HE was born Mark Feld In London on September 30 1947. He died on September 16 1977, when the mini in which he was travelling left the road and crashed into a tree in the early hours of the morning.

Marc Bolan's tragically brief life was cut short but his legacy to the music world remains - and is celebrated in the musical 20th Century Boy which is chock-full of the 1970s hits of Bolan and his band T Rex but which aims to be something other than another jukebox musical.

All the classic songs are there - Ride A White Swan, Metal Guru, I Love To Boogie, Get It On and, as they say, many more - but the show is "inspired" by the life of Bolan and attempts to tell his story with a bit of dramatic licence.

His rise to fame and fortune is investigated through his son Rolan Bolan (played by former Casualty and Waterloo Road actor Luke Bailey) as he searches for the truth about his father through visiting Bolan's mother Phyllis Feld (Sue Jenkins, from Brookside and Coronation Street).

Jenkins' memories of Bolan and his music are from "first time round" as she's old enough to remember him making his mark. "He was so ahead of his time and seemed to set different trends. He never stayed the same, he was unpredictable," she says.

"I always had a very soft spot for Marc Bolan. To me, he was T Rex. So he was the one to follow with all the pictures and pin-ups in Jackie. It's quite strange because on the prop table for the show there's all these magazines and I used to read them all."

At 30, Bailey isn't old enough to remember Bolan but his dad was a massive fan of T Rex among other groups of the time. "One of the first songs I can remember hearing is 20th Century Boy, funnily enough, when we were driving. I remember many car journeys with that song," he says. "As I've started looking back and finding influences of bands that I like then T Rex inevitably comes up."

The film Billy Elliot helped introduce Bolan to a new generation by featuring his songs on the soundtrack of that hit movie. But even those who knew him as teenagers see him in a new light. "The thing I didn't appreciate first time round with Marc Bolan, probably because I was so much younger, were his lyrics. Now having done the play I appreciate them much more - they are quite surreal and very mythical as Phyllis says. His lyrics are amazing, he was a poet."

Playing Bolan is Warren Sollars, fresh from appearing in Tim Rice's new musical From Here To Eternity in London's West End and with such shows as Kiss Me Kate, Mamma Mia!, Our House and Fame to his credit. He knows Bolan's music through his parents who used to listen to it when he was growing up. "He has one of those amazing unique qualities that you only get with a few people and as soon as you hear that sound you know instantly who he is," he says.

"What struck me is he sounded like a little boy and also a man at the same time. He just has this weird crazy like space sound. It was like he was someone from outer space.

"What's great is he's a guy who liked to reinvent himself all the time. So when you hear his early records like Deborah with Tyrannosaurus Rex there's that Larry the lamb bleat which is madness. Then he just changed his sound. It was still there but more of that Chelsea drawl almost like sexual tones."

Clearly he's done his research. "What's great is that nowadays you can watch a lot of things on line, a lot of YouTube like the Russell Harty interview and his TV show Marc as well as Top Of The Pops."

He already had some of the music on his iPod. "I was sitting on the train a few months before I got asked to audition and I had 20th Century Boy blaring out when some woman tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'would you turn that down?'. I said it's not garage, it's T Rex - and you can't beat a bit of T Rex.

"I guess when I got the audition I thought I've got to listen to these songs and get it down. I even took a wig to the audition and put a bit of guy liner on."

Rolan went to live in the US with his mother Gloria who was at the wheel of the car when Bolan died and is more of an enigma. "The great thing is that the director Gary Lloyd and a couple of the producers went over and met him. They managed to do a lot of the research for me. He's into music, flits in and out of things. There's a few videos of him," says Bailey.

Jenkins discovered a lot about Bolan's mother Phyllis through Ride The White Swan, "a really great book about Marc", she explains. "It goes back into his childhood and his time at school. The thing about Phyllis is that she was a very strong woman who had the two boys, Harry and Marc. Harry was a very strong guy and although she adored them both Marc was more needy so she absolutely protected him from everything.

"When he was at school he quite alienated but he was quite unusual as a child. Whereas most kids wanted to fit in and be the same, he wanted to be different from an early age and she wanted to protect him from the consequences of that.

"Along with all the reading, I'm a mum and it was a very painful and tragic thing for her. She lost him and then immediately lost her grandson because he was taken to America. So it was a double blow."

The tour takes in Sunderland and York, with Sue looking forward particularly to the Yorkshire date. She and actor-husband David Fleeshman lived in York for two years in the mid-1980s.

"We moved there because on our honeymoon we went to Paris and when I went to York to work at the Theatre Royal it was the closest thing I'd seen to Paris since Paris. So we literally sold up and moved to York," she recalls.

"And we'd still been living there only for the fact that I went into Coronation Street on a long term contract and I was having my first baby - and we needed to cross the Pennines. But I love York so I'm really looking forward to the nostalgia of touring there."

Sunderland Empire, May 19-24. Box Office 0844-871-3022 and atgtickets.com/sunderland; York Grand Opera House, May 26-31. 0844-8713024 and atgtickets.com/york