Original subtitles

[gentle acoustic rock music]

Downloaded from YTS.BZ

♪ I could have loved you, girl, like a planet ♪

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ

- [Narrator] Marc Bolan was an enigma within an enigma,

a man who only existed to be a star.

- He did precisely what he said he would do

and became a star.

Marc probably wrote his own epitaph.

He danced right out of the womb and into the tomb.

- [Narrator] Many have claimed to know the real Marc Bolan

but it's doubtful if Bolan himself had any idea

of where his true identity lay.

- There was a real Marc Bolan,

but it was unreal.

- [Narrator] Here, we tell the Marc Bolan story

with new insight from his closest friends.

It's the story of a man who was obsessed with being a star

and dreamed of one day being an icon.

- Marc had always said he would never make it to 30.

He always wanted to be Elvis Presley,

James Dean, or whatever.

He kind of got his wish.

He kind of got what he wanted.

♪ Really doesn't matter at all ♪

♪ No, it really doesn't matter at all ♪

♪ Life's a gas ♪

- [Narrator] In 1971, Marc Bolan, a Tolkien elf,

exploded onto the pop scene.

♪ She's my woman of gold ♪

♪ And she's not very old, aha-ha ♪

Strewing it with sequins and sparkling flash.

♪ She's my woman of gold ♪

♪ And she's not very old, ♪

♪ Aha-ha ♪

♪ Ooh ♪

The androgynous elf with the rosewood mouth

had become the Lurex-clad glitter god pioneer of glam rock.

Hit followed hit with the inevitability

of night following day.

Bolan shimmered and glittered.

He wore velvet and gold lame, skin-tight satins,

tap shoes, and silver stars under his eyes.

♪ 'Cause you're mine ♪

For the first time since Beatlemania,

and never again since, young girls swooned,

fainted, and wept at the sight of Marc Bolan,

the swaggering pop idol.

The press dubbed it T. Rextacy.

♪ You're so fine ♪

♪ I want you all and everything just to be mine ♪

♪ 'Cause you're my girl ♪

- The minute he came on stage,

it would be screaming like The Beatles in the early days,

only more so.

They were just passing out, throwing things.

The worst part was at the end of the gig,

was trying to get out of the venue.

That became almost impossible.

[crowd screams]

- I was with Marc. I always traveled with Marc.

Marc was quite a bit shorter than me

and the girls were after locks of his hair,

and so they come armed with scissors, pairs of scissors.

And we came out, and all of a sudden at exactly my eye level

are all these scissors trying to get at you.

And they were ripping clothes off.

And I thought I was gonna have my eyes out, actually.

We were then being pushed through into the car.

It was exhilarating and scary both at the same time.

And I was looking at Marc over there,

and he was wearing this sort of big boa feather thing

and he was so loving it.

I mean, this was what he'd been waiting for

for God knows how many years.

♪ I'll call you Jaguar ♪

♪ If I may be so bold ♪

♪ 'Cause you're my baby ♪

[upbeat rock music] [crowd screaming]

♪ You're my love ♪

It was 12, 13, 14, 15-year-old girls

and the other indelicate aspect of all of this

is you going out into the auditorium

after T. Rex had come off stage at the end of the concert

and there was this overpowering smell of urine

because so many of the girls

had wet themselves in their excitement.

[crowd screams]

- I used to be a toilet cleaner

and every job's got its perks,

and on Sunday they'd give me a torch and a uniform,

I'd show the fans to the seats for the rock concerts.

But then T. Rex came along and it was just incredible

because part of my job was to stop the fans

running down to the front of the stage,

but, of course, 2,000 screaming girls just trampled over

and sort of ended up with a front.

And I thought, "Blimey, here I am a toilet cleaner

"and he's got 2,000 screaming girls after him."

So he had the job that I wanted.

I went out the next day and bought a guitar.

♪ Just a Jeepster for your love ♪

[crowd screaming]

- [Marc] All right!

[upbeat rock and roll music]

- [Narrator] From childhood,

Marc Feld, as he was christened,

always believed that he would be famous.

He said, "I was always a star,

"even if it meant being a star

"of just three streets in Hackney."

- He was like their local star. He had charisma.

He would walk around Stamford Hill to the ship house,

or down around Clapton Common, or up at Manor House,

or just stand by the bus stop.

- [Steve] Marc came out posing.

He was born a star, you have to see that.

- When you saw him, you couldn't take your eyes off him.

Had monster charisma.

Wonderful, wonderful!

- He was always saying, "I'm gonna be famous."

And looking back on it, he was destined to be famous.

He had come to school in brightly colored luminous socks

and jeans and stuff like that,

even at that early age, you know, 10.

Used to have a guitar in them early days.

And he'd stand in a corner of the playground,

strumming the guitar.

- He really had a disturbing sense of self-belief

in his own destiny.

