March 13 1970

When Beard of Stars was released, rhe US president was Richard Nixon (Republican), the UK Prime Minister was Harold Wilson (Labour). Pope Paul VI was leader of the Roman Catholic church.

Famous people born on this day include American director and producer Tim Story and French cyclist Stéphane Goubert. At that time people in the US were listening to Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel. In the UK Wand'rin' Star by Lee Marvin was top. Bloody Mama, directed by Roger Corman, was one of the most viewed movies released in 1970 while Mary Queen Of Scots by Antonia Fraser was one of the best selling books. 

Malcolm Toft

Audio engineer and businessman Malcolm Toft was the engineer for the album. He worked at Trident Studios, first as an audio engineer, then as the studio's manager, and eventually as co-founder of recording console maker Trident Audio Developments. Toft went on to form another console company, Malcolm Toft Associates, which eventually led to the founding of Toft Audio Designs and then Ocean Audio. Toft is also co-owner of The Music Mill Studio. In 2009 he was awarded a visiting professorship by Leeds College of Music. He is also a member of the University of West London Student Advisory board which mentors students during the last year of their degree courses in music technology. He worked with Visconti on Prophets, Unicorn and Beard of Stars and on David Bowie's Space Oddity album. He later engineered James Taylor's debut album and was the mix engineer on The Beatles' song "Hey Jude."

Automatic Shoes Cover

 The whole album is covered and can be found here.

A Day Laye cover by Catherine Lambert

Basic Facts

Released 13 March 1970

Recorded April–November 1969

Studio Trident, London

Genre Psychedelic folk, folk rock

Length 35:03

Label Regal Zonophone

Producer Tony Visconti

Musicians Marc Bolan and Mickey Finn

Took and Finn

Four tracks from this album, including "Great Horse", were salvaged from spring 1969 sessions for a fourth album with original percussionist Steve Peregrin Took in the wake of the single "King of the Rumbling Spires". These four tracks were overdubbed for release by Finn, Bolan or Visconti or else mixed out completely. "Marc was terrified of paying Steve any royalties," Visconti said. Took was disappointed. "I didn't like the whole scene over A Beard Of Stars," he complained years later. "That was a bummer."

Mark Paytress says that Finn certainly remembered many rehearsals during his early months in the group. "I used to spend all my time up at Marc's place just off Ladbroke Grove. He had a broom cupboard that was his recording studio at the time, and in it was a snare on a stand, percussion equipment and an acoustic guitar. We were in and out of it all day long." 

A further four tracks from the Took sessions – rejected for the final album – subsequently surfaced on various compilations, three ("Once Upon the Seas of Abyssinia", "Blessed Wild Apple Girl", "Demon Queen") in Bolan's lifetime, the fourth ("Ill Starred Man") posthumously.

The Single in territories outside the UK

 

By The Light Of A Magical Moon

 

In January 1970 a single was released to promote the album

Tony Visconti

From The fat angel sings

“Something was definitely happening,” said Tony Visconti. “We knew we were getting closer to what we wanted.” The American-born producer was talking about A Beard Of Stars, the album that paved the way for the “Bolanmania” of the early 1970s. The final LP released by Marc Bolan and his band as Tyrannosaurus Rex before they transmuted into T. Rex, it came out on 13th March 1970.

The album was the follow-up to 1969’s Unicorn, after which Bolan took the bold and decisive step of firing musical partner Steve Peregrine Took. His voice was already on some of the new material Visconti had recorded, so the producer had to replace it with new vocals by Bolan. Meanwhile, Took’s successor, Mickey Finn, started to be integrated into the band. Even if Visconti would find him to be less versatile than his predecessor, his good looks were a help, and he played percussion.

In his autobiography, Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy, Visconti wrote: “The album was made in a really good atmosphere, helped no end by Finn’s positive spirit, which all led to the sessions being very creative and experimental.” A Beard Of Stars was also the album on which Marc Bolan went electric, playing Visconti’s guitar just before buying his own Fender White Stratocaster.

