The 1980s File Feature
Get It On (Bang A Gong)
Get It On (Bang A Gong): The Power Station and the Rock Revival of 1985A Supergroup Built for ExcessSomewhere in New York City in 1984, the logic of mid-deca…
01 The Story
Get It On (Bang A Gong): The Power Station and the Rock Revival of 1985
A Supergroup Built for Excess
Somewhere in New York City in 1984, the logic of mid-decade rock consolidation reached a kind of glorious conclusion: Robert Palmer, Andy Taylor of Duran Duran, John Taylor of Duran Duran, and drummer Tony Thompson of Chic were placed in a room together. The result was The Power Station, a project that felt less like an accident of circumstance and more like a deliberate experiment in rock maximalism. Their self-titled album arrived in spring 1985 with all the subtlety of a freight train, and their cover of T. Rex's "Get It On" was its most blunt instrument. These were musicians at the height of their commercial power, and the combination was irresistible.
Marc Bolan Meets the Machine
The original T. Rex recording from 1971 had a wiry, glam-rock looseness to it, Marc Bolan's guitar figure coiled like something about to spring. The Power Station did not exactly cover it so much as rebuild it from heavier materials. Tony Thompson's drumming is the load-bearing structure here: the fills hit with the force of someone who spent years behind the kit for Chic and knew exactly how much pocket and how much thunder a song could hold simultaneously. Palmer's vocal adds a sleek, slightly detached cool over the top, treating the lyric's swaggering physicality as a matter of fact rather than a boast. The production retains the riff while making everything around it larger.
A Top-Ten Summer
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on June 8, 1985 at number 58, a brisk debut for a rock track in a chart environment that summer largely belonged to pop. Over the following weeks it climbed persistently, and by the week of August 3, 1985, it had reached number 9: a genuine top-ten finish. The song spent 15 weeks on the Hot 100 in total, threading through a season that also featured heavy play from Bryan Adams, Madonna, and Tears for Fears. Cracking the top ten in that company required a record with serious commercial authority.
Rock's Second Wind
The mid-1980s were an interesting moment for rock music on the pop charts. Hard rock had given way to a glossier, synthesizer-inflected mainstream, and pure guitar bands were often struggling to break through on radio. The Power Station represented a kind of corrective: a supergroup with genuine rock credentials, major commercial appeal from their constituent bands, and production that bridged the gap between FM rock and Top 40. Their success with this track demonstrated that a muscle-bound rock cover could still reach number 9 if the raw materials were strong enough and the studio work was confident.
Palmer, Taylor, and Thompson: A Brief Alliance
The Power Station lasted long enough to make one album and tour, but the various commitments of its members pulled the project apart relatively quickly. Robert Palmer's subsequent solo career would reach even greater commercial heights; the Taylor duo returned to Duran Duran. Thompson, tragically, died in 2003. Get It On stands as the commercial peak of their collaboration, the single that proved their instinct correct: a great riff, a great drummer, and a great voice need no further justification. You can hear all three of those things operating at maximum capacity for about three and a half minutes, and the result holds up.
The album that housed this single also contained Some Like It Hot, the band's other major hit, which meant The Power Station were sending two distinct commercial signals simultaneously: one raw and guitar-forward, one somewhat glossier. The fact that both worked demonstrated the range of an outfit that could have coasted on supergroup novelty but chose to make a genuinely varied record instead. That ambition, modest by some standards, was still unusual enough to stand out.
Turn it up as loud as the room will allow, because this is a record that was engineered for volume and has not stopped demanding it.
“Get It On (Bang A Gong)” — The Power Station's singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Get It On (Bang A Gong): Desire, Swagger, and the Language of Rock
What the Lyric Is Actually About
Marc Bolan's original lyric, and The Power Station's delivery of it, operates in the long tradition of rock's physical directness. The words communicate mutual attraction through a cascade of playful, surrealistic imagery, describing a woman in terms that are vivid and bodily without quite tipping into vulgarity. The refrain announces both a desire and a call to action; it is simultaneously an invitation and a celebration of the energy exchange between two people who want each other. The Power Station, with Palmer at the microphone, delivered this sentiment with amused confidence rather than desperate heat. The tone is knowing rather than frantic.
Glam Rock's Inheritance
The original song belonged to the early-1970s glam-rock moment, when British pop had decided that sexuality, theatricality, and guitar riffs could occupy the same space without apology. By covering it in 1985, The Power Station invoked that inheritance consciously. The song carried a legacy of liberated physicality into a decade that was simultaneously more polished and, in some ways, more anxious. There is something almost nostalgic in their performance: a reminder that rock music was once in the business of celebrating the body without irony.
Power and Play
The dynamic the lyrics construct is notably reciprocal; both parties are described as magnetic, both are desirable. The song never positions one person as the passive object of another's attention. That mutuality gives the track an energy that feels more playful than predatory. By 1985, with Palmer's cool detachment added to the mix, the swagger had taken on a dimension of self-aware amusement, as though the singer knows exactly how ridiculous and also how correct all of this is. The wink is built into the delivery.
The Era's Appetite for Release
The mid-1980s pop landscape was in many respects cautious: polished, image-conscious, MTV-coded. A blunt, unapologetically physical rock track like this one served as a kind of pressure valve. Radio audiences who spent their week hearing careful, synthesizer-cushioned ballads were reminded by songs like this one that rock music had a different agenda entirely. That contrast helped The Power Station version feel both retro and urgent at the same time.
Why It Still Works
The song's durability rests on Thompson's drumming as much as on the lyric. The physical immediacy of a great drum performance mirrors the physical immediacy of the subject matter. You feel the song in your chest before your brain catches up with what the words are saying. That is what rock music at its most honest is supposed to do, and Get It On, in any decade, delivers it without ceremony. The combination of an enduring original and a supergroup with real chemistry produced something larger than either could have managed alone.
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