the hammer of glamour

"Art is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours" - Maria Callas

Johnny P and Marky B - and the B-sides

“For three or four years Marc Bolan and I were kind of best friends, along with his wife June and my wife Sheila. We used to go off and do hippie things at weekends – Stonehenge or Glastonbury Tor. And I used to get Rex loads of gigs. I’d get booked in somewhere as a DJ, and I’d ask, “Can I bring this band with me?” We spent a lot of time together..... When Marc saw the doors he’d been banging on for so long suddenly start to open, he did go a bit mad. It was one of those things where I phoned up to see what we’d be doing next weekend, and somebody answered the phone and said, “Look, Marc’s very busy. Can he call you back?” And then he never did. You feel mildly offended, but life’s too short” - JP

Plee, in his  Disc & Music Echo singles columns, reviews new 7-inch platters by his erstwhile bosom pal Boley.... in the first instance here (3rd July 1971) letting personal bitterness cloud his judgment a tad, I suspect, although who could blame him really.... 

 

The three B-sides, which I can't recall ever hearing, do indeed mention bosoms: 

"Lady, I love your chests ooh,

Baby, I'm crazy 'bout your breasts"

and

"Baby, I love your chests ooh,

Lady, I'm crazy 'bout your breasts"

More measured here (6th May 1972) - and literally measuring - Peel counts the number of times the words "metal guru" appear in the song (it's a lot). 

(via John Peel twitter)

mementoes from when they were bosom buddies

John Peel narration: 

[Narration: John Peel]

Kingsley Mole sat high on a windy knoll, his eyes consuming the silent midnight woods. He nuzzled his long molish snout deep inside the heart of a marigold and let his molish imagination skip to and fro over sunken galleons and pirate pictures of rusted doubloons and deep-water cabins stacked to the brim with musty muskets and goldfish gauntlets once worn by Henry Morgan

The lark awoke and doffed its plumed three cornered hat to its own sleepy-eyed reflection, then it hopped past the crested nest of the snoring cuckoo and flew off into the Lionel Lark morning looking for friend Mole

Mole was on a marigold comedown and sulkily scraped bluebeat rhythms with his ground-digging paw

"Yes," he whispered, "Me and Li are going a-questing for the Lilly Pond of Fox Necks."

Li'll know all the mapping gen[??], so the mole, kneeling on the soft soil, said a morning prayer to Ra, not even caring if he dirtied his yellow Rupert trousers because his molish mind knew that praying was special

Masks part 143

 A nice little lesson in rock history here (what with Johnny getting the Pistols job through miming to "I'm Eighteen" on the jukebox, "School's Out" and "Elected" as proto-punk, punk as just a scrawled addendum to glam)

Maybe I'll dig out the liner note JR wrote for the Alice box set The Life and Crimes... 

Mad Alice's Diary

 

Unmissable glimpse of the early Alice Cooper live performance mode, hotel pillows ripped to scatter feathers everywhere etc - forming the background one of those odd little movies that you caught once on BB2 as a teenager and have never quite forgotten ("rolling in the hay" - how that made me and my girlfriend howl with laughter)

Wish I had known about this clip when doing S+A, although it doesn't add much to what is well documented and also related to me in the interviews. 

Marsha and Desdemona

 

Marc's ex covering one of his first and best songs 

flipside "Hippy Gumbo" also one of his early but not so good songs

Moodie Cliches

"The Clichettes were an all-women feminist performance art group formed in Toronto, Canada in 1977. Their practice is notable for injecting humour and theatricality into the sphere of performance art. The three performers initially worked using lip sync and choreography as their tools to parody pop culture depictions of femininity and later expanded their practice by including elements from science fiction and theatre in their performances. The Clichettes are notable for their impact on Canadian performance art as well as Feminist and performing arts in general...

"....The central themes that would preoccupy The Clichettes throughout their career – satire, appropriation, parody, feminist commentary, and pop-culture and media deconstruction – were clearly present during their formational period.

"As a feminist performance group, The Clichettes' practice resisted the conventions of girlhood and dance through satirical, humorous performances. They contested gender stereotypes through the use of pop culture cliches and brash humour. The Clichettes made their debut at the Tele-Performance Festival in 1978, an event themed in response to television as content and technology. Dressed in kitsch-60's good girls outfits, the trio lip-synced to Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" for the first time. Lip-synching the words “ You don’t own me. I’m not just one of your many toys”, and their other early performances, revealed and reflected the "performativity" of gender norms. This full-frontal method of feminist assault was greatly inspired by satirical musical group the Hummer Sisters. Their brand of camp media parody exemplified the blurring between high art and entertainment occurring in the 1970s. This style of non-detached and ironic pop-culture appropriation enabled them to be critical without alienating their audience."

".... Marni Jackson became a collaborator for the production Half-Human Half-Heartache, a move for the group to expand beyond dance and into satirical theatre. The 1981 production featured a narrative casting The Clichettes as aliens who could kill by speaking, thus establishing a narrative purpose for lip-sync. The trio of aliens begins to live the facade of '1960's good-girls' but eventually become entangled in the problematic dynamics of this life. The cabaret show was a hit in Toronto, with productions that followed in Ottawa and Vancouver. Their next stage endeavour was more ambitious: She-Devils of Niagara (1985) depicted a dystopian future where gender was strictly regulated, and history had been banished to the basement of a wax museum in Niagara Falls....

"As the Clichettes' acclaim increased throughout the 1980s, their performances started to poke fun at more than just mass-market depictions of girls. Their 1985 production Go To Hell saw the group adopt anatomically correct male bodysuits as a means to expand their critique to the stereotypes of masculinity. Armed with fake guitars, they parodied the macho posturing of “cock-rock” bands. By spoofing the gestures of those musicians and lip-syncing their lyrics, The Clichettes were hilariously denouncing the contrived affectations of male stars....."
- Wiki

anti-theatricality (private / public)

 J'en ai marre* with your theatrics; your acting's a drag

It's ok on TV, but you can turn it off

Your marriage is a tragedy, but it's not my concern

I'm very superficial, I hate everything official

Your private life drama, baby, leave me out

Sentimental gestures only bore me to death

You've made a desperate appeal, now save your breath

Attachment to obligation, regret shit that's so wet

And your sex life complications are not my fascinations

Your private life drama, baby, leave me out

Oh!

* j'en ai marre = I've have it up to here.