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
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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