There was a golden period of about three years, roughly between the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers and Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, when - thanks to a magical conjunction of their hairless chests, their chiselled chins and their rent boy trousers, with music that was an unapologetically lubricious, tail-dragging reinvention of rock and roll, all stamped with the charm of their native unwillingness to take anything wholly seriously - it was widely agreed that the sexiest thing on earth you could be was an English rock star.
Between the two aforementioned groups, plus the Who and Bad Company, it seemed for a while that the impossible had been achieved. The nation of back-to-backs and cobbled streets which had brought forth George Formby and Gracie Fields, the homeland to which Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne had fought their way in order to catch a Test match, the battered old island which had been kept safe for democracy by Kenneth More and John Mills, the diamond set in a silver sea which for years had considered the most excitement its small children could take was Muffin the Mule, the country which even at this late date still had a grand total of three television channels all of which closed down before midnight, was suddenly, unaccountably, thrillingly seen as sexy.
As these hollow cheeked heroes, whose ages were still under the thirty-year mark, who had no need of the personal trainer or special diet to stay in trim, were pictured tripping on and off monogrammed planes - wreathed in chiffon scarves, their coltish old ladies on their elbows, being wafted from one American city to the next, being delivered by limousine down the goods ramp of one sports arena or another while knots of high school kids looked on enthralled - they seemed like members of some new, impossibly glamorous tribe. There is a picture of Keith Richards snapped in 1972, at the precise moment that he achieved peak Keef. He is leaning on a wall at the American border, no doubt as a pack of dogs go through his luggage. He is festooned with scarves. He is wearing mirror shades. He is exquisitely bored. The photographer has asked him to stand next to a sign which says, 'Patience, please. A drug-free America comes first.' It seems to represent the moment at which the classic image of the rock star was perfected and, what's more, it was perfected in the shape of an Englishman.
- David Hepworth, Overpaid, Oversexed & Over There: How a few skinny Brits with bad teeth rocked America, London, 2020, p.164-5.
See also:
Blog: Rolling Stones Rock 'n Roll Circus, 14 July 2020
Blog: Denmark Street, 18 January 2010
Blog: Almost Famous, 3 March 2009
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