‘My People Were Fair’: The acoustic origin of T-Rex

Posted On October 3, 2024October 3, 2024

When you think about T-Rex, you think about hard-hitting rock music. The sound they became famous for packed a punch, as songs like ‘Get It On’ and ‘Children of the Revolution’ are made for head-banging. They play into the sonic rebellion that was oh-so sought-after in the 1970s, and they burst onto the scene with such tenacity that their name still carries weight to this day. However, it wasn’t always like this. 

In a recent interview, the rapper André 3000 explained why he believes many modern rappers sound alike. Long story short, it comes down to how easy it is to make and release music these days. This means people don’t get a chance to refine their sound, and instead of working on it, they release what winds up being a carbon copy of those they idolise.

“If I were to come out as OutKast when we thought we were ready, we wouldn’t be around today cause we sounded like everybody else. We sounded like who we were listening to,” said André, “Now, I don’t think artists have time to cultivate themselves, so a lot of artists sound the same.”

He continued: “You can quickly jump on a microphone—it’s awesome because you’re getting immediacy, but you don’t get time to hone who you are.” 

He raises an interesting point, not just in the face of modern music but in an artist’s journey. When all of our favourite musicians originally started making music, they likely wouldn’t have sounded anything like what we know and love today. This is because ideas are too fresh in their minds. All they have are the people who inspire them; as such, they make music that sounds a bit like that. They need time to learn and replicate that music before adding their own spin and creating something entirely unique.

It would be interesting to listen to a lot of our favourite artists’ early music and analyse how different it sounds from what they became famous for. While there aren’t many classic rock bands we can do that with, we can listen to early T-Rex’s work and what they ended up making afterwards in a bid to analyse just how much they changed over time.

If you’re a fan of the likes of ‘Get It On’ then T-Rex’s first album may not have been for you. Electric guitars, orchestral elements, and hard-hitting drums have all been abandoned in favour of simple-sounding bongos and acoustic guitars. If not for Marc Bolan’s iconic-sounding vocals, you could be convinced that it wasn’t T-Rex at all.

The whole album title is My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows, and it was stripped back for a valid reason. All of Marc Bolan’s experiences in electric bands had been relatively disastrous. He had left John’s Children, a mod band he was playing in, in 1967. After that, he formed T-Rex with the intention of being an electric four-piece, but their debut gig was so disastrous he stripped the whole thing down to be purely acoustic.

It’s a gorgeous debut album. It certainly doesn’t hit as hard as some of T-Rex’s other songs, but there is no denying that tracks like ‘Hot Rod Mama’ and ‘Child Star’ have a profound beauty behind them, which is difficult to ignore. 

Once T-Rex had a good enough team around them to expand and become an electric band, that’s exactly what they did; however, it took some time before they could shake the acoustic style they had perfected on what now sounds like a distant debut.

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