Marc Bolan: A Weird Kid With No Friends

by Danny Holloway from NME - 12 February 1972

I recently sat down with music vet Danny Holloway (episode below) and during the course of our chat he menitoned how an interview with Marc Bolan got him his job at NME. This is one of the articles spawned from his Bolan interview.

Marc Bolan (NOT the pic with original NME article - subject to copyright).

I WAS A BIT hung-up with my records being produced, at the start.

I just wanted to go into the studio and sing my songs and then leave.

I was very much into my own little world in those days.

I'm not a very social person. I was basically a romantic, but the songs I'm writing now are exactly the songs I wrote when I lived with my parents. Like if you listen to the words of 'Desdemona', I could have written it now.

But there was those two or three years in the middle where I suppose I was a poet with a capitol 'P'. Which turned a lot of people off but it also turned a lot of people on. It was very appropriate for the time.

If you listen to the songs on the first album, they're much less poetic than the songs on Unicorn.

For me now, a straightforward "I love you baby and you love me" is much more poetic than "The craggy seas of the wild moon on the beach of the swan".

I was vary insular. I didn't boogie with people very much.

Drugs didn't influence my style much.

I used to smoke occasionally when I was sixteen, but I never got into drugs at all. Certainly not acid.

I took acid about three times, long before T. Rex, and all I found was that nothing happened to me, man. I just spent more time on things.

But there was no revelations, because all that was revealed to me was that what I knew already was right. I got no hallucinations or problems of any sort.

All that happened was: the noise that I naturally excluded from my brain (like car noise, or people talking in a room that I don't want to be in) became very loud. Do you understand? It took down the barriers which were my defence. And it just made me aware that since five years old, I'd bean constructing an inner sanctum which is probably like the acid experience. I'm very fortunate like that.

I WAS A WEIRD kid, very fucked up as a kid. Emotionally I went through a lot of experiences.

It was still a solid family background. Really nice. I never really got too involved with anyone.

I never really had friends as a kid. I didn't really want friends. It was that sort of thing. I used to read a lot.

I was very into gangs. Not fighting gangs. I was always, like, the leader of all the things I ever did, but very solitary.

I was always a centre for envy of some sort, only I never understood why, and I still don't understand why. But obviously I was giving out a sort of strange vibe.

When I was younger I certainly thought I was a superior sort of being. And I didn't feel related to other human beings. I feel very much a human being now. But I didn't as a kid.

In those days I created a world where I was king of my neighbourhood. I was very into clothes as a kid, when I was about thirteen, I had interviews in all the papers like Vogue and all those glossy things.

I, in fact, did a television interview which at that point was a big thing. I was going around with guys that were twenty or twenty four years old. I was known through the East End and where I used to live, and everything was a big wheel. But that was an illusion I created.

I had forty suits when I was a kid. But never had any friends.

My energy? My energy comes from art.

Art's the only thing that always turned me on. Books always turned me on. The only philosophy I had as a kid was that a human being is an art form, and from what you're wearing I can assess roughly where your head's at. I was never into the ego of wearing clothes. It's now that I couldn't see the point of wearing something you don't dig.

I got it from music, obviously, at this point of my life. The film Satyricon, I saw that 12 times.

Do I intentionally maintain my English accent when singing? Probably subconsciously, I'm sure.

It took me a long time to decide what I wanted to sound like. On the first couple of singles, I sounded like Bob Dylan. I still change what I sound like.

To me it sounds like two different singers on the T. Rex and Electric Warrior albums. I never think about it. It just happens.

I've been asked Steve Took's reason for leaving – it was just that we didn't communicate at all.

I knew it was going to happen after we made the first record but I was, like, avoiding it. I was very afraid of change at that point, and I'm very pleased.

It's not like Steve left or I left, it's like he wanted to do something else. He wanted to be like a front man. He thought he wasn't contributing enough and he wanted to contribute. But I sincerely believe that had he contributed what he wanted to do, it would have killed the group stone dead.

