T. Rex brought the year to an end with Jeepster, their third big hit in just nine months – but were kept off top spot by a TV comedian.
Towards the end of 1971 along came another single – their third of the year – by what had become my favourite band. Jeepster built on the foundations that had been laid by Ride A White Swan and Hot Love. It took T. Rex, and my adoration of them, to the next level.
I remember the people at school who preferred “serious” music enjoyed mocking Marc Bolan, with his corkscrew hair and platform boots and face paint, but I assumed they were just jealous of his looks and style when compared to his hairy, beardy counterparts in the prog-rock dinosaurs they worshipped. As well as his success.
They were particularly scathing of his lyrics. “Just like a car, you’re pleasing to behold,” Bolan sang to his beloved. “I’ll call you Jaguar if I may be so bold.” Pure poetry, if you ask me; pure doggerel, thought they. But for every throwaway couplet like that, there were lyrical flights of fancy like: “You’ve got the universe reclining in your hair.”
Is there any more romantic declaration of love in the annals of pop (or poetry)? Wordsworth, Keats and Byron would have given the private number of their laudanum dealer to have written a line that beautiful.
Anyway, Jeepster: here it is, in a version with additional curlicues of lead guitar and a nice mini-solo that demonstrate what an underrated guitarist Bolan was. Different lyric too, perhaps to avoid product placement: “Girl you’re like a car, you’re so good / Don’t you know you’re just like Robin Hood.”
At heart it’s basically a rockabilly tune, a hommage to the Sun Studio sound that Bolan adored, but smoothed and sharpened and updated by Tony Visconti. With its guttural ejaculations, it’s as sexually suggestive as you could get in the early Seventies without having Mary Whitehouse on your back – especially the bit at the end: “Girl I’m just a vampire for your love – and I’m gonnna SUCK ya!”
It went to No.2… kept off top spot by Benny fucking Hill.