Get It On (Bang a Gong)

Bang a gong. Get it on. Four words, and the room leans in. That is the Power Station doing Marc Bolan’s “Get It On,” the cut that sits on the self-titled 1985 album like a hot engine block in a showroom full of chrome. The Zoo has it cranked, the way a rock station is supposed to play it: loud, wide, and a little dangerous. If you came up on the original T. Rex single, this one does not replace it. It argues with it. Bolan wrote a glitter hymn in 1971. Fourteen years later a New York studio band built out of Duran Duran muscle, a Chic drummer, and a blue-eyed soul singer turned the same lyric into a hard-rock strut. You can hear both records in the same sentence and still know which one just walked through the door.

The Power Station was never supposed to be a band. In 1984 John Taylor and Andy Taylor, bass and guitar from Duran Duran and no relation to each other, wanted a break from the synth-pop machine that had made them famous. They wanted something with Led Zeppelin in the bloodstream. The excuse was a one-off. Model and singer Bebe Buell, who was seeing John Taylor at the time, wanted to cut a cover of “Get It On.” The Taylors called Tony Thompson, the drummer whose backbeat had carried Chic through “Le Freak” and “Good Times,” and booked time at the Power Station on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, the room that gave the project its name. Bernard Edwards, Thompson’s partner in Chic and one of the great bass players and producers of the era, took the chair. The Buell demo never became a record. The session did.

The original plan was a rotating cast of singers over a fixed rhythm section. Names that got floated included Mick Jagger, Billy Idol, Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs, and Mick Ronson, Bolan’s old sparring partner from the glam years. Robert Palmer, the Yorkshire singer who had already made a career out of sounding cooler than the room, was invited in to cut “Communication.” He heard the “Get It On” tracks and asked for a pass at the vocal. By the end of the day the chemistry was obvious. Palmer stayed for the whole album. Jason Corsaro engineered. The record came out on Capitol in the States and EMI elsewhere on March 25, 1985, and climbed to number 6 on the Billboard 200 and number 12 in Britain.

“Get It On (Bang a Gong)” was the second single, out at the end of April 1985, behind “Some Like It Hot.” The parenthetical is an American habit. When T. Rex released “Get It On” in 1971 it was already the title of a hit by the jazz-rock band Chase, so the U.S. pressing picked up the chorus shout and called it “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” The Power Station kept both names on the label. Bolan’s lyric is still the lyric: dirty and sweet, clad in black, built like a car, a hubcap diamond-star halo, the teeth of the hydra, a cloak full of eagles. Palmer does not camp it. He sings it like a man who has decided the girl in the song is real and the band behind him is not going to wait. Andy Taylor’s guitar is the argument. It is thicker than Bolan’s, more Leslie and less glitter, with a solo that owes as much to arena rock as it does to Marc’s boogie. John Taylor locks in under Edwards’ production. Thompson plays like a man who has been waiting for a track this wide open. The album cut runs about five and a half minutes. The single edit trims it to under four. Both of them hit.

The single reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 22 in the UK. That American peak is sharper when you remember what else was on the chart. Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill,” the Bond theme, was sitting at number 1 in the States while two of the band’s own members were riding a side project into the Top 10. “Some Like It Hot” had already gone to number 6. Three singles from the album made the U.S. Top 40, the third being “Communication.” For a record that started as a favor and a demo, that is a strange kind of victory.

Palmer sang with the original lineup in public exactly once. On February 16, 1985, the Power Station played “Some Like It Hot” and “Get It On” on Saturday Night Live. The horn section that day included saxophonist Lenny Pickett, who joined the show’s house band later that year and eventually became its musical director. After that, Palmer walked. The union had made the album. It was not going to survive a tour. He went off to cut Riptide, and he took the sound with him. Edwards produced. Thompson played drums. Andy Taylor played guitar. “Addicted to Love” is the child of these sessions, whether anybody admitted it at the time. The road band needed a singer. They hired Michael Des Barres, the actor and frontman who had co-written Animotion’s “Obsession” and fronted Detective and Silverhead. Des Barres learned “Get It On” in a London studio on no sleep and took the gig. He is the voice on the Live Aid set at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985, and on the full show from the Spectrum in that same city the following month, a tape that finally surfaced on the 40th-anniversary edition.

Thompson’s 1985 did not stop at this record. At Live Aid he also sat in with Led Zeppelin, sharing the drum stool with Phil Collins, the same week the Power Station was on the bill. For a minute the old rumor mill had him in the frame for a Zeppelin reunion. It never happened. What did happen is that the Power Station’s drum sound, big, dry, and right up front, became one of the templates for the rest of the decade. Edwards had built a career on making the pocket feel expensive. Here he let the guitars snarl and still kept the low end dancing.

The lineup did not hold. Palmer, Thompson, and Edwards are all gone. Edwards died in April 1996, in Tokyo, while the band was back together cutting a second album, Living in Fear. That reunion swapped John Taylor for Edwards on bass. Thompson died in November 2003. Palmer had died that September, at 54, in a Paris hotel. Andy Taylor and John Taylor are still out there. John is the bassist in Duran Duran. Andy, after years away and a hard fight with illness, has been back in the conversation around the band that made his name. In January 2026 Rhino put out a 40th-anniversary set of The Power Station: a remaster, raw instrumentals from the 1984 sessions, the Live Aid cuts, and that unreleased Spectrum show. John and Andy both sat for a new interview in the booklet. The record that was supposed to be one song for a girlfriend got a second life four decades on.

Play the two versions back to back and the difference is the point. Bolan’s record is a wink, a teenage riot in platform boots, produced with Tony Visconti and a saxophone that sounds like a street corner. The Power Station version is a grown band in a famous room, with a singer who treats the chorus like a command. “Get it on, bang a gong” still works because the words were never fragile. They were built to be shouted. Palmer shouts them without raising his voice. That is the trick.

You are hearing it on The Zoo, the station that still believes a deep cut and a hit can share the same hour. Robert Palmer’s catalog, including his turn with this band, lives at robertpalmer.com. The Taylors’ long-running home base is Duran Duran: the official site at duranduran.com, Facebook, Instagram, and X. The Power Station itself never kept a standing website or a social account of its own. The music did not need one. Cue it up, turn it up, and let Thompson’s kick drum settle the argument.