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

Peel's sharp ears

Peel anticipates junkshop glam - at the time - in this survey of 1974 written for Sounds.  

..."top teen bands such as Slade and Sweet and Mud have made records which collectors will be collecting avidly, as collectors always do, in a few years time" 

As for the schoolgirl uniform -  tempting as it is to see it as a glam cross-dressing move, the fear is that it points to more dubious tastes  - the parallel would be less with simpering Steve Priest of The Sweet, (who said of his glam-era image "I looked like a 9 year old girl") than with sweaty-palmed Gazzer  Glitter....

“I would rather have been raining kisses on her eager, upturned face” – not even hiding in plain sight is  it?