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.