⌠I watched them play ⌠Hot Love■ on Top Of The Pops,■ Marc addresses us from a perch on the arm of his Chesterfield, and as the record came on all the little girls began to smile. 

⌠There they were dancing away in their little hot pants and that really turned me on. Because they probably didn▓t know anything about me or who I am, but they are digging the record. I can remember for me how it was...■ 

Remember he does: recounting how the child Bolan would sit on the floor, back against the record player pressing his head back against the speaker cloth in some sort of subconscious attempt to make himself a part of the music. 

⌠...Like you thought you could force your way through and suddenly tumble out into the studio,■ put in his publicist, B.P.Fallon. 

⌠Yeah, right... that▓s it exactly. 

⌠And if you can get that feeling across to anybody then forget all about your sell outs and your knockers.■ 

What the defiant Bolan is getting into - now that the latent potential of the one time vexing Rex is gushing like a backyard oil strike, because they really have been getting bigger as well as commercial - is the power and potential of the single as the most immediate and exciting bridge between the artist and the audience. 

A kind of second best - though maybe better, because the machinery is there to serve the whole country - to singing new songs from a balcony the minute they run off the pen. Like cakes, sell them when they are hot and fresh and, if they sell like hot cakes too... 

Fab fancy 

It was primarily a music day for T. Rex - ⌠I▓m really into making demos■ - but the morning had been set aside for the NME and, earlier, a photo session for one of the teenybop magazines: Marc▓ a Fab Fancy this month you know. The sun streamed in on the activity as I waited my turn, the new Hendrix album providing the musical backcloth and Marc▓s June engagingly dispensing a ⌠Lyon▓s Corner House■ service in cream cakes and coffee. 

⌠Hot Love■ has the hot cake qualities Marc is after. All three maxi tracks, featuring Mothers of Invention vocalists Howard Kaylan and Marc Volman, were cut in a session a few hours long begun at four o▓clock one morning; the only time the signers could get a release from Zappa. It was in the shops as soon as possible after strings had been added, and has lost little time since in emulating the success of ⌠Ride A White Swan■. 

⌠Basically because ▒White Swan▓ had been out 19 weeks or so,■ started Bolan in explanation of the hot-on-the-heels of release. ⌠It was going down, obviously, and as we leave for America later this month for four and a half weeks we would have had to wait until we came back to promote the new one. That would have been almost four months; too long to wait when things are good. 

⌠It wasn▓t done as a follow-up, but the minute we did it we knew it was and it got us over the whole follow-up vibe. Then it became a case of either put it out quickly or wait until later, by which time maybe we would have gone cold on it ourselves and wouldn▓t want it released any more.■ 

Photo session over, June set about organizing a hire care for a drive to Reading. All they had available were XJ6s, the prestige Jags, the ⌠flashiness■ of which Marc accepted with a certain reluctance. 

What the success of the T. Rex singles has done is speed up the group▓s development and leave Marc▓s mind in a state of animated flux; churning out sometimes conflicting ideas like a berserk cement mixer. 

Self-discipline 

They emerge in machine gun spurts... about how the stage act should evolve; what shape the group should take; should it grow? Preparing for the American tour, he is most mindful of the need to impose self discipline. 

⌠there will only be 40 minutes in America. We▓ll be scrapping all the old stuff, basically all the acoustic things. I want to make it really visual for them. I am going through so many changes of what I want, I▓m very hopeful of getting Howard and Mark to do the tour with us. 

⌠One of the things I got out of Reg (Elton John) concert at the Festival Hall was that the strings really worked. Possibly we might get into using Howard and Mark here too eventually. 

⌠My attitude to live gigs is changing incredibly. I am trying to tighten up. It is me. I get so involved in playing. Sometimes I feel I don▓t play enough, sometimes I play too much. I would like to get over that and become more consistent as a musician. 

⌠That really upsets me, the recording is OK. A lot of musicians dry up in the studio but that doesn▓t happen to me.■ 

The telephone rings; Marc declines to answer. ⌠I don▓t take calls on a music day. I just have nothing to say to anybody. Do you get like that?■ 

He returns to the theme. ⌠On stage sometimes, if when we go on the people are a bit cool, unless I am in really good spirits, I tend to get into their mood and play just for myself and Micky. But that is wrong. In some circumstances you need to come on extra strong to warm them up. I suppose I am not a professional.■ 

He talks excitedly about bigger backings, a silver console to ⌠take the guitar further than it▓s ever been...■ 

⌠But then I go to see the Neil Young concert and see him doing things completely different from the records and it being really strong too. 

⌠Finding the people I could work with would be difficult, because I am sometimes an eccentric person. I don▓t always talk to, or want to talk to people. I have been lucky with Steve (Curry) and Micky, and with Howard and Mark. It is a whole new scene with them. We get very noisy together. I have a tape just of the talking we did on those sessions. We went in at four and took a bottle of Remy Martin with us.■ 

The Mothers singers and T. Rex first met on the duo▓s first American tour when they shared gigs with Kaylan and Volman▓s old band, the Turtles. 

⌠They were so excited to meet us,■ remembers Bolan, ⌠and we found that they had all our albums and knew the lyrics and everything, and I didn▓t know anybody else in America like that. We vibed and played together in hotel rooms on tour. 

⌠They are such good singers. It is really exciting to work with people like that. They can sign everything I have ever heard in my head with ease.■ 

Knocked out 

It is insisted that I listen to their vocals on the ⌠Woodland Rock■ track off the maxi single, and conversation returns to ⌠Hot Love■ after the playing of a Presley bootleg ▒45 of ⌠You▓re Right, I▓m Left, She▓s Gone■, and a couple of Creedence Clearwater album tracks that Marc felt should have been singles. 

⌠What I was trying to do was to take a leaf out of a real music persons▓ world and it knocks me out that after all these weeks people are still ringing up and wanting to do interviews. 

⌠I still can▓t relate to it. I don▓t mean all that bit about not believing that it can be happening to me... but what is hard to understand is that it is going out across England. 

It is like all I get is the music. I am just pleased that a lot of people are listening to it. That is what excites me. I love putting singles out. Lennon▓s into that, and ▒Hot Love▓ is so right because it▓s so new. It▓s like the last song I had written at that time. I used to say that albums were behind what we are doing but singles like ▒Hot Love▓ are well ahead. 

⌠That▓s exciting me no end because I don▓t know what I want to do yet and I am forcing myself to grow. In the past I wouldn▓t have taken any risks but everything I am going now is a risk. O am very self-destructive. 

⌠The risk is that ▒Hot Love▓ could have died a death and we could have blown the whole thing. Some people spend their lives covering themselves, insuring themselves against risks. All I am trying to do is open up my potential as a person. I could sit down now and write an album. I don▓t know if it would be any good but both ▒White Swan▓ and ▒Hot Love▓ were written like that. 

⌠I have another one right now that we could put out,■ he says, jumping from his chair, taking up a cross-legged sitting position on the floor, clutching an acoustic guitar and sitting. 

⌠It▓s called ▒Mambo Sun▓. 

"Or here, here▓s another, ▒Cosmic Dancer▓...■