"IT'S SO NAUGHTY TO PRETEND ..."

If that last statement reads like a moral indictment of Tyrannosaurus Rex, then frankly it shouldn't.  After all, it was one-time Bolan manager Simon Napier-Bell who once described Marc as "a wonderful charming fraud." Classic pop music, especially in this manufacturing nation Britain, has always sprung not from some Luddite sense of 'realism' but from creative artifice.  Tyrannosaurus Rex were enchanting, exotic and mystical because they were calculated to be so - and what is so wrong with that? Some of the most original and interesting Pop groups ever were indeed original and interesting precisely because they were thus contrived - classic 80s act Bow Wow Wow spring to mind as an example.

Throughout his life, Marc Bolan was essentially a seducer.  As Napier-Bell observed, from the age of 14 onwards Marc got what he wanted in life through sexual manipulation (women by every attractive male archetype under the sun, gay men by homoerotica, straight men by accurately aping flirtatious girlish mannerisms, etc) ultimately incorporating this into T.Rex's stage act.  When it came to seducing a certain strata of the counterculture - middle class, trendy, culturally snobbish and a tad self-righteous - Marc, with the connivance of Steve Peregrin Took and later Mickey Finn, instead exploited quite different levels of their conscience - their senses of fantasy and their aspirations for cultural superiority. 

In essence he was manipulating their anxieties about being apart enough from the herd to be capable of searching out rare gems of profound Serious Art - the more esoteric the better.  Thus Bolan was able to conduct a few years of advanced pop apprenticeship by carving out a temporary career fronting an avant-fashionable Alternative Music act.  Tyrannosaurus Rex was, correct, a con trick, yet it was the group's very 'phoniness' which gave them the freedom to create music and visuals far more captivating and appealing than that of more 'real' folk-hippy festival troubadours such as the Incredible String Band or Gong. 

Such 'genuine' acts, being themselves slaves to the same obsessions with authenticity as their fans, lacked the potency to charm and so have aged very badly indeed.  The 'counterfeit' Tyrannosaurus Rex, by contrast, still stand up today as beguilingly beautiful and soothing (if offbeat) music with which to chill out and so has lasted the test of time.

Tyrannosaurus Rex's history divides into two distinct phases - Seduction and Abandon.  The cut off point lies with the change of sideman, but that isn't the real point.  In essence, the Took era represents The Seduction and the Finn era represents the Abandon.  The latter quite simply covers the gradual dismantling of the increasingly obsolescent Contrivance, starting with Took's departure and ending with a glammed up T.Rex giving its first glammed up Proper Pop performances on Top Of The Pops in March 1971.  As such, it incorporates the first few months of T.Rex - Marc and Mickey cracking the charts with Ride A White Swan, the eponymous 'brown' album plus the brief but spectacular Bolan/Finn/Currie power trio - and for the purpose of this article, these will be treated as part of Tyrannosaurus Rex. 

The former, contrary to popular belief, was not an element in the band's conception. Rather, it gradually evolved over the course of the summer and autumn of 1967.  The original intent of Tyrannosaurus Rex had not been an ersatz flower power unit, but rather an economy version of the Marc Bolan Band of the same name (featuring Took as drummer) which had been created to show Marc's former band John's Children how things should really be done, only to fall flat on its face at its Electric Garden debut in July 1967.

That debacle had cost Bolan's new band its electric equipment and amplification plus half its line-up (pipe-smoking guitarist Ben Cartland plus an unnamed ulcer-ridden bassist) while the resulting destitution drove Took to sell his drum kit (bought on the proceeds of a GPO clerical job.) to buy food. The two impoverished remnants were reduced to busking the band's set in an underpass near Hyde Park on a battered acoustic guitar and purloined bongos.  While this new format soon proved workable enough to be kept as the long term arrangement, the band's early demos with a session bassist - immortalised on The Beginning of Doves - still follow the Rock 'n Roll style of most other era's of Marc's career. Tracks like Rings Of Fortune, Hot Rod Mama and Sara Crazy Child sound as if they were rough acoustic demos for T.Rex or even John's Children.

By the time the busking act (with the help of John Peel including their live show as part and parcel of his DJing gigs) made the jump over to the club and concert stage scene, however, (as immortalised on TAG's There Was a Time CD of the 23rd September 1967 gig at the Middle Earth club) the duo had adapted their sound and style to acclimatise to their new surroundings.  Dressing the part to enhance their enchantment (the Barrett-curled Bolan in gypsy waistcoat, tap shoes and proto-New Romantic frilly shirt, Took in cape or stylish long jacket, flamboyant women's boots, shades and goatee) the twosome presented an image which captured what every doped flower-child liked to imagine themselves to be - far from the cheap-robed proto-crusty reality of your average boggie in the street.

Marc's lyric writing had often displayed a mystical edge in the past, now his wordplay frequently became a musical sound unto itself, designed to make his verses sound far more profound than perhaps they actually were.  Tony Visconti cites the song-title "Salamanda Palaganda" as a fine example of this - meaningless but rhythmical.  One could similarly pinpoint namedrops of far and distant cultures - Afghan Woman, "my lovely Inca love" "old Eutruscan gold" "Madras silk and satin" - were designed to massage middle class hippy longings for eclectic exotica. 

It speaks volumes about Tyrannosaurus Rex's punters that this tactic worked without having to bother to blend these references into any kind of coherent context.  On occasion, Bolan might even work in brief 'mystical' parables - cod versions of the sort of tales from stoner bible The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, such as the evil 'cobra seer' who 'slaughtered a Malayan (!) sun bear' only to have the tables turned on him by a manifestation of Night.  While only the most deluded of potheads (plus a smattering of latterday Bolan fandom) could regard this seriously as "ancient wisdom" Bolan's ability to synthesise such a veneer was a vital ingredient in the Tyrannosaurus Rex stew.

Sitting in uncharacteristically humble Lotus position (with Took perched on a stool) and eschewing any overt showmanship would both reinforce Marc's "message" as would much of the mystical dogma of his interviews.  "Mythology is old truth" he once postured in typical Hippy rhetoric, "changed and woven, because people do that, but it's Truth."  Of course, harping on about Truth or being Real is an old tried and tested way of pressing buttons (or displaying ones own buttons depressed) in alternative music ideology, one that neatly evades any need for coherent analysis.

One area of the Seduction in which Bolan lacked expertise was the issue of communicating to an audience of drug-takers in the throes of high. The experience of the failed gig at Middle Earth was evidence enough that Marc by himself lacked the specialist knowledge needed for making music that was palatable to acidheads.  If he was going to take the music down this road, he would need expert involvement.

