This is Jacques’ first 7″ and was released in 1955, the titles roughly translate as “In the Square”, “Great Jacques”, “Okay (The Devil)” and “The Hate”. “Great Jacques” and “Okay (The Devil)” are the highlights here and serve as a perfect introduction to the themes that Jacques revisited throughout his career.

The Electric Warrior: the Music of Marc Bolan and T.Rex

26th of March 2014

2014 is promising to be an exciting year for fans of Marc Bolan and T. Rex, myself included. This year marks the 40^th anniversary of the release of Marc Bolan’s magnum opus, the astounding Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow/A Creamed Cage in August. In celebration, Demon Music are releasing a five disc box set including both Zinc Alloy and 1973’s Tanx, two discs of bonus tracks and outtakes from the albums and a DVD containing rare TV performances (including a Top of the Pops performance of ‘Teenage Dream’ that has been lost for decades). On top of this, a special Record Store Day release of Tanx on multi-coloured vinyl will be released and new re-masters of 1970’s T. Rex and A Beard of Stars albums are heading our way shortly, purportedly containing new and unreleased takes of music from this formative era of the T. Rex sound.

I began writing this piece on the anniversary of the historic T. Rex performance at the Wembley Empire Pool (at the time the largest concert venue in London) where the band, at the height of their fame, powered through an hour set of their chart topping singles and most popular album cuts. The concert was captured on film by Ringo Starr, who slips through the crowd of screaming teenagers practically unnoticed as they cry out for their hero. It’s hard to believe such a scene possible considering the fact that the Beatles had split less than two years before. In fact, the scenes were so reminiscent of Beatlemania’s heyday that the British press dubbed the phenomena “T. Rextasy” and both Lennon and McCartney hailed T. Rex as the successor to the Beatles; Lennon claiming that “only one group today is of interest to me, Marc Bolan and T.Rex” and that “Marc Bolan is the only one who can succeed to the Beatles", a sentiment echoed by McCartney who claimed that T. Rex “are the only British group I like”.

The first time I heard the music of Marc Bolan and T. Rex I was an inquisitive five year old who had stumbled across his father’s collection of 7” singles in a dusty corner of the spare room and asked what they were. Up to that point I’d been brought up on a diet of 1950s hits, a cassette of Verdi’s Nabucco that was played to death on car journeys and an infatuation with the music and films of George Formby, existing on cassettes and VHS tapes that my grandfather had lent me. I can’t remember the first song that crackled into existence on our old Kenwood stereo that day, but I do know that that exact moment changed my perceptions of music and entertainment immeasurably.

I’d like to think that the excitement that I felt upon my introduction to Marc Bolan was analogous to that felt by the people who opened their copy of Electric Warrior on its release date, slid the record onto the platter, and for the first time experienced the electric guitar rhythms of ‘Mambo Sun’ grating at the speaker cabinets with such ferocity and stifled energy that it’s perfectly plausible that the sound could burst free from its plastic, grooved prison at any moment. The thudding and precise drum-beat supplied by Bill ‘Legend’ Fifield mirrored Bolan’s guitar, the slight loosening of the high-hat peddle during the metronomic tapping adding to the tension and pressure building within the piece, Visconti’s string arrangements are the only thing that can cool the rock ‘n’ roll ensemble’s burning, pulsating sound. Marc’s voice on ‘Mambo Sun’ is no more than a whisper, yet still contains all the sexual energy that turned thousands of teenage girls into bawling messes at each of his concerts as he croons sweet nothings; “my heart’s all pain for you.”

What follows ‘Mambo Sun’ is thirty five minutes of the most perfect pop and rock music ever recorded. It’s feasible to imagine that those who played this album after knowing Marc as the elfin poet who sang of white swans and mythical, ancient lands were as much shocked by this departure of style as those who’d listened to Iggy Pop’s albums with the Stooges and expected 1977’s The Idiot to be a continuation of the white-hot punk of Metallic K.O. After all, the first T. Rex album contained virtually no drums, excepting a tiny patter of snare on ‘Beltane Walk’ and Mickey Finn’s conga tapping.