I mean, it really was actually quite frightening.

I mean, he always said, "I am going to be a star."

And apparently, when he was at school,

he used to pretty much get into trouble for the same thing

because he saw no point in real formal education

because he believed quite firmly

that he was going to be a superstar.

- [Narrator] As a 14-year-old model obsessed with style,

Marc swaggered around Soho

with his fellow mod, Jeff Dexter.

- The best thing would be to have a few very sharp suits

and a very well collared shirt,

and all your accessories had to match and fit in.

The whole idea was to look as smart as you possibly could.

- His style was tremendous.

When he was 14, he looked like the charisma with oozing!

Monster oozing out of him. He was always a star.

- [laughing] The attitude was to be cool, I think.

I don't know if we really were cool,

'cause we were both midgets.

I suppose we were both really amusing,

thinking about it now.

But we thought we were cool. We were both small.

We probably felt we were bigger than Woolworths.

We had more front the more than Woolworths.

- [Narrator] The teenage Marc Bolan started to hang out

at the in music venues, telling everyone who would listen

he was heading for the big time.

- He used to come up to the pub

above Leicester Square Tube Station

called the Brew Master,

where a lot of us music hacks used to hang out

and he would come in there and sell himself.

"Yeah, I'm gonna be bigger than Elvis.

"And I'm gonna be bigger than anybody.

"Bigger than Cliff, bigger than The Beatles," you know?

And we'd all go, "Yes, yes, yes.

"Sit down, Marc. There's a good boy.

"When you're old enough to buy a drink, come back again."

Nobody was really kind of rude to him

but we were a little patronizing.

I mean, we were drinking with people like The Who

and The Hollies

and the major sort of bands of that time up at the bar,

and there was this little chap coming in

telling us all he was gonna be bigger than all of them.

[laughs] Please, you know?

So, we were hardly encouraging, I suppose.

[upbeat rock music]

- [Narrator] Marc first dipped his toe

in the water of the music business

with a short-lived band called John's Children.

- [laughing] John's Children

were all about being outrageous.

And they all wore white suits on stage

and they had gold chains around their necks.

And they whipped each other with silver whips,

lots of flagellation scenes. [laughing]

And they wrote some outrageously strange songs

like "Thomas A Becket," which was all about murder,

and "Desdemona."

And Marc wrote them a little song called "Testimony,"

I think it was called, which he always said

was the filthiest song he ever wrote.

He was quite proud of that fact. And the BBC banned it.

And shortly afterwards,

I think he thought it was time to leave John's Children.

[upbeat folk-pop music]

♪ Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me ♪

♪ I'm not sleepy ♪

And at that time, in the early '60s,

the biggest thing on the scene was Bob Dylan,

and the hippie movement, the peace and love thing

was beginning to gain force.

♪ In the jingle jangle mornin' I'll come followin' you ♪

- The key mantra elements were peace and love.

This was the generation that now was gonna change the world

sexually, politically, financially.

The music was very important part

of the development of this concept of everything's great.

You love your fellow man.

Right in the middle of the Summer of Love,

The Beatles brought out "All You Need is Love."

Everybody was taking drugs,

wearing very, very colorful clothes, growing their hair.

- Marc tuned into it very quickly.

He was very quick at picking up vibrations

and feelings of the time.

The winds of change he sniffed very quickly.

And consequently, he put together this band

which originally was five people, Tyrannosaurus Rex,

and then, either for economic reasons

or simply because the band didn't work,

they whittled it down to two,

just he and Steve Peregrin Took.

- Marc transformed from quite a sort of

angular mod image in '64, '65,

to this much more loose and rounded 1967 London boy.

Kind of like everybody did.

Just literally grow your hair,

put on nice, loose, colorful clothes,

and sit cross-legged on the carpet playing acoustic guitar.

[Marc vocalizing]

- My friends and I had spent many an hour

sitting cross-legged at The Greyhound, Croydon

where Tyrannosaurus Rex would play

and this fay, elfin, curly-headed Marc

singing, "Desdemona," or "Debora," you know? [laughs]

♪ De, ba, de, ba, de, ba, da ♪

♪ Deboree, deb, deboree, deb, de-cha-cha ♪

♪ La, la, la, la, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la, la ♪

- Marc really picked up on the sound of words

or the intuitive grasp of something,

rather than really what it actually meant.

♪ Oh, Debora, oh, Debora ♪

♪ La ♪

♪ La, la, la, la, la, la, la ♪

And I'm not sure that Marc knew what sense they made

but he liked the sound of the words

and he produced things like, "My people were fair

"and had sky in their hair,

"but now they're content to wear stars on their brows

"and beard of stars and unicorn."

He loved kind of like slightly mystical,

magical kind of things like that.

[bluesy guitar music]

It was very Tolkien-ish.

I mean, he was into "Lord of the Rings."

