Why Bowie Matters
Will Brooker
A unique, moving and dazzlingly researched exploration of the places, people, musicians, writers and filmmakers that inspired David Jones to become David Bowie, what we can learn from his life’s work and journey, and why he will always matter. When David Bowie died on 10th January 2016, it seemed the whole world was united in mourning. His greatest hits were sung tearfully in pubs up and down Britain, garlands of flowers were left at the Aladdin Sane mural in his old stomping ground of Brixton and tributes poured in from a galaxy of stars. To many of us, Bowie was so much more than a pop idol. But why? In Why Bowie Matters, Professor Will Brooker answers that question persuasively, as both a fan and an academic. A Bowie obsessive since childhood, he hit the headlines over the course of a year-long immersive research project that took him from London to Berlin and New York, following in Bowie’s footsteps, only listening to music and reading books he loved, and even at times adopting his fashion. In this original and illuminating book, Professor Brooker approaches Bowie from various angles, re-tracing his childhood on the streets of Bromley, taking us through his record collection and bookshelves, and deciphering the symbols and codes of his final work, Blackstar to piece together how an ordinary suburban teenager turned himself into a legend, and how perhaps we too could be a little more Bowie. He shows us that while David Robert Jones died on that terrible day in January, David Bowie will live on forever.
WHY BOWIE MATTERS
Will Brooker
Copyright (#ulink_e28b2451-65e8-5635-a12e-bc25e7e1c23b)
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Will Brooker 2019
Cover photograph © Sukita
Will Brooker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008313722
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008313739
Version: 2019-07-22
Epigraph (#ud66ebf7d-cbf1-5b22-9945-33ac2b430dff)
Things really matter to me.
David Bowie, Afraid
CONTENTS
Cover (#u70ed053d-38fa-560b-becb-8a8e106061fe)
Title Page (#uc855a30c-dad6-5e64-9420-7d900648c01d)
Copyright (#u3e495400-8a47-536d-80b2-8a6eed75aab3)
Epigraph
Introduction: David Bowie – A Life Story
1 Becoming (#ud27e4bf7-1f2e-5876-8bb2-7b6debcfb6d7)
2 Connecting (#litres_trial_promo)
3 Changing (#litres_trial_promo)
4 Passing (#litres_trial_promo)
Conclusion: David Bowie – A Legacy (#litres_trial_promo)
Discography (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION: DAVID BOWIE – A LIFE STORY (#ud66ebf7d-cbf1-5b22-9945-33ac2b430dff)
‘Dad lived ten lives in the years he had!’ Duncan Jones’s cheerful tweet on the second anniversary of his father’s death, in January 2018, sums up the popular idea of David Bowie: a man who lived at an accelerated rate and transformed himself with the release of each new LP. In the 1970s alone, he raced from his folk-rock beginnings through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and the blue-eyed soul man of Young Americans, before moving into the introspective Berlin period and finally concluding the decade on the cusp of the mainstream, MTV success that would dominate his 1980s.
It’s a familiar story, retold in every biography. This introduction is not that story. This is the story of how my life intersected with David Bowie; how he informed and inspired me from my first encounter with my mum’s Let’s Dance cassette when I was thirteen. It is not about Bowie’s changes, but about how he changed me – from that chance discovery in 1983 to 2015, when I undertook an academic project to live like him for a year, and attempted to compress his entire extraordinary career into twelve months.
Every Bowie fan has a story of the role he played in their life. Mine is unique, just like everyone else’s. The purpose of this introduction is not to qualify me as an extraordinary super-fan – although my experience was certainly unusual – but as a fan like millions of others; as a fan, no doubt, like you. We all have our own sense of Bowie, and that is the point.
David Robert Jones was born on 8 January 1947 and died on 10 January 2016. David Bowie was born, as a stage name, on 16 September 1965. He never really died. ‘David Bowie’ was a persona created by Jones, but he thrived and survived for four decades not just because David Jones stuck with this name – he’d previously adopted ‘Luther Jay’, ‘Alexis Jay’ and ‘Tom Jones’ – but because his audiences embraced him: because of his fans.
Bowie became a star, a concept, a cultural icon, because of people like you and me, who took him wholeheartedly into their lives. We invested aspects of ourselves in him, and so a part of him continues in us. This book is a celebration of Bowie’s importance, and an exploration of his legacy as a cultural icon. But on another level, it’s also about celebrating our inner Bowie, and letting it change and inspire us. We are ‘all the millions here’ Bowie gazed at in ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ in 1970: we are the galaxy of blackstars that he left behind in 2016. We all have our own stories of how he entered our lives and what he meant to us. This is mine.
I was born the year before Duncan Jones, and so while I knew of David Bowie in the 1970s, he stood for something shocking, scandalous and grown-up. He was like the taste of wine or beer: something I assumed I’d understand and appreciate later. When the video for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ played on Top of the Pops in 1980, I found it unpleasant and a bit scary, with its distorted colours, surreal images and flat, repetitive vocals. The droning chorus reminded me of the graffiti I saw on my walk home from school on the wall of a south London housing estate: ‘Sex is good, sex is funky. Sex is best without a dunky.’ Every week, I wanted the video to end so I could see more of ABBA, Blondie or Adam and the Ants.
But I changed, and Bowie changed. In 1983 I was on holiday with my family, somewhere in the English countryside: seven days of steam train museums, hill walks and horses. I picked up a cassette my mum had brought along: Bowie’s Let’s Dance, his mainstream breakthrough. My mum was thirty-eight at the time, only two years older than Bowie. I was thirteen. I slotted the tape into the red plastic Walkman I’d got for Christmas, and didn’t take it out all week. My mum never got that cassette back. I still have it now. I asked her recently why she’d bought Let’s Dance, as I didn’t remember her being a Bowie fan in the seventies. She was ‘entranced’, she told me: he looked stunningly handsome and desirable, rather than just weird. She even tuned in to Top of the Pops every week, she confessed, to watch the videos. I felt exactly the same way, though we never told each other at the time.
For me in 1983, Bowie’s music was a soundtrack to imaginary films, the music playing during the love scenes and end credits of movies that were never made. It was a glimpse into a sophisticated, adult world – not deliberately shocking, like his singles of the 1970s, but gleaming and stylish, with lyrical cross-references and casually dropped ideas that hinted at the intelligence behind them. March of flowers! he declared on the discordant ‘Ricochet’. March of dimes! These are the prisons! These are the crimes! I listened repeatedly, carefully writing down the words; I felt like I was engaging with something challenging and avant-garde. I analysed them as if they were a poem from English class.
It wasn’t easy to fit in at my school – you needed just the right Farah trousers and Pringle sweaters, the right sports bag, the right haircut and the right couldn’t-care-less attitude. I studied too hard and couldn’t afford all the proper gear, so I was a boffin, a tramp and probably a poof too. Lads at school said David Bowie was gay. I loved looking at his videos. I recorded them from the Max Headroom TV show, rewinding and freeze-framing them. I liked his sharp suits, his sharp teeth and his pained expression, as if he were struggling with something. In the ‘Let’s Dance’ video, backed against the wall of an Australian bar and surrounded by the glares of hard-drinking men, he didn’t look like he fitted in either. Maybe I was gay for feeling that way about David Bowie, but he made me feel it didn’t matter.
It turned out I wasn’t gay, and it turned out Bowie wasn’t either. It didn’t matter. We both got married, to women. Nobody told me the groom wasn’t meant to have his own theme song playing when he walks down the aisle, so I entered to an instrumental version of ‘Modern Love’, wearing a suit I thought Bowie would appreciate. I landed a job as a university lecturer. One winter, towards the end of the last century, I flew to Australia for a conference, via Japan. I took a new Walkman, with only one cassette: a personal Bowie collection I’d compiled for the trip. It was my first time alone on the other side of the world. I listened to nothing but Bowie for a week, discovering new songs as I walked by the Brisbane River under the surprising December sun. On the way back I was stuck at Narita Airport, and was taken by coach to a remote hotel overnight. I knew nobody, and didn’t speak a word of the language. I’d never felt further from home. I listened to one song, on repeat. Now ‘Ashes to Ashes’ made sense to me, in all its alien strangeness and isolation.
I changed, and Bowie changed with me. I feel he was travelling alongside me, on that journey and on many others – or rather, that my own version of Bowie was my companion, because this ‘Bowie’ was a person I had helped to create, through our experiences together since 1983. You had your own version of him, no doubt – similar but different – who played a part in your life, and was shaped by the moments you shared.