Electric Warrior is, in many people’s opinions, the blueprint for pretty much every rock album since its release. Yet if Electric Warrior is the blueprint for rock ‘n’ roll, The Slider is the stencil.

The first thing that strikes you about The Slider is its cover, the fading image of Marc Bolan amongst the trees in John Lennon’s garden, the leather top hat reminiscent of the one worn by the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, the lost expression on Marc’s face as he enters a period of the T. Rex sound in which he would find himself losing control of the UK charts and falling out of favour with both the press and the public. Finally, resting below Marc’s shoulders is the bold red lettering proclaiming the name ‘T. Rex’.

The Slider’s production and the strength of its song writing blow Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust out of the water. Whilst Bowie’s album struggled to convey a very loose concept of an alien superstar based on an amalgamation of Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan and Lou Reed, Bolan wrote poetry and sold it as pop-music. The beauty of The Slider is that though its themes mirror those sung of countless times before (love, girls, sex), Bolan thinks up thousands of ways of echoing these themes without repeating himself (or anybody else) once. In ‘Mystic Lady’, the object of Bolan’s affection “owns [his] night”, in ‘Baby Boomerang’ Bolan dubs the punk-poet Patti Smith a “slim-lined, sheik-faced angel of the night” who haunts Max’s Kansas City’s back room. In ‘Ballrooms of Mars’, perhaps Bolan’s finest love song, he muses spending the last moments of an apocalyptic world dancing with the listener, “we’ll dance our lives away in the ballrooms of Mars.” Amongst these love songs sit two important, blistering precursors to heavy metal, ‘Buick Mackane’ and ‘Chariot Choogle’, which hint towards a heavier T. Rex sound that would ultimately cumulate in the release of the riff-laden ‘20^th Century Boy’ and the pounding lurch of ‘Children of the Revolution’.

The fact is, despite the contemporary press’ accusations of similar sounding songs and a formulaic writing style, Marc Bolan often reinvented himself. Before T. Rex, he played guitar in the proto-punk band John’s Children – notable for their violent on-stage theatrics such as brawling with each other and the audience, whipping their guitars with chains and often causing riots. After that, Bolan started the folk duo Tyrannosaurus Rex and became an underground sensation, one of the last bastions of the hippie era that at the time was burning out quicker than the joints it was founded on. It took almost seven years of experimenting between his first studio recordings and the release of ‘Ride a White Swan’ before Marc settled into his position as pop’s first superstar, and even after his success he was not satisfied. After the release of The Slider and a string of hit singles comparable only to the Beatles, Bolan began to look for ways to challenge his listener in ways similar to what David Bowie would do later in the 1970s.

From the offset, Bolan’s next album, Tanx, is a more adult affair. Its cover image – a black and white image of Marc Bolan straddling a miniature tank – had been initially rejected for being too overtly sexual and a less suggestive shot had to be taken to please EMI. ‘Tenement Lady’, the first track on the album, begins with a false start and, after little over a minute, breaks down into an acoustic love song. The album features a loose and more laidback sound, especially on tracks like the upbeat ‘Mister Mister’ or the sleek and luscious ‘Electric Slim and the Factory Hen’, which I’ve always compared to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street in terms of feeling. 

Tanx also saw Marc Bolan begin to experiment with sound. Phased and processed vocals on songs like ‘Left Hand Luke’ and ‘Rapids’ bring an unearthly feel to them, which is somewhat at odds to their compassionate themes and lyrics. Bolan is more alien on this album than he was when singing about mystical lands in Tyrannosaurus Rex. On Tanx, we also see Marc drifting further away from the use of humour in his lyrics. In the early ‘70s, Bolan had always insisted that he was never serious but by 1974, amid cries of ‘Napoleon complex’, Bolan’s tune changed to a different approach; “I believe everything I do is a work of art.” At the same time, Bolan’s monopoly on the UK charts also began to be threatened Bowie who, although he would never pose a threat to T. Rex on the singles market, was steadily creeping up the album charts, each year coming closer to beating Bolan.

