Planet Queen

@so-succexy James had the wrong end of the stick The guy replaced by Mickey Finn was in fact Steve Peregrin Took, who became unmanagable due to his drug use and was whipping himself and drawing blood on stage. (A little Iggy Pop-esque and generally a bit much.) However, Steve was out after Unicorn, the third album, and Planet Queen is off Electric Warrior, the sixth album. I'm not saying it's impossible that Steve came back for the session, but unless you have evidence to the contrary, I'm going to rule it out. (Is there perhaps an early version of...

@so-succexy James had the wrong end of the stick The guy replaced by Mickey Finn was in fact Steve Peregrin Took, who became unmanagable due to his drug use and was whipping himself and drawing blood on stage. (A little Iggy Pop-esque and generally a bit much.) However, Steve was out after Unicorn, the third album, and Planet Queen is off Electric Warrior, the sixth album. I'm not saying it's impossible that Steve came back for the session, but unless you have evidence to the contrary, I'm going to rule it out. (Is there perhaps an early version of Planet Queen from around the Unicorn period fearuring Marc and Steve as the Tyrannosaurus Rex acoustic duo? )

As for James assertion that Marc was T.Rex, it's essentially correct, but later on, in the early 2000s, Mickey Finn did put out a version of T.Rex. The singer was a Marc Bolan look- and sound-alike, and apart from Mr. Finn's iconic presence, they were essentially a T.Rex covers band. They didn't do Planet Queen when I saw them in a field in Lincolnshire playing to a crowd of 150 or so locals… they were excellent though.

What does the song mean? It's a Bolan image adventure again. An alien queen, flying saucer abduction, a girl child fathered by Marc (whom he wants back). His head gets used as an exploder and a revolver. There's a good chance he's not talking about the head on his shoulders. The "dragon head" is "machine bled", which makes you wonder what is happening there. My conclusion is that Marc got this idea for a space romance story which was too hot to present explicitly, so he made it into a song which showed people what happened rather than told them. It is what you make it, as much a vibe as a tale, but the many strong clues such as the spaceship taking Marc away and the daughter point to the content being alien sex experiments and a trip into space to another world where strange things happened. This in turn could be a redux of a strange encounter Marc had with a freak in the 60s or 70s, or perhaps it could be an argument for general sexual freedom. At one point Marc claimed he had spent time with a wizard in France doing magic and brewing potions, so maybe his story about being taken into space is also a real story? He got up to some stuff after all…