THE car crash that killed Marc Bolan in September 1977 robbed British music of a genuine superstar. It also stole Rolan Bolan’s father, a man he has spent most of his life chasing – through stories, songs and fleeting scraps of memory. “Sometimes I feel him stronger than others,” Rolan tells me. “I can walk into a place and all of a sudden a T Rex song will come on – in America it’s very rare but it’s happening a lot more these days. He must be in the wiring. He’s electric.” Although he never knew his father, Rolan followed his lead, becoming a musician. “There are times when I sing and people freak out and say ‘You sound just like your dad’,” he laughs.

Although Rolan Bolan knows he can never get his father back, he thinks a new DVD and CD can give him the next best thing: a Marc Bolan restored to the pantheon of rock greats. “I don’t think everyone realised how much musical influence my dad had, so this is the first time he’s going to be taken more seriously,” he tells me. “I want to make this the biggest thing that’s hit the planet.”

Until now Marc Bolan’s legacy has been problematic. Nearly 30 years on, it’s hard to imagine he ever really mattered. Who was he? What was he? Even those closest to him were never quite sure and today he exists only as a will o’ the wisp, a satin-clad androgyne stuck in a 1970s timewarp. All that could be about to change.

Rolan Bolan has become de facto guardian of his father’s legacy. For a while, he feared that Marc Bolan, the progenitor of glam rock, “might not even make the rock and roll hall of fame ”. Now, Rolan seems determined to fight for his father’s place in musical posterity. “I’m also trying to let everyone know there is a family there and this guy was more than just a musician, he was also a father.”

The new DVD – which contains unseen footage of the star, plus outtakes and interviews – has also, quite literally, put flesh on the bones of a ghost. “The detail is so intense. You really get to see all my dad’s features, his true eye colour. It’s great, it opens it up,” says Rolan. “I think my dad would be happy.”

Included on the DVD is an interview Rolan Bolan did with Tony Visconti, the legendary producer who sculpted the T Rex sound and later worked on many of David Bowie’s finest albums. “There are moments when I’d choke up a little,” Rolan recalls of that meeting. “There were moments when you could almost feel my dad in the room.”

And what did he learn from Visconti? “I learned a lot about [my father’s] character and some of his intensity and stubbornness when it came to recording. He wanted to work so much, sometimes he could have done a better take but he just wanted to get it over with. He wouldn’t even let the band rehearse it, they’d just jam and then ‘Boom!’ it was done.”

It wasn’t the first time Rolan Bolan and Tony Visconti had met. Years earlier , the Brooklyn-born producer had walked his dead friend’s son around London. Visconti takes up the story: “I said ‘This is where your dad and I used to walk. We used to go to this restaurant for lunch and we used to buy records in this shop’. Rolan was just wide-eyed. Nobody had actually done this with him. He had no physical, tactile experience of his dad with relation to London. We spent the whole day together and I could see that there were definitely missing pieces. He was trying to put together a story about his dad. It wasn’t enough that his dad made hit records – I told him what he ate for lunch and what wine he liked.”

The centrepiece of the new DVD is Born To Boogie, a concert film shot by Ringo Starr in 1972. “I have watched other documentaries about my dad and a lot of people [implied] that he was really arrogant and kind of an asshole. Watching Born To Boogie it seems like he and Ringo were having a blast,” says Rolan. In fact, he reveals, Starr only agreed that the footage could be used on the DVD if Rolan Bolan was involved in the project. However, that was as far as Rolan’s contact with the former Beatle went.

Has he spoken to Ringo? “No.” Has he tried to speak to him? “Yeah,” he chuckles. “He let us do the project with my involvement and I figure one of these days we’ll cross paths.”

Rolan is 29 now: the age his father was when he died. Just two at the time of the accident, he was taken to America immediately afterwards by his mother, the singer Gloria Jones. Today he lives in Los Angeles . What little he knows about his early life in London, and his dead father, comes mostly from Jones, who was driving the car in which Bolan was killed and who was vilified in the British press after the accident.

“It helped her heal, being able to see me and talk about him, share the stories,” he says. “It’s the only way you can move forward. So many people lose someone in their lives and they never talk about it. You’ve got to talk about it, you can’t forget about the people that left us. It’s the only way you can keep them alive.”

Given that, it’s no surprise that he leaps to defend his son-of-a-rock-star moniker: “I love the name,” he insists . “Someone said to me ‘Rolan, you got the best name in the industry.’

“You can make fun, you can do this and that but it’s my f***ing name and I love it.”

Has he got a middle name? “Yeah. It’s embarrassing but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s Seymour: the name of some old wizard that was on TV. My dad liked wizards.”