Bowie and I both grew older. I was promoted to professor. Bowie seemed to enter semi-retirement, then returned ten years later with a comeback album in 2013. And that October, Lou Reed died. He was Bowie’s old friend, of course, since the sixties – Bowie was one of the first British fans of the Velvet Underground – and I’d loved Lou’s music since the eighties. But more importantly, I knew Lou Reed was only five years older than Bowie, and the refrain from the old song now sounded like a warning. Five years, that’s all we’ve got. My rock idols were dying, already. I’d always assumed Bowie would go on for ever, and suddenly I came to terms with his mortality. He was in his mid-sixties now. I wanted to do something to thank him, to celebrate him, to pay tribute to him, while he was still alive.
Like every kid, I used to draw, and sing and dance. At nursery and infant school, we’re encouraged to dress up, to perform and paint. We all do it, without shame and without a sense of being good or bad. And like most of us, I started to give those things up from adolescence onwards. It was hard enough as a teenager, trying to fit in, without having artistic hobbies too; and school also encouraged my generation to progressively narrow down, to focus only on what we were best at. Eight O-levels – my year was the first to introduce GCSEs – and three A-levels, then one subject at university, with a possible minor. (I rebelled in a small way by choosing a degree that was half English, half film: I even included an analysis of a Bowie video in a third-year essay.) By the time I was eighteen, I’d accepted that my drawing and singing were average at best, and that I was good at research and writing. So that’s what I did as a career. I became an academic. And in 2013 I decided to study Bowie as an academic project. I began my research in May 2015.
I started by drawing up lists, from biographies and online sources, of all the books Bowie had read; then all the songs he’d listened to, and all the films he’d enjoyed. By immersing myself in his creative input – the art and culture that had influenced him – I hoped to gain a new understanding of his work. In Australia and Japan I’d listened to nothing but Bowie for a week. Now I was committing myself to his music for a year. I structured twelve months of my life around the various phases of his career, from the late 1960s to the present day, and devoted myself to one album at a time. As a sign of that commitment, I had my hair cut and coloured in the Man Who Fell to Earth style from the mid-1970s. I wanted to be reminded of my project every time I saw my own reflection. I wanted to connect with him, to merge with him in some way; to become an in-between Brooker-Bowie hybrid. As Bowie knew, ‘Die Brücke’ is both the name of an art movement, and the German for ‘bridge’. It’s also, of course, a near-rhyme for my own name. It seemed to fit. I was trying to build a bridge between us.
Immersing myself in his influences wasn’t enough. I grew up about six miles from David Jones, and I spent the summer of 2015 exploring his childhood and teenage territories, walking his old streets and discreetly checking out the houses where he’d lived with his family. I trained in filmmaking and photography in my twenties – again, something I gave up as a career – so I’d mixed with hair and make-up artists, but never had the experience of being on the other side of the camera, under the lights. I decided I needed to try it. I had photos taken of me, styled as Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. I posted them online. Times Higher Education magazine got in touch to find out what I was doing – a professor spending the summer break dressed as Bowie was enough for a news feature – and published a short article. Then other magazines got in touch, and newspapers, and radio, and then TV shows. I had progressed to the Thin White Duke phase – I’d commissioned a tailor for an authentically 1970s white shirt with a tall, wide collar – by the time This Morning asked me on for an interview with Eamonn Holmes. The next day, I got up early for a slot on Sky’s news show, then took a taxi to a studio at midnight for a live broadcast in Australia. ‘What are you doing next?’ the reporters asked me. ‘I’m going to Berlin,’ I told them. And so I had to go to Berlin.
I was contacted by media and literary agents. I was invited to the Bowie exhibition as it toured to Melbourne, in Australia, and then to Groningen, in the Netherlands. I was interviewed in languages I didn’t understand, and heard my words translated and voiced by an actor for news broadcasts around the world: I appeared in Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese newspapers. I’d become, in a small way, an international figure, borrowing something from Bowie’s celebrity. I was performing different versions of myself, my personality splitting into public and private. I understood something of what Bowie must have experienced when he first became famous.
And then, in January 2016, Bowie died. I was in New York City that winter, wearing a replica I’d had made of his Alexander McQueen ‘Earthling’ coat; I’d had my hair clipped and spiked, and had grown a goatee beard, as he did for his fiftieth birthday. I was reliving Bowie’s 1997 as I walked down another of his home streets – Lafayette, in Lower Manhattan – on a tour of his favourite bookstores and coffee shops. He was six storeys above me at the time, in his luxury apartment. He had a fortnight to live.
On 9 January I was back in Berlin, shooting footage for a video diary of my experiences. I’d been drawn into photography and film again; I’d also dug out my old cine camera and was using Super-8 for the first time since my teens. I flew home late that night. In the morning, the news felt like a bad dream. I did one interview, then refused the rest. I felt too shocked and sad, and had nothing much to say. That evening, I accepted an invitation from Radio 4, with director Julien Temple. We had a drink after the discussion, in a pub near the BBC with a dripping ceiling. He told me how Bowie had reacted to his half-brother’s death in 1985. (I never met the real Bowie – only my own internal Bowie – but that year, I met a lot of people who’d known him personally.)
I experienced what felt like genuine grief, as if a family member had died. Many fans felt the same: maybe you did, too. I stayed indoors, and retreated inside myself. I’d been working with a tribute band, the Thin White Duke, taking the place of their lead singer, but it was months before I performed with them again – not until May, towards the end of my research year, and by that point it felt like time for a celebration rather than mourning. The gig was packed with long-term fans in their fifties, mixed with younger people of undergraduate age. When we sang ‘Starman’ as an encore, everyone joined in. I still have the footage, panning over the crowd of faces as they chant the final chorus. It’s a picture of pure, shared joy. We were all thanking our own version of Bowie, and it felt like he was there with us.
As I approached May 2016, and the end of my project, I saw a counsellor for six sessions. I felt I needed a bridge of my own: a way to transition out of this intense research and back into everyday life. We started by talking about Bowie, and progressed to my own family, my personal history and what I’d inherited from previous generations, like my granddad in the Navy, who never talked about what he’d seen in conflict. Bowie, born just after the war, and growing up around Brixton bombsites, was about expression, creativity and release, an antidote to English repression. He was about the bravery not to care if you fitted in with the norm, about the boldness to push past your own limits. He wasn’t the best singer – Freddie Mercury soars above him on ‘Under Pressure’ – and he certainly wasn’t the best dancer. He tended to play himself, as an actor, and he was only ever an amateur painter. But he did it anyway. And, because I had to, because I’d committed to my research project, I did things I wasn’t the best at, too.
As well as taking up film and photography again, using various formats from digital to 1960s vintage kit, I experimented with painting, because Bowie did it during his Berlin period. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I wasn’t very good at first, but I got better. I started going to portrait classes every week, and continued to improve. I began singing lessons, too, and while I’ll never be the best, after four years of vocal training I’m not so bad. I have folders on my computer now titled ‘painting’ and ‘singing’, where I save my own work and track its progress. I have Bowie to thank for that. I didn’t become Bowie – nobody can – but by aspiring to be more like him, I became a better, brighter, bolder version of myself.
I am a Bowie fan, but I am also a professor, and those two sides of me are bridged rather than separate. I’ve published scholarly articles and an academic book about Bowie, which were informed by both critical theory and my decades of fandom; and I became more deeply invested in Bowie through my writing and research, as I learned more about him and studied his work more closely. I even taught a class on Bowie and stardom, enjoying the way twenty-one-year-old students, who were born around Bowie’s fiftieth birthday and the Earthling album, both appreciated and criticised his star persona.
Those twin approaches – fan and academic – come together in this book. For me, critical theory and philosophy are only useful if they serve us as tools; if they offer us a new understanding and a valuable perspective. So the use of theorists like Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in this book is not to try to elevate Bowie’s popular work to some loftier academic plane – to show that he is worthy of serious analysis and that his name can be mentioned with theirs. That, to me, goes without saying. Their theories are here as tools to give us a different angle and context for Bowie’s creative expressions, identity transitions and cultural references. They can offer us a new way of seeing, which is surely what Bowie was all about.
If you love David Bowie, you already know why he matters. You have your own reasons, bound up with moments from your own life when his songs intersected with your experiences and provided the perfect soundtrack. But this book will suggest different reasons, approaching from new directions and new angles: new ways of connecting the dots and mapping a path through the mosaic of his life.
1 (#ulink_b25a6cee-1bd1-5814-9773-9205bbb15380)
BECOMING (#ulink_b25a6cee-1bd1-5814-9773-9205bbb15380)
On 25 March 2018, a statue of Bowie – or rather, of several Bowies, because it morphed multiple incarnations into a bronze chimera – was unveiled in the market square of Aylesbury. Its title is Earthly Messenger. The aesthetic was criticised, but the name passed without comment, because it perfectly fits the new persona that has evolved posthumously around David Bowie: the idea of an otherworldly being who descended to our planet in January 1947 and departed it in January 2016.