And I think the fact that he's been doing what he wanted to do for the last two years, without doing anything, is a pretty good assessment that he wasn't into too much.

Steve was playing ego games, and I wasn't into that. I'd done that as a kid.

When he left it didn't alter me at all.

What happened was that I tried to find somebody to work with, and I couldn't. I met Micky in a restaurant when I heard him play. He sung awful, he couldn't sing at all at that point, and his drumming was not really very sophisticated but we jammed for about four hours.

I never jammed with Steve. We could play immediately, and it was a much heavier sort of feeling, more of an anchor for me. But I'd written Beard of Stars in America on the tour with Steve. And all that time I was rehearsing with myself on my own with, like, a cassette. I was working out what I was going to do when I came back.

Musically Steve didn't contribute anything apart from the occasional harmony. I knew it wasn't going to change the group.

It's interesting, the evolutionary process that led up to T. Rex.

Micky and I did gigs for about nine months. We recorded the T. Rexalbum two years ago. We did 'White Swan' and it came out and it was a hit. And I realised that we couldn't really do it like the record on stage. So Tony Visconti did some gigs on bass, and I was getting more and more into the electric thing.

That's really what the kids wanted, you see. And I was doing the older things, and most of the people that were coming to see us had never even heard of the older things. And I worked with Tony and I said "I MUST have a bass player". One day later we had Steve Currie. Then it was bass, hand drums and me, and it sounded fine. But then I realised, after 'White Swan', it had to have a drum kit on the record. So then Micky switched to kit drums, and I missed the funky feel of the hand drums. So I said "I must have a drummer now, or I'm never gonna play again". I got very dramatic. And then suddenly it was all there and I thought "Man, I got a band. What will I do with all those people?" And the second that we played it was just so right.

It sounded then like what I wanted it to sound like. Just as I imagined in my head. Which had never been done in T. Rex before. Like 'Child Star', I wrote for an orchestra. And on 'Strange Orchestras', I wanted cellos and everything but the record company wouldn't pay for them. That's why I bowed the guitar on that one. So the four piece we have now is really something I wanted to do the whole time.

AROUND THE 'Desdemona' period I was really getting into guitar playing as an idea. I abandoned it because they sold my guitar. But, had they not, I would have been an electric guitarist. I would never have been an acoustic guitarist.

It was not too hard picking it up the second time around – it was really easy. It took me a week to think about it. It's taken me two and a half years to begin to play how I want to play it. But it wasn't hard.

The things I'm putting down now, though, they're becoming more and more the things I hear in my head.

They're not always, but they can be. I've lately been surprising myself with things that I think are quite good that I've never done before. I also surprised myself by being incredibly bad, which is something else. That's another concentration.

Influenced much by Hendrix's playing?

Ummm. Consciously, no. Subconsciously, I must have been, because I saw him from the beginning. I saw him around a lot, and I could watch him a lot. I was probably more influenced by Eric. Only this was because I know Eric and watch him at home.

All those guitar players, the most important thing to me is to see them play badly. And that was a great encouragement to me, to see Eric not playing very well sometimes at home.

I saw him goofing about on things and saw him do bum notes. And I think, well, I do bum notes too. I suddenly became aware that no-one plays good all the time.

Hendrix used to rehearse his ass off. Even towards the end, he played all the time. And he wasn't very happy with what he was playing. That's what really turned me on.

I used to think good guitar players were good all the time. I can be amazing on numbers that I've played over two years. Like 'Elemental Child', I think I play really well. But after two years I OUGHT to play well. And Hendrix should have been able to play 'Purple Haze' well.

The difference between me and them is that someone like Eric or Hendrix can jam for a long period of time because they got a head full of licks. The most I can do it was about twenty minutes.

I DEFINITELY feel more at home playing rock music.

From the beginning I saw my place alongside people like Dylan or Pete Townshend. Only because I've heard Pete, and I've seen Pete, and I've played with Pete, and I know I'm as good as Pete. And he knows I'm as good as he is.

© Danny Holloway, 1972

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