06/03/2026
They were both nobody.
David Jones and Mark Feld. Two London teenagers with enormous ambitions and no money, sharing the same manager who had spent more on their wardrobes than they had earned in music. To pay him back, he put them to work painting the walls of his Soho office.
Standing there with paintbrushes, Mark introduced himself.
"I'm King Mod. Your shoes are crap."
David laughed. They talked about clothes for an hour before they talked about music.
They were both born in 1947, within months of each other. Both desperate to escape suburban London. Both possessed of a striking, androgynous beauty and an obsession with reinvention. Both absolutely certain they were going to be famous.
Mark got there first.
As Tyrannosaurus Rex — then simplified to T.Rex — he was glittering and electric, piling rock and roll energy under fairy-tale lyrics and a magnificent mane of black curls. Ride a White Swan. Hot Love. Get It On. The UK charts, one after another. By 1971, Marc Bolan was a full-blown phenomenon.
And David Bowie was still struggling.
Bolan had even hired his old friend to tour with T.Rex — not as a musician, but as a mime. Bowie had trained in mime with Lindsay Kemp and put together a performance about China's invasion of Tibet. Every night, the hippie audiences at T.Rexshows booed him off the stage.
According to producer Tony Visconti: Bolan watched from the wings with "great sadistic delight."
When Bolan broke through and Bowie was still in the basement, Bowie admitted later: "Oh yeah — Boley struck it big, and we were all green with envy. It was terrible: we fell out for about six months."
But Bowie came back.
In 1972 he released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. He took the glam language Bolan had helped build and extended it somewhere stranger, more alien, more theatrical. A track on the album — "Lady Stardust" — was a portrait of Bolan. Its original demo title was "He Was Alright (A Song for Marc)."
Now they were neck and neck, their chart battles filling the pages of British music press week after week.
Bolan won the sprint. Bowie won the marathon.
By the mid-70s, T.Rex's star had faded. Bolan struggled with co***ne and brandy, watching his former friend conquer America while he searched for a way back. In 1977, he found it — sober, energized, fronting a new television show called Marc, booking punk bands alongside established acts, feeling the music in his body again the way he had in 1971.
For the penultimate episode, he invited Bowie to come on.
They hadn't been close for years. There was tension at the taping — Bowie directing his own performance with professional intensity, Bolan feeling sidelined on his own show, the old dynamics surfacing again. But then they played together and none of it mattered.
At the end, performing a loose instrumental jam, Bolan tripped on a cable and fell forward. He caught himself, grinned. Bowie laughed beside him.
Nine days later, Marc Bolan was killed in a car accident in Barnes, South London. He was 29 years old.
Bowie attended the funeral. He told Rolling Stone: "I'm terribly broken by it. He was my mate. The only tribute I can give Marc is that he was the greatest little giant in the world."
Then Bowie quietly set up a financial fund for Bolan's infant son Rolan, keeping in contact for years, making sure the family was cared for.
They had been rivals and brothers. They had competed, insulted, inspired, and loved each other across fifteen years of the most remarkable music British culture had ever produced.
Two kids from London suburbs who met while painting a wall.
One of them changed the world.
Both of them deserved to.
In honor of Marc Bolan (1947–1977) and David Bowie (1947–2016) — who invented the future together from a paint-streaked Soho office in 1964.