‘Ziggy is Stardust now’, was the caption on one memorial cartoon, showing Aladdin Sane’s face as a new constellation: and indeed, the ‘Stardust for Bowie’ campaign named a lightning-bolt pattern of stars in the vicinity of Mars after him. Others evoked Major Tom: an astronaut stepping through the Pearly Gates, or a weeping Ground Control sending unanswered messages to the lost spaceman. One artist drew Bowie in delicate watercolours, in the style of the Little Prince: Ziggy standing on his own tiny planet in space, titled The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Time, in turn, published a commemorative edition called ‘His Time on Earth’. Blogs, articles and tweets repeated the phrase ‘Goodbye, Starman’, elaborating on the theme with each anniversary: ‘A year ago, the Starman David Bowie said goodbye to our planet to start his “Space Oddity”,’ an online fan noted in January 2017, while Vice marked ‘a year since David Bowie ascended’. ‘It’s been two years since David Bowie left us for his home planet, and we haven’t been the same since,’ suggested the Consequences of Sound site in January 2018, under the headline ‘Remembering the Man Who Fell to Earth, Two Years After Bowie Returned to the Stars’.
Of course, Bowie provided the raw material for this final media incarnation, which joins the dots of various songs and characters – Starman, Lady Stardust, Blackstar, Major Tom, the Man Who Fell to Earth and, more fundamentally, the idea of Ziggy as messiah – into the picture of an uncanny visitor from outer space, an ‘Earthly Messenger’, whether alien or angel. Fans can hardly be blamed for extending Bowie’s career-long fascination with outer space into a comforting image – somewhere between religion and science fiction – of him not dead, but departed to another world; he even advised them on his final album to ‘look up here, I’m in heaven’. But even at the time, this idea felt to me like a misreading, understandable as a coping mechanism but disrespectful to his mourning family – Duncan Jones, I guessed, did not think of his father as an extraterrestrial who’d returned to his home planet – and misrepresentative of the Bowie I felt I knew.
My own sense of Bowie was not of an uncanny creature who had descended, fully-formed, to treat us to his art before leaving us again. I saw ‘Bowie’ as a persona originally conceived by the young David Jones, who struggled for success and worked hard to maintain and develop it. Part of the point of Bowie, to me, is that Jones was, contrary to the popular myth, an ambitious, frustrated and creative young man from an ordinary environment, who created something extraordinary through sustained effort, dedication and drive in the face of repeated failure. To see him as a creature who effortlessly came and went from the stars diminishes that other side of the story: to my mind, this more complex version is the truer story, though, as we’ll see, the truth of Bowie is elusive.
The Aylesbury statue points to another, contradictory way of seeing Bowie that emerged after his death. He was supposedly from elsewhere, but he was also from, or associated with, specific places on earth, and those places wanted to claim him for tourism. Aylesbury’s boast was that the Ziggy Stardust album had debuted there – though Ziggy himself first performed at the Toby Jug in Tolworth, down the road from me – and argued that its Market Square, the site of the statue, inspired the first line of ‘Five Years’. South-east London maintained that Bowie was ‘Our Brixton Boy’ – the slogan appeared on the Ritzy Cinema just after his death – and has its own mural, now repainted and protected with a plastic cover, around the corner from his childhood home on Stansfield Road.
Strictly speaking, yes, he was a Brixton boy; he was born on that street, at number 40. But his family moved when he was barely six, and he lived in Bromley from January 1953 onwards, including a full ten years in the same house on Plaistow Grove. Brixton in south London sounds better as an origin than Bromley in Kent, as Bowie surely realised when he dropped tall tales about getting into local ‘street brawls’ that made him ‘very butch’ and growing up in an ‘’ouseful of blacks’. Brixton, in the early 1950s, was a borderline between the past and the future, where bombsites and ration books were reminders of the recent war, but where the sights and tastes of a more multicultural, modern London had begun to creep in. One neighbour recalls technicolour clothing, Caribbean vegetables, even jugglers and sword-swallowers at the local market, while Bowie describes the streets around Stansfield Road as ‘like Harlem’. Bromley, on the other hand, apart from its associations with H. G. Wells, is known primarily for bland suburbia: biographer Christopher Sandford mentions it as a ‘drab, featureless dormitory town’, and Bowie referred scathingly, in a 1993 interview, to its regularity, its conformity and its ‘meanness’. For much of his life, he preferred to write it out of his official history.
But think about your own childhood: where you were born, and where you actually grew up. I was born in Coventry and spent my earliest years there in a council flat, but by the time I turned three my parents had moved to the first of many short-term lets in south-east London. I only half remember those from photographs, unsure if my memory is of the image or the real place; and I don’t recall Coventry at all. Certainly, I was born there, but the streets I’m from – the streets that really formed me – are the ones around Kinveachy Gardens in Charlton from ages three to eleven, and then Woodhill, down the hill in neighbouring Woolwich, as a teenager.
Did his first six years in Brixton shape David Jones? To some extent, no doubt. ‘I left Brixton when I was still quite young, but that was enough to be very affected by it,’ he later claimed. ‘It left strong images in my mind.’ He apparently returned to Stansfield Road in 1991, asking the tour bus to stop outside his old house, and came back for a final pilgrimage with his daughter in 2014. But Brixton’s influence must surely pale compared to the formative decade, from ages seven to seventeen, that David Jones spent at 4 Plaistow Grove, next to Sundridge Park Station, in Bromley. There is, as yet, no statue, plaque, or mural there – just occasional flowers outside someone else’s residential house – though he recalled it in 1993’s ‘Buddha of Suburbia’, with one of those lyrics that seems a gift to biographers: ‘Living in lies by the railway line, pushing the hair from my eyes. Elvis is English and climbs the hills … can’t tell the bullshit from the lies.’ ‘I knew him as Bromley Dave,’ Bowie’s childhood friend Paul Reeves confirmed, years later. ‘As that is where we were both from.’
When I attempted to immerse myself in Bowie’s life and career, between 2015 and 2016, I followed the path he’d traced around the world, from New York to Berlin to Switzerland to New York again. I also spent time at his old haunts in London, reading his recollections of the La Gioconda coffee shop at 9 Denmark Street while sitting in the same spot, currently a Flat Iron steak restaurant. But while I’d visited his home streets in Bromley – Canon Road, Clarence Road and Plaistow Grove – I’d only paid passing attention to the area. With hindsight, there was an unconscious reason behind the omission.
My old manor, around Kinveachy Gardens and Woodhill, is about six miles from Bowie’s house in Bromley; close enough that we both knew each other’s territory, growing up. He travelled to Woolwich at least once, to see Little Richard at the Granada. My experience and his also overlapped in Blackheath and Lewisham, equidistant between our childhood homes: we both visited friends in the posh big houses of Blackheath and travelled to Lewisham for its superior shops. There are key differences, of course, and I’m flattering myself by imagining a connection between us. When Bowie caught the bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts, he jumped off it two stops later with ‘Life on Mars?’ already in his head. In significant ways, then, my experience in Woolwich was not like David Bowie’s in Bromley: but there are interesting cultural continuities, despite our difference in age. Our town centres had a lot in common, for instance: a Littlewoods with its school uniforms and jam doughnuts; the knives, forks and tomato-shaped ketchup dispensers in Wimpy’s very English hamburger restaurants; ornate, art deco Odeon cinemas on the edge of town. Because Bromley already seemed familiar to me from my own childhood, I didn’t delve as deeply in, or investigate it, in such detail. So in May 2018, I reopened the investigation. I went to live in Bromley, to revisit Bowie’s time there. I ate there, drank there, slept there and shopped there, walking his old routes.
To me, research – and critical thinking in general – is not so much about finding information as it is about making connections: drawing lines, linking points and sometimes making unexpected leaps across time and space. If you plotted them visually, the paths of my research process would form a network, a matrix: a conceptual map, expanding and developing and becoming increasingly more complex.
I started with a map: with two maps. The Goad Plan, a gigantic, hand-drawn map of Bromley in the 1960s, spread across a table in the library’s Historic Collections room, and a far smaller, digital version alongside it on my phone – 2018’s Google Maps app – which I scrolled across for comparison. The same place, separated in time.
There is little sign now of the smaller boutiques and quirky, independent shops that would have been part of David Jones’s cultural landscape – the Tip Top Bakery, Sherry’s Fabrics, Terry’s Stores, Dolly’s Trolley – though there is a Tips and Toes nail salon, and Buddy’s Café. Some of Bromley’s newer shops and venues offer an ersatz simulation of the past. Mr Simm’s Olde Sweet Shop is a franchise dating back to 2004, and Greater than Gatsby, a bar promising 1920s style, warns its punters: ‘Guys, no hats or hoodies, come on, you’re not 12.’
