(Credits: Alamy)
Tue 18 November 2025 9:00, UK
While there were plenty of artists who emerged during the 1970s who were at the forefront of the glam rock movement, nobody epitomised this style more than T Rex and their frontman, Marc Bolan.
While David Bowie may have dabbled with this style for a short period of his career, his shapeshifting tendencies and desire to move towards whatever he deemed to be the most artistically exciting avenue to delve into makes him more than just a glam rock superstar. T Rex, on the other hand, stood by this part of their identity, and were often considered to be the band that other acts of this ilk looked up towards as inspiration.
Sonically speaking, Bolan brought both crunching guitars that had an element of bombast to them into the group, but his songwriting also had a distinctly soulful edge to it. There are plenty of examples where these flourishes are brought to the forefront of the band’s sound, and it’s testament to his songwriting prowess that he was able to make this work as a combination when paired with the rockier aspects of their output.
You can hear these soaring backing vocals on songs like ‘Children of The Revolution’ and ‘Get It On’, where The Turtles’ Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan provided this integral extra layer, but there’s one song in particular from their most glorious period that has an even more stellar usage of dramatic backing vocals.
On their 1972 hit, ‘20th Century Boy’, these male falsettos were traded in for female voices, but who was responsible for them, and why did they do away with Volman and Kaylan for this particular song?
Who sings the female backing vocals on ‘20th Century Boy’?
Nothing about the use of the higher-register male voices on the band’s previous singles stood out as unusual or awkward, but having feminine voices complementing Bolan seemed to be an even more perfect addition to the band’s sound on ‘20th Century Boy’.
Despite being released at a similar time to the band’s 1973 album, Tanx, it was recorded a few months prior, and was made without their go-to man, Tony Visconti, at the helm. This, accompanied by the fact that it was recorded in Japan, is perhaps two reasons why the personnel were different, with Volman and Kaylan, later known as Flo & Eddie, being absent from the recording.
When it came to adding the finishing touches to the track in London, Bolan elected to bring in Sue Glover and her sister Sunny Leslie to provide the backing vocals, who were best known for having been members of the original incarnation of British pop group Brotherhood of Man.
With the initial lineup having disbanded in 1972, the sisters were offering up their services as backing vocalists, having already contributed to Joe Cocker’s rendition of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ and appearing on Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection, and given their track record of elevating the sound of rock songs and make them more emphatic, they’re the perfect addition to the already buoyant single.
‘20th Century Boy’ was a slight disappointment for the band in terms of its commercial performance, only managing to reach number three in the charts in 1973, despite already having four chart-topping singles to their name by this point. Despite that, it remains a fan-favourite, and is perhaps one of the strongest distillations of what made T. Rex one of the finest glam rock groups to have ever existed.
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