“It preempted Bowie”: How ‘Electric Warrior’ kickstarted the 1970s, according to Paul Weller
For many people, the 1960s represented ground zero for music and popular culture. After all, it was the era that revolutionised rock and roll, bringing with it a wealth of political activism and psychedelic experimentation. It was also an era of sexual liberation, the civil rights movement, and the changing tides of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the 1960s had to end eventually, and its departure left many kids of the ’70s feeling as if they had missed out on that revolutionary period of fashion, music, and politics.
Time is a man-made construct, and the passing of the decades should bring no drastic shift in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. Nevertheless, the end of the ’60s felt like a definitive moment – “where the wave finally broke and rolled back,” as Hunter S Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Gone were the days of paisley-clad ‘peace and love’, replaced by mustard corduroy and progressive rock, for young music fans like Paul Weller, the depressing advent of the ’70s brought an unshakable feeling of having missed out on the vibrancy of the previous decade.
After all, a young Paul Weller had been entranced by the sounds of the swinging sixties, from the fresh-faced sounds of The Beatles to the dirty distortion of The Kinks. For the future Jam songwriter, the long, complex compositions of a group like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer simply did not scratch that rebellious itch in the same way. Weller was in need of something fresh, energetic, and exciting. So, when Marc Bolan and T Rex hit the airwaves, any feeling of having missed out on the ’60s quickly washed away.
T Rex first formed as Tyrannosaurus Rex back in 1967 and, for many of their early years, devoted themselves to recording a unique brand of psychedelic folk. These early records, while interesting in terms of their content, failed to grab the attention of the musical mainstream, and they never packed the kind of punch that songwriter Marc Bolan so desired.
However, when the band rebranded as T Rex in 1970, Bolan and the gang managed to kickstart the era of glam rock. Their 1971 record Electric Warrior firmly established T Rex’s glam rock as the definitive sound of the early 1970s, going on to inspire everybody from David Bowie to the Sex Pistols.
Seemingly, the record had a profound effect on a young Paul Weller, too. Speaking to Amoeba in 2013, the Woking songwriter claimed, “It preempted Bowie, in some ways, in kickstarting the ‘70s for all the kids who missed out on the ‘60s or were too young to really be part of the ‘60s scene.”
What’s more, Marc Bolan appeared to be a spokesperson for this new generation of music fans, with Weller remembering, “He looked and dressed and spoke for a lot of kids at that time.” Ironically, that very same quote could be describing Weller himself, who used the influence of groups like T. Rex, in addition to the mod rock sounds of the swinging sixties and the punk rock explosion of the mid-1970s, to define the sound of his group, The Jam.
Emerging from the punk clubs of Covent Garden, The Jam quickly became a defining group of the late ’70s punk scene, inspiring a rebirth of the mod subculture and seeing Weller branded the ‘voice of a generation’ (though he came to despise the term). The songwriter might have missed out on the flower power years of the ’60s, but he was instrumental in creating an entirely new musical revolution a decade later. Without the influence of Marc Bolan and T. Rex, he might never have got there.
