Glamorous drinking buddies: The friendship of Marc Bolan and Ringo Starr
Everybody loves Ringo Starr. How could you not? His only three outlooks on life could be summarised by an IKEA poser: peace, love and laughs. Marc Bolan, the curly-haired mystic progenitor of glam rock, wasn’t much different. Together, they were fated to form one of the daftest duos of drinking buddies that the 1970s were lucky enough to witness.
Aside from their similar character, they also endured similar circumstances. While The Beatles may have proved more enduring, T. Rex were a band enshrined in something akin to Beatlemania. Bolan was beloved among the youth of the day, and since the ‘Fab Four’ split up, his band were probably the most comparable act in terms of the frenzied fandom that followed.
Having been through the wringer of immense fame already, Ringo saw that he could be somewhat of a sage to Bolan. As it happens, a particularly drunken sage most of the time. You see, Starr always had an eye for the next big trend. While John Lennon might have been dismissing glam rock as simply “rock ‘n’ roll with lipstick on”, Ringo saw it as the next big thing.
Thus, when T. Rex were gearing up to headline Wembley Arena in 1972, prior to the release of their iconic album The Slider, Ringo offered to film the band for his forthcoming Born to Boogie feature. The documentary would see The Beatles drummer film concert footage and staged sequences in a style reminiscent of the Magical Mystery Tour.
Although the eventual film might be around 70 minutes long, the outtake tape ended up with a far longer runtime. As you can see from the giggling long-haired goons in the video below, they weren’t quite consummate actors when they were on set together. They were disordered rockers through and through, and they fed into each other’s absurdity.
As Alan Edwards, who worked as a publicist for both parties, recalled: “Ringo and Marc had more in common than meets the eye. They both had an off-the-wall sense of humour. I think this is very important. There was obviously a great chemistry between the two.” That chemistry graced bars all over the world with a sense of hellraising charm—and hellraising on this occasion is limited to excessive giggling.
Ringo would famously encapsulate this friendship in a song that was directly inspired by Bolan: ‘Back Off Boogaloo’. For this zapping idea, he enlisted the help of George Harrison. “I was great at writing two verses and a chorus – I’m still pretty good at that. Finishing songs is not my forte,” Ringo told Time Out in 2003. “I started writing ‘Back Off Boogaloo,’ then took it to George to help finish off.”
Speaking to Dave Stewart as part of Off The Record in 2008, Ringo how Bolan spiritually led the way when he was crafting the track with his old mate: “Marc Bolan, he was a really good friend of mine and actually I wrote ‘Back Off Boogaloo’ because of him. He spoke like that: ‘Oh, back off Ringo’ or ‘Boogaloo’,” the drummer continued. “So anyway, I became friends with him and he came to dinner one night. He was talking ‘Back Off’, ‘Boogaloo’ so I went to bed and you know there’s that zone just before you go off and I could hear (In his mind almost sleeping) ‘Back Off Boogaloo… I said… Back Off Boogaloo’.”
“I said ‘Oh God, I’m getting a song here’,” Ringo rejoiced. Renowned for his ability to craft song titles, the ‘Octopus’s Garden’ crafter knew his customary verses would soon follow. “I’ve got out of bed and ran downstairs because I have no memory, I had none then and have not now. I was looking for the tape to put it on. The drag was that it was turned into ‘Mack the Knife’. Anyway, I had to (steal) one of the batteries of the kids’ toys to record the tape.” Thankfully, he nailed it in the nick of time and honoured his new hero’s quirky vernacular.
However, this would not be a farewell to a friendship. The pair remained buddies until Bolan’s untimely death in 1977. Decades later, in 2020, Ringo was still reeling off praise for his friend. At the late glam rocker’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Ringo read: “People knew him as a great musician, a songwriter, a guitarist, but he was also a poet. And he was really proud of that. He was always telling me that he was the Number One selling poet in Britain. In fact, his poetry was as important to him as his music. He had great style and was really unlike anyone else I have ever met.”
Further eulogising his buddy who danced himself out of the womb, he added: “He was a great performer, just incredible. And that’s why I called the film we did together Born to Boogie, because he really was. I told Marc, I’ll bring the camera and everything else, you just bring yourself. We had a lot of fun together. I remember lots of laughter. We lost him way too young, but in his short life, he made over 12 albums that are as far out and ahead of their time as he was.”
Fortunately, his music lives on as a joyous testimony to his unbridled soul. And those laughs they shared live on too, as you can see from the life-affirming outtake below. As Ringo concluded: “With the help of [producer] Tony Visconti and his band T. Rex, Marc’s style started a lot of trends. They called it glam rock with singles such as ‘Get It On’, ‘Children of the Revolution’, and, of course, ‘Born to Boogie’. But it was always just great music to me. And that’s why people are still listening to T. Rex today.”