So Steve, an actual LSD user, would be invaluable in rendering Bolan's rock'n roll Safe For Freak Consumption, much as Gloria Jones would prove useful as an advisor on how to make convincing Soul music.  Tookie was Bolan’s translator, turning his words into audio signals to trigger off mental pictures in a tripped-out audience.  It was Took’s arrangements which were instrumental in transforming Bolan’s music from the straightforward rock ‘n roll it had once been (and would again be one day) into an 'exotic' brew of musical eccentricity. 

A typical example of this would be Strange Orchestras, in which Took stole the show with his vocals.  Bolan sang about strange creatures playing tiny instruments but Took actually brought them to life.  His squawking parrot vocal at the start, sighed harmonising, terrifying draws of breath and deep, bassy, “goo-goo-black-cat” during the darker final verse help the mind provide visuals to the lyrics, but best of all is the final malevolent chittering, which halts the song.

 Marc once summed up Tyrannosaurus Rex as an acoustic version of Pink Floyd and indeed one can highlight their most vital instrumental trademark as being an obsession with toy instruments - generally played by Took - which could make their songs sound like a psychedelic toyshop of chimes and taps and flutes and whistles, or perhaps like the “room of musical tunes” mentioned in the final verse of Pink Floyd’s “Bike” as a lead-in to the similar array of toyshop sounds which had seen out that band’s debut LP.

Even their choice of basic instruments, while motivated more by budget than image, fell in line with their overall manifesto.  Marc's use of acoustic guitar pandered to the prejudices of "back to nature" authenticity obsessives still smarting from the electrification of the 'Judas' Dylan (this whole acoustic fetish would ultimately result in such atrocities as MTV Unplugged) while Took's use of bongos fell in line with hippy acts and other muso-types who worshipped their use for creating a distinctly marijuana-derived sense of ‘profundity’ (to this day, one can barely walk round parts of Camden Market, Notting Hill Gate or most major rock festivals without tripping over some stoned percussionist playing/’meditating’ his way through ponderous heavy beats!) 

All this would presently strike a chord with the same hippy audiences who had condemned the earlier electric version of the band. In the final analysis, Tyrannosaurus Rex were the musical equivalent of the assorted windchimes, scarves, rugs, pipes, ornaments, joss-sticks, Nicaraguan coffee, dreamspinners and other 'tasteful' goodies which can be found on sale at Camden Market or festivals and found draped around the suburban houses of many a middle-aged middle class hippy couple who, back in the 60s and 70s would have decorated their student pads in quite a similar fashion (perhaps minus the pinewood Ikea furniture and Observer colour supplement!).

This massaging of the tastes and sentiments of certain subspecies of the counterculture took Tyrannosaurus Rex a long way.  Their initial burst of chart action in the first half of '68 - two top 40 hits Debora and One Inch Rock, plus a top 20 LP - My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair But Now They're Content To Wear Stars On Their Brows (a title based loosely on a speech by the character Tom Bombadil from Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings) compare respectably with the alt-music apprenticeships of many other Proper Pop icons - for example current pop princess Sophie Ellis Bextor's two top 30 hits and #21 LP fronting late '90s indie band Theaudience.

They also displayed neat business acumen by not blowing their underground credibility with too many hits.  The awkward follow-up album Prophets Seers And Sages, The Angel Of The Ages, plus even more awkward single Pewter Suitor helped avoid charges of hype and sellout for the time being, while high profile sets on the festival circuit, as well as the Hyde Park concerts (allegedly Bolan's idea) cemented the reputations of Marc Bolan and Steve Took as, to use journalist George Tremlett's phrase, "Crown Princes of the Counterculture"

But of course, this Seduction couldn't fool the whole underground community.  Tyrannosaurus Rex may have appealed to the flower-power subspecies of hippies - but there were others.  The flipside of the bourgeois self-satisfied romanticism was a decidedly anarchic, wild and revolutionary wing of the Underground, into Garage Rock and Hard Rock and influenced heavily by Detroit-based pre-punk revolutionary band the MC5 and another crew of raucous sixties punks, the Fugs.  While John Lennon and CND anti-Vietnam War peaceniks harped on about Giving Peace A Chance, this crew actively rooted for the Viet Cong to win the war - which of course the VC eventually did. It was from this sector that the real action of the '60s Revolution -  the agitprop stunts, the bikes, the riots, the idealist literature and the wild chaos - truly found seed.

By 1968, a musical core for this side of the Counterculture had emerged in the twin shape of failed pop act (and nearly-Rolling Stones) The Pretty Things, plus a uniquely wild and angry Rock outfit from Notting Hill Gate, the Deviants - perhaps the nearest sixties equivalent to the Sex Pistols, led by Underground ringleader, activist, and International Times writer Mick Farren, he of the wild afro and raging attitude.  When these two bands came together to raise holy hell on double bills (with cover encores of The Birds' "Why?" and the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" degenerating into invitational chaotic jams) they brought to British shores a new radical face of the counterculture ethos - one that would come to dominate the underground in the 70s.

To this sector of the Underground, cod New Age acts like Tyrannosaurus Rex were a joke, plain and simple.  But not so much of a joke as their fan following.  Farren would, in his 2001 autobiography Give the Anarchist A Cigarette, put the boot into such genteel boggies, decrying them as "the bopping-elf lovers of hippiedom - the ones so full of happy-happy Toytown mysticism that they'd sooner die than brave an evening of the Deviants or the Pretty Things."  Mickey had good reason to despise this crowd - to wit his exasperating experiences with them while manning the UFO club door each Friday night, or their bemoaning his not sacrificing himself to the police the night the Middle Earth club was raided. 

If the likes of International Times represented the radical underground, then the infamous mystic mag Gandalf's Garden flew the flag for the other pole.  Despite being lumped together under the hippy banner, in truth the two elements were like chalk and cheese.  Farren and his ilk would have no truck with Bolan and Took's fans - his epithet "from Narnia" would also be applied to acts like Quintessence and Dantalion's Chariot.  Much of the blame for this kind of act he would lay at the door of UFO co-owner Joe Boyd after the jailing of Boyd's business partner, hippy prankster John 'Hoppy' Hopkins would, in his view, destabilize the scene

Tyrannosaurus Rex would be unlikely to ever become heroes to this jolly saucy street-level crew.  The odds against any common ground between "We of the wind must rejoice and speak and kiss all our starbrowed brothers on the cheek" and "Garbage makes you feel so large - puts two cars in your garage" were pretty highly stacked.  Yet events would conspire to give Tyrannosaurus Rex and unlikely modicum of street-cred.  The first strike was, quite simply, the jailing of Took in Ashford Remand Centre for marijuana possession (just as Tyrannosaurus Rex were due to promote the Debora single.)  This earned Took - and the band by extension - colours as martyrs to the drug laws.

