Marc Bolan And T. Rex

Disc One: From the concerts at The Rainbow Theatre, London on 18th March 1977, and at The Portsmouth Locarno on 20th March 1977. Disc Two: From the concert at The Agora Club, Cleveland, Ohio on 11th November 1974. A live Marc Bolan and T. Rex album was never released during Marc's lifetime. He claimed that he felt it unfair to expect fans to buy the same material more than once, and a multitude of contractual problems also kept his hands tied. This has often been due to the quality of the source tapes - a problem that has been largely unavoidable.

A new T. Rex box set called simply 1972 brings together studio recordings, broadcasts and performances by Marc Bolan and T. Rex and is available to pre-order in 6LP coloured vinyl and 5CD editions, with limited quantities being available with a print of The Slider SIGNED by producer Tony Visconti.

Recorded during Marc Bolan's U.S. visits during 1971 and 1972, Spaceball is the first full re-counting of four American radio sessions previously made partially available as a bonus LP within the Marc label's Till Dawn compilation in 1985. Eight songs, taped in L.A. in 1972, are reprised from that set; 11 more are collected here. The overall mood of the two CDs is sparse, but astonishingly dynamic, with the earliest session – taped for WBAI, New York, in June 1971 – especially remarkable. It opens with a pair of unaccompanied Bolan performances, previewing the as-yet-unreleased "Cosmic Dancer" and "Planet Queen." The guitar heavy "Elemental Child" follows, a surprising inclusion given the song's freak-out dynamics, but it's an effective piece, all the more so after bandmates Mickey Finn and bassist Steve Currie join in a few minutes into the song.

These "Final Cuts" are an odds-and-sods collection of music Marc Bolan had been working on – and it's in various stages of completion – before he was killed in 1977. Some of the music here appears on other recordings of late cuts; some are reworkings of tunes or alternate takes of tracks that appeared on Futuristic Dragon or Dandy in the Underworld; some never appeared at all. You have to be a hardcore T. Rex and/or Bolan fan to want this music. There is a weird version of "To Know You Is to Love You" with a vocal by Gloria Jones (the disco star who was Bolan's wife), and the rest has either new tags, or more or less guitars, or reworked melodies. You get the picture. Usually Edsel is spot-on, but this is dodgy. About the only thing you can really compliment the compilation producers for is good-quality sound – it's top-notch for what it is.

By late 1973, Marc Bolan's star was waning fast. No longer gunning out those effortless classics which established him as the most important figure of the decade so far, he embarked instead on a voyage of musical discovery, which cast him so far adrift from the commercial pop mainstream that when his critics said he'd blown it, he didn't even bother answering them back. Or that's the way it appeared at the time, and today, too, it must be acknowledged that 1974's Zinc Alloy & the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow is not classic Bolan, even if one overlooks the transparency of its title.

Following the success of previous RSD releases Bump ‘n’ Grind and Shadowland, Star King compiles more very rare ‘working’ and ‘master’ versions of T. Rex favourites, including a 12 minute jam of Children Of The Revolution, and one previously unreleased track. All are taken from original master tapes, and all appear on vinyl for the first time.

For All The Cats - The Best of Marc Bolan & T. Rex is the definitive 2CD / 49 tracks Marc Bolan collection featuring 20 Top 50 Hits including 4 Number 1 singles plus a generous helping of B-sides, key album tracks and rarities plus a new essay by Alexis Petridis, 20 page booklet featuring label photos and liner notes.

Although it has been completely overshadowed by the "official" CD and DVD versions of Marc Bolan's epochal rock and fantasy movie, this original attempt to re-create the soundtrack is nevertheless a worthwhile package. It targets not the full-blown glory of the film, with its dramatic in-concert centerpiece, but rather an overview of memorable moments - the string-powered "Children of the Revolution" that closes the album, the Mad Hatter-style "Tea Party," Bolan and Ringo Starr's madcap "Some People Like to Rock" routine, and so on. Of course, there is plenty of live material here, and the band sounds great - this was T. Rex at the peak of their powers, and while there are better-quality recordings out there, none recapture the sheer magic of the occasion like this one. Again, if you own (or intend to pick up) the CD soundtrack, you have no need to hunt this down as well…

The first (but certainly not the last) of the compilations issued in the wake of T. Rex's U.K. chart breakthrough, Bolan Boogie was also many of the band's new fans' first chance to acquaint themselves with all that Marc Bolan had done in the past – a point which the compilers certainly kept in mind. The catalog at their disposal was vast, reaching back to the acoustic birth of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Sensibly, however, Bolan Boogie concentrates on the material that lived up its title – aside from one cut drawn from 1969's Unicorn, the entire album dated from the arrival of Mickey Finn, and the attendant headlong dive into electricity launched by the Beard of Stars album, and culminating with the epochal Electric Warrior album. Some incontrovertible classics emerge.