“A combination of Marc’s growing proficiency on rock guitar and my engineering chops getting better helped the duo sound more aggressive,” remembered Visconti. One single was released from the album, ‘By The Light Of A Magical Moon’; it missed the UK charts, but the album debuted and peaked at No. 21 and totalled six weeks on the bestsellers. It was clear that Marc Bolan was ready to become the pop star figurehead and idol he soon turned into.

Pressings from around the world

 You can see different pressings from around the world here.

Timings

The shortest track on the 14 track album A Beard of Stars is the opener Prelude (1:04") and the longest the closer Elemental Child (5' 33").

The track A Beard of stars (1' 37") like Prelude is an instrumental track. All the other tracks feature vocals, though there are no words on Elemental Child after 1' 50".

Most tracks feature electric guitar but two are largely acoustic (Woodland Bop, 1' 40" and Dragon's Ear, 2' 36"). Organ Blues (2' 47") is distinctive in featuring only minimal organ and percussion.

Most of the tracks are between 2' 37" and 2' 49".

The original first side lasted 19' 9" and the second side a shorter 16' 29". That is a total length of 35' 38" and so it takes under 40 minutes to listen to. Originally LPs could only comfortably manage 23 minutes a side maximum. The album is fairly typical in terms of length then.

Trident Studios

The album was recorded at Trident Studios, St. Anne's Court, Soho, London and was produced by Tony Visconti. According to Visconti, it is still an uncredited Steve Took playing some of the percussion instruments heard on the album.

The US Album on Archive

 See here

Seed

This is an original business card for the macrobiotic restaurant

where Marc Bolan and Mickey Finn first met.

 

June Child

 

June Child, pictured above a short while after the album's release, was Marc's wife and supporter

and the one who designed the album cover

Ride A White Swan

The original US pressing of the album was accompanied by a bonus 7" single featuring "Ride A White Swan" as the A side and "Is It Love" as the B side. (This is not to be confused with the US stock version of the "Ride A White Swan" single, which features "Summertime Blues" as the B side, although both versions share the same catalog number (7121) In the UK both "Is it Love" and "Summertime Blues" were on the B side. Note how these discs use the longer name, not T Rex.

Agadinmar

Agadinmar is first referred to in a series of Bolan's assorted notebooks dedicated to a work known as The Children Of Rarn, begun late in 1967 or early 1968. A possible hypothesis is that this was to be a multi-volume work intended for eventual publication, but interviews with Bolan in 1970 suggest that it would more immediately be realised as a multiple album set. Two notebooks have been reproduced in a publication called Krakenmist and they may well come from The Children Of Rarn story, with The Krakenmist being a chapter from one of the volumes, or in expanded form, a volume in its own right.

The appearance of Agadinmar in these notebooks predates the earlier reference to the Elf Lord and Wizard on the sleeve of A Beard Of Stars (released early 1970), which notes the contents as being "some lore from the books of Agadinmar." Agadinmar appeared again on an acoustic demonstration recording of a scene from The Children Of Rarn, performed slightly later: ". . . the ancient high priest . . . Old Agadinmar . . " This piece was re-recorded in 1974 with T Rex, indicating a continued interest in this apparently uncompleted project.

Dworns

In an interview in America in the early seventies Bolan spoke of his grand conceptual epic Children of Rarn loosely based on his 1968 writings and more properly conceived during 1970 but that had been shelved.

"It's a pretty historic story," he continued, "which was gonna be the album before Electric Warrior, a science-fiction album.

"It's about prehistoric earth before the dinosaurs were heavy creatures," he'd tell anyone who'd listen.

"There were two races of people then, the Peacelings and the Dworns. Now the Dwoms were soulless people, very bestial. Dworn is actually a two-sided word — it's a man, but it's also a machine, which in fact was a prehistoric motorbike which worked on solar power. It has solid ivory wheels, a golden base and two gazelle horns to steer it. It could go about 800mph. Anyway, there were a lot of these creatures called the Lithons ..." And so the saga continued.

"It was going to be our Tommy, our Sgt Pepper, our big rock opera," recalls producer Tony Visconti, who got 15 minutes of the project's key elements down on tape some time during 1971.

