The
first London home where Marc Bolan lived was a large, late Victorian terrace
house on Stoke Newington Common. A distinctive feature of the row of houses
that skirted the common were the stone columns at every entrance, each topped
with ornamental Corinthian capitals, and among the Gothic moulds that adorned them
was a bird of prey with wings outstretched, an Old Father Time figure, and a
distinctive, long-necked swan – more cream than white.
This piece of invaluable information
can be found in the early pages Marc
Bolan: The Rise & Fall of a Twentieth Century Superstar by Mark Paytress, published by Omnibus in 2002. The extract below tells how
that stone swan turned him into a superstar.
A
new pop aesthetic gave a healthy glow to sessions for the putative fifth
Tyrannosaurus Rex album in the summer of 1970. Marc’s voice was double-tracked
and more prominent than ever, the percussion, including drums, had a new
no-frills directness and several simple bass lines added muscle. The rock ‘n’
roll influence, for so long quietly understated in Bolan’s music, now ran riot
through at least half a dozen of the songs taped at the sessions. Even Marc’s
lyrics had a freshness and brio about them, with many allusions to the joys of
instantaneous pop pleasure that virtually amounted to a clarion-call for his
new-found bubblegum boogie: “I want to give every child the chance to dance”, “Boy,
wouldn’t you like to rock”, “Light up the world with poems from within you”
and, presciently, “One day we change from children into people”.
The new songs spoke loudly of
transition and wish-fulfilment; one in particular managed to encapsulate
everything Marc Bolan had been looking for. At one session in July 1970, he
asked Tony Visconti to start rolling the tape. He wanted to put down a new
song, ‘Ride A White Swan’; “Let’s call it ‘Swan’,” Visconti called back from
the Trident Studios control booth, unaware that the next few seconds would
reveal the key to Marc Bolan’s glorious future. With his cherished Gibson Les
Paul around his neck (stained orange in homage to Eddie Cochran’s six-string),
Marc formed an open E shape chord above the capo he’d strapped over the fourth
fret, and kicked out a clipped rock ‘n’ roll chord just like James Burton on
those old Ricky Nelson B-sides. Almost the instant Visconti flicked a switch,
adding a small amount of reverb on the guitar track, Marc shouted back
emphatically: “I want that sound!”
‘Ride A White Swan’ not only sounded
simple; it was simple. The ingredients were few – that clipped,
three-chord-trick guitar, Marc’s cautious vocal (sung from a sheet hastily
typed by June), handclaps on the offbeat and a rudimentary Bolan bass line
(played on Visconti’s Fender Precision bass), offset by a modest,
Visconti-arranged string section and that trademark Tyrannosaurus Rex falsetto
backing drone. The lyrics – just twelve short, sweet lines – were similarly
economical, even by Marc’s recent standards. And the crucial parts that Dib
Cochran and The Earwigs lacked – a genuine voice, and a rock ‘n’ roll backing –
were here in abundance.
“When we heard what we got,” recalls [Marc’s
music publisher] David Platz, “it was simply so exciting that we knew we had a
potential Superstar on our hands. It had such a different sound, and was
exactly right for that particular time.” Releasing ‘Ride A White Swan’ as the band’s
next single seems in retrospect to have been an expertly judged calculation,
but at the time its success took almost everyone by surprise – even Marc whose
memory was already saturated with misplaced hopes. In fact, the route to number
two in the British charts in November 1970 was tortuous and complicated, with
several factors contributing to the success of ‘Ride A White Swan’.
Although Marc could will the musical
changes, and instil a new sense of ambition in those around him, even he doesn’t
take credit for the series of coincidences that enabled his ‘Swan’ to take
flight. “People associated us with Flower Power, and that was a long gone era,”
he said after the stardust had settled. “I wanted people to look at the thing
in a new light, and the only way to do that was to have a label change, change
the music and change the name but not lose any identity. I got put on Fly
Records. That happened because the company I was with, signed with those people
who formed Fly Records.”