Marc loved these kind of cult books of the period

and he was into Michael Moorcock and Kahlil Gibran.

"Doors of Perception", Aldous Huxley, he read

because they heard The Beatles had read it

and things like that.

♪ Sun, see it run across the sky ♪

♪ See it cry for you and no one else ♪

- The finest work he ever did, in my opinion,

was, to illustrate that point, was "A Beard of Stars,"

the last album that carried the Tyrannosaurus Rex moniker,

which ends with him thumping out eight or nine-minute

Les Paul romp through "Elemental Child."

You hear that, you see this rock star in embryo.

[upbeat electric guitar rock music]

Oh, I took to him immediately.

- [Narrator] Marc believes Tyrannosaurus Rex

to be the last outpost of hippiedom.

He presided over reverential gatherings

of the flower children who refused to wilt.

When Marc was not performing, nights were spent at his flat

where poems and songs were flowing

as liberally as the jasmine tea and the vegetarian food.

- Every day was a fantastic day.

Very few things...

The only things that got in our way were being busted

by the police for having a bit of dope or something.

That was the only thing that ever got in our way,

but the rest of the time we've spent being very happy.

We laughed a lot and we had great times.

- [Narrator] It was now that the disc jockey John Peel,

who became a close friend,

began to have a huge influence on Marc's career.

- John was on the radio

and when they closed down the pirates,

John moved into Radio 1.

John put Marc in front of everything he ever did,

right up to the time his first records were properly made.

[upbeat rock music]

♪ Left a good job in the city ♪

- [Narrator] By 1971, rock music was changing.

The more robust sound of Led Zeppelin,

Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, and Creedence Clearwater Revival

was dominating the market, high energy blues-rock.

♪ Big wheel keep on turnin' ♪

And then came Mungo Jerry,

with the big hit "In the Summertime,"

broadening the appeal of a falsetto voice.

♪ In the summertime when the weather is hot ♪

♪ You can stretch right up and touch the sky ♪

♪ When the weather's right ♪

♪ You got women, you got women on your mind ♪

Put the two together, and out came Marc Bolan.

♪ Ride it on out like a bird in the sky ways ♪

♪ Ride it on out like you were a bird ♪

♪ Fly it all out like an eagle in a sunbeam ♪

♪ Ride it on out like you were a bird, nice ♪

- We'd been talking about poetry

and what rock and roll writers there were

that really meant something,

and I remember we had this conversation

about Chuck Berry being super pop poet.

♪ They're really rockin' in Boston ♪

♪ Pittsburgh, PA ♪

♪ Deep in the heart of Texas ♪

♪ And round the 'Frisco Bay ♪

And how simple he made the words with the rhythm.

And what Marc was doing with Tyrannosaurus Rex

was a little bit more complicated.

♪ Sweet Little 16 ♪

♪ Just got to have ♪

♪ About half a million ♪

♪ Famed autographs ♪

The idea was that he would simplify the rhythm,

made it straight on four-on-the-floor and simple,

and that's was the creation of "Ride a White Swan."

♪ Wear a tall hat like a druid in the old days ♪

♪ Wear a tall hat and a tattooed gown ♪

♪ Ride a white swan like the people of the Beltane ♪

♪ Wear your hair long, babe, you can't go wrong ♪

That was the first breakthrough to become the new T. Rex,

as opposed to Tyrannosaurus Rex.

[upbeat electric guitar music]

- [Narrator] Marc Bolan was about to be transformed

from a hippie troubadour to a swaggering, pop idol.

Tired of his rug and his joss stick,

Marc Bolan plugged in his guitar

and reached for the cocaine.

♪ Well, she ain't no witch ♪

♪ And I love the way she twitch, aha-ha ♪

♪ Aha-ha ♪

♪ Ooh ♪

Now Bolan was treated like a king wherever he went

and he was bombarded with images of himself from magazines,

billboards, television, and T-shirts.

Now Marc Bolan cared for nothing but the fact

that he was Marc Bolan, a boy from nowhere

whose genius had been recognized around the world

and that he could do exactly what he pleased.

Success had transformed Marc Bolan

into a man whose Faustian quest for fame

would rob him of his dignity.

Bolan had been prepared to sacrifice everything for fame,

even an old friend

- At the time, John Peel and Marc

had had a breaking of the waves

at the release of "Get It On."

Because John was then at that point writing

for Disc and Music Echo, I think it was,

and had reviewed each of Marc's singles

and had been getting progressively

less enthusiastic about them,

as Marc just became more and more commercial

and I think John felt was beginning to kind of sell-out

and lose his musical integrity and all of this stuff.

So when "Get It On" came,

and this is now the full-scale pop-rock record,

John's patience just sort of ran out

and he just blasted this single.

