Warlord of the Royal Crocodiles – the Lyrics of Pop’s Supreme Surrealist

I’m in the middle of the countryside, it’s morning and I’m waiting with a few other inmates of the village’s children’s home for the school bus to arrive. We’re a ragtag bunch, not scruffy, but definitely not dressed for greatness. A song leaks out of the kitchen window, our kitchen, our radio.

Pop music of the time, the early ’70s, was a thriving, throbbing and wriggling mass of guitar-playing singer-songwriters, manufactured MOR pap, hung-out acid casualties and moving out prog-rockers. It was everywhere and nowhere baby – I mean there were few borders: you bopped to pop, you boogied to rock, and held on tight in the soul numbers – the nearest most of us got to sex. Amazingly, despite the decades since Elvis stalked the charts, popular music was, by and large, the music of young people, and I mean all young people, together, in concert if you will.

A riff floats through the cold air, seeking us out, looking for a believer, looking for me. The music wraps itself around my head and sneaks the lyrics into my head, lyrics that literally opened my mind.

“Ride it on out like a bird in the sky ways, ride it on out…”

Marc Bolan became one of the UK’s biggest pop stars ever and single-handedly invented Glam Rock, or so his publicists would tell you. Other people will tell you he was aided and abetted by a few contemporaries who saw his success and cleverly re-invented themselves. Thus, a few at least, set themselves up for a lifelong income that poured, trickled and dripped from a few hits and a lifetime of touring small European clubs to an audience that never got older, or younger, than the generation who bought the singles in the first place.

Bolan himself was emerging from his own trip down psychedelic lane, picking his way through a thicket of myth and Merlin, fantasy and faeries, into a world he knew was his, but hadn’t yet found the magic keys to. Enter Ride A White Swan…

There’s something charmingly naive about the lyrics to this song which, coupled with the song’s superb pop-sensibility, had hit written all over it. And despite its lyrical weirdness, its references to wizards, white swans and the Gaelic festival of Beltane (which was not celebrated by the English, and certainly not by a half-Jewish lad born in Hackney, east London), it was destined to grace the record collections of millions of ordinary boys and girls through the British Isles and beyond. For me it was the starting point of my own Bolan collection, which was one of the most complete in the UK at one point. (Tip for would-be record collectors: get a job on your local 2^nd hand record market stall. You get paid, you get cheaper records, and your collection expands with the help of your very knowledgeable boss.)

If you take a knife and whittle through the lyrics, you find that there’s a very, very simple story about celebrating the Beltane festival by dressing up as a druid, and uttering some magic words that waft you back in a limitless world of magic and superstition. The lyrics, for all their strange ideas and images, were not going to offend anyone: giving an oblique hint of drugged-up, hippy hang-outs, and cross-legged, floor-sitting acoustic extravaganzas, in a London still tripping from the head-curling Sgt Pepper heydays of the late ’60s. A world that Bolan had recently strummed a lift through.

But this is merely a beginning: what was important to me was not what came afterwards – although Bolan seems to have invented the only British strand of magical-realism to reach No 1 – but what came before.

I’m like this with most things; I can’t know about something’s today without wanting to know it’s yesterday – I have to see its path and the process it took to get there. How it unfurled, how all the bits join up, how it took a leap into something new, and where it all came from in the first place: its first, its last, its everything.

ZZ Top are a case in point. I bought Eliminator at the exact same moment the rest of the world did. And having gotten over the excitement of that, I had to dig my way back through their roots, splashing through Rio Grande Mud and eventually laying claim on the dry banks of the First Album.

Many people say that Bolan and his lyrics were long on fantasy and short on reality; that his words were mere shiny baubles that dazzled the listener but were ultimately worthless. But this was just the nasty smell of jealousy, of the literary and musical establishments who couldn’t bear to believe that a relatively uneducated, guitar-wielding pop star could write bona fide literature. I’m sure you’ve heard the same arguments by more recent riders of the jolly green dragon. Sure he wanted fame and fortune and to be No 1. His musical roots include Elvis, Eddie Cochrane (Summertime Blues is on the flip-side of Ride a White Swan) and Chuck Berry. But that doesn’t make him a crap poet, no more than it does Bob Dylan.

