Not Fade Away 1972: Children of the Revolution, by T.Rex.

“Glam rock was the strutting, preening  realisation of the transformative power of pop culture. Glam rock was a second chance at the Fifties for the British, who had been too strangulated by class and convention (and the memory of rationing) to really enjoy it the first time around. Glam rock told those who once had nothing that they now could have everything. If Sixties pop had told them that they could have fun and sex, and maybe even be rich (one day), the Seventies were telling them that they could be something more valuable - that they could be beautiful.” - Mark Simpson (Saint Morrissey, 2004)

And now, if you look closely, maybe you can see me sneaking into the picture at the corner of the frame.

When I was a boy pop music meant Glam rock. I was nine in 1972. Life revolved around playing football on the green, Dr Who on a Saturday night and Top of the Pops every Thursday. Radio 1 was the soundtrack to our lives and so we listened to Slade and Bowie and The Sweet and the Rubettes and Roxy. On Sunday nights we’d sit on the wall beside the lamp post that stood outside our house and listen to the Top 20 countdown. We’d buy Fab 208 because it printed song lyrics and me and my sisters would sing in the sitting room pretending to be pop stars.

My mate John loved Gary Glitter. He even dressed himself up in tinfoil and platform boots for the youth club party. Glitter’s appeal escaped me, but the rest of it I loved. Not in any discriminating way. I wasn’t making any judgements on any of it. It was just the music that wallpapered my world back then. It seeped in to my life and stayed. And when I hear it now it’s as if some familiar pattern is reasserting itself, slotting into place.

This is not nostalgia. I don’t want to be nine again. I don’t want to imagine myself back in that time, in that place. I liked my childhood but I don’t long for it back. There’s no yearning in my love for Glam. But there’s a comfort to it, none the less.  And more than that, some kind of rightness. This is what the word pop meant to be then. And the shadow of it still haunts my tastes.

Of course there’s nostalgia in the music itself. Glam rock, as Simon Reynolds pointed out in the catalogue for this year’s Tate Liverpool exhibition Glam: The Performance of Style, looked backwards to fifties rock and roll for inspiration. “Glam points to a peculiar susceptibility within pop to becoming enthralled by its own archive of stylised images and period-specific sounds,  a latent capacity to fold back on its own history,” Reynolds writes.

It’s an impulse that would recur again and again down through the years until now. If sixties pop music had been forward-looking, forward-thinking, the seventies saw pop begin to look over its shoulder (although Reynolds points out that what he calls “the Rift of retro” was already in play as early as 1968 on Back in the USSR by the Beatles - playing around with the legacy of Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys - and Frank Zappa’s doo-wop project Cruising with Reuben and the Jets).

Glam built itself on Bo Diddley and Duane Eddy riffs. But it was the way that it decorated itself that mattered. The glitz and glitter, the satin and tat (as Bowie once sang), the narcissism and novelty of it. Many saw these traits as the problem. To me it still feels like the thrill; the gaudy artificial sheen of it. I’m with the music critic Chris Roberts when he said of Glam, “I was always sold on shiny baubles, sexy surfaces, the truth of trinkets.”

I wasn’t old enough then to register the challenge in Bowie’s declaration of his bisexuality in the Melody Maker in January 1972 (I doubt I’d even heard of the Melody Maker back then). So I can’t pretend my love of Glam can be put down to its radicalism (though I would argue that it was there; punk took much of the musical blueprint of glam but just changed the costumes). And I wasn’t really old enough either to be aware of the alternative that “serious” rock offered at the time. By the time I was my tastes had already set. Even now I can find nothing in white rock of the early seventies. It’s dull and macho and humourless. It had none of the qualities that I wanted from pop. A sense of immediacy, a perpetual nowness, a lubricious shiver.

Those I found then -  and still find - in the music of black America of those years (toss a coin and I’d opt for Stevie Wonder’s Superstition as my choice for 1972) and the shiny, yes, sometimes even silly, pop of Glam.

If you wanted to intellectualise you could make the case for that era through the music of Bowie and Roxy, through Ziggy Stardust and Virginia Plain - music that had all the glitter of Glam but sought to critique it too. But to be honest I’m just as happy with the music of Marc Bolan.

The transformation of Tyrannosaurus Rex (all joss sticks and acoustic guitars) to T.Rex, electric warriors (Bolan even took lessons from Jimmy Page), is the story of the transition between the Sixties and the Seventies, the death of the hippy idyll and the (re)birth of teen idolatry. It helped that Bolan was pretty. The Sweet couldn’t offer that. Bolan’s arrival in 1971 was seismic. “The pop scene was waiting for an explosion,” he said himself. “And I was the perfect person to provide it.”

Ride a White Swan in 1970  initiated T-Rextasy. Hot Love and Get It On followed the next year. If 1971 was the peak, he still managed Telegram Sam, Metal Guru (the song that a young Johnny Marr used to sing while cycling around Manchester) and, my choice, Children of the Revolution in 1972. The lyrics of the latter mix sixties radicalism (the chorus) with seventies self-interest (“I drive a Rolls Royce/Cause it’s good for my voice”) and really in the end don’t amount to very much. But the sound ... Churning electric guitar, descending drums and Bolan’s slurred elfin vocals ... That sound has a glory to it.

Children of the Revolution only managed number two in the charts after four consecutive number ones for T.Rex. The accepted wisdom is that it marked the start of the slide (although 1973 would give us 20th Century Boy, perhaps the greatest T.Rex single and certainly the best opening blast on a single since Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti). After that Bolan got fat, got lazy and the glitter flaked off. He died in 1977 when the car he was a passenger in hit a tree in south-west London. Maria Callas died the same day. But it was Bolan who made the front pages. Still the star then, even at the end.

Other Contenders

Superstition, Stevie Wonder

The Harder They Come, Jimmy Cliff

The Jean Genie, David Bowie

John, I’m Only Dancing, David Bowie

Papa Was a Rolling Stone, The Temptations

Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed

Virginia Plain, Roxy Music

The best-selling UK single of 1972 - Amazing Grace, Royal Scots Dragoon Guards