And it was two things, Marc was absolutely angry,

but he was also very, very upset

that he just felt let down by his friend

that he could be so critical of something

that Marc himself felt was the best thing he'd ever done.

And that was it, they just... [clicks fingers]

That was it.

Just, boom, like that,

and they just stopped talking at that moment.

♪ Get it on ♪

♪ Bang a gong ♪

♪ Get it on ♪

- [Narrator] But as one friend was left at the wayside,

many others clambered on board the Bolan bandwagon.

- You know, me, I'm liking these records

more and more each one that comes out.

"Get It On" was the peak for me.

But I think, also, "Telegram Sam" is a fantastic record.

"Metal Guru" was the first one that I had reservations about

and I still don't think it's one of the best T. Rex singles.

Subsequently, then, of course, we did get another run.

And in fact, you look back now in the T-Rex catalog

and "I Love to Boogie" and "Children of the Revolution"

and stuff like that has seriously stood the test of time.

♪ She ain't no witch and I love the way she twitch, aha-ha ♪

♪ Aha-ha ♪

♪ Ooh ♪

♪ She ain't no witch and I love ♪

- [Narrator] By now, Marc had spawned many imitations,

as glam rock dominated the charts.

Gary Glitter, Rod Stewart, Slade,

The Sweet, and most significantly, David Bowie,

who would feature prominently

in Marc's last few weeks in the public eye.

♪ La, la, la, la, la, la ♪

- David was a very clever boy.

He was very good at what he did.

Marc was feeling unsure at certain times,

but although would never show it.

The rivalry when they were together,

you could see them sort of pushing their shoulders forward

like old mods would have done in a ballroom

or a nightclub, just to be up-front.

- [Narrator] In 1969,

David Bowie toured with T. Rex as the opening act.

- Those those two were like Rod and Elton,

they were the best of friends, but, you know, bantered.

Marc would wind Bowie up a lot.

Yeah. I don't suppose he meant it for one second.

- David has never denied it,

but Marc used to tell this wonderful story

of the two of them being on the King's Road,

having come out from lunch,

and they were both world-famous stars,

and a coach pulled up, full of schoolgirls, [laughs]

who all banged on the window and screamed at Marc

and didn't know Bowie.

And it wouldn't surprise me one bit

because the thing about Marc...

You know, you learn if you don't wanna be recognized,

if you don't want to be approached in the street,

if you don't wanna be as approached at airports

or railway stations, wherever you might be in public,

you learn how to dress down,

you learn how to hide and just drop your chin as your walk.

There's all kinds of tricks to prevent being noticed.

Marc wouldn't wanna be missed.

Marc would have the hair, the satin scarf all around,

and a feather boa and high heels in the street.

All of the time he was on.

Marc was like Sammy Davis Jr., you know?

Open the fridge, they do 20 minutes.

- [Narrator] Marc Bolan was now the officially

recognized number one pop star in the UK

and he aimed to keep himself in the spotlight.

- He was the most self-publicized individual,

consciously, that I ever met,

and sometimes the most self-deluded.

But he could make something out of nothing the whole time

and he loved the spotlight.

He loved being in the spotlight.

- [Eric] Well, he was a showman, you know?

He was Bruce Forsyth, in a strange way.

He was an entertainer. He gave them what they wanted.

- He was a great interview.

Whenever he was interviewed by any of the press,

even though they knew he was talking crap,

he could still spin out such a story,

they would write every single word of it down,

and they loved it.

He was definitely good value.

- He was a publicist's dream, actually, to look after

because he was always prepared

to say whatever the journalist wanted to hear, you know?

"What should we do today, Keith?

"I know, tell him I've got a gold bed

"that I take on tour with me.

"They loved that one.

"We'd done bisexual. What about trisexual?"

I never did understand what he meant by that. [laughing]

- [Narrator] Being and living the life of a star

was all Marc knew, real life was a stranger to him.

- He was cack-handed. He was hopeless.

He had no hand coordination at all, for instance.

Where I came from, they'd say he was girly, you know?

The sports boys, the boys from the football pitch,

and the rugger, the rugger team would call him girly.

He played guitar for me at Abbey Road

on one of my last EMI albums

and they had a table tennis up in the green room at....

Where was it? AIR, London.

There was a table tennis table.

Now, I'm quite good at that.

I come from a family of sporting types.

Very coordinated men and women.

And, oh, boy, you're talking about a man who couldn't,

you know... [laughs]

He couldn't play table tennis. Let's put it that way.

He wasn't a man's man, in that sense, okay?

But Gloria will tell you, they went to Monte Carlo

and spent all their money.

She had a great story about them being in

the five-star flash hotel in Monte Carlo,

and Marc would buy all the kit, you know?

He would buy the very top-of-the-range whites for tennis.

And the right shorts, the right top,

and all the right shoes and socks, the right rackets.

He would have spent on nothing but the very best.

