Marc Bolan was born Mark Feld on 30 September 1947 at Hackney Hospital, London, to Simeon (Sid) and Phyllis. His older brother, and only sibling, Harry had been born two years previously.
The Britain that Mark grew up in bore no similarity to the fey, magical Albion celebrated in his later lyrics for Tyrannosaurus Rex. Stoke Newington, where the family lived in north-east London, was, like the rest of the city, dotted with vacant lots, some razed, most still strewn with debris, grim reminders of the Luftwaffe’s unwelcome attention during World War Two. The Felds lived in a small, rented two-bedroom flat that had no hot running water and was heated by a single coal fire. Harry and Mark’s bedroom pulled double duty, serving as the living room during the day. Their flat did at least have an indoor toilet, still a luxury in late 1940s Britain.
But a new-found optimism for the future was changing the country. The National Health Service was founded the year after Mark was born. 1951 saw the Festival of Britain, a five-month celebration of post-war recovery where, according to Labour cabinet member Herbert Morrison, the Festival’s prime mover, British people could give ‘themselves a pat on the back.’ In 1952, the year young Mark Feld first attended Northwold Road Primary School, 25-year-old Elizabeth II ascended the British throne, ushering in what many proclaimed to be ‘a new Elizabethan age.’ And in 1957, the year of Suzie and The Hula-Hoops’ brief and possibly fictitious career (see below), Prime Minister Harold MacMillan famously told Britons they ‘had never had it so good.’
Additionally, two very different yet entirely interconnected phenomena which were to have a profound social and cultural effect marked the 1950s apart from its predecessors.
The first was Rock and Roll. Like many others, Mark’s introduction to this exciting new music came via Bill Haley and His Comets, and, also like many others, he soon graduated to Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent. He was an early fan of Cliff Richard and the Drifters (as the Shadows were then known), and the fact that England was now producing rock stars would have been a source of excitement and inspiration.
At the age of nine, he talked his mother into buying him a guitar, and the following year he joined his first group, Suzie and The Hula-Hoops, although it is telling that none of the other members, including future chart-topper Helen Shapiro, recall that, or any other, name. The ‘Suzie’ tag appears to be an after- the-fact Bolan invention, an early example of the self-mythologising he would become so adept at.
Helen Shapiro reached number one in the UK singles chart twice in 1961, with ‘You Don’t Know’ and ‘Walkin’ Back to Happiness’, and the fact that someone he knew could become a pop star opened up a world of possibilities for Mark. If she could do it, surely he could too?
However, according to friends at the time, it was clothes and not music that was Mark’s primary obsession. He was a teenager, that other g
