The Real MARC BOLAN
BY VAL MABBS AND JAMES CRAIG
HE is by far the most raved about pop idol in Britain a 24-year-old immensely self-confident cult figure who stands 5ft 2in in his socks, wears exotic clothes and glitter round his eyes, and cultivates an image of mystical grandeur.
Marc Bolan is a many-faceted phenomenon whose origins are predictably humble. Born the second son of a working class Jewish family in Hackney, he set out, by the means of his own prolific imagination and a firm conviction that he was the messenger of creative forces beyond his own mortal capabilities, to become a star. And he did become a star a star of formidable magnitude.
He was expelled from school for being a dedicated truant; he was a narcissistic dandy at 13, silencing critics by thumping them on the head with his gold cane; when he was short of money he stole records, and when he sought the answers to questions he'd posed in vain at school, he went off to Paris to become a sorcerer's apprentice for five months. Later he went to three separate psychiatrists for fun and thoroughly perplexed them.
It's a bizarre and colourful background and it has never been more penetratingly explored than by VAL MABBS who begins the first of an astonishing three-part series this week.
"WHEN I was 12, 1 lived in Stamford Hill and there were about. seven guys living
there who were among the first Mods. They were mostly about 20 and a lot of them were Jewish and none of them worked. They just ponced about and lived off their parents. All they cared about were their clothes and they had new things all the time. I thought they were fantastic and I used to go home and literally pray to
become a Mod." Thus Marc Bolan in a Nik Cohn interview for the Observer colour supplement in August 1967.
Four years later Marc Bolan, formerly Mark Feld, is a daunting diminutive pop phenomenon who has hundreds of thousands of guys praying to be like him, and as many girls praying for a chance to be with him.
language and absorbing the warmth and colour of the surroundings.
With the 21's coffee bar just a tomato's throw away, it was not long before Mark, in his black and white two-tone shoes, and a carefully nurtured Elvis quiff, was making regular visits to hear the sounds, with his nose pressed against the steaming window, looking at the pop posters.
He can't remember when he wasn't interested in music; it was an inborn appreciation, an inherited need which fulfilled itself in those early days through the good graces of Norah, a lady behind the bar of the 21's whom Bolan describes as "dynamite" and who allowed him to play the juke box.
"I used to help serve the coffee," Marc recalls, "and she'd give me a Coke and a roll and let me listen to the juke-box. Hank Marvin who wasn't called that then introduced me to the original Drifters' 'There Goes My Baby' and that rcally turned me on.
"I used to see a lot of people who were unknowns then but who later became stars. I remember seeing Cliff Richard kicked out when he was still Harry Webb. He was told 'You'll never make it, Harry'. "In those days if you wanted to know about music, the 21's was where you had to go. I was drawn there. If I hadn't gone it would have been like someone wanting to be a country guitarist and not going to
Nashville." His enthusiasm for music in those early days was such that he "guitar" from an orange elastic bands and const himself in fantasies about he would become a to carried the dream a li playing tea chest bass in neighbourhood kids Hel Stephen Gould. They du Suzy and the Hoola Hoops.
His musical education his formal education and upon frustration as he fo that he couldn't get practical questions that questions about life. His first in Northwold Primary the William Wordsworth s was not dazzling; and f came to an abrupt halt expelled from Hillcroft So because of a growing ha attend.
Well, the fact is that Marc Bolan has always been a little bit exceptional, a bit larger than life. He did the usual childhood imitations of his idols Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Elvis and even Lonnie Donegan (who, he claims, turned him on to blues men like Leadbelly) but he did them with a kind of relentless determination that separates the professional from the amateur. Bolan, you feel, was in show business from the day he was born.
It was a humble enough beginning. He was slapped into life at a Hackney hospital. 24 years ago, the son of Mr and Mrs Feld already proud parents of son Harry, and now even prouder to have produced such a good-looking, dark-eyed boy.
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