The crucial month was September. With
the launch of Fly Records imminent, Marc chose to drop the cumbersome
Tyrannosaurus Rex name in favour of T. Rex, an abbreviation many had been using
for convenience’s sake. Tony Visconti remembers Marc’s initial reaction: “He
came to my little office at Essex Music one afternoon, looked at my recording
calendar on the wall and took great offence at all those references to ‘T. Rex’.
I told him it was for my eyes only and that it was too tedious writing
Tyrannosaurus Rex 15 times on the same page.” In fact, Marc had used the same
abridgment when he advertised for a replacement for Steve Took 12 months
earlier. After the incremental advances of the previous three years, the name
change marked a brutal, crucial break with the past – though the motivation was
as much practical, giving DJs like Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis the
opportunity of playing the band’s records without screwing up their syllables.
Tony Visconti puts the success of ‘Ride
A White Swan’ down to two things: “The image change, and the fact we had a
string section in there.” He claims that he had to beg David Platz to pay for
the four violins used on the single and on a couple of album tracks. “Fly had
nothing to do with Marc’s success,” he declares. “We never had any support from
them. T. Rex was a legacy from the old days. We were almost an embarrassment to
the company.”
That may have been true, but the newly
constituted Fly Records could not afford to back too many losers. There was a
lot riding on Marc’s ‘White Swan’ when it appeared in the racks on Friday
October 9, 1970. For all Visconti’s reservations, the company – set up by David
Platz in partnership with Track Records’ Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp – had
splashed out on a mass-produced picture sleeve that utilised a moody Pete
Sanders portrait of Marc and Mickey Finn. And the decision had been taken to
release it as a value-for-money maxi-single with two songs on the B-side. “You’d
be surprised how many kids can’t afford an album,” said Marc, hot on the scent
of a new audience.
There is no doubt that ‘Ride A White
Swan’ was intended to invigorate Bolan’s career and provide a flagship for the
new record company. The careers of Procol Harum, Joe Cocker and The Move, all
brought over from New Breed’s previous Regal Zonophone outlet, were at stake;
both the label and its first single were expected to succeed.
The Fly launch was beset by problems
and last-minute changes. Label manager Malcolm Jones, who’d been poached from
running EMI’s progressive Harvest imprint, had initially named the new
operation Octopus. A small handful of (now priceless) acetates for the first 45
had been pressed bearing the (now legendary) catalogue number OCTO 1. Extant
copies show that the guitar-heavy ‘Jewel’ was tipped for the flipside alongside
a wobbly version of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ – though it was later
replaced by another, less abrasive cut from the forthcoming LP, ‘Is It Love’.*
After a distribution deal with Chris
Blackwell’s Island fell through, Lambert and Stamp got involved, and it was Kit
Lambert who came up with the Fly name. With the Christmas rush imminent, Platz
returned to EMI who agreed to distribute the label, a logo was hastily knocked
up by Track’s in-house design team and by early October ‘Ride A White Swan’ was
ready to go. Everyone involved expected the record to make some impact, though
the scale of its success meant that Malcolm Jones quickly ran into
difficulties. “I was so busy trying to get records pressed and sleeves printed,”
he recalled, “that the disc appeared on brown or lilac labels. That was because
I purchased Immediate Records’ lilac paper after they’d gone out of business – simply to get records pressed quickly at any
cost.”
“The business was at a very low ebb at
that point,” Marc admitted several months later. “There was nothing really
going down. When we put (‘Ride A White Swan’) out, I was well prepared for it
to bomb. I expected to get a lot of aggravation from people saying ‘It’s too
electric’ or whatever, and it was a hit in three weeks.” Actually, it was only
a minor hit at that early stage, but after strong support from the BBC – T. Rex
recorded five separate Radio 1 sessions between October and December – and the
music press (“their most commercial song yet”, raved New Musical Express) ‘Ride A White Swan’ took off.
No comments:
Post a Comment