Took would also be the determining factor in the more crucial source of band credibility.  In early '68 he had struck up a friendship, with John "Twink" Alder, formerly of top UG band Tomorrow (cradle both to Keith "Grocer Jack" West and future Yes axeman Steve Howe, he of the Gibson guitar which flew Concorde.), but now thumping tubs for the Pretty Things. Their relationship was based on a mutual interest in acid, Tolkien, mysticism and rock 'n roll lunacy. (Although Farren insists that Took "did not live in Narnia," it is worth noting the formation by Steve of a Tolkien appreciation society under the name 'Steve Faramir Took') 

From this basis, Took was rapidly plugging into the Ladbroke Grove freak community and the Pretties/Deviants, often turning out as a guest on their aforementioned notorious double-bills. In tandem with original Pretties drummer Viv Prince, he was getting up to all sorts of mischievous mayhem at venues like the exclusive Speakeasy club.  More importantly, he would play a prime role in several community projects such as the Freaks & Straights cricket team, and most vital of all, the Pink Fairies All-Star Rock 'N Roll Motorcycle Club, of which he was a pivotal member.

So the end result was that Tyrannosaurus Rex, represented by Steve, had a reputation in the other half of the hippy movement.  That much credibility was beyond even Marc's vision for the band, or maybe it was a double-edged sword.  Quite apart from the fact that it took attention away from Bolan, it really didn't fit with the duo's image of elfin innocence.  "Flower children, rushing around with revolutionaries – bad for the image." commented Took ruefully in '72.  "I'd go 'What image?  I'm Steve Took, well-known drug addict!'"

For the record, Marc only ever had two significant encounters with the Anarchist/Revolutionary wing of the Underground.  The first of these was an all-night outdoor jam session on Parliament Hill, involving personnel from several top underground bands, including both members of Tyrannosaurus Rex, probably playing their songs together.  This sort of unsolicited concert in a major public place was a common agitprop stunt in those days - other examples include the Deviants' gig on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral and later a Pink Fairies set at Trafalgar Square. 

The other occasion, as recalled by Mick Farren, was at the conclusion of the band's April 1969 concert at the Lyceum, where members of the Pretty Things and the Deviants all piled up on to the stage during the finale of "The Wizard" and proceeded to jam in much the same fashion as at Pretties/Deviants double bills.  Unfortunately, Marc was not in the mood for these kinds of games, and stormed angrily offstage!  How much of this is audible on the "Midnight Court" CD release of the gig is anyone's guess.

It should be clear by now that Tyrannosaurus Rex's 'authentic' hippy image bore no resemblance to either of its two members in real life.  Bolan, tucked away at home with June, was a trainee Pop Star slumming it in the Underground. As for Took, he was, in Farren's words, "kicking over the gossamer traces and determinedly hanging out with the bad boys." Or as Steve himself cynically put it "I was a 'Flower Child', and there's **Things that a 'Flower Child' Can't Do**. Being a natural born rebel, I wanted to do all the **Things I was Not Meant to Do**!. That caused a lot of raps with the management - and a lot of raps with Marc!" 

Nonetheless, the Seduction continued its lucrative pace as Tyrannosaurus Rex began to mount the hill of Progression.  In retrospect, Unicorn is merely the most sophisticated and most produced of the three Tyrannosaurus Rex LPs, its hippy veneer disguising a wealth of influence from Spector's Wall of Sound and the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" LP.  It's probably just as well that not too many people spotted the Spector influence at the time, given that the hippy authenticity police regarded Spector - and Brill Building pop at large - in the same sort of disdainful light as 80s/90s indie snobs viewed the output of Stock, Aiken and Waterman (even to the point of using all the same insults - notably referring to its producer-led nature as being "Manufactured")

The best examples of the direction the band were heading in were Chariots of Silk and Cat Black (The Wizard's Hat) where Took, equipped with a Chad Valley toy drumkit, was able to produce a powerful booming drum-sound which actually out-powered many of the flashy kits of the Prog era.  There were also Took's freeform vocal sections on 'Pon a Hill (“Squawk – jumping in the sky!” ) as well as the acapella freakout section on The Sea Beasts in which all the buzzing, bouncing, squeaking phantoms of Took’s drug fantasies have come out for a grand sing-a-long Carnival Of Monsters, amply illustrating the kind of insight Took provided the group which Bolan could not supply himself. 

Also worthy of note were She Was Born To Be My Unicorn as Visconti bled and echoed the gong until it became a flexing wash of sound alternately stretching the width and height of the song like a fairground mirror – or a pulsating acid dream.  It's hardly the most lively of tracks, (and as stated above, it's a fool's errand to search for any 'profundity' therein) but as a chill-out tune, it's beat an entire box set of Ambient hands down. The wash of gongs gives a dreamlike quality to the song – it washes over the listener in a low-pH sea.   All in all, it's clear from this album that had the Seduction continued unrestrained into the 1970s, then Took and Bolan would have been assured of places in the Prog Rock firmament, among (post-Barrett) Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Genesis.

The duo's arty acoustic visions of erethral beauty seemed to slot in perfectly with the grand Hippy project of the detournment and assimilation of Rock (’n Roll) into the pantheon of the High Arts, like Cinema and Jazz before it.  Perhaps the new decade might have seen Bolan perform 30 minute epic acoustic folk-ballads (the Children Of Rarn, perhaps?) with lengthy instrumental passages, sat in a giant model of a petal, while Took filled out the stadium stage prancing around masses of kettle drums, tubular bell chimes, Paste gongs, steeple chimes, full-sized Xylophones, mellotron, grand pianos and other expensive goodies, all the while clad in his 20-foot cape.

Perhaps in that case, we should be glad that at the heart of the eye of the storm, brutal reality was coming back to disrupt the fantasy dream of innocence.  The seeming whole – a pair of superhumanly elfin musical pixies embodying the deepest dream of the flower-child ideal – was failing to match the reality of the sum of the parts – one half ambitious potential future pin-up star, the other a screaming Wild Man Of Rock with a penchant for debauched chaos. If Bolan’s marginalisation of Took by refusing point blank to play any of his songs (their very existence coming as a shock revelation to Marc around the conclusion of the Unicorn sessions) set a time bomb under the band, then the fuse was lit by the boredom of both men with the gentle acoustic format and their desire to get back to electric rock post-haste. 

