From 1992, almost two years before I discovered his music.
The “impersonator” is the singer of a tribute band I’ve known about from about 1993/4-onward (pretty much since the start of my fandom) called T-Rextasy.
“T-Rextasy” was the media headline equivalent to “Beatlemania” in 1972/73. He was really very huge at the time. 5’4″ and so much larger than life.
Toyah Wilcox was probanly most-famous as a pop singer in the New Wave / New Romantic scene, and in the UK, in recent years, as a television presenter. She was in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (her first feature film) and had a prominent bit part in Quadrophenia.
Noddy Holder is the singer from Slade. Slade began life as Ambrose Slade, a credit on their first album only, which can be described as psychedelic folk-rock. Their second record, Play It Loud, the first to credit the band simply as “Slade”, was more stripped-down and “pub rock”-oriented, and marked them as the first prominent white band in the UK to embrace the Skinhead aesthetic (the same year, Symarip, a UK-based band consisting of Black members, all from the West Indies, released their seminal classic “Skinhead Moonstomp“, and in 1970, the album of the same name was released). I think it’s abundantly clear that T Rex was therefore a huge influence on Slade’s metamorphosis, rather than the other way around.
I was a Marc Bolan fan long before I was a David Bowie fan, and this is one of the songs that ultimately sold me on Bowie:
Cold fire, you’ve got everything but cold fire
You will be my rest and peace child
I moved up to take a place, near you
So tired, it’s the sky that makes you feel tried
It’s a trick to make you see wide
It can all but break your heart, in pieces
Staying back in your memory
Are the movies in the dark
How you moved is all it takes
To sing a song of when I loved
The prettiest star
One day though it might as well be someday
You and I will rise up all the way
All because of what you are
The prettiest star
Staying back in your memory
Are the movies in the past
How you moved is all it takes
To sing a song of when I loved
Prettiest star
One day though it might as well be someday
You and I will rise up all the way
All because of what you are
The prettiest star
Bolan and Bowie shared a manager, Tony Visconti, at this time, and he claims that, in the studio when this was being recorded, June said to Bowie “Marc’s to good for you, to be playing on this record”.
Still hasn’t stopped the fan-slash.
Of Thespiae is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache