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Rating: Extremely powerful, almost violent, is Bolan's departure from the schizophrenic freakbeat of John’s Children, where he felt confined within his rhythm guitar. He emerges so transformed that he takes refuge in the soft nylon of the acoustic six-string and begins to frequent small clubs with her, protected by the nervous and visionary skins of Stephen Ross Porter, whom he, completely absorbed in the Tolkien tales of The Lord of the Rings, promptly renames Steve Peregrin Took; a name that will stick to him like a second skin.
One evening, seemingly like many others, the duo is noticed by the neophyte-producer Tony Visconti during a performance at the UFO Club and without even thinking twice manages to secure a contract with Regal Zenophone (a subsidiary label of EMI) for them (and for himself). He is immediately rewarded with great sales success for their first single “Debora” which brings them directly into the top 40 of the UK charts. Riding the wave of success, the first album of Tyrannosaurus Rex also enters the top 15 during the “hot” summer of 1968. “My People…” opens with one of the two songs Bolan carries over from the John’s Children experience, although here “Hot Rod Mama” sounds like a dirty delta blues, viewed through lysergic lenses, while “Mustang Ford” is in some ways the weakest and most foreign piece of the record, freakbeat stripped of all its electricity, still far from being re-dressed in the sequins and glitter that would be the glam that would forever inscribe Bolan in the rock history firmament.
The rest of the album is a continuous series of soft folk ballads, in the highest and most noble sense of the term, where his improbable voice paints stories always immersed in fantasies on the edge between childish and fairy-like… fabulous, very reminiscent of those of another eternal child named Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett. Sometimes his guitar seems discreet, other times it merely accompanies, and yet other times it screams its importance, sharp and sure of its path, as in the frantic “Welder Of Words,” where even the singing lets itself go into wild hysterics. In all this chaos, the percussion, the Pixiephone, and the toys (in the etymological sense of the term) of Peregrin Took proceed with a mystical Middle-Eastern flair, infusing everything with a halo of magic that culminates in the hypnotic mantra of the closing “Frowling Atahuallpa (My Inca Love),” where for the first time in an Anglo-Saxon pop song the typical Hare Krishna chant is inserted, which in turn fades to leave John Peel's voice recounting a sort of fairy tale, professionally in that typical British timbre with which children's stories were (and still are) told. Almost moving is “Child Star,” a composition of delicate sweetness that seems almost played by the Elves themselves, inhabited by a subtle frenzy is “Knight,” at times insane; while the freakishness of “Chateau In Virginia Waters” precedes the dreamlike journey into the desert that lies in a parallel universe of “Dwarfish Trumpet Blues.”
“Strange Orchestra” is a bizarre toy march, while ethereal is the love song for “Afghan Woman,” as light as the drizzle that falls in those London mornings when you wander aimlessly for hours and hours, through parks that seem immense and streets still warm from the life of the previous night… you feel an immense and heavy humanity in that desolation, and the rain does not wet you; on the contrary, it seems to create a thin film on your parka with which to protect yourself.
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