Even here, their ambitions in this direction reflected the re-emergence of their true personas – Steve’s interest in Heavy Metal and American shock-rock could never have fitted with Bolan’s increasing desire to revert back to the kind of mainstream electric guitar pop tunes on which he had cut his creative teeth. For a while, a compromise formula was reached - more acoustic Rex tarted up with electric guitar lines, plus a few heavier songs.  This proved enough to induce Bolan and Took to start work on a fourth album, although by the time it was completed and released they had gone their separate ways in both life and music.

Life carried on for a few months, with gothic Rock stomper King of the Rumbling Spires released as a single (backed with Do You Remember, a song used for an electric experiment at the aforesaid Lyceum show) while at the same time such tracks as nocturnal live favourite Once Upon The Seas Of Abyssinia, rustic Blessed Wild Apple Girl and magical Demon Queen welded electric playing into Tyrannosaurus Rex's existing milieu. But it was Took's insistence on playing his own songs - and his eventual donation of two of them to Twink's Think Pink solo LP  that finally broke the camel's back.  Given that Took and the gang celebrated the completion of the album with a trashing of King Crimson showcase gig at the Speakeasy, as a result of which Took overslept and missed his flight out to a US tour with Bolan, it would seem that Steve's patience had finally snapped too.

Bolan had become so settled into the Seduction that perhaps he had even come to believe it himself - witness Visconti's account of Marc's meeting with Buddhist monk Chime Rimpoche, "the only time I ever saw Marc in a humble posture." The reawakening of Marc's sense of dominance, resulting from the "threat" to his tacit ownership of the band by Took's songs, was what caused him to end the seduction and move Tyrannosaurus Rex into the second half of its history.  With Steve only staying around long enough to fulfil his aforesaid US tour contractual obligation - a tour either marred or enhanced, depending on your viewpoint, by Steve's wild Iggy-esque shock-rock onstage antics, the seduction was brought to a close.  Marc began to gradually strike camp and resume his pursuit of Proper Pop stardom.  The Abandon had begun.

It's worth mentioning in passing that the split between Bolan and Took was one of a number of elements making up a general reshuffle in the underground music scene around '69/'70.  Already, the Think Pink LP had come about in the aftermath of Twink's departure from the Pretty Things. Just days after the end of the Tyrannosaurus Rex tour, Mick Farren found himself ousted as frontman of the Deviants while they were visiting Vancouver, Canada.  Farren returned home to the proto Fairies lineup, a solo album Mona The Carnivorous Circus and ultimately dropping out of music for a few years to focus on editing IT and writing fiction.

Meanwhile the remaining Deviants, trapped in North America until February 1970, worked out a telephone deal with Twink to form a more serious Pink Fairies band, a wild and heavy Rock 'n Roll effort that at times verged on being more of an ongoing agitprop stunt than a serious band, but nonetheless still retain a reputation as a powerful live juggernaut.  And as Bolan drifted to safer Hippy waters (and ultimately out of hippy culture entirely) , so a ferocious new force emerged on the scene in the shape of freeform space-rockers Hawkwind, a band who took Bowie's obsession with SF/Space travel as metaphor for drug-taking and soundtracked it with raging psychedelic Heavy Metal.  Together the Hawks and the Fairies would go on to dominate the early '70s underground, as we shall see.

The biggest problem facing the consideration of the Abandon as an era of the career of Marc Bolan is that it rarely gets treated as one single era. Often it is awkwardly spliced into two, with the cut placed at the time of the bandname abbreviation, coinciding as it did with the release of the first hit and the 50p concert tour.  Thus, A Beard Of Stars gets appended onto the three Tyrannosaurus Rex albums with Took, while the T.Rex brown album, by virtue of its offspring hit single Ride A White Swan gets treated as the dawning hour of T.Rexstacy. 

About as good as it gets are Mark Paytress's two biographies which encompass within a single chapter the period from which the Took-era Rex started to lose momentum until the charting of Ride A White Swan.  In truth, the transitory period from October 1969 until February 1971 is a vital and fascinating period of Bolan's career.  For a start, it was the phase during which the sound and style of hit-scoring T.Rex was conceived, refined and perfected. Moreover, it serves as an amusing parable about just how effective the previous seduction of the middle-class hippy audience had been, - as evidenced by just how hilariously long (in retrospect) amongst the said crowd it took for the penny to drop regarding the true motives of their beloved "bopping elf."!

That Marc privately flaunted his contempt for this following is evidenced by his reasoning behind who should fill the empty bongo stool - Visconti recalls how Bolan commented "by the way, I've sacked Steve.  I've got this new guy Mickey Finn, he's great, he's 1000 times better than Steve.  It's the same image, the long hair and the conga drum - the kids won't notice the difference!"  While Mickey Finn certainly developed his own style and identity musically and visually, there can be no doubt he was originally hired to dupe gullible stoners into thinking he was Took.  To enhance the illusion, he even grew his stubble into a full beard - from which the album would take its name.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex brand identity still had enough clout amongst student hippies and stoned festival goers for Marc to be able to coast on previous honours as a cover for the re-orientation of the band's career trajectory.  Of course, any credibility amongst the true revolutionary Underground had followed Took out of the exit door that autumn, manifesting itself in counterculture goodwill towards Steve's involvement in the proto Pink Fairies line-up, his Shagrat band and eventually his solo career. 

The UG didn't bother to raise too much of a stink over the validity of the new line-up, however, they were too busy guffawing at the sanctimonious quasi-religious fools of whom Bolan remarked to his publisher "As long as they pay for songs about fucking fairies, I'll write em."  Marc's gleeful cynicism contrasts wildly with the parallel abandon of hippy roots by David Bowie, the curly-haired flowerchild so ideologically obsessed with aliens/UFOs and Arts Labs that he could only possibly be disappointed with the lazy litter-spewing reality of most hippies, and thus be set on the road to Ziggy Stardust. (likewise over four albums - the path from Unicorn to Electric Warrior equals the trail from the Space Oddity LP to Ziggy.) 

Mickey Finn, for his part, had his own roots in counterculture - albeit at the very opposite end of the spectrum from Steve Took.  Finn came from the trendy Chelsea end of the hippy scene - a world of fashion boutiques, bespoke psychedelic decoration and gratuitous hip-capitalism. A painter of trippy wall murals by trade (the interior of the Beatles' Apple boutique in Baker Street was amongst his credits), Finn (with a couple of underlings in his charge) worked for the fashionable art-group (and sometime Rock band) Hapshash And The Coloured Coat. 

