T.rex

Tyrannosaurus Rex - My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows (1968) {Expanded Edition 2004}
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© 2004 Straight Ahead Prod. / A&M / UMC | 986 250-9
Rock / Glam Rock / Proto Punk

My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows is the debut album by British rock band Tyrannosaurus Rex (later known as T. Rex), released in 1968. The record features Marc Bolan on vocals and guitars, and Steve Peregrine Took on backing vocals, drums, pixiephone, and percussion. It also features disc jockey John Peel, who reads a Bolan-penned fairytale for the album's closing track, "Frowning Atahuallpa (My Inca Love)," which includes what must be one of the earliest "Hare Krishna" chants on a British pop record (two years before George Harrison's My Sweet Lord).

Until he joined John's Children, in March, 1967, Marc Bolan had never even owned an electric guitar. And once he quit the band, it is said, he abandoned it as quickly as everything else which that band represented - freakbeat pop, adrenalined psych, electric soup. In fact, Bolan never lost sight of his electric destiny, even as Tyrannosaurus Rex sawed away on their acoustic toys, a point which producer Tony Visconti cottoned onto the first time he ever saw the duo play, "Marc sitting crosslegged on stage playing his strange little songs in a wobbly voice, while Steve Took was banging on his bongos." Visconti himself was a novice producer, "holding out for something really different and unusual. I thought Marc was perhaps that." He was, and the album which he and Took delivered emphasized all the qualities which Visconti had spotted that night at the UFO club…

The third Tyrannosaurus Rex album, and their debut U.S. release, Unicorn was also the first to steadfastly state the game plan which Marc Bolan had been patiently formulating for two years - the overnight transformation from underground icon to above ground superstar. Not only does it catch him experimenting with an electric guitar for the first time on record, it also sees Steve Peregrin Took exchange his bongos for a full drum kit, minor deviations to be sure, but significant ones regardless. And listen closely: you can hear the future. The opening "Chariots of Silk" sets the ball rolling, as slight and lovely as any of Bolan's early songs, but driven by a tumultuous drum roll, a pounding percussion which might be the sound of distant gunfire, but could as easily be a petulant four-year-old, stamping around an upstairs apartment…

The most underrated of Tyrannosaurus Rex's four albums, Prophets, Seers & Sages was recorded just six months after their debut and adds little to the landscapes which that set mapped out. There is the same reliance on the jarring juxtaposition of rock rhythms in a folky discipline; the same abundance of obscure, private mythologies; the same skewed look at the latest studio dynamics, fed through the convoluted wringer of the duo's imagination - the already classic pop of the opening "Deboraarobed" is further dignified by its segue into the same performance played backwards, a fairly groundbreaking move at a time when even the Beatles were still burying such experiments deep in the mix. But if the album itself found the duo rooted to the musical spot, still it delivered some of Marc Bolan's most resonant songs…