MARC BOLAN PRANCED INTO 1972 ON THE BACK OF A STRING OF HITS. BUT AS METAL GURU AND THE SLIDER SHOT T. REX TO INSANE NEW LEVELS, A COCKTAIL OF COGNAC AND COCAINE, PLUS PREMONITIONS OF DEATH AND DISASTER, WERE SPECTRES AT THE FEAST. WOULD HE END THE YEAR IN ONE PIECE? “EVERYTHING MARC DID SPOKE OF INSECURITY,” DISCOVERS MARK PAYTRESS.

PORTRAIT: WOLFGANG HEILEMANN

IN THE SMALL HOURS OF JANUARY 16, 1972, Marc Bolan, still wearing the sparkling gold jacket he’d worn on-stage earlier that night, was returning home to London in a 1956 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud 1 driven by his wife June. He’d recently bought the car on the back of Number 1 hits Hot Love and Get It On, naming it ‘The White Swan’ in honour of the song that had turned his life around the previous winter.

“I’m not into status stuff,” Bolan told journalist Michael Wale. He just had a weakness for cars and liked singing about them, from Ford Mustangs and Cadillacs to the girl with the “hubcap diamond star halo” in Get It On that had ever yone talking about poetr y in pop again. Besides, it was the shape of the Roller that turned him on.

The couple were returning from Boston in Lincolnshire, where T. Rex had just played their first British gig since November. Bolan had pranced, pouted, sat cross-legged for a solo acoustic interlude and urged the band on with warrior cries of “Yeah!” during songs. The estimated 5,000-strong crowd, mostly teenage girls, held up pin-up photos and screamed. Thirty or more fainters were pulled to safety over the crash barriers. At least one ended up in hospital.

“It’s like science-fiction,” said Bolan, who’d named his band after a line in a Ray Bradbur y short stor y. They were Tyrannosaur us Rex then, back in 1967, and until Ride A White Swan changed ever ything, including shortening the band’s name, Bolan seemed forever tainted with failed Summer of Love idealism. That made success, when it came, all the sweeter. “Like it or not,” announced NME in a ‘REXMANIA’ cover stor y on the Boston triumph, “Marc Bolan has become the only true rock star of the Seventies.”

ROCKBOLAN LIKED THAT. FOR MONTHS, WHILE the naysayers cried “Sell Out!”, he’d insist that his new-look, four-piece T. Rex were creating hits destined to endure alongside classic Who, Hendrix and Beatles 45s. He’d grown tired of cynics mocking his ‘Larry The Lamb’ voice, of watching underground acts like Jethro Tull and Juicy Lucy play Top Of The Pops while Tyrannosaurus Rex struggled to shake off the ’60s. Bolan was bigger than pop.

“He uses Jimi Hendrix as an example of the need to move constantly, musically,” Record Mirror’s Val Mabbs wrote in July 1971. Bolan also spoke glowingly of the late guitarist’s “ability to give something so soulful and personal that it gives [his] music an extra dimension”. Describing T. Rex’s music in 1971 as ‘Cosmic Rock’ was another nod to Hendrix.

Late that year, Bolan explained away his pop success by describing himself as “a rock’n’roll poet who’s just boppin’ around on the side”. He knew how fickle pop audiences were, especially since the big names had switched to the LP market, leaving pop at the mercy of studio-based bubblegum acts. Now, that was changing. Rod Stewart and Slade’s recent success was partially down to the Bolan effect. And, considering recent developments, The Who’s concept album champion Pete Townshend re-evaluated the pop single as “concentrated energy in compact form”.

Star and stripes: the selfdescribed “rock’n’roll poet” Marc Bolan in Munich, Germany, February 1972.

Camera Press/Heilemann

Bolan, who’d emulated Townshend’s guitar-lashing antics while supporting The Who in 1967 as part of John’s Children, took Townshend’s view to be an endorsement. The next Rex single would be “a test”, he said, a feet-first venture into pop intensity.

Previous T. Rex hits ran on hooks, melodies and Bolan’s breathy vocal seductions. Released the week after Boston, Telegram Sam was as much about the sound: a soupedup, foot-stomping hit factor y production that matched Bolan’s new resolve.

And it was joyful, the sound of Marc Bolan rejoicing in his “main man” status.