In case anyone came past and recognized him,

he would have to have the very best.

It would have been certainly very seriously on his mind

when he was purchasing these things

and she told me how they bought absolutely everything

for a lot of money and then get onto the tennis court

and, of course, he can't hit the ball.

He can't throw it in the air and whack it. [laughs]

But he had to pose. He had to have the kit.

He had to look like he knew what he was doing.

Had to look like that's what you do in Monte Carlo.

You got this five-star hotel with tennis courts out there,

go and use them, but buy the kit first.

"Why not just go out, Marc, you know?

"Put on a pair of plimsolls or trainers

"and just see if you can do it."

- What he really loved was being in that spotlight,

was being famous.

He loved that more than anything.

To be famous was what he loved.

And if he could be with famous people,

who were more famous than he was, even better!

I was looking after the Rolling Stones at the time,

and I'd got him a backstage pass to come and see us,

and shortly before the Stones were due to go on stage

and he insisted on going into Jagger's dressing room

and saying hello.

And I said, "I don't think now's the time, Marc,

"'cause he's a bit stressed out.

"You can back after the show."

"No, I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to stay

"all the way through, I'll go in now."

And he was a bit out of it, as well.

Well, anyway, he waltzed into the dressing room,

shut the door behind him, [laughs]

and there was this scream from inside

and this muffled voice saying, "He's grabbed my balls!"

[laughing] The next thing that happened

was the two security guards rushed in, carrying Marc out,

sort of one under each arm with his feet kicking in the air

and him sort of like saying,

"I didn't realize they were sacrosanct!

"I didn't realize they was sacrosanct!"

And every time he came up to my office after that,

he always asked how golden balls was. [laughing]

- [Narrator] Marc Bolan displayed a ruthless streak

that become more and more apparent as his career took off.

- Well, I think Marc had a sense of self-preservation,

and if there was something that he saw

that he's gonna have to do in order to continue his march

upwards towards that destiny of being a star,

people would get dumped along the way,

and people did get dumped along the way.

♪ Get it on, bang a gong, get it on ♪

[upbeat rock music]

♪ Get it on, bang a gong, get it on ♪

- [Narrator] But Marc Bolan was changing.

- Well, his character changed because of the mad success.

Everything was written about him

that he was some new superstar and he believed it.

He believed that he could do no wrong, basically.

He suddenly believed that whatever he did was so good

that he didn't have to think or work at it,

he just thought it fell out of him.

And it made him very difficult for lots of people

and, at the same time, lots of people fell by the wayside

because he was suddenly a superstar.

- By now, Marc has moved on to become a different person

from the person that John and I knew in 1967.

And it was interesting, too, to watch him

because his weight ballooned at this period of time,

and it seems to me that this was symbolic

of his ego getting bigger and bigger,

so he was sort of ballooning with the size of his ego.

And he did get into big ego problems, as we all know,

and became extremely difficult.

The sort of slightly boastful, but in a joking way,

"Yeah, I know we've sold millions of records."

Then became it was serious.

"Yeah. We've sold millions of records," you know?

The emphasis became so completely different

and then that was it

and I saw very, very little of Marc from then on.

- A part of the reason for what I saw as a decline

was his excesses.

He did start drinking too much.

Then there was a period when he was going out

with Harry Nilsson and Ringo and Keith Moon.

[laughing] Well, I mean, that combination

more or less speaks for itself, doesn't it?

I mean, I think there's only one left alive, isn't there?

And there was a bit of cocaine going down, I think, as well.

- It became mad, as the drink crept in

and the drugs crept in, people do turn into monsters

and Marc turned into Elvis Presley on acid.

And well, it wasn't acid, it was alcohol and cocaine,

that didn't help him at all.

- He knew how to open a bottle of champagne.

Although, what we really drank together,

we were terribly, terribly smashed all the time, was cognac.

I gave that up. But, I mean, we did a lot of bad...

We spent our money in a lot of the wrong ways.

- And if it was drugs or it was pills

or it was food or drink,

but he was maybe three, four, five stone overweight.

Monster, monster, monster fat.

- And this is what I was saying about symbolism.

The symbolic thing of him,

his weight filling out and everything,

'cause he was getting bigger and bigger,

there's no doubt about that.

But I think that he just got swept up with this whole thing

of how big I am,

and, eventually, you're going, "Hello? I'm here."

And that's a bit what it was like.

- He was beautiful-looking boy.

He had great friends around him.

He had great management and he had some fantastic music

but it all turned into pop trash I'm afraid.

- [Narrator] As his fame declined

and his records stayed on the shelves,

Bolan's capacity for self-publicity

had turned into a cruel self-delusion.

- The thing about Marc, again,

was his ability for self-deception.

I mean, he really could bring himself

to believe in his own publicity.