Medhurst’s Department Store, where Bowie bought his American vinyl and listened to records in the basement sound booths, is now a Primark. Wimpy’s, where he ate burgers with his school-friend Geoff MacCormack, indulging his tastes for America, is the Diner’s Inn Café. The nearby Lyons’ Corner House, where teenagers could gather over coffee, has also vanished – it’s now a Mothercare – though there’s still a music store, Reid’s, with saxophones in the window.
I sat at the Stonehenge Café, opposite Primark, and watched the Market Square and High Street with a double vision. It wasn’t hard to imagine a teenage David walking through the doors – past where the Aladdin Sane T-shirts are now hanging – to meet his girlfriend Jane Green, who worked on the record counter, for a covert smooch to Eddie Cochran and Ray Charles. ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’, says one of Bowie’s 1960s singles. I couldn’t help thinking about him. One of his last songs – released posthumously, on 8 January 2017 – was called ‘No Plan’. His final tracks in particular feel like a puzzle he left behind, a message for his followers. What was his plan, during the 1960s? Did he have any sense of his end goal? Was he working his way towards fame, or just enjoying the scene, the lifestyle, the groups and the girls, like so many other teenage boys who loved records and made their own music?
Pulling the digital map back from the High Street to a wider view, we can begin to plot Bowie’s Bromley on a broader scale. Most of the key landmarks in his early life are all within walking distance of each other; I proved it to myself by walking between them, putting the legwork into my research. Only Bowie’s secondary school, Bromley Tech, was out of easy reach; he used to take the number 410 bus. It’s now Ravens Wood School, and I visited it for the final chapter of this book.
Plaistow Grove is less than a mile north of the town centre. I took a right at the Hop and Rye pub, then walked down College Lane, passing St Mary’s Church, where a seven-year-old Bowie sang in the choir with his friends George Underwood and Geoff MacCormack. Nearby is a chip shop that dates back to 1920: I wondered if the lads got a takeaway there, as I did. Their Cub Scout pack, the 18th Bromley, is still based at the church, and meets every Friday. Past Plaistow Green, a well-tended grassy square, it’s another fifteen minutes down quiet, safe streets to David’s former primary school, Burnt Ash.
The Bromel Club, in the Bromley Court Hotel, is another mile from Plaistow Grove, along London Lane. Bowie played there with the Lower Third in 1966, aged nineteen: it was a prestigious gig, in a venue that also hosted the Yardbirds, the Kinks and Jimi Hendrix. The exterior has barely changed, but the Jazz Club became a ballroom, which became the Garden Restaurant, a gorgeous space of curved archways and elegant pillars. There are photos of Bowie with a mod haircut on display in the hotel reception, with a mounted single of his early songs with the Lower Third and The Manish Boys.
Sitting in the restaurant, I studied a different kind of matrix: a list of names and numbers, from an old reference book called Kelly’s Directory. It told me exactly who had lived on Bowie’s street and in the surrounding area in specific years. Even the abbreviations carried an air of quaint, pre-war convention. Every George was shortened to Geo., every William was a Wm. There were Herberts, Cuthberts, Cyrils and Arthurs; the Misses Austin, Miss Osborn and Miss Gibbs. I spoke to residents who’d lived on Plaistow Grove at the same time as Bowie. Some of them remembered him, or had stories about him passed down from previous generations. One told me that her nan saw David with his mother regularly at Mr Bull’s greengrocer shop. ‘She always tied coloured ribbons in his hair as a toddler because she wanted a girl. No wonder he turned out weird!’ Bromley’s older locals confirmed the shops around the corner from the Jones family, all the owners known politely by their surname. Mr and Mrs Bull had a dog called Curry. The Kiosk, selling sweets at Sundridge Park Station, was run by Miss Violet Hood; then there was Coates electrical engineers, Arthur Ash boot repair, Bailey’s the newsagent, a butcher’s shop run by two brothers, and a hair salon variously known at different times as Beryl’s or Paul’s.
Plaistow Lane, the main road, slopes slightly uphill before the turn on to Bowie’s home street. A painted sign brands the area as Sundridge Village. On a sunny evening in spring, it looks like a great place to grow up. David Jones’s neighbours did not change at all between 1955, when he was eight, and 1967, when he turned twenty. There was Miss Florence West, to the left at number 2, and to the right, Mr Harry Hall; Mr George Rowe lived at number 8, and Mr and Mrs Pollard at number 10. None of them moved in or out during those twelve years. On that specific, local level, Bowie’s life on Plaistow Grove seems consistent to the point of being comatose.
Walking down the short, quiet street from the main road to his house – morning, Miss West, good morning, Mr Hall – you can easily imagine an ambitious, imaginative and creative teenager becoming bored. From his back bedroom he could hear the trains from Sundridge Park on their way to London, and the music and boozy crowds from the pub, the Crown Hotel, at the end of his garden. I talked to a resident who’d occupied the same room, after the Jones family left. She explained that you couldn’t hear the trains anymore, now that the windows were double-glazed. Times change. The Crown is now Cinnamon Culture, an upmarket Indian. I sat in the beer garden. You can see what would have been his bedroom window, from the back, and imagine him again, looking out at the lights, the trains, the adults in couples and groups; listening to the music from the pub as it mixed with his American radio broadcasts, and longing for escape.
Of course, it’s only imagination. We can establish certain facts, but then we choose how to fill in the gaps. Without Bowie’s long-promised but never-written autobiography, we can only rely on available documentary evidence like maps and directories, and the recollections of his friends, family members and acquaintances, decades later. But judging by the jokes, provocations and outright lies that constitute many of Bowie’s interviews, can we really assume that even his own memoirs would be any more reliable?
Every biography of Bowie, even the most authoritative, is a constellation created by joining together a scatter of stars into a convincing picture. It is a particular route, plotted across the points of a map, which leaves some paths untravelled. It is a selection of ideas and evidence from the Bowie matrix – the vast network of what we know about this public figure and private man – which emphasises some details, and discards others. That’s the nature of research and writing: not just the discovery of information but the way we join it up; what we omit, as well as what we include. A history of Bowie – like any other history – is a story, based around selection, interpretation, speculation and deletion. It has to be, because if biographers simply absorbed and channelled all the available information about Bowie’s life, it would overwhelm any sense of conventional narrative and character: put simply, it wouldn’t even make sense.
In 1967, for instance, Bowie told a New Musical Express journalist that he’d moved with his family not to Bromley, but to Yorkshire when he was eight. He claimed to have lived with an uncle in an ancient farmhouse, ‘surrounded by open fields and sheep and cattle’, complete with a seventeenth-century monk’s hole where Catholic priests had hidden from Protestant persecution. The NME journalist commented helpfully that it was ‘a romantic place for a child to grow’. There’s a seed of truth in what sounds a purely fanciful story: Kevin Cann’s Any Day Now: The London Years, built around well-documented details, suggests that David did visit his Uncle Jimmy in Yorkshire for holidays in 1952 and fabricated these trips into an extended stay at a later age. Yet even this contradicts Bowie’s simultaneous assertion that he lived in Brixton until the age of ten or eleven and walked to school past the gates of its prison. Authors Peter and Leni Gillman dug into educational archives to confirm that David Jones transferred into Burnt Ash Juniors, Bromley, on 20 June 1955. The school is seven miles from Brixton Prison, which makes it very unlikely that a ten-year-old took that detour. Historical records and maps, with their prosaic evidence, are duller than Bowie’s stories about his past, but more reliable.
Can we trust the memories of the people who grew up with him? Dana Gillespie, one of Bowie’s first girlfriends, memorably describes a trip to his parents’ ‘tiny little working-class house … the smallest I’d ever been in’. She thinks they had ‘little tuna sandwiches … it was a really cold house, a very chilly atmosphere.’ There was a television ‘blasting away in the corner, and nobody spoke’. She repeated the anecdote for Francis Whately’s 2019 documentary, David Bowie: Finding Fame, adding a postscript: ‘It was hard going. It was soulless.’
David Jones’s mother Margaret, known as Peggy, is similarly described by his former school-friends as cold and unaffectionate: ‘I don’t think it was a family,’ remembered Dudley Chapman. ‘It was a lot of people who happened to be living under the same roof.’ George Underwood agrees: ‘Even David didn’t like his mum. She wasn’t an easy person to get on with.’ Geoff MacCormack remembers telling Bowie that Peggy ‘never quite took to me’, receiving the rueful confession in response that ‘she never quite took to me, either.’ Peter Frampton suggests that David had a better relationship with his teacher, Owen Frampton – Peter’s dad – than he did with his own father, Hayward Stenton (known as ‘John’) Jones. ‘I’m not privy to the relationship … but I don’t think it was that great.’
