February 12, 1972 - New Musical Express

T.REX Cover Inset & 2 Page Feature

I was a bit hung-up with my records being produced, at the start.

I just wanted to go into the studio and sing my songs and then leave.

I was very much into my own little world in those days.

I'm not a very social person. I was basically a romantic, but the songs I'm writing now are exactly the songs I wrote when I lived with my parents. Like if you listen to the words of "Desdemona", I could have written it now.

But there were those two or three years in the middle where I suppose I was a poet with a capital 'P'. Which turned a lot of people off, but it also turned a lot of people on. It was very appropriate for the time.

If you listen to the songs on the first album, they're much less poetic than the songs on "Unicorn".

For me now, a straightforward "I love you baby and you love me" is much more poetic than "The craggy seas of the wild moon on the beach of the swan".

I was very insular. I didn't boogie with people very much.

Drugs didn't influence my style much.

I used to smoke occasionally when I was sixteen, but I never got into drugs at all. Certainly not acid.

I took acid about three times, long before T. Rex, and all I found was that nothing happened to me, man. I just spent more time on things.

But there were no revelations, because all that was revealed to me was that what I knew already was right. I got no hallucinations or problems of any sort.

All that happened was: The noise that I naturally excluded from my brain (like car noise, or people talking in a room that I don't want to be in) became very loud.

Do you understand? It took down the barriers which were my defense. And it just made me aware that since five years old, I'd been constructing an inner sanctum which is probably like the acid experience. I'm very fortunate like that.

I was a weird kid, very messed up as a kid. Emotionally I went through a lot of experiences.

It was still a solid family.