I think, in a way, some of that shut him in on him himself

and he began to actually kind of

believe these things were true.

There was one occasion where my partner, Chris Williams,

was going down to see him

and had rung up to make arrangements

to meet him at his house, off the King's Road.

And he said, "Oh, Chris, you gotta be careful

"if you're coming this morning.

"There are thousands of fans around the house.

"They nearly tore me apart when I came in."

And this was one of the periods in time

when he was going through a bit of a lull anyway.

And Chris said, "Oh. What do you want me to do?"

He said, "Well, when you get down here,

"phone me from the telephone box across the road,"

there's a red telephone box just across the road

in the King's Road,

"and I'll open the front door

"and you make a run for it from the other side of the road."

So Chris dutifully did as he was told. [laughs]

There wasn't a soul there.

And burst puffing and perspiring through his front door

and said, "Well, where are they all?"

He said, "Oh, they're all hiding

"behind that wall over there."

Well, I mean, they weren't.

♪ 20th-century boy ♪

- Marc never believed he could lose his popularity.

He always thought he was still the same teenage idol

he was when T. Rextacy was at its height.

He still believed there were people

camping outside his house or the flat,

waiting for him every minute of the day,

when the whole thing had already burst and moved on.

He believed that he was being followed everywhere.

He still thought the fans...

There were always the fans.

Some fans are incredibly loyal

and they'll live with anything,

but the majority of them had gone.

Marc's magic had actually gone.

[upbeat rock and roll music]

- [Narrator] As Bolan got fat, Bowie got thin.

Bolan couldn't get a hit, Bowie took America.

As the hits dried up, Bolan failed to dry out.

To him, now everything he did was a stroke of genius.

And surrounded by an entourage that agreed with him

and fueled by booze and coke, he was not dissuaded,

even though the following day,

he would not be able to remember

what he recorded the night before.

By early 1976,

Marc Bolan had been out of the spotlight

he craved for three years.

In the meantime, pop music had become stagnant,

a world of glam imposters,

self-indulgent progressive rockers,

and the insidious disco beat.

[upbeat disco music]

And then along came the Sex Pistols

with the singer Johnny Rotten,

whose sneering face would symbolize the punk era,

just as Bolan had symbolized glam rock.

[heavy punk music]

Ever the chameleon, Bolan latched onto punk rock

with a mixture of instinct and opportunism,

and while the punks sneered and spat at the rock hierarchy,

they took Bolan to their hearts.

It was a mutual appreciation society

as Marc hailed the new wave

as the children of the revolution.

- I took him to The Roxy club.

Took him out to meet all those...

And he had such a great time.

He went for it, after that, in such a big way.

And then a couple of the punks were interviewed

and mentioned that they'd cut their teeth

listening to T. Rex records.

So, suddenly, he had new support

and he could see a new way of inventing himself.

- Well, most of the people

who ended up in punk groups in '77 were buying records,

in '71, '72 when T-Rex were at their peak.

So we all knew this stuff really well

and it was really classy kind of pop.

When you buy your first guitar and that,

you can pick out "Hot Love," what, there's three chords?

It's easy. It's a good little riff.

[upbeat rock and roll music]

♪ She's my woman of gold ♪

♪ She's not very old, aha-ha ♪

Bolan's stuff, it was fresh and exciting,

and he could really play a guitar, as well.

Hell of a guitar player.

[upbeat electric guitar music]

- [Narrator] In 1977, Marc Bolan toured the UK

and took with him The Damned,

one of the more memorable punk acts.

- I borrowed a shirt, a T. Rex shirt,

off of Mark Perry who was writing a punk fanzine

called Sniffin' Glue,

and there was a picture of me in Sounds wearing it,

and I suppose Marc must have seen it

and gone, "Okay, they're the boys I want.

"Get them as my support act," you know?

♪ Whoo ♪

♪ Wow ♪

[upbeat rock music]

Usually, you have to travel in a little transit van

and you stay in dodgy B&B and everything is kind of....

You know, it's a bit of a tough life, to be quite honest.

But Marc paid for everything.

We traveled on his coach.

We ate at the same dinners as him and used his PA

and was fantastic to us.

He was really decent.

And he used to give us little bits of advice

on the tour bus.

We opened and, funnily enough, a lot of his fans liked us,

and a lot of our fans liked them.

So the thing really worked,

much better than any of us thought it would.

And it was nice to play in front of a bunch

of attractive girls and stuff.

And, of course, it was my first proper tour.

So we took full advantage of it

and chatted up as many of Marc's fans as possible.

Which pissed him off a little bit

because sometimes we'd take them on the tour bus, you know?

And we thought, "Oh, we'll a snog

"up the back of the bus," and everything.

And as soon as I got on the bus they ran for Marc

and left us behind, you know?

So they didn't wanna kind of disgusting

old punk rocker, after all, they wanted Marc.

