Chart entered : 19 September 1981
Chart peak : 51
If memory serves this is the first posthumous goodbye since Otis Redding.
A lot had happened to T Rex since they first appeared as Tyrannosaurus Rex. Steve Peregrin Took was sacked after the first three hits in 1969 for excessive drug use and challenging Marc Bolan's dominance of the songwriting. He was replaced by the less talented but more compliant Mickey Finn. In 1970 they shortened the name to T. Rex , went electric and soon became leaders of the glam rock scene with Marc the biggest teen idol since The Beatles with four number ones in the early seventies. Bassist Steve Currie and drummer Bill Legend were recruited to the band.
T.Rex's fame was just on the turn as I became interested in pop at the end of 1972 and consequently his was the first decline I witnessed. The album "Tanx" released at the beginning of 1973 failed to repeat the success of its immediate predecessors ; excluding the number 3 ht "Twentieth Century Boy" probably didn't help. Bill quit at the end of the year and "Truck On" became the first single of the electric era to fall short of the Top 10. He would in fact never return to it. His next album "Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow" , made with an extra guitarist Jack Green now in the line-up, confirmed his commercial decline and both Mickey and producer Tony Visconti quit the T.Rex project in its wake. The music press was now hostile to him but his fans didn't completely desert him ; both "New York City " ( 1975 ) and "I Love To Boogie" ( 1976 ) made the Top 20.
His last album "Dandy in the Underworld " in March 1977 finally got the music press back on side and The Damned agreed to be his support act on the tour. Then Muriel Young offered him the hosting job on her latest pop show "Marc" which allowed him to rub shoulders with The Jam, Boomtown Rats and Generation X. It's often claimed he was on the cusp of a renaissance though it should be noted the last single of his lifetime "The Soul of My Suit" only scraped to number 42.
On 16th September 1977 it all became academic when Marc was killed in a car accident as his girlfriend Gloria Jones drove into a fence and then a tree. She was injured but survived ; he was killed instantly. As the news broke his home was looted. His passing was marked with a big funeral but always somewhat overshadowed by the death of Elvis Presley the previous month.
In October 1980 Steve Took passed away, officially as a result of inhaling a cocktail cherry ( I remember a guy at school mis-attributing this cause to Led Zeppelin's John Bonham who'd died the previous month) though it's widely assumed drugs were involved. He had spent the past decade generally floating around the underground scene , a regular festival presence as a solo performer and a starter of various bands such as Shagrat and Inner City Unit . He can be heard on a number of recordings by these outfits which were only released after his death.
It wasn't really until the new decade when kids who'd seen Marc on Top of the Pops began making records that his reputation began to revive with covers of his songs by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus and rockabilly chancers The Polecats. In May 1981 his Fan Club acquired the rights to release an EP "Return of the Electric Warrior" comprising two new songs he'd performed on Marc and an outtake from the late sixties. It reached number 50. Just a month earlier Steve Currie too had perished in a car crash in Portugal. He had been working as a session musician , often in tandem with Chris Spedding , since Marc's death.
Encouraged by the EP's performance, Marc's ex-manager Simon-Napier-Bell got session musicians to flesh out some demos from the sixties he had in his possession and squeezed out another Bolan LP "You Scare Me To Death" on Cherry Red Records. This title track was originally meant as a jingle for Amplex breath freshener tablets and therefore the hookline goes "You scare me to death with your horrible breath". To say that it's a marriage of 1966 pop whimsy and 1980s New Wave guitar pop it's skilfully done. You can't see the join but nothing can hide the fact that the song itself is just a piece of doggerel. Napier-Bell put a self-justifying essay on the back of the sleeve to make it worse. Despite it getting to the cusp of the Top 40, Radio One completely ignored so I hadn't heard it until now.
The album reached number 88 in the charts. Another single the nursery rhyme-like "Cat Black" was released in November but didn't chart.
