IT WAS the most visually overloaded era in pop history, so it isn’t surprising that glam rock was the first British pop boom really to exploit the cinema. While A Hard Day’s Night and John Boorman’s underrated Catch Us if You Can were classic Sixties beat pictures, acts as big as The Who and the Kinks went the whole decade without working on something for the big screen.

But in the Seventies they were all in on the act, from Bowie and Bolan to Gary Glitter and Slade. Only the Sweet seemed to miss out. Most of the glam set had been plugging away with no reward throughout the Sixties, so by the time they broke in the early Seventies, the likes of Bolan and Bowie were well versed in both industry machinations and rock history: they had seen Blackboard Jungle, The Girl Can’t Help It and A Hard Day’s Night and pined for their own celluloid moment.

Seventies American pop cinema meant blaxploitation or such heavy items as The Last Waltz. In Britain we got Bolan impersonating Chuck Berry’s duckwalk and Slade’s drummer, Don Powell, crouching in a pigeon loft.

Marc Bolan was the first out of the blocks. Reductivist rock’n’roll combined with mystical lyrics and corkscrew hair made him a bona fide superstar in 1971. It had been remarkably easy. Since the Beatles folded there had been no other teen screamers, and girls’ mags were turning to TV and movies for pin-up material. The three other bestselling acts of 1971 were Elvis, Andy Williams and the Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep hitmakers, Middle of the Road. The elfin Bolan and his band, T Rex, had it all sewn up with Ride a White Swan, Hot Love and Get it On.

Born to Boogie was filmed at a series of T Rex shows at Wembley Empire Pool in 1972, a time when they were responsible for one in eight records sold in Britain. There was no competition, which proved to be a dangerous thing once the glam floodgates opened.

“There were times when he wanted to be a musician,” recalls the producer Tony Visconti, “and times he wanted to be a star. That was his main internal struggle.”

Born to Boogie shows the coke and champagne star trip destroying Bolan’s concise pop mind: extended guitar solos spoil most songs, and the film struggles to make it to 65 minutes. It’s a real shame, as better editing could make the more oddball scenes (a tea party where Catweazle plays host; a jam with Elton John and a giant toothbrush) more fun.

It was directed by Ringo Starr — presumably Bolan got off on a Beatle playing second fiddle to the mighty Rex. The double DVD offers superior live footage and, best of all, crowd scenes of insanely passionate T Rex fans, a good third of whom are male. Massing in a North London car park, screaming for their hero in their glam gladrags and leathers, they look far more removed from the modern world than any kids in pop films of the Fifties or Sixties.

David Bowie, a mate and rival of Bolan’s for some years before either was successful, benefited from the innovator’s errors. Instead of a semi- retired drummer, he employed D. A. Pennebaker, the director of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, to shoot the Ziggy Stardust tour movie. Better yet was Cracked Actor, Alan Yentob’s TV documentary of a painfully thin, very wired Bowie on tour in America in 1974. Yentob lets the fans rant about the world being a spaceship on which Bowie is the captain, while the singer pulls on another cigarette and looks permanently on the point of fainting. It’s unnerving and splendid.

That’ll Be the Day was at the cinemas as Rock On hit the Top 10, establishing David Essex as pop star and movie star simultaneously. His second film, Stardust, shared the grubby postwar Englishness of the first, but otherwise played like Cracked Actor and Born to Boogie distilled and then taken to extremes. Essex plays Jim Maclaine, a fairground johnny in the first film, and in Stardust a rock sensation who ends up committing suicide live on TV. It’s all a little ridiculous, but for Essex, whose real life was then of goldfish-bowl dimensions, it must have been a dangerous role to play. Tellingly, he didn’t make another film for six years.

Never in danger of egomania, and the band least likely to kill themselves as an act of glam insurrection, Wolverhampton’s Slade somehow ended up making the best film of the lot. Slade in Flame is riddled with casual violence, slum clearance and music industry corruption; it is closer in spirit to Get Carter than Magical Mystery Tour. The faded Seventies film stock only aids the bleak atmosphere and graveyard humour. As Slade play the pushed-around band to perfection (“I’m not a bloody fish finger!”), the Black Country backdrop shows Britain lurching towards the Third World, with glam as a last defiant stand.

Perhaps the ultimate glam movie scene has to be from Never Too Young to Rock, a 1975 catch-all film featuring the Rubettes and the Glitter Band. It opens with Mud singing The Cat Crept In in a transport café. There is no irony as Les Gray dances between the sauce bottles on the table. Things really had become this cheap: a little satin, a lot of tat, and brown sauce with everything.

• Born To Boogie is out now on Sanctuary DVD

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