There you go.

- [Narrator] Marc's welcome to punk rock

also signaled a massive change in his health and appearance.

He cleaned up completely.

- He just wandered around with a tracksuit on.

And while the rest of us were in the services,

eating greasy fry ups and that,

Marc would be jogging around.

You'd see him. You could time him by your watch.

"Hey, there goes Marc. Yeah, he'll be another five seconds."

And he was desperately trying to get fit, you know?

And he was, he was doing it.

He was off the drink and drugs and he was looking good.

- He had a big weight problem, you know?

He was the shape of a football at one point.

Which he shook off.

I think he knew about it

and he shook off a lot of the weight.

He would have known, you know, he wasn't stupid.

You'd look in the mirror and think,

you know, "The screaming hoards are growing up

"and if I'm gonna win them back,

"I'm no longer gonna be a poster on the bedroom wall,

"I have to be making serious music."

- I just felt that the original Marc Bolan

was beginning to come back,

and particularly with the onset of punk

and the way that Marc really got into

the whole new wave scene,

and also the way that he was regarded

as something of a hero figure

by the emerging punk generation.

I think Marc was beginning to stabilize again now

and beginning to return to the person

that he was when I first met him.

♪ Sometimes I wonder what I'm a-gonna do ♪

♪ But there ain't no cure for the summertime ♪

[upbeat rock music]

- [Jeff] There was no such second coming in Marc's mind.

He hadn't gone away.

He'd just re-trimmed himself

and things were gonna be different.

He had a new band, that were a red hot band, great band.

Things were actually looking better for him.

- [Narrator] The favorable notices Marc coveted

began to roll in.

He sensed real success again

and that hunger replaced his hitherto unquenchable desire

for alcohol and fatty food.

And Bolan's dedication was soon rewarded by Granada TV.

He was invited to front a six-part pop show

to go out late in the afternoon.

With a nod towards punk rock,

Marc invited The Jam, Boomtown Rats,

The Rods, and Generation X onto the show,

describing Generation X's singer, Billy Idol,

as almost as pretty as me.

- Billy Idol is supposed to be as [sniffs] pretty as me.

- [Narrator] The final episode was broadcast

in the summer of 1977.

- Thank you for goodbye.

And all the boys in the band, David, everybody for the cash.

You know who they are.

This is a new song.

- [Narrator] And it featured the great

Marc Bolan-David Bowie rivalry,

for what would become the final time.

[upbeat rock and roll music]

- Oh, God, yeah, the Marc Bolan-David Bowie confrontation

on the final TV show that Muriel Young directed

was absolute chaos.

- That day at the studio

was one of the worst experiences of our life.

- Bowie's people made a huge production

about keeping people away from him.

I'd brought down a huge contingent of press, [laughs]

ostensibly to see Marc, but also on the basis, of course,

that David Bowie was gonna be performing,

and we wanted press for the show.

- We get back to the studio.

We go to walk straight into the room

I've been in three days a week for six weeks,

and this guy puts his hand up and says,

"Sorry, you can't go in there. It's closed session."

I said, "Excuse me? Who are you?"

He said, "I'm stopping anyone going to see David Bowie."

I said, "Well, you get out the bloody way right now

"or you're out of here, mate."

I walked straight past him into the studio.

I walk in and there's this air and the studio is empty,

apart from Marc and the band, and David.

And there's two other people on the other door.

So I go out the side door, I go to look for Muriel,

and I walked down the end of the hall

and there's this floor manager standing on the side

with his kit on, and there's a group of people,

they're gonna call out everyone out.

They've been ordered out of their own studio

by David Bowie's security.

- Then the run-through itself was chaotic

because people were arriving late.

The Generation X turned up without their equipment

and had to borrow from everybody else.

And Marc was saying,

"If they smash anything of mine, I'll kill them."

- So this turned into an incredible row between everybody.

Once Marc had twigged what had happened,

the rivalry then really showed.

- Marc was going into his Cecil B. DeMille routine.

You know, "Why do I have to do it all?"

You know, "I can't be the director,

"the producer, the artist," and you know. [laughs]

It was very funny actually. I loved it.

- It was live. It was going out live.

But there was this incredible tension in the air.

Anyway, Marc had given David one of his guitars,

sort of peace offering,

"Okay, we'll just go and do it, have a good time."

And it was a good show.

[upbeat rock and roll music]

- Because the show is overrunning

because David and Marc decided to do a jam at the end of it,

during which Marc fell off the stage,

much to David Bowie's amusement.

♪ What can I do ♪

- You see at the end of the show finishes just there

with Marc falling off the stage.

It was a sort of sign of things to come, I think,

in a strange way.

- [Narrator] 8:00 p.m., Thursday, 15th of September, 1977,

and Jeff Dexter is checking out a new punk band

at The Speakeasy Club in Central London,

where he was expecting to meet up with Marc, Gloria,

and her brother, Richard Jones.