“Essentially what they tried to do with Bowie was create another Marc Bolan, but the interest with the kids was not there,” Marc Bolan mused in a 1973 ‘Creem Magazine’ interview with Cameron Crow after the release of 1973’s Tanx. The truth was, however, that Bolan was coming to realise how much his position at the top of the charts was jeopardised by the Thin White Duke. Tanx became the first T. Rex album to be beaten by a Bowie album in the charts, which is perhaps due to the fact that T. Rex’s 1973 hit singles were not included on Tanx, whist the hit ‘Drive in Saturday’ appeared on Aladdin Sane and ‘Sorrow’ featured on Pin Ups. The fact is, however, that at this point in his career Bolan no longer wanted to be a singles artist restrained to writing glam rock songs for teenage girls.

With Bolan’s next album, 1974’s Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow, he comes one step closer to being the artist he frequently claimed himself to be. Zinc Alloy, which Allmusic shamefully (and wrongly) state is a desperate attempt to capitalise on the success of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, was a concept album Bolan spoke of as early as 1968 when Bowie was no more than a mime act Bolan used to open his shows. Zinc Alloy works as a perfect parody of the pompous “glitter crap gaiety” of the mid-70s glam rock scene that Bolan was quick to dismiss. Bolan had been proclaiming glam rock to be dead at the same time Bowie was painting his face for the Pin Ups cover, and called its heroes ‘posers’ who try to tag along with the current trends in order to sell the same music they’d been making before the glitter explosion.

Zinc Alloy is a monster, a behemoth construction of punk, soul, and funk influence that pre-dates Bowie’s Young Americans by over a year. Its cocaine-fuelled excesses, both lyrically and musically, make Zinc Alloy one of Bolan’s most intriguing works. Whilst Tanx exerted a somewhat laidback feel, possibly due to Bolan relaxing into his fame and cooling off after the successes of Electric Warrior and The Slider, Alloy is Bolan’s unhinged and ferocious attempt to claw back his rapidly fading popularity. On ‘Venus Loon’, recorded at Hendrix’ Electric Lady Studio, the strings are pushed high in the mix; the guitar a treble-laden staccato scratch; an urgent and paranoid itch. Bolan’s voice sweeps blissfully through deranged couplets, contemplating his first love “covered in flies” and rotting after being attacked - before going on to note that “everyone I’ve ever loved I’ll love till I die.”

During the song ‘Sound Pit’, Bolan digs up the characters from his old hit singles in an attempt to finish them off and lay them to rest properly, perhaps an attempt to further distance himself from glam rock; “Metal Guru’s in the loo with my glue, yeah.” “Telegram Sam bought some land in Milan.” This is Bolan’s response to critics questioning what happened to the string of hit singles that usually preceded T.Rex’s albums. The truth was, Bolan was sick of making singles like ‘Metal Guru’ and wanted to make the music that he felt should be popular.

Any person who has listened to Zinc Alloy will recognise it as a completely unique work. Nobody in music history before or since has managed to reach such magnificence as the string section on the fadeout of the track ‘Liquid Gang’ and no other artist has put so much relentless effort into the poetry of his lyrics yet still managed to produce an air of ease to his words. Some of the songs feel as if Bolan was exhaling T. S. Elliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in each breath. During the song ‘Explosive Mouth’ for example, a song I have always held as being a precursor to rap, Bolan “picked up Kenny at an art deco deli and Zero’s a cat with an automated hat and I need to be rid of all the fantasies I’m hiding.”

