T. Rex began 1972 the way they signed off from 1971 – with a chart-topping single. Telegram Sam was their third No.1 and confirmed Marc Bolan as the biggest star of the post-Beatles music universe.

“Me I funk but I don’t care / I ain’t no square with my corkscrew hair.” With those words, Marc Bolan sealed his place as the pre-eminent pop star of the post-Beatles early Seventies.

This song, not enormously different from its Howling Wolf-inspired predecessor-but-one, Get It On, introduces us to a colourful cast of characters with superpowers, albeit ones of varying practical application in the Great Britain of 1972.

There’s a natural-born poet called Bobby who’s invisible. There is Golden Nose Slim with his powers of intuition, perhaps due to that golden proboscis. We have Purple Eye Pete whose mouth melts young women on account of his lightning lips. And the never knowingly wrong Jungle Face Jake.

None of them, of course, any match for Marc’s main man, the titular Telegram Sam, despite his evident lack of superpowers. Marc, meanwhile, reveals at the very end his ability to transform himself, if necessary, into a howling wolf.

I learn now that Telegram Sam was a pseudonym for Bolan’s manager Tony Secunda, who took care of business while his wife Chilita took care of his growing pharmaceutical needs. Presumably by means of an urgently dictated message typed in capital letters, on account of the drug dealer’s favoured communication device, the beeper, not having been invented yet.

I can almost picture Marc popping along in an agitated state to Stoke Newington Post Office (close to where I write this) to send his request: “MORE WHITE STUFF. STOP. BEFORE TOTP IF POSS. STOP” and a Rolls-Royce being dispatched to N16 forthwith.

Telegram Sam contains one my favourite rhyming couplets in what was a fast-growing lexicon of doggerel in Marc’s lyrics: “Automatic shoes, automatic shoes / Give me 3D vision and the California blues.”

This became their third No.1 single and their gig at Wembley Empire Pool in 1972 is probably the one I most wish I had seen, if only I had been old enough. Here they are, in their second home, in the Top of the Pops studio.