David Bowie & Marc Bolan – Friendship, Rivalry and Glam Rock

One of the earliest documented connections between Bowie and Bolan came through businessman and manager Leslie Conn. Both young performers were associated with Conn while attempting to establish themselves in London’s music industry.

Bowie later remembered that he and Bolan were both temporarily out of work when Conn put them to work painting his office. What became a famous story was therefore not merely a later piece of glam-rock mythology: Bowie himself recalled the episode.

The live connection between Bowie and Bolan predates the better-known Tyrannosaurus Rex tour of 1969.

On 19 May 1968, Bowie appeared at the Middle Earth club in London’s Covent Garden on a bill headed by Tyrannosaurus Rex. Bowie was advertised not primarily as a singer but for his increasingly important theatrical work, including mime.

The connection continued only weeks later. On 3 June 1968, Bowie and Tyrannosaurus Rex were among the performers appearing in The Babylonian Mouthpiece Show at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The programme also included John Peel, whose association with both artists forms another link between their early careers.

These appearances are historically important because they demonstrate that Bowie and Bolan were already occupying the same performance world before either had become a mainstream star.

The connection became more substantial in February and March 1969, when Bowie appeared as a mime artist during a Tyrannosaurus Rex concert tour.

Surviving tour material lists a programme featuring Tyrannosaurus Rex, John Peel, Vytas Serelis and David Bowie – Mime. Bowie was therefore an advertised part of the show rather than an undocumented backstage visitor or occasional guest.

The tour visited British venues during February and March 1969, including performances in Birmingham, Croydon, Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool and Brighton.

Bowie had studied mime with Lindsay Kemp and regarded theatrical movement as an important part of his artistic development. His contribution to the Tyrannosaurus Rex shows was consequently a theatrical performance rather than a conventional musical support set.

Another major connection between the two artists was producer, arranger and musician Tony Visconti.

Visconti became deeply involved in the work of both men. He produced important recordings for Tyrannosaurus Rex and T. Rex while also developing the creative relationship with Bowie that would eventually span decades.

His position gave him a rare view of both artists before and during their rise to fame. Visconti later recalled that Bolan possessed a strongly competitive personality and that Bowie became one of the people against whom he measured himself.

The clearest surviving studio collaboration between David Bowie and Marc Bolan came in January 1970, when Bolan played guitar on the original single recording of Bowie’s The Prettiest Star.

The sessions began at Trident Studios in London on 8 January 1970, Bowie’s twenty-third birthday, with further work during January. Tony Visconti produced the recording.

Bowie wrote the song for Angela Barnett, whom he would marry in March. Bolan’s distinctive electric guitar contribution gives the original recording an important place in the Bowie–Bolan story.

Bolan achieved his major commercial breakthrough before Bowie. As Tyrannosaurus Rex evolved and the name was shortened to T. Rex, the music became increasingly electric, direct and accessible.

Ride A White Swan became a major British hit in 1970. It was followed by an extraordinary sequence of singles including Hot Love, Get It On, Jeepster, Telegram Sam and Metal Guru.

By 1971 Bolan was one of Britain’s biggest pop stars. The intense audience reaction surrounding T. Rex became known as T. Rextasy.

Bolan’s curls, glitter, colourful clothes, electric guitar and playful sensuality helped establish a new visual vocabulary for British rock.

The chronology matters. When T. Rex became a national phenomenon, Bowie had still not achieved sustained commercial success.

Hot Love reached number one in Britain in 1971, followed by Get It On. The album Electric Warrior confirmed that Bolan was no temporary pop sensation.

Bowie was therefore witnessing a contemporary he had known during the uncertain years of the 1960s become one of Britain’s biggest stars.

It would be misleading to reduce Bowie’s subsequent development to imitation. Their music, ambitions and artistic methods were substantially different. Bolan’s success nevertheless demonstrated that fantasy, flamboyance, ambiguity and rock and roll could reach a mass British audience.

One of the most important artistic links between Bowie and Bolan emerged in 1971.

On 9 March 1971, Bowie recorded an early piano-and-vocal demo of Lady Stardust at Radio Luxembourg Studios in London. The song would eventually appear on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

The connection with Bolan is stronger than later fan speculation. David Bowie’s official website has described Lady Stardust as “David’s ode to Marc Bolan.”

The song presents a charismatic and glamorous performer whose appearance fascinates an audience while challenging conventional expectations surrounding gender and presentation.

A small but revealing episode from 14 September 1971 demonstrates that the Bowie–Bolan connection extended beyond music.

During Bowie’s first visit to Andy Warhol‘s Factory in New York, Bowie wore a pair of shoes that had been given to him by Marc Bolan.

The meeting with Warhol was famously awkward, but the shoes attracted Warhol’s attention and briefly provided a subject around which the conversation could develop.

It is a minor detail compared with their recordings and performances, yet historically it is valuable. Bolan was literally present in an object Bowie carried into one of the most famous encounters of his early career, at a time when Bowie himself had not yet achieved the level of stardom Bolan was already experiencing.

Bowie and Bolan are routinely grouped together under the term glam rock, but they approached performance from different directions.

Bolan’s music relied heavily on groove, concise songwriting, electric guitar and his distinctive vocal personality. His lyrics mixed sexuality, mythology, automobiles, cosmic imagery, humour and rock-and-roll fantasy.

