Twentieth Century Boy

A montage of Marc created for the Network DVD release of his ITV series.

‘There’s a pop group called Tyrannosaurus Rex...’

…so said the pretty young student teacher who’d been seconded into our form as a classroom assistant. She'd seen me drawing the prehistoric creature in my ‘Topic Book’ (a hazelnut in every bite), and it was the autumn of 1970. I remember her as being trendy in appearance, with the then-fashionable short hairstyle soon to be sported by Jo Grant in Dr. Who. Our actual form teacher, a middle-aged frump, wouldn't have known the pop group from their prehistoric namesake, but this ‘bright young thing’ was exactly the type to appreciate the proto-hippie band, long championed by John Peel in his ‘perfumed garden’.

This was very likely the first time I heard of the band that, within a matter of months would be re-christened T Rex. I’ve long suspected that palentologists later adopted this ‘cooler’ nomenclature for official purposes, as the books I owned in the 1960s always referred to the dino-king as simply Tyrannosaurus, only occasionally adding the ‘Rex’ suffix. T Rex, then, was seemingly, the creation of Marc Bolan, along with his whole glam rock dandy persona.

The recent publicity surrounding the 40th anniversary of Bolan’s death has prompted me to reflect on whether the man and his music meant anything to me back in the day...

My earliest memory of the band seems to come shortly after hearing of their existence in the schoolroom, and I’m fairly certain they were still in their ‘cross-legged and bongos’ phase at that point. Whatever incarnation of the band I saw, it was on Top of the Pops, and the song must have been Ride a White Swan, by which time they had adopted the shorthand version of the name by which they would become world famous. I didn’t care for Ride a White Swan then or now, and it’s little wonder, considering that it was apparently inspired by Mungo Jerry’s hit In the Summertime which had reached number one a few months previously. As you may know from an earlier entry, I consider In the Summertime to be the nadir of popular music, and Swan... with its whimsical, chugalong melody clearly shares some of its DNA.

Fortunately, the band dropped this ‘electric jug band’ style for its subsequent releases, and the full-on glam T Rex sound definitely felt of the moment when records like Get It On and Twentieth Century Boy appeared in the charts. I didn’t buy either of them, nor indeed have I ever owned any T Rex recordings, but I didn’t object to hearing them in the Sunday chart rundown, nor to the sight of Bolan strutting and swaggering on Top of the Pops. Bolan’s appearances seem to typify TOTP of the 1972-73 era, complete with its crazy ‘solarized’ camera effects, which were always seen to particularly good effect with that mane of hair haloed against the studio lights. For all this, I knew at the time that, alongside Gary Glitter, T Rex wasn’t really my kind of thing. Perhaps I sensed the massive ego at work, or was somehow aware of Bolan taking himself too seriously, but for me, the glam band of choice was always Slade (or ‘the Slade’ as we referred to them back then).

Not so for a school friend of mine, who absolutely idolized Bolan, and worshipped T Rex to the exclusion of all others. We toyed for a while with the idea of getting some kind of band together, but he was too much in thrall to his idol (especially his Tolkeinesque early phase), and I to mine (the Beatles) for us to be able to carve out much common ground. He gave me a few copies of TV21, though, so that was okay...

My own favourite T Rex waxing was probably Solid Gold Easy Action, which charted at a time when the top twenty felt like almost wall-to-wall good stuff (early 1973), and was a welcome addition to the year’s various 12th birthday party bashes. Just a year later, with his glittering star now in the descendant, Bolan, with immaculate timing, gave us Teenage Dream. I’d just turned thirteen and we had this in the charts, to say nothing of Alice Cooper’s Teenage Lament ‘74. Frankly, I felt somewhat embarassed at having my new teen status so much in the pop spotlight.

I didn’t really notice the gradual decline of T Rex. Their absence from the charts seemed more or less par for the course at the time. In retrospect, one can look back and see a pattern – the years of obscurity followed by the sudden rise to fame, popularity and status as a pop icon, followed by the inevitable decline. It’s a career trajectory that has been followed by many others, and at the time it felt more or less like the natural order of things for any of pop’s flavours of the month to be cast aside as soon as the next big thing came along. Even the mighty Slade felt like a spent force by 1974, and glam, like all pop trends, enjoyed no more than two to three years of popularity before dwindling into nostalgic oblivion.

It’s hard to say what, if anything, took its place. From 1974 to 1977 there seemed something of a power vacuum in the pop charts, as an ‘anything goes’ mentality took hold. What was the defining sound of those years? Probably pomp rock, but its only notable chart entries came courtesy of Queen. A new kind of easy-on-the-ear pop was emerging, with Abba leading the way, and the glam rock stars of a few years before were forced to adapt or perish. As things turned out, Bolan did both.

His attempt to adjust to the changing musical climate came less in the form of his actual recorded work than his championing of new young bands like The Jam, who appeared on his short-lived ITV show. Bolan, introducing them, was still clad in a decidedly glam-era skin-tight glitter suit, corkscrew hair and all, but he was obviously drawn to the new sounds, and went out of his way to make room for the young pretenders on his show. I never saw it myself, as it aired too early in the evening, but I later made my own very small contribution to the legend by designing the sleeve for its release on DVD (and when I say ‘designing’, I mean I slapped on a huge picture of Bolan, to which I appended a photoshopped version of the logo from the TV series).

To me, one of the most significant facts about T Rex at the time was the band’s own record label, which I would frequently come across whilst browsing through remaindered chart singles in Woolworths. Not many bands had their own label, I thought, apart from the Beatles and Apple, and this small fact seemed to confer some significance on the efforts of Mr. B. I did, however, read the piece about Bolan and T Rex that appeared in 1972’s Story of Pop book (a compilation of articles from the eponymous magazine), and was somewhat amused by the sight of the young ‘Marc Feld’, with oiled hair, pictured as a ‘sharp mod’ in a couple of vintage photos (frankly, his appearance put me more in mind of Jimmy Clitheroe...)

I’m afraid that when I heard the news of Bolan’s demise – via the Birmingham Evening Mail – it didn’t mean a great deal to me. It would have been more shocking had he taken his last bow at the height of his fame, but by 1977 – five years on from the band’s high water mark – T Rex felt like yesterday’s men. By comparison, I remember being more ‘shocked and stunned’ at the news, in summer 1973, of Slade drummer Don Powell’s car smash which left Powell in a coma and his girlfriend dead. At the time of the accident, there was every expectation of Powell’s not pulling through, and although he eventually made a full recovery, the incident served as a reminder that pop idols are mere mortals like the rest of us, as did the premature death of Bolan four years later.

Bolan had, apparently, rather foreseen his own premature demise (although I refuse to believe the story told by his manager that he literally imagined himself dying in a Mini as opposed to the Porsche that killed James Dean). And although he may well have gone on to greater things, re-inventing himself, perhaps, in the manner of his contemporary, Bowie, he could just as easily have slid into a ‘fat Elvis’ twilight, a fate which had been somewhat foreshadowed by his physical appearance a year or so prior to his death.

T Rex may never have been my favourite band, but they definitely felt like an integral part of what was happening in pop at the time, and let’s face it, the seventies wouldn’t have been the seventies without Marc Bolan and his corkscrew hair...