Between March 1971, when Hot Love boomed to the top of the UK charts, and the release of the compilation Great Hits in November 1973, Marc Bolan was the prancing, strutting face of glam rock. With his top hat, bacofoil suits and eyeliner, Bolan had just as much claim as his pal David Bowie to be called the Prettiest Star. Bolan had even played guitar on Bowie's recording of that very song in 1970. "People are really works of art, and if you have a nice face you might as well play about with it," said ex-model Bolan winsomely, understanding better than anyone the combustible effects you could create with a bit of pouting androgyny, some thrift-shop tat and a sprinkling of glittery guitar riffs.
Universal's four-disc set Marc Bolan and T Rex - 20th Century Superstar (****) represents the first credible attempt to tell the full Bolan story. It runs through the whole of the Hackney-born artist's life, from his childhood skiffle group through mystical folk and psychedelic gibberish to the boiled-down, raunched-up formula of T Rex in "electric warrior" mode. The collection scores full marks for thoroughness, and has even managed to hunt down two tracks Bolan recorded during a fleeting stint with John's Children: Midsummer Night's Scene and Sara Crazy Child (a copy of the original single is now worth £3,000, apparently). But there's a daunting heap of whimsical fairy-land nonsense and idiotic eastern-flavoured piffle to struggle through before you get to the bits you're likely to remember. It isn't until disc three that we find T Rex getting into their rampant hit-making stride with Jeepster, Telegram Sam, Metal Guru and the rest, with Bolan's trademark bark-and-warble vocals in full spate.
But I suppose there is a seam of hilarity to be mined from hearing the 17-year-old Bolan, originally christened Mark Feld but temporarily calling himself Toby Tyler, strumming folkishly through Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind and a thing called The Road I'm On (Gloria), tooting coyly into a harmonica and sounding like an even limper version of the execrable Donovan. And before we advance to the hippy heyday of the original T. Rex, there's Bolan quavering uneasily through the bogus American pop of Beyond the Risin' Sun or the spurious Doug Sahm-isms of The Third Degree.
As for the original Rex combo, it's amazing to consider the reverence in which their Hobbit-like twitterings were held. Songs such as Salamanda Palaganda or Once Upon the Seas of Abyssinia would seem, with hindsight, more deserving of demolition by surgical air strike than of acid-addled adoration. Hence, the pop hits come as a blessed relief. The band's bubblegum funkiness bounces undimmed through Get It On or Twentieth Century Boy; certainly it was nifty enough for the Stones to steal it for It's Only Rock'n'Roll, and for Prince to cash in on with Cream. On disc four, the likes of I Love to Boogie or Dandy in the Underworld suggest that even if the mid-1970s Bolan couldn't quite reclaim his megastar crown, he had not forgotten how to manufacture a serviceable pop hook.
If you want to skip the history lesson and cut straight to the poptastic Bolan, you might consider Universal Music TV's The Essential Marc Bolan and T.Rex (****), a 24-song collection of Bolan blockbusters with an additional DVD of performances from his 1970s TV series, Marc. Possibly all you'll ever need.
Habitually hailed as the pinnacle of Dusty Springfield's career (even if she claimed she could never understand what all the fuss was about) and a 1960s white-soul landmark, Dusty in Memphis sparkles afresh in a new deluxe edition from Mercury (*****). It is still astonishing that the notoriously insecure artist was ever able to command such knowingness and controlled emotional intimacy - not to mention grandeur - in these performances. Son of a Preacher Man is by the far the best-known track, but its stately tempo, rousing brass fanfares and gospel-inflected backing chorus from the Sweet Inspirations are only part of the widescreen sound-panorama expertly assembled by the unbeatable production trio of Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd. Each contributes a memoir to the accompanying booklet, with Wexler claiming that Springfield was so fraught that "I never got a note out of her throughout the entire Memphis sessions", and that her vocals had to be recorded subsequently in New York. Perhaps it should have been called Dusty in Manhattan.
The chemistry between the personalities involved and the inspired choice of songs resonates as powerfully today as it did in 1969, although British buyers initially missed the point - bizarrely, it was the first Dusty album that failed to chart in the UK. A glance through the songwriting credits suggests this was always destined to be something special, with Randy Newman's Just One Smile and I Don't Want to Hear It Anymore jostling alongside Carole King's bittersweet No Easy Way Down and So Much Love. Arif Mardin reckons he wrote "a string quartet in the style of Ravel" as a framework for Burt Bacharach's In the Land of Make Believe, while Dowd and Mardin explain how they conspired to customise Michel Legrand's billowingly Gallic Windmills of Your Mind to help Dusty's phrasing. This reissue also includes mono mixes of eight of the original tracks, as a reminder of what audio used to be. It's a priceless fragment of history.
Mod-era hardliners who have grown accustomed to the cheap thrill of hearing the early Who in rattling, crackling mono might have mixed feelings about Polydor's deluxe edition of My Generation (***), with its newfangled stereo remixes. First released on the Brunswick label in 1965, the Who's debut album was originally designed as a collection of Motown and R&B cover versions, but Pete Townshend's songwriting was developing at such a pace that the blueprint was modified to accommodate a newly penned batch of his songs. Due to a contractual dispute with American producer Shel Talmy, My Generation has been unavailable in the UK since the 1960s, apart from a limited appearance on vinyl in 1980 from Virgin. But now a settlement has been reached, and Talmy has remastered both the original album and an extra 18 tracks that were shelved first time around. The latter are mostly covers, including loud yet funky rampages through Daddy Rolling Stone and James Brown's Shout and Shimmy. However, completists will be agog at the inclusion of Townshend's previously unissued Instant Party Mixture and an alternate version of Anyway Anyhow Anywhere.
Brighter and cleaner though the stereo mixes are, something of the Who's original scouring assault has gone missing in action. That said, the bass guitar barrage from the late John Entwistle on the instrumental, The Ox, could saw through a double-decker bus. Judging by internet postings, fan reactions are mixed. "You've gotta be nuts not to rock to this great music," says one. "My first four Beatles albums on disc in stereo were a thousand times more of a treat than this letdown," argues another. Ah, give it time.