This aestheticisation of the sound of words is a recurrent technique used by Bolan; the words themselves are less important than the sound of the words or the response one gets to saying them. This is a tactic that was employed throughout Bolan’s song writing career and, like Bowie’s method of creating lyrics by randomly arranging words and phrases into sentences, it is not a technique invented or popularised by him. Bolan’s writing is, however, an example of this style of writing being taken to its extremes and a remarkable exploration of the English language. Books such as Tony Stringfellow’s The Wizard’s Gown have been written in attempt to delve into Marc’s lyrics.

I think that the main reason that Zinc Alloy was not a commercial success is in fact one of its main strengths; the fact that this album was so different to the music in the charts at the time. Even the “Truck Off” tour which included “two drummers, two sax players… and possibly whoever else turns up” and a light show by Arthur Max (Pink Floyd’s production designer) failed to drum up any interest for the new T. Rex. Marc’s own reasoning as to why the album was unsuccessful is perhaps the best explanation of the scenario: it was simply “far too ’74 to be ‘73.”

After Zinc Alloy, Bolan fired his producer in an attempt to further remove himself from the old T. Rex sound. Filling in Visconti’s role himself, he went on to record Bolan’s Zip Gun, a sparse and crisp album that jarred with the still-booming glam scene in the UK. “[W]ith Light Of Love,” (the album’s first track) wrote Ken Barnes in a 1974 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, “Bolan has recharged his vitality, and that raw spirit which galvanized the globe… Electric Warrior is once again present.” Bolan’s Zip Gun is often cited as being the worst and most often underestimated T. Rex album; however I believe that time has treated it far better than its contemporaries. The minimalist production is starkly modern compared to, say, Bowie’s Young Americans, and its simple lyrics are a Warholian exercise in repetition.

1976’s Futuristic Dragon is perhaps the weakest T. Rex album, but this I put down to having a failed concept and musically inconsistent songs as the quality of the song writing and production is high on this effort. Dragon consists of songs recorded as early as 1974 (‘All Alone’), songs that were recorded for Bolan’s Zip Gun (‘Theme for a Dragon’) and, most intriguingly, a feedback-laden introductory poem reminiscent of ‘Future Legend’ from David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. Mixed together, this curiosity is somewhat overwhelming, its loud and abrasive numbers such as ‘Jupitar Liar’ and ‘Calling All Destroyers’ do not sit well amongst the orchestral might of ‘Dawn Storm’ and the refined and elegant love song ‘Dreamy Lady’.

Dandy in the Underworld is perhaps the most underrated album of the late ‘70s. At a time in which punk was blossoming amongst the ashes of glam excess, the Sex Pistols screamed for anarchy and David Bowie and Iggy Pop were releasing their masterpieces, Dandy – billed as T. Rex’s great comeback – only reached #27 in the UK charts.

On this album, Marc presents a collection of restrained, somewhat elegant new wave. Modest is not often a word that one thinks about when considering Marc Bolan, however I truly believe that Dandy is a modest and reflective work. Not only that, but Dandy also contains some of Marc’s best work; the simple yet sweet ‘Soul of my Suit’ and the futuristic ‘Pain and Love’, where Bolan borders on inventing gothic rock a couple of years before Bauhaus’ ‘Bela Bugosi’s Dead’ was recorded, are both prime examples of Bolan writing catchy, inventive and unique songs that are just as good – or in fact better – than those written during his string of 10 hit singles. Had the album ended on the feedback laden final note of ‘Pain and Love’, this would have made a poignant and fitting end to a richly varied and never dull career, but in typical Bolan fashion ‘Teen Riot Structure’ bursts out of nowhere bringing with it an infectious beat that end’s Bolan’s career on an upbeat note.

As I finish writing this piece, I notice that today is the anniversary of T. Rex’s last concert, which took place at the old Portsmouth Locarno. Throughout the years, as my musical tastes have matured and broadened, my love for the music of Marc Bolan has remained. Listening to T. Rex opened my eyes to a world of music that existed before me, pointing my musical compass towards the likes of David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls and a plethora of other artists that stand in the wake of T. Rextacy.