The Dad Who Defended Bolan

In the summer of 1972, public school drop-out Anthony Saint was launched by his father on an intensive programme of self-improvement.
Through home study and with the help of local private tutors, he set about making up for the fact that he'd left school at 16 with only two General Certificate of Education passes to his name, where a respectable amount would be no less than five.
He took Karate classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, and among his fellow students were hard-looking young men – some of them flaunting classic ‘70s feather cuts - who may have been led to the dojo by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, such as the films of Bruce Lee, and the “Kung Fu” television series.
There were swimming lessons at the local pool, where he fell hard for a beautiful elfin girl with a close crop hairstyle which made her look a little like a skinhead girl. She beckoned to him once to come and be with her, but he just stood there as if frozen to the spot. His heart wasn't in the swimming though, and this soon became clear to one of the teachers, who once told him with devastating frankness:
“I don’t know why you bother even turning up.”
Music did interest him though, and although he was an idle slacker, he was yet successfully initiated into the basics of the Rock guitar solo by a shy and sweet-natured guitar teacher of about 45 by the name of Gerry Firth. Gerry gave lessons from a tiny little abode down an alley in Walton-on-Thames, a London suburb which conjoined Anthony’s own small home town, and he lived there in apparent content with a much younger wife and golden-haired infant daughter.
His profound love for the rebel music of Rock and Roll was wholly belied by an appearance which was almost militantly square, even by the standards of middle-aged men in those days. He wore his grey hair in a severe short back and sides style which he supplemented with shirt and tie and sleeveless sweater, and great baggy grey flannel trousers. In other words, he was every inch the typical British seventies dad…that is, on the surface of things. The truth was infinitely different.
On one occasion, Anthony tried to persuade him of the superior merit of Classical music on the basis that it’s “well-played”, which Gerry countered with:
“Well, isn’t Rock Music well played?”
Anthony was baffled by his argument, because despite his own preference for Rock, he had no great belief in its artistic merits.
Another thing that bewildered him about Gerry Firth was his admiration for British teen idol Marc Bolan of seminal Glam Rock band T. Rex, a man he’d always contemned as much for his girlish appearance as his simplistic three-chord Pop music. As to Glam Rock, while it was a genre that veered wildly between Pop chart stompers by Bolan et al, and the more sophisticated decadence of major musical talents such as David Bowie and Todd Rundgren, it was yet to make any kind of impression on the neanderthal Anthony. He still favoured the bearded and moustachio’d macho men of the Heavy Rock movement.
“Don’t you find him effeminate?” Anthony once asked him disgustedly of Bolan, fully expecting Gerry to express due horror at the thought of Bolan’s startling choirboy looks, while continuing to enjoy his catchy tunes. But Gerry trumped him with an answer that caused his adolescent jaw to drop:
“Not as excitingly so as Mike Jagger!”
“Mick Jagger”, said Anthony, correcting the older man as if in a trance.
“Mick Jagger”, Gerry conceded, still with the same stubborn fixed smile on his face.
By the following year, Anthony had come around to Gerry’s view of Marc Bolan and become a massive fan himself, although not just of the Bopping Elf, but of all the leading Glam icons of ’73, but at the time he was aghast at what he saw as the older man’s defence of what was still to him the indefensible.
Sadly, Bolan died in a car accident close to his home in Barnes, West London at just 29 years old. Yet, following his premature quietus, he underwent something a transformation both in terms of his persona and his music, both attaining classic status where they remain to this day. Not that Anthony Saint is any longer a fan.
He became a born again Christian in 1993, and on the virtual eve of doing so, was enjoying a near-ecstatic experience thanks to Bolan and another of his musical heroes, fellow Rock poet Jim Morrison, for whose work the English bard had the greatest respect.
He was playing their music in swift rotation on the afternoon following a massive nocturnal binge. But it was that very day that his health caved in on him after years of alcohol abuse…and he went through a lengthy season in Hell during which time he could have sworn he had an intimation of the fate that awaited him were he to lose consciousness and collapse.
The experience could be said to have cured him of his addiction to both Morrison and Bolan, who were so similar, and in so many ways, and not just in terms of their looks. Both were primarily poets, with androgynous Shelleyan faces topped by a head of cherubic curls. Both had begun as darlings of the late ‘60s underground, only to find themselves in the position of being Pop star pin-ups thanks to a single hit record. Both struggled for years with substance abuse issues, only to die young while in the midst of attempting to bring some order back into their chaotic Rock and Roll lives.
It was this very romantic fatality that Saint had once so adored about them, but after becoming a Christian, he decided to distance himself from those darker and more intense elements within Rock Music, and so to divest himself of much of his musical collection, including albums by both T. Rex and Jim Morrison’s band, the Doors. Occasionally though, he still allowed himself a listen to his erstwhile favourites, even if they entirely failed to produce the sense of transcendent defiance of every known law they once did within him. It was as if he was listening to them as another person altogether, which in effect he was.
But he continued to be charmed by Morrison’s beautiful voice, so crooner-like that an infuriated Frank Sinatra once accused the Florida boy of emulating him; and revisiting Bolan in 2010 thanks to the miracle of the Spotify web site, he was struck by how extraordinarily witty his lyrics were. As to his music, while simple even by Rock standards, he found it strangely infectious, perhaps even alarmingly so. After all, he must have had something to have so delighted Gerry Firth all those years ago, to the extent of making a sixteen year old look square for detesting everything he stood for. Quite a blow struck on behalf of the old hipster guard in the generation wars that were still being fought back then. But Saint forgave him, because arguably more than anyone, Gerry Firth was responsible for providing him with the building blocks of the music he once defended with such impassioned fervour.