T.Rex – Children Of The Revolution (with Elton John & Ringo Starr)
- LUD:
Marc Bolan left a note on a tape box in Copenhagen asking for Ringo Starr’s attention. Six days later a Beatle was behind the drums.
On March 31, 1972, at Rosenberg Studios in Copenhagen, T. Rex recorded a studio rehearsal of Children of the Revolution that ran past twelve minutes, with Flo & Eddie of the Turtles singing behind Marc Bolan. When the tape went into its box, somebody wrote on it that the jam was for the attention of Ringo. Six days later, on April 6, Bolan was at Apple Studios in Savile Row recording the song again, with Ringo Starr on drums and Elton John at the piano.
Starr was not there by accident, and not only because of a note. Bolan had wanted a concert film, and he went to Apple Films and hired a Beatle to direct and produce it. T. Rex played two shows at the Empire Pool in Wembley on March 18, 1972, ten thousand people at each, and Starr filmed them, taking a cinematography credit under his own name, Richard Starkey. The concerts made the front pages. What began as a document of two nights kept growing.
The Apple sessions were part of that growth. Bolan brought the band into the Beatles’ own studio, added Starr behind a kit and John at the piano, and ran through this song and a version of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti. Starr is in a clown suit. At one point Bolan’s head appears through the open lid of John’s piano while John keeps playing. Nothing about it is arranged for the camera in any careful way, which is the whole appeal.
Two songs with one name
The version filmed that day is not the record that went into shops. EMI released the single on September 8, 1972, a separate two-and-a-half-minute recording produced by Tony Visconti, written by Bolan, with Jitterbug Love on the B-side. It reached No.2 on the UK Singles Chart, which broke a run of four straight No.1s, though it did top both the NME and Melody Maker charts. The song never appeared on a regular studio album. What it had instead was a film.
The lyric addresses the young directly, telling them nobody is going to fool them, and that is as much politics as Bolan ever wrote. Some listeners in 1972 read the title alone and decided the record was propaganda. The line is closer to a piece of glam swagger about belonging to a generation, delivered by a man in a satin jacket beside a Beatle dressed as a clown.
MGM-EMI released Born to Boogie on December 18, 1972, sixty-three minutes long, part concert film and part a series of odd staged sequences, including a tea party shot on John Lennon’s estate at Tittenhurst Park. Critics have never quite known what to do with those parts. The performances are why the film survives, and why it has been restored and reissued repeatedly with new mixes supervised by Visconti.
Bolan died on September 16, 1977, at 29, five years after this footage was shot. The film is what remains of the exact moment when he had everything he had asked for, including a Beatle willing to work for him. The single is the version that charted. This is the version people remember, and it was recorded by a band that never played it this way again.