George Underwood, by contrast, recalls John Jones as ‘lovely, a really nice gentle man’, while Bowie’s cousin, Kristina Amadeus, points out that David’s dad, who ‘absolutely doted on him’, bought him a plastic saxophone, a tin guitar and a xylophone before he was an adolescent, and that ‘he also owned a record player when few children had one … David’s father took him to meet singers and other performers preparing for the Royal Variety Performance.’ The Jones’s house may have seemed tiny to Dana Gillespie, but to Kristina, it was ‘lower middle class … his father was from a very affluent family.’ Uncle John, she tells the Gillmans, ‘really wanted him to be a star’. Note that despite these many documented friendships and relationships with cousins close to his age, Bowie reports of his childhood that ‘I was lonely,’ and also recalled: ‘I was a kid that loved being in my room reading books and entertaining ideas. I lived a lot in my imagination. It was a real effort to become a social animal.’
Despite the supposed coldness of the Jones family home, Bowie reminisced in the late 1990s about roast dinners on wintry Sundays, with a small fire blazing, and his mother’s voice soaring to match the songs on the radio. ‘Oh, I love this one,’ she’d remark, joining in with ‘O For the Wings of a Dove’, before haranguing John Jones for thwarting her musical ambitions. David Buckley’s biography describes her as a ‘drama queen’ with a frustrated dream of ‘being a singer, being a star’, while John was ‘naturally nonconfrontational’. Frigid, unaffectionate, not really a family; or a warm, even heated environment, with a drama-queen mother and a softly-spoken dad who used his industry connections, his experience as head of Dr Barnardo’s publicity department, and his comfortably middle-class salary to support his son’s ambitions?
Bowie’s former manager Kenneth Pitt, meanwhile, gives an impression of 4 Plaistow Grove that contrasts with Dana Gillespie’s chilly image; and his version of Peggy is also far more doting. ‘It was a very conventional suburban home, a tiny terraced house, very comfortable and very homely … and there I’d sit in the front room, talking about David, and his mother would tell me, “You know, he was always the prettiest boy in the street, the sort of boy that all the neighbours loved.”’
Biographer Christopher Sandford adds to the complexity of this family portrait. David’s father was ‘irrepressibly proud of his son’ but also ‘dour, taciturn and tight-fisted – a cold man, an unresponsive man’ who had a stream of affairs and was ‘very prejudiced … very’. Peggy, by contrast, was ‘loud, fractious and given to bewildering mood swings’, yet also ‘inhibiting and aloof’. Sandford finds quotes from Bowie to support this perspective: his father ‘had a lot of love in him, but he couldn’t express it. I can’t remember him ever touching me’, while a compliment from his mother ‘was very hard to come by. I would get my paints out and all she could say was, “I hope you’re not going to make a mess.”’
Peggy herself told an origin myth of Bowie. When he was three, she explained to a journalist in 1985, he’d taken an ‘unnatural’ interest in the contents of her make-up bag. ‘When I found him, he looked for all the world like a clown. I told him that he shouldn’t use make-up, but he said, “You do, Mummy.”’ It’s a neat story, and it echoes her son’s memory of being scolded for playing with paints, as well as his later glam, drag and Pierrot personae. But with hindsight, knowing what David Jones became, it’s understandable if those who knew him, even his mother, tend to tell stories that fit the finished picture, and if biographers, in turn, choose those as the building-blocks of their books. Our sense of David Jones’s childhood is a mixture of non-fiction, invention and half-truth, shaped retroactively by everyone’s awareness of what happened next. The adult Bowie – sometimes literally – rewrites the past of young Jones, and those who knew him tend to follow suit.
Underwood, for instance, remembers that David boasted precociously to the school careers adviser, ‘I want to be a saxophonist in a modern jazz quartet.’ Owen Frampton recalls the Bowie of Bromley Tech as ‘quite unpredictable … already a cult figure’. Dana Gillespie claims Bowie told her, at age fourteen, ‘I want to get out of here. I have to get out of here. I want to go up in the world.’ A neighbour tells Sandford that Bowie used to stand in the glow of the Crown pub’s coaching-lantern, ‘anticipating his pose as Ziggy Stardust’. Another relative recalls that he stood up in front of the TV, aged nine, and announced, ‘I can play guitar just like the Shads … and he did’ – even though the Shadows didn’t appear in public until David was eleven. The local anecdote about Peggy taking her infant son to the shops with ribbons in his hair – ‘No wonder he turned out weird!’ – falls into the same pattern. Even the midwife who delivered baby David in 1947 supposedly pronounced, eerily prefiguring the image of Bowie as angel messiah, that ‘this child has been on earth before’. His music teacher, Mrs Baldry, is unusual in her careful refusal to fuel the Bowie myth. ‘He was no spectacular singer. You’d never have picked him out and said, “That boy sings wonderfully.”’ Bowie’s own revisions of his past, of course, don’t help. ‘I’ve always been camp since I was seven,’ he claimed. ‘I was outrageous then.’ His tendency to retcon his own origins – to suggest that the seeds of his later strangeness and stardom were already rooted in childhood – is particularly evident in his 1970s interviews, when he was keenly forging his media brand.
‘Can’t tell the bullshit from the lies.’ As ever, Bowie’s lyric was knowing. The truth, inevitably, lies in an amalgam of all these testimonies – the interviews, the reminiscences, the dry documents – with the likeliest possibilities emerging in the overlaps between stories, or in a combination of apparently contradictory reports. A house can be tiny, poky and cold to one visitor; tiny, cosy and warm to another. A man can find it difficult to express physical affection towards his son, but show his love by buying him instruments and introducing him to celebrities. A mother can praise her boy as the prettiest in the street, but still feel wary of him playing with her make-up. A woman can sing without shame to the radio over a family Sunday dinner, and still seem aloof or uncomfortable in front of a fourteen-year-old girlfriend. A teenager can have many friends and still feel lonely.
The information we have about Bowie in Bromley (and in London, and Berlin, and New York) is a complex mosaic: Dylan Jones’s David Bowie: A Life, a collection of short interviews from which some of the quotations above are taken, is a perfect example of a book’s form echoing its subject. Bowie is, essentially, a kaleidoscope of multicoloured fragments, constantly shifting. We can identify patterns from the shapes, but someone else can look again from a different angle, and twist a little, and see something new. Our knowledge of him is a complex network, where two conflicting ideas can both have been true at once. ‘Some writers have struggled to put all this in a logical sequence,’ he told journalist George Tremlett in the late 1960s. ‘I wouldn’t bother if I were you.’
Why does this matter? It matters to remember that David Bowie did not descend to earth in 1947 but spent the longest stretch of his younger years in that tiny home on Plaistow Grove and in the streets surrounding it. He wasn’t hanging out with glam rockers and groupies, but with Peggy and John Jones, with George and Geoff and Peter, and sometimes Kristina, and sometimes his half-brother Terry Burns. Ten years before Ziggy, he was the fourteen-year-old in his school photo, with a winning, wonky grin, a neat haircut and two perfectly normal eyes.
He was, in many ways, like the hundreds of other boys at Burnt Ash and Bromley Tech. He was also far from the only local lad to form a band as a teenager: his first group, The Konrads, was already well-established, with George Underwood as the vocalist, by the time David was allowed to join in June 1962. David Jones had talent and ambition, but so did a lot of young men in his social circle. Somehow, he made himself exceptional. Somehow, he emerged from this environment and created an act – a work of art – that the world had never seen before. The story matters because anyone could have done it, but only Bowie did: and the fact that a boy who grew up in Bromley could forge the persona of a world-conquering glam rock messiah is surely more inspiring to the rest of us than the idea that Bowie simply arrived from space, fully-formed.
So how did he do it? This is my own interpretation: my way of connecting points in the Bowie matrix to create a story.
The suburbs played a part. Novelist Jonathan Coe has written of his upbringing on the outskirts of Birmingham that ‘it gave me the imaginative space to dream of different worlds; wider, more exciting, not necessarily better. It was the very uneventfulness of the suburbs that turned so many of us into creators.’ Rupa Huq, in Making Sense ofSuburbia Through Popular Culture, identifies locations like Bromley as a nowhere-land, neither ‘city’ nor ‘country’. ‘There is a case to be made,’ she goes on, ‘for the very fact that suburbs are seen as unremarkable and conformist allowing artistic endeavour to flourish there.’ David Buckley agrees that ‘the geography of the situation is crucial: living in the suburbs so close to London provided the perfect paradigm for escape. London represented exotica, freedom and change for youngsters driven to near-desperation by the blandness of the capital’s environs. And it was close by – a mere half an hour away by train.’ No wonder Bowie’s back bedroom, where he listened to the radio within earshot of the railway line, looking out at the carriage lamp of a busy pub, is such a potent image in his origin myth. Academics like the word ‘liminal’ for these spaces that lie in between, neither one thing nor the other; ‘liminal’ comes from the Latin for ‘threshold’. David was outside, waiting and wanting to cross over.
‘You find yourself in the middle of two worlds,’ he reflected. ‘There’s the extreme values of people who grow up in the countryside, and the very urban feel of the city. In suburbia, you’re given the impression that nothing, culturally, belongs to you. That you are, sort of, in this wasteland.’ He dreamed not just of London but also beyond it, through the jazz records and Beat poetry Terry Burns brought back from Soho, to America. Young David, born exactly twelve years after Elvis, was already fired up on ‘Hound Dog’ and Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’, and listened to the American Armed Forces Radio; by age thirteen he’d written to the US Navy via the embassy in London, and been invited to spend the day with them learning about American football. ‘Then, much to his amazement,’ the Bromley and Kentish Times reported in November 1960, ‘David was presented with a helmet, set of shoulder pads and a football, all of which had been donated by a local Air Force base.’ The news story features a photo of him in full football gear, and the headline ‘David Leads Sport Revolution’.
We get a sense of the initiative, the ambition, the almost naïve confidence – if you don’t ask, you don’t get – that we associate with the later David Bowie, who drawled like a gangster in ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate’, from 1974: ‘if you want it, boys, get it here.’ But behind this remarkably enterprising teenager, a man stands in the wings: a secondary supporting character, reminding us that David’s supposedly dull suburban life had other dimensions.
‘It all started,’ the local paper explains, ‘when David’s father, Mr Haywood Jones, purchased a short-wave radio with evenings of musical relaxation in mind for the family.’ John Jones is also there in the background of his son’s news stunt: ‘His father, who comes from a family of avid rugby enthusiasts, stood by scratching his head, perplexed.’ He takes the role of the boring suburbanite – ‘it is a safe bet that the people of Bromley may soon be scratching their heads, too’ – but it was John who escorted David (with George Underwood, who appears in some of the photos) up to Grosvenor Square for the day, and who bought the radio set in the first place. Jones Senior had already provided the house with a TV, in time for the coronation in 1953, and a stack of new American 45s, including David’s beloved ‘Tutti Frutti’, in 1956. Bowie later enthused that when he first played Little Richard, ‘My heart nearly burst with excitement. I’d never heard anything even resembling this. It filled the room with energy and colour and outrageous defiance. I had heard God. Now I wanted to see him.’ If this is another convincing origin story for Bowie’s stardom, his dad was behind it, quietly enabling his son’s transformative experience.
David may have dreamed of escape from Bromley, but there are far worse things to escape than boredom. He had the leisure to experiment and play – to join bands, to try different fashions – because, despite the modest size of his house, he was cushioned by a comfortable level of middle-class privilege. In the year they moved to Plaistow Grove, David met new friends at the choir and the Cub Scouts, and was taken by his dad, with his cousin Kristina, to see Tommy Steele, getting his autograph backstage. His headmaster at Burnt Ash encouraged the class to express themselves through ‘movement training’, describing David as a ‘sensitive and imaginative boy’. There were regular trips to his dad’s work, more meetings with TV stars, and a Scout summer camp on the Isle of Wight, where George and David performed their favourite pop songs as a skiffle group.
John Jones took David to visit potential secondary schools; David got his first choice, Bromley Tech, ‘with no real battle’. His form master, Owen Frampton, was progressive and inspirational, starting an ‘art stream for students interested in visual creativity’. David decided he wanted to become a jazz musician, after reading On the Road in 1961: his dad bought him an acrylic sax for Christmas that year. Within a couple of weeks, David had persuaded his dad to help him buy a better one, and they went to Tottenham Court Road together to get a professional instrument on hire purchase. David set himself to the task of learning music from his American singles; self-disciplined for a fifteen-year-old, but no doubt helped by the fact that his house already had an upright piano. With his characteristic, wide-eyed chutzpah (if you want it, boys, get it here), David wrote to a local jazz musician, Ronnie Ross, asking for lessons. His proficiency on the sax got him into his first band, The Konrads, and his first public gig at a school fête. There was a network of local venues ready to accommodate them: church halls for rehearsals, country clubs, colleges and ballrooms. John Jones arranged the band’s professional photoshoot. Although David left school with a single pass, his form master Owen Frampton made the effort to find him a job in advertising, which David was fired from a year later. ‘I just couldn’t stand the pace … it was just so boring trying to compete with sketching out raincoats and things.’ His dad supported him financially as David decided to dedicate himself solely to making it in the music business. Both his parents signed his first management deal, because David was only seventeen. This was summer 1964, and he was in his third band already, having made his television debut in June.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves: but as we piece together the story of how David Jones became Bowie, and how Bowie became Ziggy, it’s important to remember that his background helped him – not just by giving him something to transcend and escape, but in a more literal sense. He faced obstacles and hardships, there’s little doubt of that. The eye injury that left him with a permanently-dilated left pupil sent him to hospital – his dad rushed him in when it ‘just exploded’ – and needed months of convalescence. He argued with his mother in particular, who, concerned about his obsession with music and fashion over schoolwork, ‘wanted me turned down’. He often had to retreat to his bedroom, thinking, in his own words, ‘they are not going to beat me.’ (But didn’t we all, as teenagers?) And then there was Terry, and the family history that Terry carried with him, which we’ll come to later. But he also had a father, at least, who ferried him around, funded him and gave him many of the tools that forged his later, larger-than-life persona. It was his dad, ironically – or with self-sacrificing generosity – who helped his son to become bigger and bolder than David Jones, to rewrite his childhood and to ditch the family name.
But there were a lot of boys in bands in 1960s Bromley, sharing similar levels of middle-class privilege, home comforts and family support. David Jones’s success was not, of course, solely due to his dad. In the story so far, we can already sense an incredible self-belief; for a supposedly sensitive, insular teenager, he went straight for what he wanted. His music career in the 1960s suggests a slow, steady attempt to construct something original and distinctive from available materials: a piecing-together of genres and styles, a testing of what worked and a willingness to quickly reject what didn’t, and a struggle within the system to create something new. He didn’t want to be a great bluesman, a pop singer or a folk artist. He combined his talent for music with his flair for fashion and visual art, using them all as a means to an end. What he wanted was a certain type of stardom.
Shortly before joining The Konrads, he’d been inspired – on another theatre visit, to see Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, in July 1961 – by Anthony Newley’s theatrical flair and his power over a crowd.
He kept saying ‘Stop the world’, and the cast would freeze, and he’d come forward and rap to the audience. Then he’d say ‘OK’ and they’d start moving again. The girls were like machines, lifting their arms and legs up and down like clockwork. It just blew me over and I knew I wanted some of that, but I didn’t know what exactly. That’s when I started formulating my own style.
Even if we take Bowie’s tendency to retcon his past into account, we can trace this impulse through his early experiences with local bands. His dedication to the saxophone, thanks to Ronnie Ross, won him a place in The Konrads. He started to take on vocal duties and wrote some of his own songs, slipping them in between, as he said, the usual covers ‘of anything that was in the charts’. They worked hard; they were a journeyman band, aiming to please the crowds of the Royal Bell in Bromley (now a boarded-up nightclub) and the Beckenham Ballroom with versions of the Shadows and ‘Johnny B. Goode’. Audiences stopped dancing and drifted away from the stage when the band switched to one of David’s compositions, but he kept pushing, expanding them beyond a straightforward covers outfit. He challenged his own insecurities by singing two songs at each gig – ‘I was never very confident of my voice’ – and, perhaps to counter the shyness, started to invent a rock ‘n’ roll persona for himself. He told the others that Jones was a boring name, and toyed with Luther Jay and Alexis Jay before settling on Dave Jay, signing it with a saxophone on the capital letter.
The band’s uniform of green corduroy jackets and brown mohair trousers was his idea too – as were the publicity pics with his dad’s photographer friend – and he drew towering cartoon backdrops of jazz musicians for their later gigs, creating a distinctive sense of theatrical space.
A news report in the Bromley and Kentish Times of August 1963 explains that ‘a feature of their stage act is the special infra-blue lights which, when directed on their specially coated instruments, cause them to change colour – a big hit with the fans.’ The article doesn’t specify that it was David’s idea, but we can take a guess. Earlier in 1963 he’d failed to persuade the other boys to rename the band Ghost Riders, with a Wild West image, and instead announced that he was thinking of changing his own name to Jim Bowie.
