Straight outta Stokey…. this was local boy Marc Feld’s first single, released by Decca in October 1965. With its stripped-back R&B sound, it could be filed under Freakbeat, and you can already hear the nascent influence of psychedelia and fantasy in the lyrics.

What you can’t really hear is the distinctive vibrato that characterised Bolan’s singing when he got better known, which makes me wonder whether his signature style must have been more of an attention-seeking affectation than a natural warble.

Whatever it was, it worked.

Marc had already recorded two unreleased songs by the time this came out on Decca in 1965 – a fairly straight cover of Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind and a self-penned number called The Road I’m On (Gloria) under the name Toby Tyler.

Because of its title, some fans of a conspiracist bent believe to be a premonition of his death when a car driven by his girlfriend Gloria crashed on… you know, a road they were on.

In those early days Marc was toying with different stage names – Toby Riggs, Toby Tyler – before he settled on Bolan, possibly because he shared a flat with the Likely Lads actor James Bolam around this time, borrowing ‘Riggs’ from his other flatmate Riggs O’Hara – or because he was joining two halves of BOb DyLAN.

We may never know. But we can hear this. It was recorded in September 1965 and released a month later with another Bolan composition on the B-side, Beyond The Rising Sun.

Weirdly, having settled on the name Bolan he then played for a while with using an umlaut over the O, making him (briefly) Marc Bölan. Thankfully, he had dispensed with that daft idea by the time he followed this single up with The Third Degree and Hippy Gumbo.

In 1967 he went off to join John’s Children but later the same year he left to form an acoustic duo with Steve Peregrine Took. And we all know what happened after that.

Tyrannosaurus Rex made their debut with an album that set a record for the longest title of all time – My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair But Now They’re Content To Wear Stars On Their Brows – until Chumbawumba trumped it with some nonsense that had 156 words.

By 1970 they had shortened their name, electrified their sound, and swapped their hippy trappings for make-up and glitter, re-recording The Wizard in a nine-minute version for their debut album.

I much prefer this one.