Ziggy: John Lennon Sings About Marc Bolan

Legends Reborn closes with the most English track on the album.

Ziggy is John Lennon singing about Marc Bolan — the boy from Hackney who put stardust on his face and walked into the seventies like someone who had planned the decade in advance. And John Lennon from Liverpool, watching all of this from New York, finally saying what he thought.

The track ends with a spoken coda. Lovely bloke, actually. Terrible driver. But a lovely bloke. That is Lennon's humour — dry, direct, affectionate in the specific way that the English working class expresses affection, which is by acknowledging the flaw alongside the love rather than pretending the flaw is not there.

It is the perfect ending for the album.

Before Ziggy

The argument the song makes — and it is an argument, delivered with Lennon's characteristic directness — is that Marc Bolan was doing glam before Bowie claimed it.

Marc — you were Ziggy before Ziggy had a name / Marc — you were playing glam before Bowie played the game.

This is historically defensible. T. Rex's Electric Warrior predates Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona. Bolan was in velvet and feathers and stack heels before the lightning bolt arrived. The revisionism that placed Bowie as the originator of British glam erased what Bolan had already built — partly because Bolan died young, in 1977, and Bowie went on to reinvent himself a dozen more times and accumulate the legacy accordingly.

Lennon, who had his own complicated relationship with how history writes itself, has something specific to say about this.

Working Class, Both

The lyric draws the connection between Lennon and Bolan that matters most: Working class lad from Hackney / Made himself into a star / John Lennon from Liverpool / Knows exactly what you are.

Both of them built enormous things from nothing. Both of them understood that the costume, the character, the stage persona was not a lie but a declaration — a way of saying to the world: I am not going to be what you expect from someone like me. I am going to be exactly what I decide to be.

Bolan did it with velvet and curls. Lennon did it with words and wit. The strategy was different. The ambition was identical.

The Album's Last Word

Bolan died in September 1977, two weeks before his twenty-eighth birthday, in a car crash in Barnes. He was one of the most alive people British music has ever produced — that alive, that specifically, stubbornly, gloriously alive — and then he was gone.

Three years later, Lennon was killed in New York. And the music they both made kept playing.

That is the whole Legends Reborn album in one sentence. The artists are gone. The music keeps playing. And somewhere in the playing, the conversations they never got to have are finally happening.

Marc Bolan — you were never wrong. You were never wrong.

Watch Ziggy alongside the full Legends Reborn visual album →

Legends Reborn is out now. All eleven tracks. All eleven conversations.