October 30, 1965 and Marc Bolan, hyping his first single, ‘The Wizard’, appears in the society magazine, The Tatler/London Life. He looks Dirk Bogarde handsome in his Decca publicity pic by David Wedgbury . . . His disc has an ‘eerie lyric’ that he wrote himself. . .
His name was an invention of his manager, he was going to be called Bolam but Decca mispelled it and now he was Bolan and, then, four months later (February 19, 1966) in his second appearance in the journal he was Marc Bölan; the German umlaut added to his surname which, with the French spelling of his first name, created quite the picture of the modern cosmopolitan.
For an 18 year-old Marc was never less than precocious . . . with ambition to boot. He was, he said, a writer, poet, filmmaker and dramatist . . . who had four, count them, of his compositions under consideration by The Byrds. He hopes to live in Paris . . .
The magazine regularly asked musicians and celebrities to review the latest releases . . . Marc’s comments on the new discs are pitch perfect. Dylan is a ‘truly royal talent’ who makes his ‘guitar sound like a motorbike’, while Nina Simone plays piano like a motor-bike’, descriptions which I can buy. On the whole, The Who’s My Generation album is ‘bad’, he said, but the title track ‘swings’. He thinks that the Charlie Mingus album ‘sounds like everyone at this session was out of their heads’ and, pay attention Pete Townshend, ‘after one track you know where The Who got their sound from’. . . which nails it for me.
