A Near-Fatal Overdose Of Early Seventies Hip-Shaking Awesomeness

Pan’s People were a dance troupe that Top of the Pops used to trot out when a pop single absolutely had to be played and the band that recorded it was too stoned or had 10 percent too much dignity to show up and lip-sync it. And you had to play T. Rex in 1971.

T. Rex was Marc Bolan and a loose gaggle of other blokes. A lot of rock critics point to Bolan as the milepost that marks the birth of Glam Rock, even though there were plenty of art-school fops like Bryan Ferry straddling the Liberace/TeddyBoy divide visually and musically just then. Bolan was dead in a car crash before the decade ended, even though he was so afraid of dying in a car crash that he never got a driver’s license. Life is like that sometimes.

Everyone would point to Bang a Gong as their big hit, but Jeepster is the really kewl thing you’d put in a seventies movie soundtrack if you knew what you were doing.

I’m getting old. The contemporary emcee’s joke at the beginning about David Cameron falls flat for me. I know David Cameron was only five when that video was made — but I was almost old enough to take a run at those sherbert-colored qiana-clad hip-hugger and halter-topped pre-boob-job-buxom bell-bottomed babes after the show. I would have invited them to play army man with me, but still.