Onward to 1973 and the year began the way all good years began in the early Seventies – with another T. Rex hit.
I didn’t love Solid Gold Easy Action with quite the same passion that I loved its predecessors. Perhaps it was the start of a slow decline. But a lesser T. Rex song was still better than most other acts’ very best singles.
I love the rockabillyish proto-punk guitar riff; not so much the way Tony Visconti douses it in syrupy strings that seem to belong in a celluloid melodrama. And I don’t like that unncessarily urgent “Hey-hey-hey!” backing chant. But Marc’s lyrics were as surreally memorable as ever.
“Life is the same and it always will be / Easy as picking foxes from a tree.” Answers on a postcard. “A stud is a lamb with the the thoughts of a tiger / who moves like a cat and knows how to ride her.” “All my hair will keep her smiling / With my wondrous walk and my telephone dialling.”
Best of all was the ambiguous, arguably gender-bending (not-that-I-knew-it-at-the-time) sexual undercurrent in the closing refrain: “I know you’re shrewd / And she’s a dude / But all I want is easy action.”
It has been claimed that the opening lyric somehow prophesies Bolan’s own death in 1977, when his girlfriend Gloria Jones drove off the road in Barnes and hit a tree in a car whose numberplate was FOX 661 L. Which sounds like a retro-fitted theory to me. Or just a coincidence.
And here’s another piece of pop trivia I never knew: the largely forgotten ‘Mod revival’ band Department S covered this song on the B-side of their only hit, Is Vic There? – and the backing vocals were by… anyone know this? Bananarama!