21st century boy

I should have known things were getting out of hand when the brambles tore a hole in my satin trousers. A grey autumn evening in 1987, and I was on a mission. Freshly arrived in London and still unsure of my way around, I was nevertheless determined to find what I was looking for. Ten years to the day since the death of one of my all-time heroes, I wanted to make my first pilgrimage to his grave.

It had taken me all day to spray my hair and apply my make-up – in the circumstances, anything short of the full glitter job would seem disrespectful – and by the time I arrived in Golders Green, the streets were empty. The absence of fellow glam rock disciples worried me a little, but I pressed on. When I got to the cemetery, the gates were closed.

A minor inconvenience. Nervously glancing both ways, I clambered over the railings, and fought my way through thick undergrowth. After shredding my clothes on the thorns, I began scanning the pristine rows of headstones, many of them written in Hebrew, in search of a Marc Bolan, or possibly a Mark Feld. A thousand or so graves later, I still hadn't found my Marc, it was getting dark, and I was starting to get spooked. I climbed back over the fence, possibly sparking a local vampire scare, and went to drown my sorrows at a T.Rex party at the Limelight.

The reason I couldn't find Marc Bolan, or even a Mark Feld, in Golders Green cemetery was simple: he wasn't there. A lazily-researched magazine article had given me a bum steer; Marc's ashes were in the crematorium across the road.

My Bolan Mania had begun a couple of years earlier at Barry Island, the tacky seaside resort (imagine third-rate Blackpool) attached to my hometown by a causeway. I'd just been sacked from my summer job as a potato-cleaner in a seafront chip shop (on the grounds, I swear, that I was making the potatoes too clean). "Simon," said my boss, "you'll never be a fish and chip man."

His words echoing in my ears, I sat on the verge opposite the Pleasure Park to collect my thoughts. Suddenly, a sweet and strangely familiar sound wafted across the road. "Well, she's my woman of gold, and she's not very old, ah hah hah ..." sang a ghostly voice over a bewitchingly laid-back pop-blues groove. It was a song I remembered from my toddler days, but couldn't put a name to it. Another 10 songs followed, and I sat, transfixed. The DJ in the fairground had lazily whacked on a T.Rex hits compilation, and had accidentally changed my life. I soon found out that the man responsible was Marc Bolan, and that he wasn't a fish and chip man either.

Marc Bolan was born Mark Feld, the son of a Polish-Russian lorry driver and a Soho market stallholder, in Hackney Hospital on 30 September, 1947. In any sense that matters, though, he was his own creation.

From an early age, Mark was entranced by rock'n'roll, devouring records by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, even Cliff Richard. At Northwold Primary School, he formed his first band, Susie and the Hula Hoops, with the soon-to-be-famous Helen Shapiro. Never the academic type, he was expelled at the age of 14, and made a living working on his mother's stall, modelling, and playing bit-parts in children's shows like ITV's Five O'Clock Gang. The teenage Feld was infatuated with the narcissism and attention to detail of the Mods, and whatever he earned, he spent on clothes. His androgynous features – wide cheekbones, a manly jawline, but a girlish mouth, nose and eyes – made him a photographers' favourite, and he became a well-known face around town.

Before long, he fell under the spell of Bob Dylan – there's a theory that his eventual stage name "Bolan" was created from the first two and last three letters of Dylan's name – and began writing folk-pop songs under the name Toby Tyler. At first, no one wanted to know, but in 1965, he recorded a single for Decca under the new alias Marc Bowland. Entitled "The Wizard", it was, he claimed, inspired by a magician he had met in Paris who ate human flesh from a cauldron.

The single flopped, but Marc was a born hustler – Peter Jenner, one of his early managers, described him as "a flower child with a knife up his sleeve" – and his ambition remained undaunted, his confidence undented. Simon Napier-Bell, the legendary pop impresario, remembers the first time "this Charles Dickens urchin" phoned him up and announced, "I'm a singer and I'm going to be the biggest rock star ever, so I need a good manager to make all the arrangements."

Now rechristened Marc Bolan, he recorded an album's worth of material with Napier-Bell and released one single, "Hippy Gumbo", showcasing his peculiar vocal style: a high-pitched warble, apparently developed by listening to Billy Eckstine and Bessie Smith 45s at 78rpm. "Hippy Gumbo" also bombed, so Napier-Bell placed Marc in one of his bands, the riotous freakbeat combo John's Children. He lasted just two months, writing their single "Desdemona", and when he left, their label, Track Records, repossessed his guitar and amp.

This, as much as any artistic decision, shaped his next direction. In 1967, Bolan recruited bongo player Steve "Peregrine" Took and formed the acoustic duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex.

For three years, Bolan and Took worked the hippy underground with their Donovanesque combination of pastoral strumming and bongos, playing cross-legged at free concerts in Hyde Park and Glastonbury in the days before the 20ft fences came. Bolan, his hair now grown out into tumbling black curls, was writing songs inspired by J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis, populated by dwarves, pixies, kings and warlocks. The first Tyrannosaurus Rex album was called My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair ... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows, the follow-up was Prophets, Seers and Sages, The Angels of The Ages.

