My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows (Digitally Remastered)

This is the album that finds Bolan at his least self-conscious. Matching his swooping, screeching voice and guitar-flaying playing to the zoned-out bongos of Steve Peregrine Took, it's a suitably freaky folk record, rich in tranced-out atmosphere.

Whilst the instrumentation is theoretically skeletal, just acoustic guitar and hand percussion, Bolan and producer Tony Visconti build evocative arrangements by multi-tracking his voice. On "Strange Orchestras", the most Banhart-esque moment, Bolan's voice barks, squeals, hiccups, and carols all over itself; whereas, on "Dwarfish Trumpet Blues," the many layers of vocal work in harmony, building broad walls of wailing. "Child Star" finds the song, a tale of a self-destructive piano prodigy who dies on the cusp of adolescence, ebbing and flowing, his sinuous singing wildly swinging through meter and pitch.

But his voice, and the whole album, never sounds better than on "Frowning Atahuallpa (My Inca Love)," a triptych in which Bolan becomes possibly the first person to introduce Hare Krishna chants to Western secular music, climaxing a rollicking love-song with devotional Vaishnava mantras; before employing John Peel to read his unironic Kenneth-Grahame-on-acid woodland-storybook writings; then signing off with a minute-long title-track that laments the Fall of humans from mystical spirit-creatures to work-a-day, office-desk drudges.