(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 20 April 2025 19:30, UK
It’s tough to imagine David Bowie being jealous of anyone. He’s remembered as a truly singular artist, an utterly unique phenomenon, a rare alien who fell to earth as a complete one of a kind. As his career went on, he earned that cultural memory time and time again with each new iteration and persona. But in the early 1970s, he had a counterpart, a friend, an inspiration who quickly soured to a nemesis.
“We were just two nothing kids with huge ambitions.” That’s what David Bowie said of the late 1960s and the early ‘70s. He was wandering about London, playing shows where he could, figuring out the next steps after the release of his debut, which had made him somewhat known but had yet to give him a name. His dreams were big, though, and so were his best friend’s. In pubs in Soho, Bowie would be sitting with Marc Bolan, talking through ideas, sharing inspiration, getting into trouble.
They’re not even two sides of the same coin; they simply were the same coin. At that point, both had had an incredibly similar trajectory. Bolan, just like Bowie, started out in an odd folk vein. Originally called Tyrannosaurus Rex, and originally just a duo, they’d also just released their debut, a psychedelic folk album called My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows. The story was the same as Bowie’s. The album fostered intrigue but not yet excitement, and excitement was the thing that both men wanted.
But they spent this odd time together. They toured together in 1969, they hung out a lot, they even fashioned themselves off each other, spending time shopping around London and digging through bins on Carnaby Street to find new styles to wear. By the time the ‘70s hit, they were like brothers. “David always adored him,” Tony Visconti said of their relationship, and that was an understatement.
There was bound to be an issue, though. For two musicians that close, both working in the same genre, both clearly inspired by the same styles, sounds, and energies, given how closely their mutual interests tied them together, it was always going to cause a problem. Their careers couldn’t move alongside each other at the same pace forever, and eventually, Bolan took the lead.
Suddenly, it was T.Rex, the glam rock group. Bolan got there first, releasing his first albums from this new iteration of the group two years before Bowie launched his own glam rock alien, Ziggy Stardust. Despite the strong friendship between them, a competitive nature was bound to come out eventually, and when Bolan saw real success with Electric Warrior in 1971, the green-eyed monster showed its face.
“Oh yeah! Boley struck it big, and we were all green with envy. It was terrible: we fell out for about six months,” Bowie admitted, “It was [sulky mutter] ‘He’s doing much better than I am.’ And he got all sniffy about us who were still down in the basement.”
But really, it was more than that. It wasn’t just that Bolan got famous first; it was that from then on, there was always the comment that Bowie was copying T.Rex simply because he’d won the race on the course the two friends were running together. It would be a comparison that would crop up time and time again, haunting both the artists’ careers. But eventually, it dissipated as Bowie said, “We got over that.”
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