What sort of man did his mother describe ? “A very loving, fun, giving person,” he says. “She told me that he believed in himself and never took much crap. He really loved the fans so when people weren’t buying his records and his career was starting to go it really upset him. He couldn’t understand what he was doing wrong. And then he found himself again – that was when everything was going well and unfortunately that was when the accident happened.”

What made Marc Bolan’s death doubly cruel was that, at the time, he felt he was on the verge of a comeback. Earlier in 1977 he had toured with The Damned, his song 20th Century Boy had been covered by Siouxsie And The Banshees, and no punk costume was complete without its Marc Bolan Is God badge. Of course, there was a teasing irony in the adulation but also genuine respect, a notion that punk’s Year Zero mantra wasn’t as all-pervasive as Malcolm McLaren wanted to think. Punk was a party for the young, but included on the guest list were a few names from an earlier age: David Bowie, Iggy Pop and, of course, Marc Bolan .

He even looked better in 1977. He was slimmer and the dark-eyed pixie look had returned to a face grown chubby through years of drugs and booze. Those props had been jettisoned too. The Damned’s Captain Sensible recalls howling with laughter when, during a tour stop in a greasy spoon café, the band looked up from their egg and chips to see Bolan jog by in a tracksuit.

If Bolan was right about the comeback, it would have propelled him out of the glam rock 1970s, through the punk years and into the straight-legged 1980s, there to upstage the New Romantics and show Adam Ant how the original dandy highwayman once did it.

But for all the ifs that haunt Marc Bolan’s legacy, there is no argument about the facts. He didn’t just dominate the early 1970s, he owned them. T-Rextasy was a word dreamed up by Bolan’s publicist BP Fallon as a rejoinder to Beatlemania, but it perfectly encapsulated the hysteria that met Bolan and his band T Rex everywhere they went. With the single Ride A White Swan, released in October 1970, the band had showcased a rougher, more electrified sound, but when a glitter-bedecked Bolan performed Hot Love on Top Of The Pops in March 1971, everything changed. Glam rock, as the newspapers would soon christen it, was born that night.

T Rextasy exploded with the subsequent UK tour. Fans started turning up with scissors, desperate for a lock of Bolan’s hair. In Bournemouth, there was a near riot and, by the time the group hit Glasgow on May 21, Bolan and his bandmates – Mickey Finn, Steve Curry and Bill Legend – needed a police escort to even get to the venue. The live shows were pandemonium and the headlines spoke of a group that was bigger than The Beatles . That same year, T Rex released the single Get It On, the album Electric Warrior, and another single, Jeepster. Telegram Sam, Metal Guru and Children Of The Revolution and the album, The Slider, would follow in 1972 – a year that would be another story entirely.

Born Marc Feld in Hackney in 1947, Bolan was always a scenester. In 1962, aged 15, he’d been profiled by Town magazine for an article about working-class Mods, headlined Faces Without Shadows. By 1965 he’d changed his name, first to Bowland, then Bolan, and released his first single. In 1966, he joined the band John’s Children as a guitarist and then, foreseeing the hippy revolution, formed Tyrannosaurus Rex. An earlier incarnation of T Rex, it featured a cross-legged Bolan strumming an acoustic guitar alongside bongo-playing sidekick Steve Peregrin Took.

He first met Tony Visconti in 1967 . “I offered to produce him and he was on my doorstep the next day,” recalls Visconti. “We got on great. We had identical taste in music. One thing I didn’t know about was The Lord Of The Rings, which Marc was very much into. He bought it for me and said: ‘You have to read these books if you want to know what I’m about.’ That was the first thing he made me do. I had to understand where he was coming from. His early music was full of the imagery of that kind of stuff.”

But despite the closeness of their working relationship, Visconti never really worked Bolan out. “He was a very complicated person. He was shy and withdrawn but he could overcome it with this incredible courage and arrogance. But it was a front. When he got his first bad review he called me up in tears saying ‘Why do they hate me?’ Then he said: ‘I’ll never cry again.’ He got very steely after that. I could never really get a true read on him.”

Photographer Keith Morris says the same thing. He first met Bolan in the late 1960s, when Morris was working for underground magazine Oz and Bolan was flitting around the psychedelic and hippy scenes. Their casual acquaintance became a friendship in October 1971 when Morris was hired by Bolan’s then manager, Tony Secunda, to take publicity pictures. By then, Tyrannosaurus Rex had become the electrified monster that was T Rex. Although Morris was initially reluctant to take the job – “The music was a bit top 10 for me” – he was fascinated by Bolan as a subject. “From a photographer’s point of view he was very interesting,” he recalls. “He was totally off the wall. ”

Bolan, with his animated, expressive face, treated each session like a performance, which suited Morris. “He knew what shapes he made because he spent a lot of time looking in the mirror. So he was very self-aware and could project what I wanted and what he wanted.”

