 | SOLID GOLD, EASY ACTION by TIM DE LISLE
This is quite an old Independent Newspaper article, but it shows wonderfully how much has changed beween now and then. The article is entitled Roll over, Elvis. Another king of rock'n'roll headed for heaven in '77 - Marc Bolan. And 20 years later, his memory lives on and dates from Sunday, 17 August 1997
" Elvis has his tomb in the Meditation Garden at Gracelands in Memphis. Jim Morrison has a grave in a celebrity cemetery in Paris, where the neighbours include Chopin, Wilde and Piaf. Marc Bolan has a tree on Barnes Common.
It's an unusual memorial, maybe unique. There is nothing formal about it: no inscription, no signposts, no attempt at fencing off. The official one is a few miles away - a plaque at Golders Green Crematorium, in north London. And that has its share of pilgrims. But the tree has more than its share, for it has something that ordinary memorials don't have. This is where Bolan died, in the passenger seat of his purple Mini, at five o'clock one September morning in 1977, when he was three quarters of a mile from home. The thing that killed him has become his shrine and his emblem.
The tree is an institution, mentioned in all the reference books. A picture forms in your mind of something big and solid - an oak, perhaps, festooned with flowers, a major local landmark, in a well-trodden clearing. It's not like that at all.
Irony plays through Bolan's story like his own rhythm guitar, swooping deftly in and out, making a small point here, a larger one there. One of the lesser ironies is that the tree he crashed into is easy to miss. It's in a small, dense wood, on the edge of a road called Queens Ride which is narrow and feels narrower, because the trees press in like fans round a limo. There's no pavement on the westbound side and Bolan's tree is so close to the tarmac that had he not hit it, he could have reached out and touched it.
It doesn't look capable of killing anyone. The trunk is only about 18 inches across: tall and spindly, like a boy in a band - and 20 years ago it would have been spindlier still. As well as the Mini (GT - the sporty kind), Bolan owned a pink Rolls-Royce, although he didn't drive: that night, as usual, the driver was the mother of his son, the soul singer Gloria Jones. If they had gone in the Rolls it might well have been the tree, not the star, whose life was cut short. But they were going to the narrow streets of Soho, to have dinner and see a band, and Minis are so much easier to park.
The tree is ordinary in every way except one: picked out, at random, by the headlights of fame. It is no longer covered with tributes, at least not when the 20th anniversary is still some weeks off, but neither is it bare. There's a white swan on a tin disc that says RIDE ON, MARC, and a string of black beads with a St Christopher's medal, belatedly wishing him a safe journey. There's a book cover in a plastic sleeve and higher up a collage: the fan who brought that must also have brought a stepladder, and a friend to hold it, as the ground slopes steeply down from the road. There are a few black ribbons and some glittery metal leaves, a shoelace and plenty of graffiti (MARC FELD - ROCK'N'ROLL NEVER DIE; MISSING YOU XXXCM97). There's a plastic chrysanthemum and a real red rose, not quite turned to black. Behind the tree, down on the bank, are clumps of florist's cellophane, bedraggled and sad, and a white-ish wooden placard-like object, three or four feet long, which turns out to be the outline of a man holding a guitar. No fans are here tonight; just a snail, at eye level on the trunk, silently feasting on the dead flowers.
It's all a bit spooky, but also endearing, even heartwarming. Much like Bolan's music. His early death was a terrible thing, robbing Rolan, then not quite two, of his father and any memories of him; depriving Harry Feld, now a Portsmouth bus controller, of his only brother, and Sid and Phyllis, now dead, of a son; cutting short a happy romance, and leaving Gloria Jones a legacy of grief and guilt (though she bears no blame: the Mini had just gone in for a service and had come out with the wrong pressure in one tyre, and some loose wheelnuts). But it does fit the arc of his career." ...
"AND THEN there is the tree. It is about to become a little more official. A memorial headstone has been commissioned by the Performing Rights Society, the first in its 83-year history, recognising not just Bolan's music but his generosity: he left a portion of his royalties to the PRS Members' Fund, for songwriters who fall on hard times, and it has received hundreds of thousands of pounds as a result. Planning permission went through without protest from the owners of the large, detached houses at the bottom of the bank, where the stone will stand. It will be unveiled next month in front of a small invited audience of friends and family."
The article ends "In the cuttings file, the tree is sometimes described as a horse chestnut. It's not - it's a sycamore. They grow fast and die relatively young. And this one, you'll see if you look closely, is infected. It is dying the death of a thousand drawing pins." which was very true ... way back in 1997 which was of course BT - before TAG :-)
Read the Full Article |
| |  NEW STATEMAN ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS MARC'S TRUE AS A 'FIRST'
Say it with flowers: enshrine the dead
The rise of death shrines, regularly left at the scence of car crashes, calls our attention to the transcendent piercing the mundane
This article by Will Self was published 07 January 2010.
"What is one to make of the shrines that are now regularly erected in the aftermath of fatal car crashes? It may be a failure on my part but I can't remember these extempore street furnishings being part of the British landscape or urban environment until the late 1970s. Indeed, the first shrines - such as the one in Barnes that sprang up after Marc Bolan's accident - were an obvious outgrowth of the hero worship their subject inspired in life. It followed that depositing flowers, cards and handwritten poems at the site where he died had a certain logic: these were funerary gifts suitable for a pop star, adulation to sustain him in the netherworld.
I think it highly likely that this is the sort of cosmology cleaved to by serious fans, whose belief in the quasi- or wholly divine nature of guitar-pickers, and even actors, supports an entire iconography, complete with relics and - after Elvis - resurrections. The religion of fame is a syncretism, of course, between deep-seated animism and whichever monotheism happens to be locally dominant. If a 20th-century boy such as Bolan was accorded a kind of sainthood by virtue of his notoriety, then it also made sense to pray at his shrine for a similarly glittery and platform-soled career. www.newstatesman.com |
14th February 2010 