[people chattering]

The plan had been to go to Morton's restaurant

and meet up with Marc's manager Tony Howard and some friends

but then Marc sat down with a punk band

to give them, first of all, the benefit of his company,

and later, business advice.

- Money will come. The money will come.

- And Marc saying, "Well, I'm going to Morton's.

"I've got to eat something."

So I phoned the head to Morton's and I told Tony,

"Marc's on his way now, be careful."

[upbeat rock music]

And I'm afraid I didn't go to Morton's.

I didn't want to be in that situation.

And that's the last I saw of Marc until...

Well, that's the last I saw of Marc.

[tense music]

- The day of the accident,

Marc was doing the interview for the BBC

and he ended up telling his life story,

how he started in the business

and, actually, just told his whole life story.

So he was really up

and so he suggested that we stop and have something to eat.

Now, we go into the restaurant, there are friends there.

One gentleman, he'd known since they were kids.

And Marc said, "Sing me a song."

I said, "Are you serious?" He said, "Yeah."

So I got up and I did a number for him.

And it was just a beautiful, beautiful evening,

not knowing that that would be our last evening together.

And we were going home

and

fate wasn't on our side.

- [Narrator] Everyone left the restaurant

around 4:00 in the morning.

Victoria accepted Richard's offer

to drive her back to Marc and Gloria's home.

- [Victoria] Hi. Where are we going?

- [Narrator] That night Marc had given the driver time off.

So they drove home in Gloria Jones' Mini,

with Richard and Victoria following them.

The journey to Upper Richmond Road

would usually take around an hour at that time of night.

[upbeat rock music]

Gloria drove home through the streets of South London.

♪ You're so sweet ♪

♪ You're so fine ♪

♪ I want you all and everything just to be mine ♪

♪ 'Cause you're my babe ♪

♪ 'Cause you're my love ♪

The car went over a small humpback bridge

and that is all Gloria remembers.

♪ For your love ♪

[woman screams]

Gloria's Mini plowed into a tree, killing Marc instantly,

and robbing him of a second taste of fame and fortune.

- The way the car was totaled, I should have died with him.

In fact, the doctors they felt, how did I live?

I wasn't told that a Marc had died.

Richard asked the doctors and nurses not to let me know.

So, I didn't get to go to the service.

I wasn't aware of anything.

And Tony came to the hospital, he and Richard,

and then they told me that I had lost Marc.

[sparse somber music]

- It's fantastic when you meet your heroes

and they turn out to be good people,

and some of my heroes have turned out to be assholes

and some have been wonderful human beings.

Marc was a great, great, great bloke.

- He was a very generous person, very generous of spirit,

and that's what I would have cared about.

I loved him. I loved listening to him.

I knew he'd been through something

that was an extremely rare occurrence.

He'd been through something that very few of us

would ever, ever experience, you know?

It was Beatlemania for Bolan, wasn't it?

The friend that I mixed with

was the fellow who sat cross-legged singing great poetry,

very strange poetry.

This was the fellow I sat with.

I didn't sit and talk and mix with the feather boa-wearing,

posing, pouting pop star.

You don't forget someone like Marc.

And yeah, I was very proud to have been his pal. Yeah.

♪ I could have loved you, girl, like a planet ♪

♪ I could have blazed your love in the sky ♪

- [Narrator] Marc Bolan, whose songs celebrated the movement

of swans and seagulls, Jeepsters and Cadillacs,

was still at last.

♪ Life's a gas ♪

- Marc had always said he would never make it to 30.

[gentle pop-rock music]

- Weird thing is about Marc,

he could sometimes come up with a little kind of almost

clairvoyant things about in his own destiny and stuff,

and he always said he would die young, you know?

- I'd turned 30 the year before

and Marc was about to become 32,

which was, to him, a huge step and he didn't quite make it.

♪ No, it really doesn't matter at all ♪

♪ Baby, life's a gas ♪

- He loved these figures that died young

and made a good corpse.

James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, you know?

He adored those kinds of iconic Hollywood figures.

♪ I could have burned your fate in the sand ♪

- He always wanted to be

Elvis Presley, James Dean, or whatever.

He kinda got his wish. He kind of got what he wanted.

- Now, one sees the value of what Marc was doing

in the early '70s, how good those records were,

and how much his influence still resonates.

Look at the number of ads

that use one or other of Marc's songs.

And even the fact that Robbie Williams,

on "Top of the Pops" a year or so ago,

was wearing a T. Rex "Slider" T-shirt.

Marc always said how great he was. He always did.

I know that he would be able to say,

"You see, look, I told you."

♪ But it really doesn't matter at all ♪

♪ No, it really doesn't matter at all ♪

♪ Life's a gas ♪

[gentle somber music]