It's young and gold and silvery old

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

07/02/71 : T. Rex - T. Rex

Our second visit with T. Rex, with the last one having been surprisingly enjoyable. It ruled the charts at the end of the year, so I guess this is its predecessor, so I'm expecting it to sound similar, but probably not quite as good.

Yeah, that's very much where we are - you can hear them trying to work out that classic T. Rex sound from their folky Tyrannosaurus Rex roots, but they're certainly not quite there yet. It's a musical curiosity, but not one that's particularly enjoyable I'm afraid - it just sounds odd. I'm not loving that album cover either...

We're at #7 in the charts this week on their fifth week of a nine week run - it then took two weeks off and came back for another eight weeks (which seems peculiar) but this was as high as it ever got. The top five this week were George Harrison, Simon & Garfunkel, Andy Williams, Elton John and Motown Chartbusters Vol 4 (the third such album we've seen this year) and the highest new entry was Van Morrison (#21) - that man has been around a loooong time!

Wikipedia tells us this is the first T. Rex album but the fifth if you include previous Tyrannosaurus Rex albums. There's a load of random stuff in there but, for a change, some bits jumped out at me! I never knew that Marc Bolan's parter-in-crime in T. Rex was called Mickey Finn, which sounds like a complete rock'n'roll alias but was actually his real name - allegedly he wasn't any great shakes as a musician but Marc thought he looked great so gave him the job. There were some heavyweight names behind the scenes though - the album was produced by Tony Visconti and engineered by Roy Thomas Baker (who went on to work with many people, but is probably best known for producing many of Queen's early albums). 

The most confusing information for me relates to the artwork which tells us "the sleeve design was unusual, requiring a sideways look to unfold the full cover, or to have the artwork sideways to remove the LP" - I think this just means you take the album out of the top of the picture, but I'm not entirely sure. Critically, everyone was surprisingly nice about the album and there's definitely a retrospective view that this is the album that made them huge in the UK, but (from my position of immense knowledge on the matter), I feel that "Ride A White Swan" having charted in late '70 was probably the defining factor - and it's somewhat strange that track isn't included on this album. Commercially, it got to #37 in Australia but didn't do anything anywhere else.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version of this for £6, but if you want to splash out then there's a white label reissue version for £120 - I know some people love a white label, but I'd want the proper album cover if I was spending that much. Especially because in this case, the album cover is pretty much the most intriguing thing of the lot - it was interesting to hear T. Rex on their musical journey, but it's not something I will ever feel the need to revisit.

14/02/71 - Intriguing nonsense