Global Glam and Popular Music

In the book Global Glam and Pop Music Alison Blair writes about Marc Bolan. She says of Beard of Stars that it is subtitled "Some Lore from the Books of Agadinmar." and this title

frames the entire album as a repro-duction of fragments from an ancient spiritual work, which is, in itself, Bolan's own invention. The "existence" of this fictional work, then, sets up an entirely Bolan-created fantasy world. The inner sleeve of the record features a photograph of Bolan's own statuette of the Greek god Pan and is dedicated to "the Priests of Peace, all the Shepherds and Horse Lords and my Imperial Lore Liege - the King of the Rumbling Spires." Throughout, the album features references to the sun and moon, the woodlands, the earth, mountains, sea, wind, stars, and sky and includes Bolan's own mythical creation, the "Dworn" (a fighting machine mentioned in the song "Dragon's Ear"). The Dworn, the sleeve notes explain, is a "machinery of war, a bronze frame with wheels of white ivory and horns of a gazelle for steering, so sayeth Agadinmar," Bolan's own fantasy invention in a narrative of good versus evil, which is, as [Fredric] Jameson notes, a trope of the fantasy genre that reflects (in a particularly escapist way) the ideological struggles of the present.

Peter Sanders

The photographs on the cover of the original album were taken by Peter Sanders. Sanders was Bolan's best man when he married at the beginning of 1970. He is a British photographer. His later works focus on the Muslim community around the world, especially on their traditional and spiritual aspects. Having more than four decades of experience in photography, he is one of the most renowned and respected Muslim photographers in the world. Before converting to Islam in 1971 London born Sanders began his career in photography in the mid-1960s, where he often recorded the faces of well-known musicians including Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and The Rolling Stones. In the 1970s, his attention shifted, which led him to photographing Islamic subjects.

Her Kiss Is a Whip of the Moon

The line is from Elemental Child and is the tile of an album by Daughter of the Water (Sarah Lambert-Gates). She has a nice version of Life's a Gas here.

Advert from the time

 

Cube Records

Cube Records was launched on 26 May 1972 by independent music publisher David Platz, and was based at his UK offices for Essex Music.

Platz had entered the arena of record production in the early 1960s, and having had a string of hits by licensing records to major labels (most Essex artists were released on EMI's Regal Zonophone), decided to start his own independent record label in 1970. With Malcolm Jones as label manager he formed Fly Records.

By mid 1972 Marc Bolan had left Fly Records to set up his own label imprint and Essex/Fly producer Tony Visconti had also left with Bolan, setting up his own Good Earth Productions. With new staff brought into the label, Platz decided to promote a new roster of artists and re-launch with a new label named Cube Records.

The headline of the press release issued by Malcolm Jones in May 1972 to communicate this development boldly stated "Essex puts Fly into Cube". A fact literally translated by the label's logo, which consisted of a fly within a wire-frame cube. According to the press release, Fly Records had been limited to operating in the UK, but Cube Records would be an international operation. In effect, Cube simply continued using Fly's catalogue numbering prefix, but with only one Fly artist, guitar virtuoso John Williams, remaining on the new label.

By July 1972 the label's ethos had moved too far from Jones' remit during the Fly days, and he left the label. The company's legacy recordings that had been released via FLY on its TOOFA series were also now brought into Cube, and by the end of the year Cube continued the TOOFA campaign with releases by T. Rex and Procol Harum, while all efforts were focussed on a brand new signing Joan Armatrading, an artist developed by Elton John producer Gus Dudgeon. Cube released Armatrading's first album, Whatever's for Us in 1972.

Cube became Electric Cube, albeit briefly, before its label manager Jeremy Thomas shelved the Cube imprint and established The Electric Record Company, whose Electric Records imprint became the home for new releases.

Cube Records soon ceased producing its own catalogue, opting to license to various catalogue companies over the years. Going full circle, Cube's recordings were incorporated into Onward Music, run by David Platz's son Simon Platz, and Cube’s catalogue has returned to its initial home, Fly Records.

