The most “criminally underrated” guitarist Tony Visconti ever worked with
If you only listen to T Rex on a casual basis, you might be somewhat surprised when you jump into the mythical depths of their debut with a long title, which I promise I’m not making up.
My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows was released in 1968, and it saw the band embrace a stripped-back acoustic sound with Marc Bolan on guitar and Steve Peregrin Took on bongos.
It’s the kind of music you would play if you found yourself in a room full of hippies and in charge of the music. The whole record is very chilled out, with themes that dance around the mystical, touching upon the stars, fairytales and fantasy, making for a wonderful listen, especially when the incense is burning, but it’s not representative of what we now know T Rex as, so, what changed?
Simply put, nothing changed, and that was the problem. Bolan and Took liked the music they were making but found themselves frustrated by this seeming stagnation, where their albums were failing to top 20,000 sales, and while they were happy people were buying them, they also wanted to take things further.
“They had a very limited audience, who were mostly John Peel fans,” said Tony Visconti, who produced the majority of the band’s albums, regardless of what kind of sound they were championing. “They wanted the most underground thing going, and they wanted to preciously hang on to that. We know how many of those people there were: It was 20,000. We always hit the ceiling at 20,000 album sales.”
The reinvention of T Rex started with Syd Barrett, as the Pink Floyd founder gifted Bolan a Stratocaster, which the band member used to start hashing out some heavier riffs. A few ideas crept into the band’s following albums, but T Rex weren’t officially recognised as a rock band until the release of their 1970 single ‘Ride a White Swan’.
This is where the official regeneration of the outfit officially started, pricking people’s ears as the classic rock ‘n’ sound was bottled up, shaken, and mixed with different influences, both sonic and aesthetic, to create something totally unique. With this reinvention came glam rock, and there was plenty which contributed towards T Rex’s success within this genre, and since rock music was polarising, the band offered a welcoming middle ground, one that music lovers took to and danced on.
Their producer, Visconti, worked with a lot more bands than T Rex, but he attested that out of all the people that he had the privilege of working with, Marc Bolan was one of the most underrated. He’s not wrong, as without the catchy guitar lines that provided the backdrop for T Rex’s most popular music, glam rock might look very different.
“Marc is criminally underrated as a guitarist,” claimed Visconti, “All rock ’n’ rollers love T Rex, and there’s a little bit of T Rex in every rock ’n’ roll band”.
