Martin Bramah Falls for This Marc Bolan Tune
The Fall, Blue Orchids and Factory Star member enlightens us on this favorite song you've never heard
British singer/songwriter Martin Branah tells BlastEcho his favorite song you’ve never heard:
“Beyond the Rising Sun” by Marc Bolan
Somewhere, it is always summer and this song plays all afternoon. It’s actually under two minutes long, but don’t let that stop you. This is the B-side of Marc Bolan’s first single, released in November 1965; the A-side being ‘The Wizard.” As an interesting aside, he also covered Fred Neil’s ‘That’s the Bag I’m In’ at this session, but it has never been released as far as I know.
Though this track is pre-Bolan’s ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’ golden age, it seems to herald its coming wonderfully, as well as hinting at the better known glam-pop sounds of the mighty T. Rex.
I love the innocent bravado here, the confident boasting of impossible facts and tantalizing promises. Marc will be our guide as we take our first teenage trip into the fabulous.
I was that teen explorer, who discovered T. Rex in my own summer of love, somewhere in the early ’70s—and what a rich treasure chest I unearthed in that Tyrannosaurus Rex legacy. Bolan’s imagination knew no bounds and my doors of perception were flung wide open.
We all have that one special summer when innocence and experience unite and all the pieces fit together for the first time and you feel with your whole being ‘I am here – I have arrived!’ and you’re always going to remember it, even when you become an adult, right?
Well some of us do.
This was the moment music became something personal to me. I began to study sound without even realizing it – to really listen for the first time, and digest.
I was too young to be of the hippy generation, and I didn’t much like their ill-defined ideas of ‘peace and love,’ but Marc Bolan managed to cherry pick the interesting bits and passed them on uncorrupted to the next wave of youth, and I hit puberty at just the right time to get the message.
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