The self-styled Boppin' Elf in action. Photograph: Globe Photos Inc/Rex Features
This Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of Marc Bolan's death. It seems to be passing in a surprisingly subdued manner. The pick of the events on offer is either an exhibition of photographs that opens today at Redferns Gallery in London, or a new documentary to be screened tonight on BBC4, which is fast emerging as the saviour of music on telly.
The rest looks a bit meagre. Digital-only station BBC 6 Music is running a pretty underwhelming-sounding Marc Bolan Day, the highlight of which seems to be a chance to watch some silent Super 8 film of the singer visiting Radio Hallam in Sheffield in 1975. Despite the best efforts of the commentary - by former Radio One DJ Keith "Cardboard Shoes" Skues - to whip up some excitement about the footage, there's something weirdly depressing about watching it. By the look of things, Bolan seems to have attracted a crowd of about 30 people: by 1975, T Rextasy was a dim memory.
The artists who've lined up to pay tribute to him at a gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire on Saturday night are a motley bunch: I'd pay good money to hear Marc Almond doing something melodramatic to Cosmic Dancer but the other big names on the bill are Shakin' Stevens and Ray Dorset, luxuriantly sideburned former frontman of Mungo Jerry. The other TV celebration looks pretty hopeless: half an hour on ITV on Saturday, paid for by Bolan's record company Universal.
We live in an era of perpetual nostalgia and heritage rock. The music industry usually loves an anniversary. Perhaps the slightly half-hearted celebrations reflect a slightly equivocal attitude to Bolan's legacy. On the one hand, there's something absolutely undeniable about his greatest records (the sort of person that doesn't feel a prickle of excitement when Metal Guru kicks into life probably just doesn't like pop music much) and furthermore, he was undoubtedly an innovator. As Barney Hoskyn's book Glam! notes, virtually every one of glam rock's signature sounds was coined on Bolan's unimpeachable run of hit singles that starts with Ride a White Swan and ends with 20th Century Boy, including the fat sustain of the Les Paul guitar, compressed, mechanical-sounding drums, squealing backing vocals and the sequence of tumbling major chords that Julian Cope dubbed the 'glam descend'.
On the other hand, what happened after that unimpeachable run of hit singles suggests Bolan had a severely limited musical imagination: he'd used up every one of his good ideas in barely two years. Not even a T Rex nut like Morrissey can muster much enthusiasm for Dandy In The Underworld and Bolan's Zip Gun - these are no one but the barmiest adherent of the self-styled Boppin' Elf's idea of classic albums. Indeed, there's an argument that suggests that even at his peak, Bolan wasn't quite as great as he thought he was, that he had almost no sense of quality control - this is a man who could write something as sinuous and quivveringly sexy as Raw Ramp, then release it on the b-side of Hot Love, as a medley with an atrocious bit of sub-hippy whimsy called There Was A Time - that 1971's Electric Warrior contains more filler than you might expect a legendary album to have and that the Ringo Starr-directed movie Born to Boogie is about as excruciating a celluloid experience as one can have without involving Adam Sandler.
Or perhaps the anniversary of Bolan's death is simply the victim of changing fashions. Devendra Banhart has clearly been listening to the skewed folk-pop Bolan made before shortening Tyrannosaurus Rex's name, but, a decade after Oasis ripped off Get it On, Bolan casts virtually no shadow over current rock and pop music.
So what do you think? (a) Hopelessly over-rated opportunist? (b) Genius cruelly overlooked due to the vagaries of musical fashion? Or, as it used to say on exam papers, (c) none of the above?
