Marc Bolan: The man who brought glam rock to Scotland

He may have lost some of his lustre, but Marc – who died forty years ago this month – could still pull in the fans. Thousands of Scots Bolanites flocked to the gig amid scenes of hysteria reminiscent of the crazy T. Rextasy days just a couple of years earlier.

Bolan made a spectacular entrance on stage atop a raised star-shaped platform, bashing out the iconic riff for 20th Century Boy with a huge superstructure behind him flashing neon lights spelling out the name T. Rex.

Carrying a few pounds too many in weight, Bolan still strutted the stage majestically – to cheers and screams from the adoring fans.

Then it all went horribly wrong…

Julie Webb of the New Musical Express could barely believe what she was seeing, as Bolan collided with the hydraulic platform and was sent sprawling into the drum kit. “He was helpless on his back, like an upturned tortoise!” she recalled.

Bolan’s loyal lieutenant and band mate Mickey Finn, aided by two roadies, dragged Marc off stage and after a few minutes delay, he pluckily soldiered on.

At a later press-conference, on the tenth floor of the city's Albany Hotel, he tried to repair the damage. But the press ridiculed Marc in their reviews. Julie Webb was especially dismissive, “as a musical experience, it was dire…never have so many screamed for so little.”

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BOLAN’s choice of the Apollo for that crucial January 1974 concert was telling. The Hackney-born star loved to play north of the border. “We get a better reception in Scotland…down in London it’s too reserved!” he once told the Evening Citizen in Glasgow.

Indeed, his all-too-brief career with T. Rex was bookended by two, long-forgotten, mini-tours of Scotland. In May 1970, the dying days of his hippy duo Tyrannosaurus Rex, Marc and bongo-playing partner Mickey Finn, sitting cross-legged on stage, played a series of small Scots gigs, including one which was billed as “Motherwell’s First ‘Underground’ Concert”!

At the Empire Theatre in Inverness they entertained 300 enthusiastic fans. There was a bigger audience at the Caird Hall in Dundee where they supported Ten Years After. The Dundee Courier reported how the audience “relaxed to the high-pitched falsetto strains of the voice of Marc Bolan…this unique duo played a wide range of instruments, including acoustic, electric and bass guitars, bongo drums, organ bells and a Chinese gong.” The perceptive Dundonians applauded politely at all the meandering, hippy acoustic songs, but gave the band’s one electric number a standing ovation.

Maybe that reaction left an impression, for within a couple of months Marc had made the switch to electric guitar permanent. Expanding the band to a four-piece, and contracting the name to the radio-friendly T. Rex, with judicious use of make-up and sterling production work from Tony Visconti, the look and sound of British glam-rock was born.

For the next couple of years, the five-foot-seven-inches tall singer was the biggest star on the British music scene with a string of near-perfect pop/rock singles (which still sound remarkably good today) and influential albums like Electric Warrior. T. Rex were the biggest music sensation since The Beatles, accounting for 3.5 per cent of all UK record sales in 1971. Even his old friend/rival David Bowie struggled to keep pace with Marc.

At the height of his fame, the magazine Jackie was receiving 800 letters a week from Bolan fans. Everyone from broadsheet critics to teenybop fans loved Marc. The breadth of his appeal was astounding. In one Q & A with the Melody Maker, Bolan talked knowledgably about his favourite guitar, a 1947 Gibson Les Paul, and in the next breath, told fans where he bought his ladies shoes! (At Anello and Davide’s in Oxford Street, apparently.)

When T. Rex played Green’s Playhouse (later The Apollo) in Glasgow in May 1971, fans laid siege to the venue. The band and DJ Bob Harris, who compered the gig, had to call for police protection to escape as crazed fans even tried to snip off some of Bolan’s trademark corkscrew hair with scissors.

The fall from grace, when it came, was rapid though. Increasingly in thrall to cocaine and the booze, the quality of his records tailed off, and he never troubled the UK singles top ten again after 1974. Instead, he poured his energies into a forlorn attempt to break the lucrative American market. Back in the UK, The Osmonds and David Cassidy had won the teenybopper hearts and acts like Sweet and Bowie were at the forefront of the glam-rock scene. It rapidly became very uncool to like Marc Bolan. Week after week, the classified ad columns in the music weekly Sounds were filled by former fans trying to sell their T. Rex records.

The showcase Apollo gig in January 1974, with Glasgow-born guitarist Jack Green in a ten-piece band that also contained two drummers, a brass section and two back-up vocalists, was part of a tour that failed to restore Bolan’s reputation.

Two years later, he was back in Glasgow again, using the Pond Hotel on Great Western Road as base-camp for a series of Scottish gigs. But by now even the loyal Scots were starting to lose faith. Only 150 fans turned up for a gig at Motherwell Concert Hall. Another proposed concert – at the Kilmarnock Grand Hall – was called off after only £187 was taken in advance ticket sales.

Thankfully, the good people of Falkirk saved the tour from being a complete disaster, 500 of them giving the band a rousing reception at a concert in the Town Hall. Weirdly, Bolan and his second wife Gloria Jones showed up in the Roman Bar in Camelon before the gig, signing autographs and chatting away to customers.

Come show time, Bolan summoned up all his old magic. The Falkirk Herald reported: “Two young women had to be carried out when they collapsed. The fans adored him. They couldn’t get near enough and he told them ‘You’re not country people. I don’t care what people say. You’re sophisticated. And I love you so much for coming to see us’.”

His final appearance in Scotland came just a few months before his death, back at a half-empty Glasgow Apollo. Support came from The Damned, one of many punk and new wave acts who championed Bolan. Marc seemed reinvigorated by this new attention, and returned to the fray drug-free and looking young, happy and slim. The devoted fans dreamt of a Bowie-style reinvention that would get their hero back to the top. Sadly, it wasn’t to be and he died in a car crash on September 16, 1977. The Mini car driven by Gloria Jones went out of control at Barnes Common in London, left the road and hit a sycamore tree. Bolan was only 29.

Forty years on, many of his contemporaries are still touring the land, still churning out the old hits to dwindling crowds. At least, faithful old fans say, his tragic, early death spared Marc that further indignity.