📰The Lost Night Ride Session – Mar. 1968
- Tyrannosaurus Rex
- Mar 13, 1968
- 3 min read
BBC / Archival Reconstruction
Date: March 14, 1968
Length: 5–6 min read
A vanished broadcast from the dawn of Marc Bolan’s psychedelic ascent — six songs, one fleeting interview, and a BBC session now lost to time.
A spectral snapshot of Bolan and Took before the myth took shape.
Broadcast on March 14, 1968, the second Tyrannosaurus Rex session for the BBC’s Night Ride programme captured Marc Bolan and Steve Peregrin Took at the very beginning of their partnership. Recorded just two weeks earlier at Broadcasting House, the session featured six songs — including two titles with no surviving studio equivalents — and a brief interview. Today, the entire recording is believed lost.
📰 Key Highlights
• Recorded February 28, 1968 at BBC Studio 2
• Broadcast March 14, 1968 on Night Ride
• Produced by John Muir
• Six songs performed, including rare early‑era titles
• Session is completely lost, with no known off‑air tapes
📰 Overview
In early 1968, Tyrannosaurus Rex were still an underground curiosity — a duo weaving incantatory folk‑psych spells in clubs, basements, and late‑night radio slots. Marc Bolan had only recently abandoned his mod‑era electric sound, and Steve Peregrin Took had joined him in shaping a new, mystical acoustic identity. The BBC Night Ride session recorded on February 28 — and broadcast on March 14 — captures this embryonic moment, before the duo’s cult following had fully formed.
The tracklist is extraordinary for its rarity. Two songs, “The Wizard” and “Hippy Gumbo,” have no surviving studio versions from the Took era, making their inclusion historically invaluable. The BBC’s Programme as Broadcast (PasB) sheets preserve timings and titles, but the recordings themselves have vanished.
Despite decades of searching by collectors and archivists, the session remains one of the most elusive artefacts from Bolan’s earliest creative phase.
📰 Source Details
Publication / Venue: BBC Radio — Night Ride
Date: March 14, 1968
Format: Radio session / Broadcast performance
Provenance Notes: Based on BBC PasB sheets and verified archival research.
📰 The Story
The session was recorded on Wednesday, February 28, 1968, inside BBC Studio 2 at Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London. Produced by John Muir, the recording captured Tyrannosaurus Rex performing six songs:
“The Beginning of Doves” (1:36)
“Wielder of Words” (3:32)
“The Wizard” (2:47)
“Afghan Woman” (2:00)
“Hippy Gumbo” (2:00)
“Frowning Atahuallpa (My Inca Love)” (5:34)
The PasB sheets also document a brief 17‑second interview with Marc — a tiny sliver of spoken‑word insight from a period when Bolan was still shaping his public persona.
The broadcast aired on March 14, 1968, offering listeners a rare, intimate performance from a duo still unknown to the mainstream. Yet unlike many BBC sessions of the era, no transcription disc was cut, and no home‑taped off‑air recording has ever surfaced. Over the years, numerous researchers have attempted to locate the tapes, but all evidence suggests the session was wiped during routine archival clear‑outs.
What survives is the paper trail — timings, titles, and the knowledge that this session once existed, shimmering briefly across the airwaves before disappearing forever.
📰 Visual Archive
Tyrannosaurus Rex — BBC Night Ride Session (Broadcast March 14, 1968).
📰 Related Material
• Early Tyrannosaurus Rex BBC Sessions (1967–1968)
• My People Were Fair… (1968)
• Prophets, Seers & Sages (1968)
📰 Closing Notes
The March 14 broadcast stands as one of the most tantalising missing pieces of the Bolan archive — a ghost‑session from the earliest days of Tyrannosaurus Rex, capturing the duo’s fragile, hypnotic magic before fame, electricity, and reinvention reshaped everything.
📰 Sources
• BBC Programme as Broadcast (PasB) sheets
• Archival research into BBC session logs
• Contemporary documentation from collectors and historians
• There Was A Time - Marc Bolan a Chronology' Cliff McLenehan
📝 Copyright Notice
All BBC materials referenced remain the property of their respective copyright holders. This Chronicle entry is a transformative, non‑commercial archival summary created for historical documentation and educational reference. No ownership of the original material is claimed or implied.
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