The following year the Fan Club run by John and Shan Bramley set up a designated label Marc on Wax to release Bolton material. They had access to more recent material and released the outtake "Mellow Love" from April 77 in February 1982. It's a pleasant enough slice of Francophile pop with some nice bass work but the release clashed with a tenth anniversary reissue of "Telegram Sam" which reached number 69. 1982 then saw an absolute blizzard of re-releases on four different labels ; the Bramleys had to sit back until the end of the year when they released "Christmas Bop" a trifle recorded for the fan club back in 1975 which filches heavily from Under The Boardwalk ( which is perhaps why it wasn't previously released ).
By the following year they had scraped together enough material for a "final" album "Dance In The Midnight" The first side is pleasant enough but the second is dire with a pointless cover of "Stand By Me" , a weak early version of "Solid Gold Easy Action" and a couple of unlistenable jams to round it off. It reached number 83.
Thereafter with no more "new" material available Marc on Wax began remixing the hits to howls of protests from the fans. Tony Visconti was initially involved but pulled out acrimoniously. It was all pretty tawdry. A medley "Megarex" reached number 72 in May 1985 and a pilloried remix of "Get It On" reached 54 two years later.
In 1991, when Marc on Wax still owned the rights, "20th Century Boy" was chosen by Levi's as the soundtrack for their next ad featuring Brad Pitt. My then-colleague and friend Graham, who's about six years older than me, anticipated that it would follow The Clash to number one and made the horrible error of telling the young clerks on his section, one of whom he had a hopeless crush on, that they were about to hear something special at number one. I know the sentiment - like when I read "classic tune " in You Tube comments on some completely unmelodic rave or hip hop track or Tom Ewing and his buddies slavering over The Spice Girls on Popular - but even back then I realised that he was only going to be disappointed by their response. None of his young cohorts thought much of the record and in any case it peaked at number 13. That was Marc's last appearance on the chart apart from as a credited sample on Bus Stop's "Get It On", a number 59 hit in 2000.
No one was in any great hurry to sign up or employ Mickey after he left the band. He did a little session work for The Blow Monkeys led by huge T.Rex fan Dr Robert but you suspect that was more for the association rather than Mickey's musical abilities. He sometimes appeared on stage with a band called Checkpoint Charlie. In 1991 he joined an R& B outfit WD 40 but soon had to pull out for health reasons. In 1997 T Rex's tour old tour manager Mick Gray invited him and Jack to a 50th Birthday Concert for Marc which inspired them to form Mickey Finn's T.Rex with Paul Fenton who'd played on at least one of the albums as a session drummer. Jack left in 1999 and was replaced by former Smokie man Alan Silson. There was never an intention to record new material but they released a live CD in 2002. After returning from a tour of Japan Mickey died of liver and kidney failure in January 2003. Fenton has continued the band still bearing Mickey's name to this day.
After his brief stay in T. Rex Jack joined The Pretty Things for a couple of albums and Rainbow for a couple of minutes ( I'm exaggerating slightly but not much ) before launching a solo career with four albums between 1980 and 1986. The couple of singles I've heard "This Is Japan" and "Murder " suggest Chris Rea- like indeterminate rock without the voice to make it interesting. He now lives on the Isle of Wight where he teaches guitar and has a small film production company.
Bill Legend , the only surviving member from the band's peak period went back to session drumming after Marc's death. He missed the 50th anniversary concert through personal issues and in recent years has been playing in Christian bands. Last year at the age of 70 he decided to form Bill Legend's T Rex and has played gigs in Europe under that name.
I do remember when "20th Century Boy" was re-released seeing the video on the Chart Show and being quite impressed by the hooks. I also recall my mother being dismissive of Bolan for being "too short" (!)
ReplyDeleteStill, a sad loss - you do wonder if he could have turned it round due to positive associations with the punks (I've heard Lydon be very complimentary about his guitar playing) - I've no idea the size of crowds he was pulling on the tour with Damned to judge how much of a draw he was.