Perhaps noting that Bolan was less committed to flower power idealism than he was to becoming famous, some areas of London’s hippie counterculture regarded him with a jaundiced eye (“He was a cocky little shit,” complains one underground luminary in Jonathon Green’s definitive oral history of the era, Days in the Life), but the music Tyrannosaurus Rex made was frequently extraordinary. Then came Tyrannosaurus Rex, an acoustic duo featuring Bolan and the percussionist Steve Peregrin-Took, but with the former evidently calling all the shots.
MARC PIANO PRODIGY MOD
By the time of his first minor flush of fame in the late 60s, the former Marc Feld had already been a teenage mod who appeared in Town magazine, boasting about how many ties he owned, and a Dylan-inspired folkie called Toby Tyler, before becoming Marc Bolan, the author of two Donovan-esque flop solo singles and the guitarist and second vocalist in the Who-esque troublemakers John’s Children.
Photograph: Ernesto Notarantonio/Ipa/Rex/Shutterstockįor another of the album’s contributors, the singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart, part of Bolan’s appeal is “the idea of switching up your style without any real concern, because he was really going for it”. ‘Maybe he could be running a cult in Fiji’. I thought: ‘This guy doesn’t give a fuck, he’s just being who he is and he’s loving every single minute of it.’ And that had a great effect on me.” At a time when I was still becoming Elton John, he was a great role model. “His songs were great, his records rocked, he had attitude, he had performing skills, he looked fabulous, he dressed the part. “He was the perfect pop star,” says John. The sense that, while other artists ultimately sold more records or had longer careers, it is hard to think of anyone who has been better at actually being a pop star than Bolan, with his self-mythologising lyrics – “I drive a Rolls-Royce / ’Cos it’s good for my voice” – his interviews filled with wild claims and outrageously entertaining lies, his looks, his charisma.
The image: what the Edge calls “that transgressional thing of challenging stereotypes and being this ambiguous creature … that really did create a new kind of space”. What continues to attract musicians to an artist whose imperial phase lasted barely two years? The music, obviously: the golden run of singles that begins with 1970’s Ride a White Swan and ends with 1973’s 20th Century Boy the insouciant, sexually charged brilliance of the albums Electric Warrior and The Slider.
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