These eighteen months with The Konrads – he joined in June 1962 and left on 31 December 1963 – give us a template for Bowie’s early approach. Rather than trying to strike out on his own as a singer-songwriter, he worked within the existing frameworks; nudging a jobbing covers band to experiment, while pushing for his own ideas and styling the brand as much as he could. But failure is also a key aspect of Bowie’s career. The Konrads’ song ‘I Never Dreamed’ – co-written by Jones, Alan Dodds and Roger Ferris, and recorded during an audition for Decca – was rejected by the label, and the band also failed to get past the first round of Rediffusion’s TV contest, Ready, Steady, Win. David, frustrated at his lack of control within the group, teamed up briefly again with George Underwood – significantly, their side-project the Hooker Brothers was initially called Dave’s Reds and Blues, giving him top billing – and recorded music in his bedroom, using basic equipment to build guitar parts and harmonies and effectively creating a band on his own.
By January 1964, a month after leaving The Konrads, he’d recruited three older musicians, along with Underwood, into a new band, Davie Jones and The King Bees. Now he was headlining. The green corduroy, striped tie and brown mohair trousers were out, replaced by jeans, T-shirts, piratical leather waistcoats and high-cut boots from a fashionable London boutique. Acquaintances of the time describe him as ‘very fashion conscious’, with ‘way-out clothes and dyed hair’; outrageous enough to embarrass his more conventional girlfriends. With a distinct focus on blues, rather than just playing every chart crowd-pleaser, the King Bees had a stronger identity, and the Davie Jones of his 1964 publicity shots is more recognisable as proto-David Bowie.
Again, with characteristic inventiveness and cheek – perhaps inspired by his dad’s insider knowledge – he wrote to a local entrepreneur, laundry magnate John Bloom, asking him to sponsor the band. Bloom passed the details on to talent scout Leslie Conn, who signed up David, offered the King Bees a prestigious gig and management, and negotiated a record deal with Decca. On 5 June, just six months after The Konrads’ failed Decca audition, Davie Jones released his first disc, ‘Liza Jane’: on the 19th they performed it on Rediffusion’s TV show, Ready Steady Go!. In July, David was fired from his job in advertising after a blazing row with his boss – he’d been working as a ‘junior visualiser’, a paste-up artist – or, if you believe his version of events, decided to quit and dedicate all his time to making it in the music business.
From one angle, it seems a clear-cut, focused trajectory towards his later fame. But what if The Konrads had been signed by Decca, and triumphed on Ready, Steady, Win? Every point of apparent failure in Bowie’s 1960s is a pivot to an alternate future – now an alternate history – where his success would have come sooner, but surely would have been short-lived.
The pattern continued: a few steps forward, another setback, and another shift. The King Bees’ first major gig was a flop that left David in tears. Juke Box Jury, on BBC1, voted ‘Liza Jane’ a miss. Musically, though credited to Leslie Conn, it’s indebted to the standard ‘Li’l Liza Jane’, and, in the words of RebelRebel author Chris O’Leary, is ‘doubly derivative (aping the Stones aping American electric blues)’, not far from The Konrads’ straight covers. Davie Jones, despite his growing confidence, still tries to disguise his accent, though it slips through: as O’Leary notes, ‘Jane’ becomes a twangy ‘Jayne’ by the end. Anne Nightingale, in a contemporary review, called it ‘straight R&B with a strong Cockney inflection’. The B-side, ‘Louie, Louie Go Home’, was a cover of an American release and another mash-up of borrowed styles: if the original was white kids trying to sound black, the King Bees’ cover added Beatles-like backing vocals and a whiny Lennon inflection from the lead singer.
‘Liza Jane’ failed to sell, and David once more left the band. He was chasing success, rather than a particular sound; he even altered his accent from the A-side to the B-side of the single, as the genre shifted from blues to pop. Once again, his projects overlapped as he impatiently sought a new vehicle: he auditioned for The Manish Boys in July 1964, and quit the King Bees later that month. (But again, an alternate path branches out from this point. What if ‘Liza Jane’ had been a hit?)
The pattern continued into 1965. The Manish Boys recorded ‘I Pity the Fool’ in January and released it in March with one of David’s own compositions, ‘Take My Tip’, on the B-side. His talent for provocation and media manipulation emerged more boldly, as he told a promoter his sexual preference was for ‘boys, of course’, and invented a story for the Daily Mirror: he’d supposedly been banned from the TV pop show Gadzooks! It’s All Happening because of his long hair. While enjoying the press attention, David was furious that the band had persuaded Leslie Conn to drop his individual credit on the record, and release it as a single by The Manish Boys. He reasserted himself when they played at the Bromel Club, his home territory, and ensured his name was highlighted, but the other band members hit back with a reminder in their own local paper that ‘Davie is a member of the group, and not, as many people think, the leader.’ Again, the single tanked, and he left the band on 5 May 1965, less than a year since his audition. Once more, we get the sense that every band, every stunt, every style and soundbite was a means to an end: he wanted to cultivate his own brand, not just to join a gang.
And the cycle started again. By 17 May he was leading Davie Jones and the Lower Third. In August, the new group released ‘You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving’, credited solely to Davy Jones. It was an original composition, though this time David steered his new group towards a Who sound – built around the structure of ‘Tired of Waiting for You’, by The Kinks – and his vocals approximated Roger Daltrey. The B-side, ‘Baby Loves That Way’, pastiches Herman’s Hermits and owes a further debt to The Kinks. Drumming up attention for the new single, David met agent Ralph Horton, who agreed to manage the Lower Third and advised a style shift towards London’s mod fashions.
David was still a darling of the local press – the Kentish Times saw it as newsworthy that ‘Davie Changes His Hairstyle’ – and now, under Horton’s influence, adopted what the paper called a ‘college-boy’ look, with Carnaby Street white shirts, hipster trousers and flowery ties. In September, Horton introduced David to the more experienced manager Ken Pitt and, on Pitt’s advice, they changed his stage name to Bowie. David was interviewed in style magazines – ‘I consider myself just to be fashion conscious, not a mod or anything’ – released ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ in early 1966 for his new label, Pye, and covertly planned to go solo. The other band members suspected, but only realised when their 29 January gig at the Bromel Club was billed as ‘David Bowie’, and they were told they wouldn’t get paid. We can predict the next step. On 6 February, Bowie formed a new group, The Buzz, and toured with them for eight months. In August, he released ‘I Dig Everything’, without the band: it was his last work for Pye. Again, the writing was on the wall, and in late November, just before launching a new single on the Deram label, he told The Buzz he wouldn’t be needing them in future.
The single was ‘Rubber Band’, with ‘The London Boys’ on its B-side. ‘David not only wrote the song,’ boasted the press release, ‘he scored the arrangement and produced the master recording.’
Finally, we’ve reached tracks that appear on his debut album from June 1967. It feels like a landmark: after five years of adapting, borrowing, ditching, adopting and dropping – from David Jones through Davie Jay to David Bowie, from The Konrads to The Buzz, from Pye to Deram, from Horton to Pitt – he’s become the solo performer we start to recognise, grabbing his hard-hustled place on the outskirts of fame and edging closer to the centre. The LP features a close-up of his face and his stage name. He’s made it, surely.
How had he got here, when so many other boys and bands from Bromley had dropped out of the race? Partly, simply, through persistence. He’d decided to make it his career, and he wanted stardom enough to get over any misgivings and hesitation. He had a safety net, certainly – not every young man can give up his job in advertising, knowing his father will fund him – but he was still pushing himself on a personal level, taking risks and forcing himself to make them come true. This had been his sole focus since the age of fourteen: or earlier, depending which story we believe.
Like a petty gangster in a crime movie, he’d kept on moving up, replacing the boss in one band then moving to a larger outfit when he got bored or felt his ambitions stifled. With every step higher, he gained more status symbols: a headline credit, a newspaper article, a TV appearance, a magazine feature. He was ruthless, self-centred, dedicated to his own success, but endearingly creative in how he achieved it. He was single-minded and canny, but also innocently imaginative: his natural shyness and sensitivity were balanced with sheer front and cheeky charm. Writing to a self-made millionaire in the laundry self-service business and asking him to sponsor the King Bees worked because it reached John Bloom out of the blue, taking the magnate by surprise. David was an artist, not a con-artist.
How much of his approach during those five years was clever media manipulation, and how much was an expression of something more personal? Were the dyed hair, piratical boots and leather blousons of 1964 the sign of David’s genuine interest in way-out styling, or the fashioning of a distinctive brand image? We can’t know. He may not have known himself.
We have to guess whether he was just playing with the press when he told the reporter he was into boys, ‘of course’, prefiguring his later claims to be gay and bisexual. We can’t be sure whether he changed his hair, his clothes and brand to fit the changing market, or his own changing tastes; whether he was genuinely trying to subvert gender roles with his long hair, or whether he simply guessed it would get headlines. His interviews at the time are as frivolously playful as his later interactions with journalists: ‘Insistently he claims the dubious honour of being Bromley’s first “Mod” but has since changed his philosophy to become a “Rocker”,’ proclaimed his press release in 1965. David ‘likes Scandinavian “birds” … dislikes education, 9–5 jobs, long straight roads and “coppers” (in either sense – “cash” or the “law”)’.