Bowie increasingly approached performance through characters, theatre, narrative and deliberate transformation. Ziggy Stardust was not simply a costume but part of a larger constructed identity involving music, performance and storytelling.

Both nevertheless challenged conventional expectations surrounding the appearance and behaviour of male rock stars. Make-up, glitter, colour, sexuality and ambiguity became increasingly visible within mainstream British popular culture.

During 1972 and 1973, Bowie’s career accelerated at extraordinary speed.

The Ziggy Stardust concerts transformed him into a theatrical rock star whose influence extended beyond the records themselves. The red hair, costumes, make-up and carefully controlled stage presentation created a visual identity immediately recognisable to audiences and photographers.

Bolan remained one of Britain’s most famous musicians during much of this period. T. Rex continued producing major hits, while The Slider reinforced the band’s position at the centre of the glam era.

Bowie and Bolan were increasingly presented as competing figureheads, but their shared history was older and more complicated than the public rivalry suggested.

After glam rock’s initial commercial explosion, Bowie and Bolan followed increasingly different paths.

Bowie dismantled Ziggy Stardust and continued changing direction through Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Station to Station. His music moved through dystopian rock, soul and funk before turning towards the experimental work associated with his late-1970s European period.

T. Rex continued recording and touring, but Bolan no longer enjoyed the almost uninterrupted run of enormous British hits that had defined the band’s commercial peak.

This period is sometimes reduced to a simple narrative of decline. Bolan nevertheless continued writing, recording and performing while attempting to move beyond the expectations created by his earlier success.

By the middle of the decade, Bolan could speak about Bowie very differently from the competitive comments associated with the height of T. Rextasy.

In a 1975 interview, Bolan openly acknowledged parallels between their careers and artistic interests.

Their connection remained alive during Bowie’s Station to Station period.

On 3 May 1976, Marc Bolan and his partner Gloria Jones attended Bowie’s concert at Wembley Empire Pool in London.

By then Bowie had moved far beyond the Ziggy Stardust image, while Bolan was rebuilding his own career. Their continued personal contact provides useful evidence against the idea that their early-1970s rivalry had permanently separated them.

Jones later described the relationship as one in which competition never completely destroyed the underlying friendship.

By 1977 Bolan was experiencing a significant creative and public revival.

Punk had transformed the British musical landscape, but Bolan showed considerable enthusiasm for many younger performers. In return, musicians associated with punk and new wave frequently recognised the directness and energy of early T. Rex as an influence.

Bolan released Dandy in the Underworld in March 1977 and toured Britain with The Damned as support.

The pairing made cultural sense. Bolan’s concise rock songs and outsider glamour had influenced musicians who were now challenging the elaborate conventions of mid-1970s rock.

Bolan’s renewed visibility led to Marc, a Granada Television music series made for ITV in 1977.

The programme gave Bolan a platform for his own performances while also presenting contemporary artists. Guests across the series included musicians associated with Britain’s rapidly changing punk and new-wave scene.

Rather than presenting himself simply as a survivor of an earlier era, Bolan demonstrated an active interest in younger performers and contemporary music.

For the sixth and final programme, Bolan invited a guest whose history with him stretched back more than a decade: David Bowie.

Bowie’s appearance on Marc was recorded at Granada Television in Manchester on 7 September 1977.

The recording date is sometimes confused with the programme’s later transmission. The episode containing Bowie was broadcast on 28 September 1977.

By the time British viewers saw it, Marc Bolan had died.

Bowie arrived during another major creative period in his own career. Low had appeared earlier in 1977, while “Heroes” was about to become the centrepiece of his next album.

The television appearance therefore reunited two men who had known one another before fame, survived the glam-rock explosion and followed dramatically different routes through the decade.

Bowie performed “Heroes” during the programme.

The appearance occupies an important place in Bowie history because his official archive identifies it as the first television performance of “Heroes”.

Bolan’s final television series therefore became part of the early public history of one of Bowie’s most celebrated songs.

Bowie and Bolan then appeared together for an informal closing number titled Standing Next To You.

Bowie’s official archive describes the song as having been written by the two men together. The performance was loose and informal rather than a polished studio production.

Its historical appeal lies partly in that informality. After years of public comparisons, two musicians who had known one another since their uncertain early careers were once again standing together with guitars on a television stage.

Only nine days after the Granada recording, Marc Bolan was killed in a road accident.

During the early hours of 16 September 1977, Bolan was travelling through southwest London in a Mini driven by his partner Gloria Jones.

The car left the road near Barnes Common and struck a tree.

Bolan died at the scene. He was 29 years old, only two weeks away from his thirtieth birthday.

Gloria Jones survived the crash but suffered serious injuries.

Bolan’s death ended a career that had recently shown renewed creative and public momentum.

The episode containing Bowie’s appearance was transmitted on 28 September 1977, twelve days after Bolan’s death.

The circumstances inevitably changed the meaning of the programme. What had been recorded as a lively reunion between two figures who had survived the London music scene of the 1960s and the glam era became a final television document.

The surviving images of Bowie and Bolan smiling, playing and laughing together remain among the most memorable visual records of their relationship.