Mickey's colleagues in the crew were Nigel Waymouth and Michael English, the former of whom would eventually finish up on the 'Hates' list of Malcolm McLaren's 1974 Loves/Hates t-shirt, alongside June Bolan and Chelita Secunda.  Their complacently trendy world was as repugnant to the Ladbroke Grove freak scene as it would prove in time to early punks.  To the average be-kaftanned middle-class stoner of a future suburbanite, however, it made no odds, it was all "far out, man" and in some ways, the Vogue end of Hippyism might seem a more natural home for Tyrannosaurus Rex than the street-credible end of the Underground.

Finn's arrival on the scene, together with Marc settling into electric playing, does mark the first flushes of what would eventually come to be recognised as the T.Rex sound.  Mickey, like Took, had a distinctive playing style which lent a great deal of individuality to his work.  Like Steve, he eschewed flat handed beats; unlike Took, Mickey's style was a funky bebop rhythm, played with cupped hands and bending at the elbow and wrist.  This resulted in a frequently bouncy foot-shuffling beat which, in times to come, would be vital to the boogie vibe of tracks like Jeepster, Cadillac and Mambo Sun.  In late '69, it simply substituted what was lost in sophistication by Took's departure for a new danceability.

As noted above, the Abandon era was T.Rex hidden under a veil of minimum hippy trappings.  The aptness of this description becomes clear when one listens to the two LPs recorded during this era.  Vast swathes of T.Rex identity make their debut on the finished A Beard Of Stars, far more than just electric guitars and Mickey Finn.  The most distinguishing feature of the album is its sense of schmaltzy warmth (far at odds with its Bowie counterpart, the cold prog of Ronson/Woodmansey debut The Man Who Sold The World,) heard to best effect on single By The Light Of A Magical Moon, B-Side track Find A Little Wood, love ballad Dove and the crystalline A Day Laye. 

The lyrics, despite their literary/fantasy veneer, speak mainly of love, warmth, dancing and partying - all very much Pop subject matter.  Many tracks display an aura of rustic cosiness, already showing its face during the early sessions before Took's departure (witness Blessed Wild Apple Girl)  Soundwise, the electric guitar chords have drifted away from the harsh fuzz of the spring/summer '69 experiments towards a rich fluid tone, while the lead solos have taken up much of the stellar sparkle previously provided by the pixiephone (as exemplified on the title track). 

The acoustic has likewise become more plaintive and vibrant - much more like T.Rex's occasional acoustic ballads.  Marc's voice has become throatier and clearer, his singing accent more English, his vowel sounds often a soulful cockney.  One big change is the heavier bass frequencies - there are various bass guitar parts by Marc, Mickey and Tony Visconti, while Finn's percussion is echoed and mixed to give it a booming thumping quality.  This is heard to the best effect on the bouncy Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart, where bass and bongos combine the produce explosive flurries on the intro, and the descending chords midway through each verse.

Other innovations were very much nuts and bolts of the future T.Rex formula.  Marc's war-cry of "Ow Yeah!" makes its debut here (on A Day Laye, Organ Blues and Elemental Child.)  Woodland Bop would be the first of a whole string of Bops for Bolan and Glam in general, and featured the very Proper pop couplet "Everybody's a-doing the Woodland Bop/ Once you've started you'll find it hard to stop."  Rampant 4/4 R'nB rolls based on E and G chords surface for the first time on the outros of Pavilions Of Sun and Dragon's Ear.

There were a few false trails to alternative futures in the mix, of course.  There was the keyboard-dominated sound of Organ Blues, Wind Cheetah and Took-sessions leftover Great Horse (sung in a Welsh accent!)  There was the glissando descant rock-solos played on acoustic ballads - to wit A Daye Laye and the second half.  The track Pavilions Of Sun is set in that world of pastoral chivalry, scented Perfumed Gardens and jaded pagodas that only the stoned and idealistic can possibly equate with a litter-strewn festival site field.  One vital loose end from the Abandon era was a flirtation with Heavy Metal, which Bolan would later disparage as his "Marc Hendrix" tendencies, embodied in particular by two live numbers, the first of which, Elemental Child, gets its studio capture here.

The biggest indication of the dismantling of the old facade was the album sleeve, and not just in terms of the exile of Finn to the back cover to allow for a close up of Marc's face.  It's worth comparing the way Bolan looked on the new album with his appearance on its predecessor.  Unicorn shows a more hippy-friendly Bolan, hair wiry and unkempt, not a hint of make-up, an expression of ancient sagacity and Zen humility.  He looked like a much older man, to quote Iscariot "old and bruised but [his] fate is that of youth."  On the A.B.O.S. album sleeve, Marc actually looked younger and fresher, his curls coiffed and fluffed, his eyes sharp with a hint of eyeliner.  Most of all, there is his facial expression displaying ambition, attitude and just a hint of an arrogant sneer about the mouth.

The album was a start, but it was at live concerts that the hippy audience bore unwitting witness to the gestation of the T.Rex recipe.  After a quick tour in November '69, the duo's first major gig was a short concert on New Years Day 1970, transmitted as part of the first edition of John Peel's Sunday Show.  All seven songs from the gig have been released on legitimate CDs, and of the three Tyrannosaurus Rex gigs to get such treatment, this is the only one from the Abandon phase.  Indeed, apart from the 1968 French TV performance of Salamanda Palaganda, this is the only pin-sharp live sound-desk recording in known existence of either pre-stardom two-man line-up.

One piece of the puzzle was already very much in place - Marc and Mickey's acoustic/bongos rendition of Debora remained unchanged over the next two years of T.Rexstacy.  Then there were Finn's explosions of bebop beats during the outro of Hot Rod Mama, sounding like the rhythm of a trad-jazz Fred & Ginger tap-dance routine - Astaire and Rogers being in many ways an appropriate metaphor in many way for Marc and Mickey's onstage chemistry together in T.Rex.

Another piece slotted into position with a chance remark by John Peel at the end of a rather muted performance of Elemental Child - "Scotty Moore would be proud of you!"  The allusion to Elvis's sidekick should have sent a few alarm bells ringing in the hippy firmament - in 1969/70, fifties rock 'n roll was still seen as sad, retarded and retrogressive pop.  Indeed, from this springs the very term "Retro" - opposite and enemy of progressive "Prog".  To openly admit to being a fan was an act of potentially untrendy heresy.  To be a closet fan, therefore, was to part of a secret coded world - it was the basis of Peel's friendships not just with Bolan but also with David Bowie and Mick Farren.

