Marc Bolan dressed to the left.
 
Sometime in the 1970s, an intrepid BBC reporter posited the question What is it about today’s pop stars that appealed so much to young girls and boys? After talking to a small selection of very emotional and breathy fans, he soon discovered the answer was music. This didn’t quite satisfy our keen reporter who seemed to be hoping for an answer more akin to that given by Mrs. Iris Mountbatten’s when she revealed her son “Leggy” had first appreciated the large talents of the Rutles after seeing their tight trousers.

It’s well known that tight trousers have a long history in rock and pop music stretching all the way back and front to the 1950s when Elvis Presley first unleashed his “Hound Dog” on national television. Within weeks, it seemed as if every singer was wearing a pair of strides one size too small leaving many broadcasters to shoot these performers from the waist up so as not to offend the less fashionable viewers at home. But with the arrival of four well-endowed young men from Liverpool, trousers which revealed everything and left nothing to the imagination quickly became the focal point of the sixties’ “British Invasion” and the inspiration for many bands over the following decade.

For some, what God had provided wasn’t enough and their trousers were often padded with socks, lead pipes, cucumbers, shuttlecocks, “armadillos,” and the massed pipe bands of a well-known Highland regiment. However, having spent minutes if not hours poring over rock stars crotches I have got to the nuts and bolts of this subject and cobbled together a small (or should that be large?) selection of classic rock stars and their unfeasibly large talents…
 

Mick Jagger packed his own lunch.
 

Robert Plant’s noticeable onstage ‘presence.’
 
More rock stars and their lunch boxes, after the jump…
 

 
Paula Yates was an interesting figure who sadly passed away much too early at the age of 40 a number of years ago. In the 1970s she had a column called “Natural Blonde” in the Record Mirror and used the Reform Club in London for the site of her Penthouse spread.

In the 1990s Yates had a show on Channel 4 called The Big Breakfast in which she would interview people while lying in a bed. She was married to Bob Geldof for a while, and they had a messy divorce in 1996 when she left him for Michael Hutchence of INXS. Hutchence committed suicide in 1997 and Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000, which probably tells you everything you need to know about the volatility of their relationship.
 

Paula Yates
 
When she was still in her early twenties, in 1980, Yates released a cheeky book called Rock Stars in Their Underpants. It was just what it seemed to be, a series of pictures of prominent rock musicians wearing underwear. Andy Warhol somewhat hilariously called it ‘‘the greatest work of art in the last decade.’‘
 

 
In addition to the luminaries pictured here, the book features Yates’ future husband Geldof as well as Sparks, Chrissie Hynde, Frank Zappa, Godley & Creme, Steve Jones, Jools Holland, and Phil Lynott.
 

 

 

 
After the jump, Bowie, Lemmy and Macca in their skivvies…...