Mystical whimsy proved modestly marketable. The first album reached number 15, and the band were relentlessly championed by John Peel. However, over the course of the next two albums, Unicorn (his last with Took) and Beard of Stars (his first with new percussionist Mickey Finn), Bolan drifted away from acoustic hippydom towards electric rock, with the help of the brilliant young producer Tony Visconti. His first album of the 1970s featured one last, vital refinement: the band's name had been shortened to the more concise, punchy, pop-friendly T.Rex.

In 1970, pop music was still in a post-Beatles vacuum, and its older brother, rock, was drowning under the weight of prefixes: progressive-, folk-, country-.

Marc Bolan saw his chance, and moved in for the kill. T.Rex were reconstituted as a full four-piece rock band with the addition of bassist Steve Currie and drummer Bill Legend. The new line-up's first single "Ride a White Swan", released in October 1970, was a silly, lightweight tune with a daft lyric about druids, but it had an easy groove and a catchy hook, and became a surprise hit, rocketing to number two. The next single, "Hot Love", reached number one in March 1971, and stayed there for six weeks. Bolan Mania – or "T.Rextasy" – was underway, and fans literally tore themselves apart to get near him. At a Manchester show, one kid broke his jaw in the stampede for the best seats.

Bolan's appearance made him an instant pin-up. His striking features, framed by that corkscrew hair, were augmented by thick eyeliner and lashings of glitter, his diminutive 5ft 2in stature exaggerated by stack-heeled dance shoes from Anello and Davide. Pop stardom was a mantle he wore as though it were his calling: "I have no choice but to see myself as a teenage idol." Bolan's androgyny, coupled with his ambiguous lyrics (the love object was often a "he"), and his announcement to Record Mirror that he was bisexual, only added to his shamanic potency.

An astonishing run of hit singles followed: "Get It On", "Jeepster", "Telegram Sam", "Metal Guru", "Children of the Revolution", "Solid Gold Easy Action" and "20th Century Boy", most of them number ones, the rest not far behind. T.Rex also made two genuinely great albums, Electric Warrior and The Slider, but Marc's main achievement was in single-handedly reinventing the pop single as a respectable art form.

He had also inadvertently created a whole new genre: Glam Rock. Bolan had hit on a winning formula: supercharged 12-bar blues with big, simple, memorable riffs, boot-stomping rhythms, and falsetto backing vocals to add a sheen of hysteria. His lyrics were pop-art poetry, pure rock'n'roll gibberish, a collision of slang buzz words that didn't need to mean anything as long as they sounded super-cool together. For two years, T.Rex were the biggest band in the world. The public's craving for a new Beatles was fulfilled and in fact, in their first year on the charts, T.Rex sold three times as many singles as The Beatles did in theirs.

"Pop should be a spell," Bolan once said. If he'd paid more attention at school, he might have learnt that the word "glamour" itself was originally a Celtic term meaning an enchantment placed by a supernatural being on a human, and that its usage was "to cast a glamour over" a person. Between 1971 and 1973, Marc Bolan had cast a powerful glamour over the pop audience. It wasn't to last.

Bolan, never previously a particularly druggy type, started getting into cocaine and cognac, and began to lose his looks. His life went through many changes. He left his wife June (whom he had married in 1970), and shacked up with soul singer Gloria Jones (of "Tainted Love" fame), with whom he had a son, Rolan. Mickey Finn left the band, and Marc parted company with Tony Visconti. His music suffered, the hits dried up, and he made a run of increasingly sub-standard albums with only the occasional great song ("Whatever Happened To The Teenage Dream?", "Dreamy Lady") to recommend them.

During punk, however, Marc's credibility took a surprising upturn. Many of the new breed namechecked T.Rex as a formative influence, and Bolan reciprocated by inviting them onto his TV show, Marc. In 1976, he took The Damned on tour as his support band. Siouxsie And The Banshees performed a cover of "20th Century Boy".

At 5.58am on 16 September 1977, after a hard night's partying in a south London restaurant, a purple Mini driven by Gloria Jones – Marc couldn't drive – skidded over a humpback bridge on Barnes Common in west London and slammed into a tree. Bolan, two weeks short of his 30th birthday, was killed instantly.

All of this was ancient history by the time my own T.Rex phase arrived. In the mid-1980s, Bolan's stock was at an all-time low, and if he was mentioned at all, it was usually in the same breath as Mud and Wizzard. To me, though, his music seemed to chime with my own heroes of the time, The Smiths and Prince. I joined the Official Marc Bolan Fan Club, a cottage industry run by a nice couple called John and Shan Bramley, and felt even more alone.

Gradually, in the Nineties and Noughties, Marc's respectability has increased. Once Bolan has his claws in you, he doesn't let go. Like the man said, "My name will live on – I'm a life style." To this day, if anyone asks for my favourite albums of all time, Electric Warrior will always be in the top five. And I'll be there on the 16th, at the tree, the crematorium, maybe both. This time, I'm going through the gates.

'Marc Bolan & T.Rex – The Essential Collection' (Universal) is released on 16 September; Mark Paytress's biography, 'Bolan: The Rise and Fall of a 20th Century Superstar' is published by Omnibus Press on 19 September; the accompanying exhibition is at Proud Galleries, London WC2 (020 7839 4942), 10-16 September