The two key tracks, however, are the acoustic love ballad Dove, and the poppy pure-electric version of A-side By The Light Of A Magical Moon.  The former, despite being performed on acoustic/bongos (with Marc humming the electric guitar solo of the studio version) bears no real resemblance to the folky acoustic Tyrannosaurus Rex of the past.  More than anything, it points to the future place of acoustic sounds in T.Rex, for use on smoochy slow-dance ballads like Cosmic Dancer, Girl and Spaceball Ricochet.  In particular it resembles the live two man performances of Cosmic Dancer - early 1971 US Radio versions bearing the closest semblance.

Magical Moon, however steals the crown as the first real example of the T.Rex electric boogie, bouncing along on a similar rhythm and vibe to 'Cadilac' two years later.  Unlike the gentle meandering studio version, this one is tight, clipped and aggressive.  It's all there - the beat, the chords, the hooklines the poppiness, the guitar solo (not dissimilar to the twists and turns taken by Cadilac at the TV session at Chateau d'Heroville two years later) and most of all the energy.  In many ways, it's a pity this arrangement wasn't used on the studio version - it could have usurped the place of Ride A White Swan (which it actually blows out of the water) to be Marc's first hit, ahead of time.

Better yet is the June 1970 version from the Kralingen Festival, which can be seen on the event film Stomping Ground.  By this time Mickey (to Marc's initial chagrin) had shaved off his Took-a-like beard, revealing a second pretty face for the band.  The performance of Magical Moon is tighter even than the BBC concert version, the solo even more Cadilac-ish (with much the same minor key notes as the above Chateau version).  Amusingly, even the screen caption introduces the band as being T.Rex.  It might well do so; just days later, work began on sessions for what was meant to be a fifth Tyrannosaurus Rex LP (but in the end came out as the T.Rex brown LP ) including the taping of breakthrough hit Ride A White Swan.

As Finn rinsed the last swirls of facial follicle down his bathroom sink drain, so was unmasked both halves of a musical tag team of pretty boys that would do the job in the early 70s UK music scene nowadays reserved for boybands.  Neither man would initially change costume much at the time of Ride A White Swan's success and Marc's dungarees - uniform of the rural farmhand bumpkin - would show up in the earliest pin-up pics for teen mag Jackie.  Even the actual instruments used - Marc's second most famous guitar, the white Stratocaster with the paisley teardrop and Mickey's brown clay bongos - can both be spotted again in the 1972 Born To Boogie footage of T.Rex at Wembley.

The only throwback to past days is the audience which (apart from one nice young lady at the end) consists of Dutch hippies in varying states of druggy regression.  A grotesque naked grandmother flails her arms about randomly, a blond haired girl, head on one shoulder, eyes closed, swivels back and forth, a balding man with uncoordinated eyes performs cosmic experiments with two soup cans on passers by.  It really doesn't seem to have dawned on them that their beloved hippy duo aren't really hippies much more (not that Marc really was to start with) and are practically playing them for fools by charming them with the very T.Rex formula they would soon grow to hate.

There is something gloriously incongruous about this rabble of mashed freaks gullibly tripping out to, of all things, cutie-boys Marc 'n Mickey doing the T.Rex electric rock 'n roll boogie, a mismatch that just months later would prove deeply embarrassing for them.  For sheer retrospective unlikelihood, it's only topped by Genesis in 1976 circa Trick of the Trail, (immediately after Peter Gabriel's departure) when a bearded, bobble-hatted Phil Collins - yes, the corporate AOR devil-on-earth himself - just briefly actually became a serious icon to legions of New Age tree-hugging environmental-protesting proto-Swampy anti Newbury Bypass types!  It's the image which sums up the Abandon as an era - the oblivious boggies still somnambulant in their blind love for a band in fact looking to dump them forthwith and go for a poptastic ride to the Stars.

Other parts of Tyrannosaurus Rex were being metamorphosed into their future forms by now.  Earlier that same month, on BBC Radio 1, former Top 30 hit One Inch Rock, once a gentle strolling English ukulele-folk beach tune, had been revamped into a bouncy electric tapdance, complete with intertwined jazz-scat from Marc and Mickey, further confirming their status as the new Fred and Ginger. Listening to the vocal, one can almost hear them skipping and tapping their way round  the floor, cheek to cheek during the "doo pa doo dai-dai" vocal.  It wasn't for nothing that Marc wore Annello & David tap shoes.

On the same session, the other half of the "Marc Hendrix" pair Jewel, had also been unveiled.  Influenced heavily by Jimi's "Voodoo Chile (slight return)," the extended jam at the end of this song and on the coda to Elemental Child grew into unwieldy 10-minute freakout pieces in their own right that hint at an alternate career of for Marc Mickey and (once he'd joined) Steve  Currie as prog Metal musos.  But like the band's fast dissipating hippy identity, such a direction would have proven a roadblock to pop stardom.  It was very much a dead end.  Although the Marc Hendrix pieces would survive in the live set well into 1971, their true heirs were the good messy fun of the chaotic tambourine-bashing, soloing, feedback-ridden jams during curtain song renditions of Get It On.  These more serious earlier jams were just to give the hippy audience just a few more straws at which to clutch - for now.

Given all this, it does seem rather strange that the planned fifth Tyrannosaurus Rex LP provisionally christened The Children of Rarn, (not to be confused with the mooted concept LP project of the same name) and later retitled The Wizard, is treated as the start of a new era and quite apart from its predecessor, really for no other reason than it eventually emerged as the eponymous T.Rex brown LP towards the end of the year.  In fact the only significant modifications since the previous album are the use of strings instead of keyboards, more reverb on the electric (possibly due to the debut of the Les Paul) and the now near-exclusive use of soulful cockney vowel sounds on Marc's vocals.

At the end of the day, the T.Rex brown LP is an album of cleaned-up hippy guitar-pop, more radio friendly than the three Took albums. but still not venom to the festival field - much like its Bowie equivalent, the clear singer-songwriting piano balladry of Hunky Dory.  In retrospect Mark Paytress was bang on the money when he described the vision sold by the album sleeve as "a sanitised version of the longhair cult."  Like the glossy-haired Bowie on the Hunky back cover, the photos of Marc and Mickey portray a pair of family-friendly bohemians - the sort who got nice jobs teaching art or music at summer camps, or else presented summertime kids programmes on 70s ITV.  And also like Hunky Dory, history has misguidedly linked it in with the Glam Rock masterpieces which followed.

In the case of the T.Rex brown LP, the main culprit is not actually on the album itself.  The breakthrough hit Ride A White Swan was not, contrary to popular belief, the declaration of war.  It was, of course, the first A-side to use the poppy pure-electric sound that Marc had been developing at live shows over the last 11 months (quite distinct from the heavy chords of King of the Rumbling Spires.)  As previously observed, ...Magical Moon may have been robbed of first-hit status by Marc opting for a safe, mostly acoustic version and indeed this time around he later admitted he had been prepared to disown the single if it backfired.   In the end, Swan was still very much a hippy song dealing with hippy-friendly fantasy matters - in this case, Wiccan-derived. 

Its essential hippy appeal can be further demonstrated by its most valuable promotional plug - blanket airplay by Bolan's old friend DJ Jeff Dexter to the half-million strong crowd at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. The promo opportunity was not without its ironies - the festival would see the coming of age of a new, Ladbroke Grove-based regime in the hardcore Underground as the battle raged over the perimeter fences and overlooking hill - triggered by Mick Farren's "White Panther Party" communiqué - while the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind assumed their crowns as The People's Bands, playing an alternative free festival outside the gates.  These two bands and their Free Music ideology would become the dominant countercultural philosophy in the 70s, their Pinkwind jams continuing the Deviants/Pretties tradition and both outfits, collectively and individual members, being intertwined with the life and music of Steve Took.

Not that this mattered much to Bolan and Finn who were quietly headed towards the exit door of the hippy world.  A breakthrough hit was the key to the exit door but it was not the exit door itself.  Stardom and Hype may have been anathema to freaks, but a hit single was not necessarily seen as the death of one's hippy cred.  It could even be seen as a subversive triumph - case in point Hawkwind's #3 hit Silver Machine.  Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson took the flute-playing hairy boggy archetype into the Top 5 twice in 1969.  On the other hand, for example Deep Purple often found themselves taken to task for daring to hit #2 with Black Knight, while following the success of Fog On The Tyne, folksters Lindisfarne actually made good on their pious threat to break up if they ever had a hit.

This kind of breast-beating "Oh woe is me, for we have had a hit!" approach (quite popular in the '90s amongst ex-Britpoppers) was quite commonly used by bands trying to plead forgiveness for daring to succeed.  Frankly, methinks the Pink Floyd did protest too much with regards to their disowning of See Emily Play, and there is the much vaunted tale of how Tomorrow was wrecked by frontman Keith West's solo hit "Grocer Jack".  Even David Bowie briefly threatened to pack himself off to a Tibetan monastery after Space Oddity hit #5.  He was acquitted as the song became the emblem of his hippy phase.  Since Ride A White Swan did not hit its #2 peak or even the top 5 until late Jan '71, one can understand how its slow progression from another Debora/One Inch Rock to its pre-Xmas peak of #6 didn't ring too many alarm bells.  If Bowie could get away with it, so could Bolan.

By this time, the song which would prove to be the real Declaration of War on hippydom, Hot Love was in the works.  T.Rex, now featuring Steve Currie and operating under the temporary guise of a hippy-Rock power trio, even managed to Trojan-Horse it into the public domain early. The rustically inclined stumbling 2/4 electro-folk arrangement on the BBC Radio version from December '70 gives virtually no indication of the high-camp first-ever Glam Rock Anthem  the hit version would become.  Then again, many elements of the coming party were arriving in camouflage.  The 50p T.Rex tour, for instance, was promoted with the slogan "Last Of The Great Underground Groups." Bolan and Finn performed their hit on Top Of The Pops in front of a lysergic Eye backdrop.  Poster artwork depicted a bearded spirit figure while the first few handfuls of screaming teenybop fans arrived not in sequins and glitter, but bearing gifts of bead necklaces! 

The best insight into the state of play on the eve of battle is the French TV footage of the 28th January 1971 gig in Paris, where Marc and his two sidekicks are still - barely - hanging onto Alternative trappings. Bolan in his floral shirt, denim dungarees and minimal showmanship (apart from the odd flick of his curls, mostly focusing on his guitar-playing), moustachioed bassist Currie and Finn in his floppy hippy hat still sat in his chair playing bongos act out a temporary formula - the three-man tasteful jamming Hard Rock Musicianship unit who recently scored a crossover hit.  The main focus of the gig seems to be the serious freewheeling noise-scapes on the codas to the two 'Marc Hendrix' numbers Elemental Child and Jewel. The overall impression is not of a Pop Group per se but more a post-Hendrix/Cream improvisational Progressive Metal project. 

It disguised Marc's intentions well enough for the last lap of the journey.  The folksy live Hot Love distracted attention when the Glam version - featuring session drummer and future 'Bill Legend' Bill Fifield -  appeared on the shelves of record stores.  Even the Glam clothing could be sneaked into the mix quietly - shiny synthetic jackets from proto-Glam boutique Alkasura were all the rage on the trendy Kings Road so not too many eyelids were batted when Marc started turning up to gigs with such jackets draped on top of his dungarees.  There was only one place to truly declare War - the stage of  uber-Proper Pop show Top Of The Pops.  Even then, the first performance, with the dungarees finally replaced with yellow silk trousers and glitter on Marc's face, was an understated affair with attention shared with dance troupe Pan's People.

It was the second Top Of The Pops appearance that proved the final straw for the hippies - just about the time the Glam version of Hot Love, in all its camp schmaltzy glory hit the prized #1slot.  George Tremlett wrote of Hot Love that it "was such obvious teenymeat that the underground might disown him  - and indeed they did."  It would be more to the point to suggest that Hot Love was partly an exercise in deliberately antagonising the Hippy audiences and this TV performance achieved this in spades.  Dressed in a shiny silver sailor suit (in fact made of velvet but looking like satin or even lamé), its plunging neckline further enhancing his femininity, face daubed with glitter and make-up erupting into girlish giggling, throwing shapes with his guitar and even the odd pointed arm gesture  Marc waxed alliteration, a study in silver, sparkle, smiles schmaltzy saccharine and showmanship.  He knew his time had come and didn't need hippy values one second longer.

The most potent section of the clip - and for hippies the most distressing - was the section of the final 'la-la-la' outro.  This time real girls from the audience were dancing onstage and the image was superimposed onto that of the smiling silver-clad pretty-boy.  Tormenting enough was this for older Serious Music fans, made worse by the fact that this new pin-up idol had been one of their Artistic heroes.  As the single carried on along its six week run at the top, the nightmare vision was tape -looped over and over again by repeated  screenings and further invoked by playback on radios and jukeboxes, as well as rough attempts from smitten young girls - perhaps even one's own younger sister. 

