Did glam perish with Marc Bolan when his Mini came off the road in Barnes in 1977? That epochal year, in which Elvis Presley also passed away (exactly a month before Bolan, in fact), saw a shift from the long tail of jangly sixties sunshine rock ‘n’ roll to the visceral snorting of punk; the Sex Pistols released their only studio album in late ’77, The Clash having burst onto the scene with their debut around six months earlier, and there were acerbic rumblings from the likes of X-Ray Spex, Buzzcocks, The Stranglers, The Damned, The Adverts, Stiff Little Fingers… the shift from shaman to shouting was unsubtle to say the least.
Oh, but was there ever a vehicle more glam in concept than Bolan’s Mini? A 1275 GT in beguiling Black Tulip,