Some of these pictures have since become iconic, such as the one of Bolan sitting cross-legged, a Flying V guitar poking up like a phallus from his lap. One in particular has particular resonance for Morris. “We were doing some shooting in a warehouse,” he recalls. “We got chatting and wandered round to the back where there was a car, a Cadillac I think. It was parked and he just said, ‘Why don’t you take a picture of me behind the wheel? I’ve never learned to drive because I’ve always thought I’d die in a car crash.’ He jumped behind the wheel and I started shooting and, as I took one picture, he threw his head back and laughed maniacally. Knowing what happened afterwards, it has a drama of its own. When I look at that picture, I always think of that conversation.”

So how did he feel when he heard about Bolan’s death? “There’s always shock when you hear that someone you knew well and liked has died in quite a violent way,” he says. “But I could never imagine an old Marc Bolan.”

As well as their professional relationship and their growing friendship, they were also neighbours: when Bolan and his then wife June moved into a new flat in Clarendon Gardens, Little Venice, they found that Morris was living across the canal.

“We socialised a lot and I was working three or four days a week with him ,” says Morris. “Marc’s writing was appalling and he wasn’t very gifted in normal educational terms, but he was very knowledgeable. A mass of contradictions. That’s why he was a very interesting person to be around.”

What did they talk about? “With Marc it was either music or the occult. He didn’t talk about football. Morrissey said recently you could never imagine Marc Bolan in a pub and that does sum him up very well.”

The former Smiths singer did indeed say that, and a lot more besides. Morrissey revealed that his first ever live concert was a T Rex show in Manchester’s rough Belle Vue district. “It was messianic and complete chaos,” he recalled. “My father dropped me off outside wearing a purple satin jacket. I think he thought I’d be killed and he waved me off like it was the last time he’d ever see me alive. It must have been like losing your child to a deadly cult.”

That was June 16, 1972, and if the preceding 12 months had seen T-Rextasy hit its stride, then this was the year it hit its seat-wetting, ear-piercing, satin-ripping peak. We can even date its high watermark: March 18 1972, two concerts in front of 20,000 people at the Wembley Pool that were immortalised in film by Ringo Starr.

Released as Born To Boogie, Starr’s film intercuts live footage of the evening concert with skits such as a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in which Bolan performs a medley of hits backed by a string quartet. The skits are best described as zany, but there’s no denying the power of the live performances: Bolan struts the stage like a latter-day Mick Jagger, pouting, gesticulating, even licking the microphone at one point. The fan response is orgasmic; indeed Starr told Keith Morris afterwards that even at the height of Beatlemania, he had never experienced anything like it.

For Marc Bolan, nothing ever quite matched that night. The Beatles are more famous today than they ever were but Bolan and his music have been preserved in amber, stuck in a 1970s time capsule that makes it difficult to assess his legacy or his influence. Subsequent albums didn’t fare as well as Electric Warrior and The Slider, T Rex failed to crack America and by the time 1973 was over Slade were topping the charts. Meanwhile, American acts such as The Osmonds and David Cassidy were eating into Bolan’s constituency and, in 1974, Visconti and Bolan’s artistic partnership came to an end.

“He, along with one or two others, bridged a gap between two eras and if you want to isolate his legacy, it was very much as a pop icon,” says Keith Morris. “He clicked at a time when the whole rock and roll thing was looking a bit tired. He was a breath of fresh air.”

For Visconti, Bolan was a “borderline” genius. “The only reason I have reservations is because I think he under- estimated himself,” says Visconti. “There was a critical period when he and I broke up when, if he could have just taken a year off and absorbed some deeper form of culture, he could have come up with something like Pete Townshend did when he wrote Tommy. But he always felt that the work would be too hard and he’d lose his audience.”

So although he hears echoes of T Rex in modern bands like U2 and Placebo, even the man who worked closest with Bolan is unsure of where to place him in the pantheon. Rolan Bolan doesn’t agree . For him, the re-release of Born To Boogie will finally see his father get the credit he deserves. T-Rextasy Part Two then? Dust down your purple satin pants and, as Marc Bolan himself might have said, let’s get it on. And for the son he never knew, there’s still a father to find.

“Some of my stories have become memories but also I have the music. There’s a lesson to be learned there. Even though he wasn’t there for me, I feel his presence. The older I get, the more I see his mannerisms and stuff come out. Everyone keeps on calling me Marc, now.”

Born To Boogie is released on DVD and double CD on May 16. Born To Boogie, and a Tartan Short, All Over Brazil – the story of a young T Rex fan in 1970s Glasgow – are showing at the UCI Edinburgh tomorrow at 8.15pm and the Glasgow Film Theatre on May 3, 4 and 5 at 8.15pm

24 April 2005