The hippy Rock fans might have booed and condemned Bowie's 'Hype' project into embarrassed disowning, but here was one Hyperman who could not be so destroyed, indeed who seemed to draw as much strength from the hatred of mature Rock devotees as he did from the love of his new young female following.    This was the day that war was declared on hippy values by the Glam Rock rebellion.  The hippies had been Seduced and Abandoned by Marc and he left them bleeding, broken hearted and shafted - and in the eyes of many young kids, it served the hippies right for being so smug.  A Superstar was born in that Top Of The Pops clip - and also born was the new Anti-Christ of Hippydom.  It was the dawn of a whole new age in British Pop music.

It would be tempting of course to carry on the story from here and expand the remit of this essay to examine the full length and breadth of  Marc's subsequent ongoing rebellion against the Alternative/Credible/Progressive values of the hippy Serious Music brigade - his avowed Pop status - a slap in the face for those who hankered for the idea of Rock as 'the new classical music', his backlash and rejection against dull dressed-down Authenticity (demonstrated in his costumes make-up and showmanship ), his arrogance and attitude (a breath of fresh air in the face of the smug 'modesty' masking hubris, adopted by most 'respectable' Artists) his catering to the teenage female market outraging the deeply patriarchal Rock musicians and fans. 

It would be even more tempting than a full-length Bolan-biog to tell the full pop-culture history of the tradition of Pop-Art, Artifice and Anti-Authenticity that followed in Marc's wake.  One could trace the development of Bowie's outrageous pop-art project Ziggy Stardust gender-bending  and its manifesto against hippy authentic values built on T.Rex's foundation, as well as Roxy Music and their stylish sleek art-deco democratisation of the aristocratic bon vivant outlook.  One could even trace how the progeny of Bolan, Bowie and Ferry grew up to largely kill off hippy culture with the stylish sharp-shock early generations of Punk (who were more than happy to play along with Bolan's claim to Godfather status) and the revolt into style of the Blitz club, all of which burst into summer bloom with the style-pop riot of the New Romantics, or in the '90s the Romo bands and Kenickie formed an underground resistance to the dull, deadening Noelrock/ladrock/dadrock parka-clad 'authentic' slop.

But let's not get carried away and end up with an encyclopaedia!  Suffice to say, Marc was now the great Judas, the great Sell-out, the Antichrist of the Hippy Movement.  But while Hippies could previously sniff disdainfully at the manipulated Monkees and loftily jeer at Tamla Motown (sometimes propping themselves up intellectually with ill-digested Black Power rhetoric which made them look very closed-minded about the aspirations of Afro-America) this new shiny showbiz pretty boy dealt a deeper emotional cut - the heartbreaking reminders  that this was the same man who had once been a Hippy icon now laughing, sneering and spitting in their faces. As Blackhill Enterprises' Pete Jenner put it "I was always a cultural snob ..." (well at least he could admit to it!) "and I always thought there was something good about Marc's music, then he just went and made vulgar Pop records"

All this plus the added twist of the knife - the embarrassing realisation that his brand of Ancient Wisdom and  Truth had been an utter counterfeit for which they had fallen hook, line and sinker.  Their world revolved around Authenticity, yet they had fallen for a con-trick courtesy of the master manipulator who knew how to caress their yearnings for cultural superiority.  They had been Seduced by the fantasy of Tyrannosaurus Rex and had failed to notice Marc gradually Abandon them.  As John Lydon would put it nearly seven years later at the end of the final Sex Pistols concert  "Ah ha-ha, ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"  

The boggies and proggies certainly felt they had egg on their faces and got their chance to manifest their hatred at the 1971 Weeley festival with an almighty blast of sanctimonious Boo-ing Power.  But their condemnation, once lethal to the 1967 electric band and to Bowie's Hype was turned back on them by Marc who made them recoil back into their seats when he sneeringly told them to "FFFUCK OFF!!!!"  The hippies, the avatars of 'coolness and 'good taste' had no power over Bolan, quite the reverse.  This feeling they would not enjoy one little bit - it made them  feel small.

Ironically, much of the serious Revolutionary underground had similar reservations about the hippy throngs, both in general and indeed at Weeley where the twin problems of hunger and disgust at the hippy masses, nearly drove the Pink Fairies to cannibalism with a cry of "Kill 'Em And Eat 'Em".  Intriguingly, amongst the survivors of this crowd, the only ones with strong opinions on Bolan were those like Larry Wallis or Michael Moorcock who had to deal with Steve Took's rejection scars.  Sometimes there might be the odd amusing stunt like Frendz's visit to the Boston Gliderdome gig or even IT's spoof "Bolan - who needs him?" cover (which, its producers will be delighted to hear, is just as potent to Bolan collectors on Ebay 30 years on as it was in its prime ).  Mostly they feel there were more important fish to fry than the current top pop star - as Pink Fairies drummer Russell Hunter puts it, ".I don’t have anything against him, don’t know him, he never did me any harm."

In fact the prevailing sentiment seems to be that T.Rex were actually an improvement on Tyrannosaurus Rex - at least this time Bolan was being honest about his intentions and ambitions - and at the end of the day it was good Rock 'n Roll.  It's worth observing how all of the PF cotiderie, including Took, were big fans of Ziggy Stardust while Steve was even a Slade-head!  Towards the end of his life, Marc would form friendships with Bob Calvert and Mick Farren (Farren can prove ready to be an unlikely defender of Bolan and T.Rex when confronted by the hippy consensus) invited Hawkwind - "my best friends" - onto his Marc TV shows and even gave a plug to Steve Took's own music in his Record Mirror column.

But for all this, there are still a generation of middle-aged middle-class ageing hippy Prog Rockers who look upon Bolan with deep bitter hatred.  In many cases, this is not merely the product of T.Rex's glitz and glamour but also their own shame at being gullible enough to fall for the faux-authentic charms of Tyrannosaurus Rex.  As writer Alex Stump put it in his prog history The Music's All That Matters, "Time has not been kind to Bolan's reputation - accusations of barefaced exploitation of the zeitgeist abound."  Pity not though such fools who would judge Tyrannosaurus Rex (or any musical work) on its profundity and Truth, whether positively or negatively.  Freed from the constraints of 'authenticity,'  Tyrannosaurus Rex were able to fabricate some of the most original and beatific sounds around.  In this context alone should they be judged and in this context they stand head and shoulders above their contemporaries as the most listenable of hippy acts.