Tyrannosaurus Rex – Unicorn

Long before Marc Bolan turned electric, installed a rhythm section, shortened the name of his band to T Rex and launched a full fontal assault on the UK charts with his hugely successful brand of glam rock, there was Tyrannosaurus Rex, the two man psychedelic-folk outfit who ruled the underground during the late ’60s.

John Peel favourites, the band comprised of Bolan on vocals and guitar, and the wildly hedonistic Steve Peregrin Took – a  man who’d named himself after a Hobbit – on percussion, backing vocals and anything else that came to hand. They swam in an enchanted sea of acoustic folk-rock, heavily influenced by the psychedelic scene, with tales of the fantastic straight out of Tolkien, blended with the poetry of Blake.

Unicorn, released in 1969, was their third album and Took’s last.

I’m not entirely sure where I stand with this one, suffice to say it doesn’t see a lot of stereo action round at HFoS. That’s not to say that Unicorn is rubbish… Well not all of it, anyway. As anybody who reads this nonsense regularly will know, I’m rarely scathing in my reviews. After all, if I didn’t think I’d like it, I wouldn’t buy it (yes, I do buy my own copies). Occasionally I’m caught out, such as when Robert Plant recommended The Incredible String Band’s, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, a spot of advice I did indeed live to regret. But generally I like to be fair. Plus there’s the fact that something that initially gives the proverbial earache can often take to you like lichen, following repeated listens. Sadly that’s not the case with Unicorn.

Fair enough, it’s lyrical, experimental, and so far wide of convention that it would require a skilled navigator, a master cartographer and a Native American scout to get it back within the same continent as the norm. The sort of thing HFoS usually likes. But in the case of Unicorn, there just seems to be something missing. Maybe it’s the fact that each song on the original album sounds like a demo, sorely lacking the vibrancy of an electric guitar or rhythm section. For instance, the 2004 CD reissue features amongst its mammoth selection of bonus tracks, the two singles from this era, ‘King of the Rumbling Spires’ and ‘Do You Remember’, both plugged in and easily putting everything else Unicorn offers distinctly into the shade.

That’s not to say I’ve anything against acoustic numbers… Love them, in fact. It’s just that these sound amateurish. But like I said, it’s not all bad. There’s the aforementioned singles and a certain charm runs through the likes of ‘Cat Black (the wizard’s hat)’ and ‘She was born to be my Unicorn’.

I imagine it may well be sacrilege in some circles to even question the quality of anything Marc Bolan put out, such is his cult and that of any prominent musician who died unnecessarily young, but I have to say that the bongo-beating feyness of Unicorn just falls short of cutting the mustard. On the plus side though, it’s not as bad as The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

Unicorn [Expanded Edition] has been deleted but is available through Amazon Marketplace

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album reviews, psych-folk