By the the summer of 1971 T.Rex were churning out singles every four months and Bolan – by now a superstar – had gone full Glam, with face glitter and everything.
This was their third hit, and their second No.1 (after Hot Love) in July 1971. You might recognise the piano player too… just don’t shoot him.
Who else but Bolan could seduce a girl with the chat-up line: “You’re built like a car”? On paper it’s not the greatest compliment but the follow-up is one of the great pop lyrics: “You’ve got a hub-cap diamond star halo.”
As ever, the lyrics were as playfully peculiar as they were memorable. I’m not sure that at the age of 13 I would have immediately been attracted to a girl who was “dirty and sweet” (let alone “windy and wild”). And I’d have been frankly terrified to find she had “the teeth of the Hydra”.
The piano player on the record, by the way, isn’t Elton – he was just miming with them for the Christmas edition of Top of the Pops – but a penniless Rick Wakeman, who was paid the princely sum of £9 for his efforts. The saxes are played by Ian McDonald of King Crimson.
The song would be reborn when Noel Gallagher nicked it for Cigarettes And Alcohol. I once challenged Noel about this and he characteristically admitted it, saying the band had been working into the small hours trying to come up with a riff for a new song. At around 2am, Noel triumphantly “nailed it” and they all went home to bed.
When he came into the stuio the next day his fellow guitarist Paul Arthurs, aka Bonehead, said to him: “You know that great riff you came up with last night for the new song?” Noel glowed with pride as Bonehead nervously added: “It’s T. Rex innit?” “Fuck it!” responded Noel. “No one’s ever gonna hear it. They can sue me if they want.”
The fact they didn’t was probably due largely to the fact that Bolan himself had adapted it from Chuck Berry’s Little Queenie. Unlike other white musicians who ‘borrowed’ from black bluesmen (naming no Led Zeppelins), Bolan didn’t hide his plagiarism – he even includes a cheeky reference in the song, ad-libbing Chuck’s throwaway line over the fade: “Meanwhile… I’m still thinking.”
If anyone wants to disappear further down this particular rabbit hole, then look (and listen) no further than Humble Pie’s live version of Eddie Cochran’s C’mon Everybody, which is… how can I put it… exactly the same.