In his early adult life, he sprung onto the London scene via a career in modelling men’s clothes – with one magazine citing him as the vanguard of the Mod movement. So he wasn’t shy in front of the cameras or stressed about getting his face splashed across the country. Like many of us, he wanted to make the leap from the gutter’s obscurity into the shiny, happy world of the bold and the beautiful – and I can’t blame him for that. But he was also a great lyricist: one of the best the UK has ever produced.

Flicking through some early songs, for example, One Inch Rock, Salamanda Palaganda, Warlord of the Royal Crocodiles, and King of the Rumbling Spires, shows an affection for the bizarre and nonsensical. This love of the outlandish was given free rein in the title of the Tyrannosaurus Rex album ‘My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair, But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows.’ At 20 words long, it took almost as much time to say as it did to play, and remains No 1 in the list of albums least likely to be requested at any wedding disco.

But dive into the lyrics themselves and you discover not only a whole universe of new worlds and bizarre beings, but a level of craftsmanship that few dare to aspire to, and a use of words and imagery that even fewer dare to write. The real beauty of his work was the cunning way in which he inter-weaved normal existence with the incredible and often quite surreal. This was a great thing to offer the nation’s youth: “Look at the beautiful world around you children, now what about the even more incredible ones that lurks inside your head?” He showed us barely-teenagers that there was an alternative to the world around us, and it was ok to go there and hang out.

For example, let’s have a look at verse one and three of Salamanda Palaganda, an acoustic number from the LP Prophets, Seers and Sages, the Angels of the Ages, which is delivered break-neck speed:

‘Small girl with the smiling gibbon, bridled with an orchid ribbon.

His curved brow in Scarlatti fashion, boots that ride the night sky eagle.’

And:

‘A cobra seer with the punctured ear, slaughtered a Malayan sun bear.

Night stood erect with bronzen haunches, zapped the seer and gave the bear back to us.’

I’m not going to go through these image by image, but how far out can you go with ‘boots that ride the night sky eagle’? Will you need satnav to get you back again? And verse three is a killer, two frames straight out of graphic novel: the whole song is a multi-car pile of imagery, laced with references to his soon-to-be wife June Childs and word pairings that are beautiful and utterly meaningless. If that wasn’t enough, he slips in a little reality by way of the Parisian zoo.

There’s more imagery and word play in this one song than some people manage on a whole album. And this is only one song of 14, one album from a set of four Tyrannosaurus Rex albums.

Then we have the fantastically-named Warlord Of The Royal Crocodiles, taken from the Unicorn LP (crammed with a mere 16 numbers of densely woven images, my favourite being The Throat Of Winter). This simple story, about a crocodile king, and how magnificent he is, contains the wondrous line:

‘The elements and oceans congregate on his brow, and he stalks in style like a royal crocodile.’

Here we have the image of a crocodile – transformed into a human-like figure blossoming into a beast so huge that he can contain the oceans in a small space above his eyes as he hunts down his prey. Here the fantastic is twinned with reality: the idea that he is so magnificent the seas are at home on his body – a body that is nothing more than the home of a savage and very un-regal killing machine.

Of course, this is as dry as the as the desert when you pick it up off the page. The key elements of music, composition, delivery and that unique voice lift the word play and imagery are all missing. Call me bossy if you will, but you really need to sit down somewhere quiet with these albums and listen to them yourself. You need to absorb the worlds he creates, you need to travel through his universe and meet the extraordinary people and creatures and listen to their extraordinary stories. Only then will you really find the magic that carried me away before the school bus whisked me off to grey reality.

As a child already living in his own world, and his own head, Bolan’s words and music spoke to me like no one else did. They were part of me, a me that was trying to get away from a world of insecurity and hidden dangers. As a writer, his lyrics taught me to go beyond the limits, to stretch meaning and ideas. They gave me the courage to express myself how I feel I ought to and not to hold myself back with anything I write – even if no one else likes it and even at the risk of never being published. They showed me it is possible to create worlds that bridge the gap between the every-day and the fantastic, and that you can, on a day-to-day basis, live in both.

I’m British but live in the Netherlands and have travelled widely in Latin America, and in certain parts of Europe. At age six, I abandonded my childhood to my mother’s mental illness, divorce and a long fight with the authorities: I found it again at the end of my teens when I discovered writing and playing in bands.  I write here http://mickdavidsonpicturesword.weebly.com and here  http://mickdavidsonphotos.weebly.com