Fly Records

Fly Records is a British independent record label, established in 1970 by the independent music publisher David Platz, and initially managed by Malcolm Jones from the offices of Essex Music in London.

Platz had been producing records independently, in conjunction with record producers funded by Essex, and leasing them to major record labels. These creative collaborations quickly made their mark with hits such as "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (Procol Harum), "Flowers in the Rain", "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" and "Blackberry Way" (The Move) alongside influential recordings from the likes of Beverley Kutner, Tucker Zimmerman and Michael Chapman.

The producer roster involved with Platz included Denny Cordell, Gus Dudgeon, Rodger Bain, Don Paul, Johnny Worth and Tony Visconti, whom Platz had brought over to the UK at Cordell’s initiation.

After a string of hits in the late 1960s licensed via labels Deram and, later, Regal Zonophone, Platz launched his own label Fly Records in 1970. Malcolm Jones had left university to work for EMI, becoming a label manager and creating his own imprint at EMI, Harvest Records, but moved to work for Platz as manager of Fly.

Fly's first release was "Ride a White Swan" by T. Rex, produced by Visconti. The following year the album Electric Warrior was both Fly's and Bolan's first #1 album.

In keeping with Platz’s publishing style, the label chose not to concentrate on a particular sector of the market but preferred to offer an eclectic mix of artists and releases, some aimed directly at the chart and some intended simply to enhance the profiles of new artists or artists who were linked to the Platz's publishing enterprise. Vivian Stanshall, Third World War, John Kongos, Georgia Brown, John Keating and John Williams were all featured on the label's early releases.

In 1972, Fly consolidated their chart success with older material. Four three-track Magni-Fly singles were released which reintroduced songs from the company's back catalogue, such as "A Whiter Shade of Pale", into the UK Singles Chart. An album campaign entitled 'Toofas', (double albums priced as a single), found favour, and albums such as Procol Harum's debut set suddenly made the UK Albums Chart years after their initial release.

Once T. Rex's album Bolan Boogie reached #1 in the UK Albums Chart, departures at Fly HQ forced a change of plan. Jones left the label, Cordell moved to the US forming Shelter Records, and Bolan moved to EMI, where he was given his own imprint, taking Visconti with him. The new Fly team chose to relaunch the label as Cube Records, with a new logo caging the 'Fly' in a cubic jail. A raft of new artists were signed, and Fly Records was shelved as a label in its own right.

By the time the Fly label was revived in 1988 as an independent outlet for various publishing related projects, Platz had incorporated the Fly label into his company Onward Music Ltd., whilst Platz’s publishing company Bucks Music Ltd. remained his core business. The revived label's first signing in 1988 was Babayaga a band fronted by Kirsty MacColl's brother Hamish and recording engineer Matt Wallis.

Following David Platz's death on 20 May 1994, his son Simon Platz continued managing Onward's ongoing archive exploration under the wing of his own publishing company, Bucks Music Group. A host of original tapes thought lost, as well as unreleased and forgotten recordings from unfinished or unreleased projects from the production company, continues to fuel releases through Fly Records and various licencees.

Blue Thumb Records

Blue Thumb Records was an American record label founded in 1968 by Bob Krasnow and former A&M Records executives Tommy LiPuma and Don Graham. Blue Thumb's last record was released in 1978. In 1995, the label was revived and remained active until 2005.

Bob Krasnow had been in the record business since the 1950s, working as a promotion man for King Records and also working for Buddah/Kama Sutra Records. Blue Thumb was originally intended by Captain Beefheart to be the name of his backing band. However, Krasnow did not think the name was right for the group. Later Krasnow chose the name for his label.

Other acts that appeared on the label include Gerry Rafferty, The Credibility Gap, The Crusaders, Hugh Masekela, Aynsley Dunbar's Retaliation (licensed from UK Liberty Records), Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, Jimmy Smith, Dave Mason, The Pointer Sisters, The Hoodoo Rhythm Devils, T. Rex (in its earlier incarnation as Tyrannosaurus Rex, licensed from the UK's Regal Zonophone Records), Ike & Tina Turner, Love,and National Lampoon (on the Banana label imprint).

