbians who had been drinking at Halfway all day decided to take their tops off and parade around the downstairs bar, tits-a-bobble! Trindy loved it - shrieking from the stage "Oh fuck! It's the Isle Of Wight Festival, 1970!", before launching into numbers from my favourite Bowie albums Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust.

The show was a stunning success - with straights and gays, Queen Bitches and lesbians alike all up bopping away in a genuine nostalgia trip! So much so, that once the allotted time had passed Trindy (never one to miss a beat!) performed encores of Marc Bolan/T Rex numbers.

We moved upstairs after the final cheers, to meet up with Tony, Ginger Dave and others (who we had seen earlier on their way to see Dirty White Boy and had returned raving about the show), when all of a sudden more familiar Glam Rock strains emerged from downstairs! Drunk on her success, Trindy had decided to carry on the party atmosphere - so down we went for a fabulous set of songs by Suzi Quattro, Glitter Band, Slade, Sweet and even Mud! A great night!

This was the definitive star turn of the evening, and should definitely be Trindy's signature tune (along with Radiohead's Creep that she performs as part of her more general show) - laydeez'n'gentlemen, Mr Marc Bolan...

T Rex - 20th Century Boy

Fabulous.