What music are you into right now?

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Jan Pieter Geersing, from his CD "analogue age." highly recommended

Interesting. I saw T Rex live in 1972 (not one of their better performances), and I've been through several intense Bolan obsessive phases in my life. I prefer a lot of his earlier stuff (I've got original Unicorn and Beard Of Stars LPs). I got rather disillusioned with him when he entered his cocaine-fuelled rock superstar phase (listen to interviews with him from 1970 and early '71, then compare them to stuff from late '71 onwards - was this the same person?). He could still do a decent stage show in 73/74 (have you seen the 1973 Midnight Special and 1974 Kirshner show performances?), but I don't listen to post Tanx material, and am sceptical of the claim by fans that he was on the verge of a huge revival in fortunes around the time of his death.

I'm into Irish country music.

I personally think that if Marc Bolan had lived, he would rarely have bothered the upper reaches of the charts. In 1977, despite the Muriel Young-produced TV show, he was still seen by the public as a here-today, gone-tomorrow teen pop star in the mould of Gary Glitter and Donny Osmond. He strongly resented the teenybopper label and been trying to prove himself as a serious artist since Tanx. Hooking up with Pat Hall and Gloria Jones in 1973 and moving into soul with Zinc Alloy was before Bowie and Elton did the same, but wasn't as successful. He couldn't accept the public had an image of Marc Bolan and didn't want to see it change. The moment his wife June cut off his hair to spite him after he was caught cheating on her with Gloria, his career took a nosedive. His only real successes after 1974 were New York City and I Love to Boogie, slight returns to the traditional T. Rex sound.

It was pretty hard to make a successful pop-rock formula more serious.

And yes, he was still experimenting with new sounds at the time of his death. Several of the tracks mooted for the followup to Dandy in the Underworld had a far darker sound than anything he'd ever done in the past. It would have been interesting to hear the finished product particularly considering that Mickey Finn was most likely to be involved. T. Rex lost something the day they lost Mickey. The congas were as integral an element of the classic sound as Tony Visconti's Spectoresque production.

And yes, I would have loved to have seen him live in person. Very little live footage exists beyond the two Wembley Arena shows from 1972 and what else there is is usually of very poor quality.

I'd like to have seen him persevere with the 'heavier' sound he was producing in some live performances circa 73. Twentieth Century Boy when it was released, suggested a new departure, but he didn't really build on that. This rare clip from the German TV show Musik Laden is interesting:



Also recently came across this very powerful rendering of Cadillac, live 1972. Superb guitar work by Bolan and Steve Currie there.



Hope you can view these YouTube tracks in the USA.

Very interesting piece of info on Mickey Finn, by the way, never realized that.

I'm listening to Bryan Adams or Kelly Clarkson, I'm listening to her now, her Stronger CD

8-bit or Nightcore versions of the music I usually listen to.

I changed these ones with converters I found: