Marc Bolan: The Rise And Fall Of A 20th Century Superstar

By Mark Paytress

Marc Bolan was the very first superstar of the 1970s. As the seductive focus of T. Rex he revelled in fame and fortune, released a string of classic records before tragically losing his way. The fatal car accident in 1977 cut short his planned comeback as a punk rocker, but also served to fix Bolan as the definitive icon of the Glam years.

Bolan's music and chameleonic style were to influence a generation of future bands. In his various guises he could be a beatnik, a mod, a punk, a hippie and a Glam hero. This biography of a pop obsessive draws from interviews with many friends and colleagues including broadcaster John Peel, brother Harry and band members Mickey Finn and Bill Legend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2009
• ISBN: 9780857120236

Book preview

2002.

1

Sweet Little Rock’n’Roller

When I was younger I certainly thought I was a superior sort of being. And I didn’t feel related to other human beings … I created a world where I was king of my neighbourhood.

— Marc Bolan (1972)

The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetised in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest … ambition gave their genius its wings.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)

At nine years old I became Elvis Presley.

— Marc Bolan (1972)

When Marc Bolan exploded so spectacularly all over the front pages during 1971 and 1972, huge chunks of his immediate past were virtually erased from history. The T. Rex Superstar as a bongos-in-the-dirt merchant performing to indifferent festival goers as Tyrannosaurus Rex? It was messy and low achieving, and besides, the truth could be easily corroborated. Bolan preferred to skip these years of hippie humility and instead let his keenly developed imaginative talents loose on the darker continent of his distant past. For an audience barely able to recall The Beatles without beards, Bolan’s yarns provided a thrilling portrait of life as a permanent revolution of the self, each costume change bringing with it an entirely new world.

Cynics looked at the credentials of this supposed Superstar — a bare handful of chords, a clown’s wardrobe and more front than Jayne Mansfield — and roared. Bolan had effected the most shameful volte-face since the Soviet Union signed a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, they claimed. Even better, for a rock press reduced to interminable profiles of ‘Supersessionmen’, this apparent charlatan of the most insincere kind was photogenic, popular and eminently quotable.

The creation of Marc Bolan: Superstar was as crucial to the health of the pop press as it was to a teenage audience desperate for someone to encourage and inspire their fantasies. Despite spending much of his life gazing up at the stars, the reality of Superstardom stunned Bolan too — even though he’d been playing the part since the late Fifties as if it had been his God-given right.

The life and death of Marc Bolan is a gutter-to-glitter opus rich in all the pleasures, and many of the pitfalls, that life can offer — art and ambition, excess and hubris, mythology and, finally, tragedy. Notoriously economical with the truth, Bolan took great delight in obscuring the details of his tortuous path to fame with a repertoire of preposterous stories and golden one-liners, all grist to the illusion that Superstardom — and nothing less than Superstardom — was his destiny. I was always a star even if it was only being the star of three streets in Hackney, he’d boast proudly on many occasions.

That much, at least, is true: Marc Bolan was working class and enjoyed premonitions of grandeur from an early age. But did he really play skiffle with Helen Shapiro? Roadie for Eddie Cochran? Audition at the 21’s while still in short trousers? Was he really London’s sharpest Mod at 14? Or commanding four-figure fees for modelling assignments a year later? By the age of 17, he was practising the black arts with a cannibalistic wizard in Paris — or so he claimed. How did that tally with those heavy hints of French ancestry? Born To Boogie? Well, maybe. He certainly wasn’t born Marc Bolan. According to official records, Marc was born Mark Feld in Hackney, east London, the second and younger son of a lorry driver and his market-stallholder wife.

While revealing no obvious French connection, The Feld family records do disclose a genuine continental link, albeit one devoid of the connotations of Gallic sophistication that Bolan later coveted. Mark’s paternal grandfather was Henry Feld, born in Whitechapel on March 21, 1894 and of known Polish-Russian descent. His parents — Mark Feld’s great grandparents — were almost certainly among the thousands of Jewish émigrés from eastern Europe who resettled in east London after the pogroms unleashed on their communities in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

Traditionally excluded from many professions, London’s Jewish settlers often turned to the rag trade, particularly tailoring and millinery. However, Henry Feld applied his hands somewhat less delicately. By day a porter in Smithfield’s busy meat market, he supplemented his income with regular bouts of bare-knuckle fighting, an illegal though not uncommon sideline for the more fearless among east London’s meat-packers. Henry would occasionally get his tasks confused: when a horse once had the temerity to stand on his foot, he punched the animal between the eyes and watched it fall to the ground.*

On December 3, 1913, the 19-year-old Henry Feld met and married a local girl, Betsie Ruffell, also 19, a redhead of Irish descent, at the United Synagogue of London. Settling in nearby Stepney, the pair later made the short move to 9 Reeds Mansions in Gosset Street, Bethnal Green. It was while living there that ‘Bessie’ (as she preferred to be known) gave birth to a son, Simeon, on August 22, 1920.

Simeon Feld inherited his mother’s fair colouring but not his father’s stocky stature. Nevertheless he continued the family’s meat trade associations, starting his working life at Blooms, the noted kosher butchers. It didn’t last long. On September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany and 19-year-old Simeon was conscripted to join the army. Six weeks later he was back on civvy street on account of his poor eyesight. Determined to play his part, Sid (as he was better known) joined the Dutch merchant navy, and spent much of the wartime period as a steward on a munitions ship that journeyed between Liverpool, New York and the West Indies.

Back in London, teenager Phyllis Winifred Atkins was one of millions of women who staffed the factories in support of the war effort. Born on August 23, 1927, Phyllis lived at 32 Kinnoul Road in north-east Fulham from where her father, Henry Leonard Atkins, ran a small, unprofitable greengrocery business. During the early Thirties, in order to make ends meet, Henry’s wife Elsie (mother to three other daughters as well) undertook early morning cleaning jobs for the idle ladies of South Kensington. By the early Forties, Phyllis was a breadwinner too, making the short daily trip to the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre that had been requisitioned as a munitions factory. There, she helped make tarpaulin decoy lorries for the Ministry of Supply. Meanwhile, Henry’s business had ceased trading and he’d become a dust destructor, operating the incinerator at the end of the refuse collecting process.

Sometime during 1944, Sid Feld returned home from sea and joined the Ministry of Supply’s payroll as a porter at the Earl’s Court building. That’s where he met and — spinning tales of his high seas exploits — wooed young Phyllis Atkins. Blissfully oblivious to the seven-year age difference the pair became sweethearts, and by the end of the year, the 17-year-old had become pregnant. This far from unusual occurrence demanded a similarly routine response: on January 31, 1945, Sid and Phyllis were married at Fulham Registry Office, and headed eastwards, renting the upper rooms of a three-storey house in Stoke Newington for 15 shillings per week. The newlyweds were soon separated, though, when Phyllis was evacuated to Walton Hall, a stately residence on the outskirts of Wakefield in Yorkshire. She returned to London in the summer; with her was the couple’s first child, Harry Leonard Feld, born on June 25, 1945.

With a wife and baby to support, Sid — who had obtained his driving licence before the war — found a job with a local road haulage firm. Longdistance lorry driving from his firm’s base in Islington was hardly an ideal occupation for a man who preferred his own bed to the notorious hospitality of the English guesthouse, but excepting one brief interlude hawking hairbrushes in 1947, Sid spent much of his life on the road. The Felds’ marriage survived the disruption, though it did mean that Phyllis played a more significant role in the upbringing of her sons than was usual.

When Sid Feld made it home, which he endeavoured to do as often as he could, it was to 25 Stoke Newington Common, a large, late Victorian terrace house owned by a Mr. Ambrose who occupied the middle floor. The Felds’ living-quarters consisted of four shared rooms split over two levels. At the top of a long flight of stairs was a kitchen, fitted with a gas stove and a coal fire, and a cold-water bathroom; a few steps up was a back bedroom and a living room that looked out across the common. Actually no bigger than a small football pitch, the common — like the railway linking the suburb with Liverpool Street station and the West End-bound number 73 bus — helped alleviate any feelings of inner city claustrophobia.

One distinctive feature of the row of houses that skirted the common were the stone columns at every entrance, each topped with ornamental Corinthian capitals. Among the Gothic moulds that adorned number 25 and its immediate neighbours was a bird of prey with wings outstretched, an Old Father Time figure, and a distinctive, long-necked swan — more cream than white.

* * *

While we await the arrival of the Mark Feld who is the subject of this book, we must pause briefly to meet another Mark Feld, whose fate provides a cautionary note to the moral back-slapping that resounded throughout the Allied territories in the immediate post-war euphoria. Unlike his brother Simeon, this Mark — the youngest of the four Feld boys — was a physical lad who wasn’t averse to getting into the occasional scrap. Having served in the army during the war, he was posted to the Burton Dassett camp in Warwickshire. It was a poorly disciplined establishment where indiscriminate gunfire and soldiers going AWOL were not uncommon.

This indiscipline reached a horrific climax on the night of August 19, 1946 when Mark Feld, asleep in his billet, was struck a fatal blow to the head with a truncheon. Apparently, following an earlier incident, 35-year-old Patrick Francis Lyons of the camp military police, together with the acting company Sergeant Major, Sgt. Henry Storey Crampsie, ended a night’s drinking by paying Feld a surprise visit. It was alleged in court that Lyons had told Crampsie that he intended to do Feld up and that Feld was a bad soldier who would fit only one place and that was Belsen. Lyons claimed that his only intention was to frighten his victim.

When I was about a yard from the foot of his bed, he told the court, Feld jumped up and came for me. I struck out with my truncheon and aimed what I thought to be a light blow at his shoulder. That blow, which was indelicate enough to fracture Mark Feld’s skull, earned Lyons a conviction for manslaughter. Sentencing Lyons to 10 years’ penal servitude, the judge told him that he was as nearly convicted of murder as possible.

Private Mark Feld 14709755, a Jew who didn’t need to go to Belsen to meet a tragic end, received two posthumous tributes: the Under-Secretary of State for War belatedly sent a service medal to his mother Bessie Feld; his elder brother Simeon named his second son in his memory.

* * *

The baby boom peaked in 1947 at 20.5 per thousand of the population, an inevitable consequence of demobilisation. Liberated from the hardships of war, the nation rejected Winston Churchill at the polls, and instead turned to the Labour Party which had fought the 1945 election on a platform of economic and social regeneration based on state socialist principles. Promising mass nationalisation of the country’s industrial infrastructure, the party’s egalitarian instinct chimed with the camaraderie and optimism that victory in war had given.

On September 30, 1947, while the nation gazed idly into a future that promised economic prosperity and perhaps even that much-vaunted classless society, a second Mark Feld gave his first yelp to a tiny audience in Hackney Hospital. Phyllis and Sid’s delight was soon tempered by the arrival of one of the coldest winters of the last century. In a flat with no hot water or proper heating, where the walls were held up by thick layers of wallpaper and which occasionally entertained a stray mouse, Mark’s first experience of life was the snug protection of a mound of heavy blankets.

The widespread belief that ‘things can only get better’ filled young families like the Felds with aspirations for their children. Mark, an outgoing, endearingly precocious boy with a cute smile, became the focus of these hopes from a young age. At the height of his fame, in 1972, he recalled how Phyllis’ mother Elsie would flatter him and insist that he would be famous one day. He was four at the time.

For Harry, the arrival of a younger brother gave him the opportunity to exercise some sibling authority — if he could keep up with him. We always played together when we were young, but because I was that bit older I had to look after him, which wasn’t easy because he was always running. He was like a little bullet. He had this peculiar way of pushing his feet out sideways as he ran.

One day, Harry did catch up with him — and gave Mark his first taste of public exhibitionism. It was one winter, around 1951 or 1952, when there was a heavy snow — the only time I can ever recall six-foot mounds of snow in the streets. I dressed Mark up in my bright red school blazer and my mum’s fur boots, and I took him out into the street. Everyone laughed at him.

More typically, the neighbours would see the infant Mark on the porch at number 25, pushing his Dinky cars through the flowerbeds and gazing out at the common across the road. Indoors, Mark spent much of his time in the family living-room — the largest room in the flat — which had been converted into a bedroom for the boys who slept in twin beds separated by a wooden cabinet. With television still a luxury, Mark and Harry’s main contact with the wider world during the Fifties was the radio. "One of the highlights of our week was to take the radio — an early portable from Radio Rentals — up to our room at bedtime, put it on the cabinet and lie in bed listening to Saturday Night Theatre," Harry remembers. Ghost stories were a particular hit with the boys.

According to Harry, Mark adored anything that stoked up his imagination — comics, fairytales and the Biblical tales that Phyllis would read to them at night. It wasn’t a religious exercise, he says. We were too young to understand Biblical language anyway, so she used to put the stories into plain English, so we could enjoy the adventures of David and Goliath or Daniel and the Lion’s Den. Tales from bygone days fascinated the Feld boys — and the stranger the better. Inevitably, they seized upon the prehistoric, dinosaur-dominated world with boyish awe. I think Mark liked the idea that such huge creatures walked the earth, but weren’t here any more, Harry muses.

The dinosaurs had been obliterated, Hitler had been humbled, and still panic-prone post-war Britain trembled. This time, the enemy was more insidious: American mass culture. The seductive spectre of what cultural critic Richard Hoggart called its shiny barbarism united voices from both sides of the political spectrum. For Hoggart and the intellectual left, a vibrant, ‘authentic’ working-class culture, typified by stoicism and cycling clubs, would become corrupted by capitalism central’s promised land, a candy-floss world of instant gratification and Disneyland aesthetics. The establishment, ever desperate to preserve their own interests, was similarly terror-stricken. As custodians and dispensers of high culture, any ‘triumph of mediocrity’ scenario would further undermine their raison d’être.

What Hoggart underestimated in The Uses Of Literacy, his magisterial work on popular culture, was the pleasure principle. Though brilliant and well meaning, his book romanticised the culture of Hoggart’s youth; when workingmen’s clubs were apparently debating societies with beer and ‘Don’t Dilly-Dally On The Way’ was top of the pre-war pops.

Mark Feld was both vibrant and authentically working class, but that didn’t stop him rejoicing in the ultra-brite surfaces that illuminated postwar Britain. Mark, like many among his generation, seized upon anything that promised liberation from the puritan restraint of the traditional working-class lifestyle. And nowhere was this promise more seductive than in the cinema, that cathedral of dreams where alternative lives could be watched, worshipped and aspired to.

Phyllis Feld regularly took her two sons to the ABC cinema along Lower Clapton Road and the Regent (later the Odeon) in Stamford Hill. The cinema really fired Mark’s imagination, says Harry, who recalls his brother’s almost unnatural desire to live life through a succession of onscreen heroes. It was, Harry suggests, as much about self-protection as it was fantasy. If ever Mark was unsure of a situation, he’d become one of the characters he’d seen or read about as a way of shielding himself. That way he could never get hurt. That way, he could cope with anything.

Audie Murphy, the most decorated war hero in Hollywood, provided an obvious shell for young Mark to inhabit. But his first and most relished piece of theatrical armour was Mighty Joe Young, a name many would later assume was that of a little known bluesman from Chicago’s South Side. In fact Mighty Joe Young was a fictional gorilla, a King Kong for kids who in the 1949 movie that bears his name is transported from the African jungle into an American household. All goes smoothly until a sip of alcohol sends him berserk. While his classmates fought to assume the identity of Apache legend Geronimo, Mark preferred to masquerade as something significantly less human. Oddly enough, the film’s kitschy compound of the strange and the sentimental neatly anticipated the future course that Marc Bolan’s creative life would take.

* * *

Today, Stoke Newington has succumbed to bourgeoisification, especially around the restaurant-strewn Church Street, although areas of high deprivation still exist behind the fashionable façade. The High Street, once home to department stores and thriving small businesses, has been sacrificed to a one-way traffic system. The housing estates, built to replace war-damaged properties and alleviate poverty, have brought their own problems. What has remained, though, is a strong nonconformist presence. The Angry Brigade, a group of anarchists who exploded two bombs at the house of Home Secretary Robert Carr in 1971, were based here, while the occasional Class War slogan can still be spotted between the ubiquitous To Let and For Sale signs.

The district has long been a haven for immigrants and the marginalised. Religious dissenters established a thriving community here in the 18th century, while the Victorian era saw the emergence of a small Jewish community, which grew dramatically during the 20th century. Simeon’s parents Henry and Bessie Feld, who brought up their four sons and two daughters in accordance with the Jewish faith, were among those who migrated northwards towards the end of the Thirties ending up at 38 Carlton Mansions, Holmleigh Road in nearby Stamford Hill. But with Simeon marrying a Gentile, and Harry and Mark given a secular upbringing, contact between the two Feld families was confined to weddings and funerals.

We were a very self-contained family, Harry remembers. Independently minded, too. There were never any restrictions, Mark proudly proclaimed years later. The Felds sent their sons to the nearby Northwold Road Primary, a state school where religious content was restricted to a daily hymn followed by a recital of the Lord’s Prayer. The headmaster Mr. Kershaw was Jewish, and the school was situated at the heart of the Jewish community on the Stoke Newington/Clapton borders, but the prevailing ethos was always education over faith.

Mark, who began his schooling in September 1952, was a popular and happy pupil at Northwold Primary, liked by his teachers and surrounded by a wide circle of friends. At first, Phyllis would pick him up and take him home for lunch, but he soon settled in and was forced to eat school dinners like everyone else.

Even at this early age, it was obvious that gap-toothed Mark Feld was destined for diminutiveness. This pint-sized propensity, which he shared with Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, has — as psychologists constantly remind us — always demanded a trade-off and, typically, Mark grew bigger in other ways. Harry remembers his brother’s boldness, at least in public, where — with or without a little help from Mighty Joe Young — he’d often play the tough guy. His bravura also started to show in his appetite for horror films, sparked by a thrill-packed encounter with Phantom Of The Opera starring Claude Rains as the disguised, disfigured organist. But once indoors, and with no audience to play to, Mark was barely able to climb the stairs in the dark without quivering in fear. Instead, he’d conquer his fear of darkness by summoning one of his expanding roster of (anti) heroes and swagger to the rooms at the top as if Mark Feld didn’t have a care in the world.

These protective masks suggest that fantasy loomed large in Mark’s life from a young age. While his schoolmates left their alter egos in the playground, Mark Feld took his everywhere, his flight from self hastened by cinema, stories and, increasingly, his imagination. In common with Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett, avidly listening with mother in middle-class Cambridge around the same time, Mark’s wide-eyed thirst for life tended to blur the boundary between reality and fantasy. Syd never did grow to accept the rules of adulthood, though Mark was sufficiently versed in survival techniques to make a more successful transition.

That was largely down to his mother, from whom he inherited his dark colouring and a lifelong passion for reading. Phyllis Feld firmly instilled in her boys a traditional sense of right and wrong, even administering the occasional slap, but she never babied them, preferring instead a healthy, almost adult dialogue when difficulties arose within the Feld household.

Although the Felds weren’t great socialisers, they had the occasional night out, confident that Harry and Mark would gorge on the lemonade and crisps they left on the table and leave everything else in the flat intact. As a precautionary measure, Phyllis would ask the neighbours to listen for signs of trouble. The keenest pair of ears belonged to Frances Perrone, who had moved into 25 Stoke Newington Common at the end of the Forties, occupying the rooms on the middle floor.

They were ordinary, working-class people, she remembers. Phyllis wore the trousers. She was nice and friendly, a real Cockney. I got on very well with her, and they weren’t bad tenants at all. They were a happy family; they didn’t quarrel a lot. Mrs. Perrone can recall only one occasion when a party at the Felds’ got out of hand, and that, as Harry now admits, was down to him and his mates.

The brothers were just two years apart, and maintained a remarkably peaceful co-existence in their shared bedroom. But in almost every other way they were polar opposites. Harry was quiet like his father; he wasn’t like Mark at all, remembers their neighbour. Mark took after his mum. He was strong-willed, and much more sociable and jolly. Harry, fair like his father and stocky like his mother (the inverse of Mark’s genetic inheritance), concurs. We were 100 per cent different. I realised that from an early age and it became more apparent as time went on. Even my friends were more rough and ready.

Harry was boisterous but content. Mark demanded attention. As the younger son, he felt compelled to keep up with Harry and his friends, a task made doubly difficult by the fact that he looked young for his age. Swaggering around in his treasured Davy Crockett hat and suit worked for a while, but the novelty wore off and Mark was soon searching for new ways to project and exaggerate his individuality.

Speaking in 1972, his father remembered the eight- or nine-year-old Mark as … well, sort of different. He had a head full of ideas. Initially, these took the form of school-sanctioned pursuits, like experiments in plasticene and painting in a style that anticipated all this contemporary lark. But the moment Mark Feld heard Elvis Presley, a singing, dancing demigod whose very name sounded ultra-modern and deliciously deviant, his life changed forever. Goodbye Mighty Joe Young, Davy Crockett, Audie Murphy and Geronimo. Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll…

* * *

Presleymania had been sending British teenagers wild for months. As the embodiment of rock’n’roll, Elvis incited Teddy Boys to riot and big skirted girls to swoon. It was September 1956 and, still several days shy of his ninth birthday, Mark Feld was similarly mesmerised. Elvis Presley had it all. The animal grace of his movements; the way he cradled his guitar, curled his lip, raised his heels and swivelled his hips; the ghostly tone of his voice, bathed in echo as if from Mars; and that drive-in lyricism rammed home with magnificent insolence. Mark Feld was too young to appreciate fully the latent aggression and sexuality in Presley’s performances, but he understood that as a sensationalist of the strange, Elvis was without peer.

The close-knit Feld family were not in the habit of defying convention. Even Simeon’s estrangement from his own family was tempered by the fact that he spent every Sunday helping his father assemble trellis and cover units for the stallholders at Petticoat Lane market. One particular Sunday early in September 1956, as Sid lent a philanthropic hand in a bustling East End market, as ‘Hound Dog’, the fourth Elvis Presley single, was about to hit the shops, and as a potential crisis over the Suez Canal simmered ominously, Phyllis Feld and her two sons were on the number 73 bus making their way across central London towards South Kensington. On arrival, they picked up a number 30 that took them all the way to Phyllis’ family home in Fulham. Mark and Harry always enjoyed the trip especially if, by some quirk of timing, they glimpsed the Changing of the Guard as the 73 passed The Mall.

On this particular autumn day, Mark glimpsed something of rather more consequence on the back page of Phyllis’ Sunday Pictorial newspaper. It was one of those ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ warehouse advertisements, the kind that offered relatively expensive goods at affordable hire purchase rates. Mark’s finger wagged furiously at the line drawing of a six-string acoustic guitar, but Phyllis knew that at £9, the cost would be more than twice Sid’s weekly wage. But the HP facility made the price manageable and besides, she was now earning too, helping out on a friend’s fruit and vegetable stall in Soho’s Berwick Street market. On September 30, 1956, with ‘Hound Dog’ neatly installed in the British Top five, nine-year-old Mark Feld unwrapped the best present he’d had in his life. It was, as he said years later, time to become Elvis Presley.

Of course, this ambitious rock’n’roll juvenile couldn’t play a note, but who cared when he could now impress his invisible bedroom audiences with real conviction. I had a guitar as a kid, but I used to just look in the mirror and wiggle about, he recalled in 1972. Out went the home-made contraption his father had fashioned out of orange boxes and elastic bands. The snare drum he’d been given even before discovering rock’n’roll gathered dust in a corner. And as for that soap-box car he later sung about on ‘Thunderwing’ …

Mark Feld’s musical education had advanced significantly since the start of the year when his father picked up a copy of Bill Hayes’ ‘Ballad Of Davy Crockett’ in Petticoat Lane market. Mark had been so pleased with it that Sid went out and bought him another Hayes record. Or so he thought. I looked at the cover, Bolan remembered many years later, and there was this guy jumping around with a guitar. I said, ‘Dad, this isn’t Bill Hayes, this is Bill Haley.’ Disappointment soon turned to delight when Mark spun the record, a 1956 EP that included two of Haley’s biggest hits, ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and ‘See You Later Alligator’. Just one play of that and I chucked Bill Hayes out of the window, he recalled. Haley was much more exciting. Well, until Elvis came along.

In a diary entry dated May 7, 1966, Mark recounts the story of how his prized, 78rpm copy of Presley’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ was smashed into smithereens by a stoned associate called Freddy. I used to, when about 9, dig that very record, sitting real close to the speakers and be washed and resouled by that fantastic ‘Oh-a-hum — one for the money’ bit, he remembered. Considerably less enamoured of Presley’s music, which would boom out of a monstrously sized radiogram, was Frances Perrone, whose living room was directly beneath the boys’ bedroom.

Noisy? When you came in that front door and he had that radiogram on, you could hear him down three flights of stairs, she exclaims. He’d sit up there in front of his player in that big room with all his records on full blast. Sometimes I had to go up there and tell him to pack it in. Harry also remembers Mark’s one-man rock’n’roll parties. The music used to sound so loud because that large room acted like an echo chamber. Rock’n’roll was, in the words of Frank Sinatra a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac, and Mark Feld adored it.

Other fledgling rock’n’rollers from the locality remember a distinct lack of chords emanating from Mark’s guitar, but plenty of gumption. I’ve got this very strong memory of Mark as this chubby little kid in a brown suedette jacket with the collar turned up, whose great claim to fame was that when he combed his hair forward his quiff covered his whole face, remembers Helen Shapiro. Within four years, this eleven-year-old from neighbouring Clapton, had become Britain’s biggest-selling singing star. But back in 1957, Mark Feld was the one most likely to. He was very into the look and the whole rock’n’roll image even then, she says.

The two starlets met via a mutual friend, Stephen Gould, who lived round the corner from the Felds in nearby Fountayne Road. Shapiro, a year Mark’s senior, was already attending Clapton Park School and, with her cousin Susan Singer, was already a compulsive singer. We were friendly with two boys in our year at school, Stephen Gould and Melvyn Fields, and after Stephen was given a guitar for his birthday, he suggested we get together and form a group, says Shapiro.

It was the 1957 summer holiday and the quartet, with Mark Feld and Susan’s brother Glenn tagging along, congregated in Stephen Gould’s front room to practise their rock’n’roll repertoire. Stephen and Mark couldn’t really play, Helen recalls. The guitars were twice as big as them anyway. But they looked good. In those days, to have a guitar was the height of sophistication and wonderfulness, because Elvis played — well, held — a guitar. Just to walk along the street carrying one was a thrill.

The six-piece Susie & The Hula Hoops (a name mentioned by Mark years later but which neither Shapiro nor Susan Singer can recall with any certainty) took it in turns to hold the guitars as they wandered the streets of Stoke Newington in search of an audience. They weren’t alone: the embers of the skiffle era, when every street had its own DIY group, were still smouldering. We obviously grew out of the skiffle movement, Shapiro says. I vaguely recall us having a tea-chest bass for a time, though we never had a washboard. Melvyn kept the beat on the snare drum and brushes while Susan and I sang. There were two distinct camps at the time, skiffle and rock’n’roll. I was in both because I played with my brother’s skiffle group from time to time, but Mark was definitely keener on the rock’n’roll thing.

The group’s repertoire, which tended to be sung (harmonies and individual vocal leads) rather than played, bears this out. There was plenty of Presley: ‘Teddy Bear’, ‘Got A Lot O’ Livin’ To Do’, ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ plus ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, his breakthrough 45. The Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’ and Buddy Holly & The Crickets’ ‘That’ll Be The Day’, both hits that summer, were also rehearsal regulars; Susan Singer recalls endless versions of the Holly song at the group’s impromptu debut in a Stoke Newington cafe (now demolished). We didn’t get paid, Shapiro says, we just got endless free cups of tea.

Susie & The Hula Hoops also performed at a local school, to children whose parents were unable to look after them during the holidays, before the new autumn term curbed their activities. The group drifted apart, but not before Mark shared his enthusiasm for the latest prince charming in his life, one who was closer to him — both physically and geographically — than Elvis could ever be.

Cliff Richard had been plucked from obscurity to become Britain’s answer to Elvis Presley. Difficult as it is to imagine now, in 1958 Cliff was a serious — and potentially panic-inducing — rock’n’roll idol when he charted with the mean and moody ‘Move It’ that September. Mark’s well rehearsed shoulder jerk and lip twisting routine was better suited to mimicking the soft-faced, fast rising British star. Taking off Elvis’ surly demeanour and maniacal stare with a face full of puppy fat was never that convincing.

Mark discovered Cliff Richard before anybody and he wanted to be like him, says Helen Shapiro, who maintains, He used to do a very good Cliff impression. Harry Feld insists this infatuation represented a genuine watershed in his brother’s life. In his mind, he never ever deviated from the time he started following Cliff Richard. I think he told himself, ‘This is what I want,’ and he single-mindedly pursued that line until he finally made it.

One of Mark’s favourite yarns was the one about meeting Cliff in Soho’s legendary 21’s coffee bar when the singer was simply the front man in a combo called The Drifters and in desperate need of a break. They threw him out! he remembered gleefully. He even claimed to have auditioned (there was a battered piano downstairs) at the beat hangout in 59 Old Compton Street when he was ten years old. He was too young, his mother recalled. I think they only let him do it to keep him happy.

While these stories are clearly nonsense, both were spun out from the basic truth that Mark had been an occasional visitor to the coffee bar, which opened in April 1956 and set Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Adam Faith on the road to stardom. By the time Mark Feld walked through its doors, this hothouse of British rock’n’roll was proclaiming itself ‘World Famous’ and ‘Home Of The Stars’ and had already become a magnet to tourists and celebrity-junkies. Mark, who spent most Saturday mornings helping his mother on her nearby market stall, found the invitation irresistible. Phyllis would slip him some coppers and he’d run round the corner, dip inside to escape the cold, and help Nora serve the coffees.

Although he occasionally spotted a real star there (Johnny Kidd glowering in a corner, for example), it was the 21’s American-style jukebox that had a more immediate impact, introducing Mark to little heard musical exotica such as The Drifters, The Coasters, Ray Charles and 21’s favourite Bill Doggett’s ‘Honky Tonk’. The first record I heard on their jukebox was ‘There Goes My Baby’ by The Drifters, Mark remembered. I was knocked out by it. However, the effect of his proximity to stardom at such a tender age cannot be underestimated according to Harry Feld. Although he was the little’un on the outside, in his mind he was already one of them.

The popularity of rock’n’roll and the rise of a new wave of homegrown talent prompted the launch of Britain’s first indispensable television pop show, Jack Good’s Oh Boy. The shows were filmed on Saturday mornings at the Hackney Empire in Mare Street. Conveniently, the 106 from Stoke Newington stopped right outside, and Harry remembers Mark making the journey on several occasions. The show’s most frequent guest was Cliff Richard, but Billy Fury, Adam Faith and Marty Wilde also put in regular appearances. Helen Shapiro managed to obtain Wilde’s autograph backstage, though Mark claimed to have gone one better — carrying Eddie Cochran’s guitar when the American appeared on the show in spring 1960, just weeks before Cochran was killed in a car accident. Once again, it’s the close encounters with stardom and the star-making process that really matter. Mark was able to peel away the mythology and see his idols as flesh and blood like himself and, reversing the situation, imagine himself as an idol like them.

There’s little chance that Stoke Newington’s keenest filmgoer would have missed Eddie Cochran make his 1957 film debut in Untamed Youth. As rock’n’roll made its way onto the big screen, he also saw the all-star Disc Jockey Jamboree, featuring Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. By 1959 he had two Cliff movies under his belt: Expresso Bongo, which highlighted the dubious role of the manager/agent in the pop process, and Serious Charge, which introduced Mark to the illicit thrills of an X-rated film whose subject was homosexuality.

By this time, starstruck Mark Feld was attending the mixed sex William Wordsworth Secondary Modern School, based in Hackney’s Shacklewell district. The Palatine Road site was a short walk away (at 14, he moved to the seniors’ building in nearby Albion Road), but from his first day in September 1958, Mark resented every second he spent there. He was in the lower grade, he was lazy and just didn’t bother to try, says Harry.

School was a waste of time, dead, Bolan remembered at the height of his fame. It wasn’t a bad place to be when I was five and we spent our time building bricks. But when the teachers tried to get me to do figurework and writing, I just freaked out. Far more important to him was daydreaming about the world outside and inventing little narrative scenarios to keep himself amused. But one book did leave a profound impression on Mark — though he found it at the local public library. It was, Harry remembers, a biography of Beau Brummell, the 19th century dandy who had been immortalised on screen in a biopic starring Stewart Grainger.

Meticulous about every detail of his personal appearance, this elegant, arrogant aristocrat who’d risen from the margins and was destined to return there, further encouraged Mark to take flight from the habits and conventions of his environment. He was just like us really, he told Town magazine in 1962. You know, came up from nothing.

He got the idea of adding a slit in the trouser leg to go over the boot from Beau Brummell, says Harry. But the impact was more overwhelming than that. Reborn as a dandy amid the east London underworld, Mark’s every waking moment was now spent endlessly refining his appearance with a precision that was virtually pathological.

* Animal justice was meted out years later when Henry got slapped in the head by a side of beef, an unlikely event that forced him into early retirement.

2

You Can’t Catch Me

I’ve got 10 suits, eight sports jackets, 15 pairs of slacks, 30 to 35 good shirts, about 20 jumpers, three leather jackets, two suede jackets, five or six pairs of shoes and 30 exceptionally good ties.

— Mark Feld, Town magazine (1962)

The Mod way of life consisted of total devotion to looking and being ‘cool’. Spending practically all your money on clothes and all your after work hours in clubs and dance halls. To be part-time was to miss the point.

— Richard Barnes, Mods! (1979)

I was completely knocked out by my own image, by the idea of Mark Feld.

— Marc Bolan (1967)

In a memorable interview, conducted at the height of his career, Marc Bolan recounted a tale that freeze-framed British subculture in transition. Seated on the porch at number 25, dressed in his black drainpipes, chukka boots and blue, Everly Brothers-style striped shirt, the teenage Mark gazed out across Stoke Newington Common. Engrossed by nothing in particular, he was snapped out of his torpor by a passing Teddy Boy. From the indecent crease in his duck’s arse hairstyle to the needle-like sharpness of his winkle-picker boots, this Hackney rebel was a picture of punctilious perfection. Torn between envy and the smug satisfaction that he too could turn heads, Mark returned to his idling.

A little afterwards, a second figure caught his attention. It was, he discovered later, a local Face named Martin Kauffman. He had on ginger Harris-tweed trousers. Very, very baggy. And a pair of green handmade shoes with side-buckles, very long points. A dark green blazer with drop shoulders, one-button cutaway, very short. (And) his hair was parted straight down the middle, like Hitler, over both eyes. The Beau Brummell of Stoke Newington was delirious. The impact of having just seen what one thought was really a trendy-looking Teddy Boy and then seeing this cat…just the image of him! To this day I still can’t trace how he got like that. But I knew something was going on.

It was. The Teddy Boys who’d been casting long and sinister shadows in the streets of Elephant & Castle, Clapham, Stamford Hill and Stoke Newington since the mid-Fifties were losing their lustre. The drape jacket, brothel creeper shoes and bootlace ties that once thrilled and threatened had, by the end of the decade, become frayed and familiar. In its appropriation of the Edwardian look of 1947, a style originally targeted at well-heeled Dandies, Teddy Boy fashion had been an imaginative — and subversive — refusal of mainstream culture. When paraded to the flash, brash soundtrack of American rock’n’roll, the potency of the Ted image soared, investing a power and visibility in youth it had hitherto barely known. But to a new breed of late Fifties peacock such as Martin Kauffman, Teddy Boy apparel was as archaic as the ration book.

Kauffman was undoubtedly an early Modernist, a new generation of obsessive stylists that flourished in London’s modern jazz clubs, and whose notion of personal liberation was predicated on matters such as tie width, shoe-stitching or the way a particular pair of trousers hung. The Modernists’ microscopic attention to the details of dress was the essence of what later became known as Mod culture. It was consumption, and shameless consumption at that, but in pampering an essentially ungratified self it provided a perfect boost to troubled egos.

The role of a frontline fashion guerilla slaughtering his gracelessly attired rivals (or ‘Haddocks’) with style was tailor-made for Mark Feld. Within days of witnessing the bloodless battle of mean street elegance, he too had begun to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to the art of sartorial warfare. The self-obsessed, almost exclusively male world to which Martin Kauffman and his contemporaries belonged offered infinite possibilities, enabling Mark to turn his role-playing back on himself, to indulge his manifest narcissism and satisfy the unquenchable desire for constant reinvention in ever more spectacular guises.

The passing of the Teds and the emergence of the Modernists represented far more than a mere change of tailor. While both subcultures flourished in the same working-class districts, and similarly screamed out for recognition, the Teddy Boy rite of passage involved little more than dressing up in the uniform and giving it some ‘Wild One’ attitude — flick knife optional. The early Modernists were quite different, shunning uniformity for originality, strength for sophistication.

Rejecting the idea of the sartorial readymade, these bricoleurs continually adapted and evolved their style. Any combination was possible for the early Modernist: functional garments for the country gentleman juxtaposed with sportswear, ladies’ fashions complementing city slickers’ suits. Better still, they’d have their ‘clobber’ customised by one of the capital’s many back-street tailors. This preoccupation with stylish one-upmanship reflected the new mood of competitive individualism that was fast replacing the era of austerity, and in this respect, Modernist culture marked a sharp break with the parochial, herd-like outlook of the Teds. They were the ‘in crowd’ before it became a crowd.

Frances Perrone noticed the change in Mark. He used to leave the house dressed up to the nines. He became a real little flash boy who never went anywhere without his rolled-up umbrella. The room at the top of number 25 would still reverberate to the sound of Mark’s rock’n’roll 78s — only now visitors would be forced to negotiate the clothes line he’d hung across the room. ‘Flash boy’ also found another use for his neighbour downstairs. I used to have a shoe repair shop in Stoke Newington Church Street, Frances recalls, and Mark was always asking me to make him shoes. I’d got him some made in either lizard or snakeskin, but then it got a bit too much. He wanted shoes every other day.

Mark Feld was too young to have posed a serious threat to the first wave of Modernists. The ‘Italian Look’ — square-shouldered ‘bumfreezer’ jackets with thin lapels and two or three covered buttons, narrow trousers without the turn-ups — had already peaked in 1958 when Mark was just eleven years old. Regarded as the height of sophistication and modernity, the style had been introduced to Britain three years earlier by crooner Frankie Laine, who was savaged by the critics for daring to sport such radical attire at the London Palladium. Nevertheless, pre-pubescent Mark, who still lacked the stature to carry classy cloth convincingly, continued to pester his mother for an Italian-style outfit. When Phyllis relented and took him to a local tailor, her son’s precise instructions for the cut of the suit exasperated the outfitter. He didn’t even know what it was that Mark was after, Phyllis recalled proudly.

Knock my talent if you must but not my tailor, retorted a bruised Frankie Laine. As he approached his teens, Mark Feld too understood that he could no longer rely on the goodwill of neighbours or inflexible local tradesmen if he wanted to put on the style convincingly. The need to find cheap, efficient tailors capable of meeting his exacting standards took him beyond his usual environs, away from Stoke Newington, Stamford Hill and Clapton to