Blue Thumb originally used independent distribution, but went to Capitol/EMI for distribution in late 1970. Gulf and Western's Famous Music Group took over distribution in mid-1971, then bought the label outright in 1972. Late in 1974, the Famous Music record labels were sold to ABC Records. ABC kept Blue Thumb active for a time, mostly for albums by the Pointer Sisters and the Crusaders as well as some reissues. In 1979 ABC sold its labels to MCA Records, which discontinued the Blue Thumb imprint altogether.

In the UK and Europe, Blue Thumb releases were licensed to Harvest Records (also owned by EMI) from 1969 to 1971, and to Island Records thereafter. In 1995, an anthology CD was released, All Day Thumbsucker Revisited: The History of Blue Thumb Records, consisting of recordings from various artists from 1968 to 1974.

The label was revived in 1995 for blues and soft rock releases. This remained so, even after the 1998 merger with parent Universal Music Group and PolyGram and being put under the fold of the Verve Music Group, continuing to be Verve's imprint for non-jazz releases. In early 2005, the Blue Thumb imprint was deactivated and was replaced with Verve Forecast to handle such releases. UMG's reissue arm Hip-O Records has reissued several Blue Thumb recordings, including such acts as the Crusaders, Dan Hicks & his Hot Licks and the Pointer Sisters.

Regal Zonophone

Regal Zonophone Records was a British record label formed in 1932, through a merger of the Regal and Zonophone labels. This followed the merger of those labels' respective parent companies – the Columbia Graphophone Company and the Gramophone Company – to form EMI. At the merger, those records from the Regal Records catalogue were prefixed 'MR' and those from the Zonophone Records catalogue were prefixed 'T'. Record releases after the merger continued using only the 'MR' prefix.

Originally Regal Zonophone handled American releases from Okeh Records, Victor Records and Columbia Records, as well as offering home-grown recordings by artists such as Gracie Fields and George Formby. The label is also known for its releases of Salvation Army (particularly brass band) music.

In the 1950s the Australian division of Regal Zonophone played an important role in the emerging Australian country music genre, signing several emerging country stars including Slim Dusty, Smoky Dawson, Reg Lindsay and Chad Morgan. Slim Dusty's 1957 Regal Zonophone hit "A Pub with No Beer" became the biggest-selling Australian recording ever released up to that time.

EMI revived the Regal Zonophone imprint in 1967 to handle the Essex Music/Straight Ahead producing account that had moved from Deram (after one Procol Harum single and two singles by The Move) and continued well into the early 1970s, with successful producers Denny Cordell and Tony Visconti both having production companies releasing records through the label. During this period the label had both album and single success with artists such as The Move, Procol Harum, Joe Cocker and Tyrannosaurus Rex. During the mid-1970s, many of these production deals ended and, despite a few sporadic releases by Blue Mink, Geordie, Dave Edmunds, and Grunt Futtock (a one-off project featuring Roy Wood, Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton and Andy Bown), EMI stopped using the imprint as a major pop label. Many of the label's artists moved to Fly Records or to the EMI imprint.

Regal Zonophone was revived by EMI in 1985-86 and again at the end of the 1990s as a reissue label. This incarnation of the label is no longer active, as EMI relaunched Regal and Zonophone as separate imprints of Parlophone. In 2013, both Regal and Zonophone were taken over by Warner Music Group after Universal Music Group spun off Parlophone from EMI, at the request of international regulators.

NB Regal Zonophone is one of the few record labels commemorated in song, namely "Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone)" from the album Shine On Brightly by Regal Zonophone artists Procol Harum and mentioned in "Repetition" by the Fall.

Regal Zonophone originally released Thrillington, a 1977 album produced by Paul McCartney, under the pseudonym of Percy "Thrills" Thrillington.

Elemental Child Live 1971

The Pan Statue

 

This is Danielz with the original Pan or Poon Statuette which Bolan gave to roadie Mick O'Halloran

Collector's Mug

 See here for a relevant collector's mug

Max Bordenghast

 This is a remake of the whole album.