Were the idiosyncratic ideas like infra-blue lighting, a Wild West-themed band and the cartoon backdrops just an attempt to grab attention with a gimmick, or a deeper impulse from the boy who’d been told not to make a mess in his bedroom with paints, and now found himself with more freedom? The truth is that we don’t have to choose – the same decision can combine both a clever media strategy and a personal, artistic experiment. Again, when we meet a contradiction in Bowie’s history, it doesn’t always have to be resolved: we can see it in double vision.
It’s tempting to think, though, that when he dug out his green corduroy jacket from The Konrads and drew felt-pen stripes over it, customising it for his brief role with the Riot Squad in spring 1967, that this was an act of individual expression, a creative sabotage of the uniform he’d worn in his first band. In contrast to the teenage investment he’d put into The Konrads, the Riot Squad was a deliberately short-term fling for a twenty-year-old Bowie. The band knew he was going to move on, and they welcomed his ideas of hand-painted props, mime and make-up: they already used a flashing blue police light in performances, which may have drawn him in. He even hid behind a disguise rather than using his real (stage) name, adopting the temporary alias ‘Toy Soldier’ in promotional material: perhaps his first persona. The jacket is now on display in Bromley Library, one floor down from the maps and local directories. ‘It’s tiny, isn’t it?’ the archivist remarked to me. ‘And what a conservative type of rebellion’ – she laughed – ‘to draw pinstripes on your own jacket!’
He’d been writing his own lyrics since at least summer 1962; The Konrads backing singer Stella Gall remembers him noting them down in an exercise book. He didn’t have to persuade a band to let him perform them now, or compete for credit. He no longer had to cover this week’s hits, or ape the sound of Lennon and The Beatles, or Daltrey and The Who. This was his opportunity to let the world hear David Bowie. What did he do with his new solo platform? He let the world hear another Anthony Newley.
That’s an over-simplification, of course. But Bowie’s debut album for Deram is a compilation of oddities, made up largely of short stories about quirky characters: a ‘Little Bombardier’ who is driven out of town for inappropriate friendships with children; ‘Uncle Arthur’ who leaves his wife and returns to Mother’s cooking; the cross-dressing soldier in ‘She’s Got Medals’. These are vignettes with a mild twist, centring veterans from wars before Bowie’s time – the narrator of ‘Rubber Band’ fought in the 1914–18 conflict – and delivered with a chirpy-chappy vocal. The sound effects and melodramatic acting of ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’, the spoken punchlines at the end of ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, and the comedy voices (Nazis, news announcers) on ‘We Are Hungry Men’ add to the sense of vaudeville. Like ‘Rubber Band’, ‘Maid of Bond Street’ is based around a play on words (‘this girl is made of lipstick … this girl is maid of Bond Street’), and ‘She’s Got Medals’ also does double-service as a dirty joke, as Chris O’Leary points out (basically, ‘she’s got balls’).
O’Leary suggests that Bowie’s shift towards music-hall pastiche and a celebration of an imaginary English past was a clever move, ‘acutely timed’ to fit with a nostalgic 1967 trend for brigadier moustaches and military uniforms. The brass-buttoned jacket Bowie wears on the LP’s cover is a smart, sober version of The Beatles’ multicoloured Sgt. Pepper get-up; their album, celebrating a mythical military band that launched ‘twenty years ago today’, was released the same week as Bowie’s. On the other hand, we know that Bowie had genuinely been inspired by Newley back in 1961, before he joined The Konrads, and may have seen this shift into theatrical storytelling as a way to express himself as an original artist; a sharp about-turn from the stale Mod scene.
On one level, we shouldn’t expect Bowie’s 1960s solo work to tell us anything about his upbringing and environment. His decisions so far had all been based around gaining greater independence and celebrity, using each band in turn to move further away from the Bromley music scene. His gigs took him on increasingly wider circuits, from school fêtes and local village halls with The Konrads in 1963, to the Jack of Clubs and the Marquee in Soho with The King Bees in 1964, to gigs in Maidstone, Newcastle and Edinburgh with The Manish Boys by the end of that year. In December 1965 and January 1966, he performed with the Lower Third at Le Golf-Drouot and Le Bus Palladium in Paris.
But on the other hand, he kept returning: not just to Soho – he held a regular slot at the Marquee Club – but to the Bromel Club, barely fifteen minutes’ walk from his parents’ home. He was still living at Plaistow Grove in 1965, though he shuttled between Bromley and Maidstone during his stint with The Manish Boys, and spent nights in between gigs at friends’ houses or in the band’s van. As a minor, Bowie still needed his parents to sign his contracts, and drew a sketch map for Pitt in summer 1966, showing him how to get from Sundridge Park Station to 4 Plaistow Grove: Pitt wrote to John Jones and ‘your wife’ to confirm that he would be David’s sole manager, and visited Bromley in February 1967 to go through the paperwork. The first time Bowie formally moved out from his parents’ house was June of that year, when he began sharing Pitt’s apartment in London; even then, he only spent Monday to Friday with Pitt, and went back to Bromley at weekends. He unashamedly told a magazine in July of that year that he still lived at home with his parents. ‘I’d never leave them; we’ve got a good thing going.’ As O’Leary points out ‘The London Boys’, despite its edgy urban setting, was written by a teenager ‘living in Bromley, fed and clothed and funded by his parents’, and feels like ‘a suburban correspondent filing a story from the field’.
Though part of him was trying to escape his background, he was clearly reluctant to fully give it up, and this tension crept into his work, sometimes between the lines and sometimes more explicitly. Bromley was the territory he knew best, and it formed part of his mental landscape. But what emerges more strongly is a sense of in-betweenness: the dynamic between safety and escape, comfort and frustration, home and adventure, city and suburb, family and freedom. Bowie’s first-person narrators and characters of the period are often caught between these choices, poised in limbo.
Take, for instance, ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ (January 1966), which Kevin Cann sees as a ‘confessional and reflective’ evocation of ‘his mother, Sundridge Park Station, the recreation ground at the end of his street, St Mary’s Church’. While it lends itself to an autobiographical reading, with a girl calling out, ‘Hi, Dave,’ its lyrics are, in fact, not nearly so specific as Cann suggests – there’s a church, a mother, a recreation ground, a station and indeed a school, but they are left generic. The song focuses on the moment when its young narrator is forced to leave (‘I’ve gotta pack my bags, leave this home’), revisits memories of the home town as he walks to the station, and ends at a point of transition, while ‘the ticket’s in my hand’. His family and friends are left behind in ‘never-never land’, but his future is unknown: ‘I’ve got a long way to go, hope I make it on my own.’
‘The London Boys’ (December 1966) finds its central character a few steps down the line, but equally uncertain. ‘You moved away, told your folks you were gonna stay away.’ This protagonist is ‘seventeen, but you think you’ve grown, in the month you’ve been away from your parents’ home’; like the narrator of ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’, he’s traded comfort for uncertainty, and now can’t turn back. ‘It’s too late now, cause you’re out there boy … now you wish you’d never left your home, you’ve got what you wanted but you’re on your own.’
‘I Dig Everything’ (August 1966) checks in on the same milieu on a different day, in a more upbeat mood. The newcomer in ‘The London Boys’ has bought coffee, butter and bread but ‘can’t make a thing cause the meter’s dead’; in ‘I Dig Everything’, the narrator ‘ain’t had a job for a year or more’, rents ‘a backstreet room in the back part of town’, and is ‘low on money … everything’s spent’, but he doesn’t care – he feeds the lions in Trafalgar Square, makes friends with the time-check girl on the end of the phone, and waves to policemen. He finds stuff to do for free. He digs everything. He’s made himself a home in London. Even so, the joy in this song stems from uncertainty (‘I don’t know a thing’), and from embracing the precarious balance between success and failure (‘some of them were losers but the rest of them are winners’).
Bowie’s debut album moves away from this semi-autobiographical approach – two of the examples above are from a first-person perspective, and have ‘I’ and ‘Me’ in their titles – but uses the same dynamic structures with some of the character vignettes. The ‘Little Bombardier’, like the narrator in ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’, is thrown out of his home town and catches a train towards an uncertain future; though the tone tends towards throwaway comedy rather than teenage angst, the ending is almost identical.
‘Uncle Arthur’, finally, is still living with Mother, facing ‘another empty day’ of routine tedium as the bell strikes five and he closes the family shop; he finds romance late in life, at age thirty-two, but runs back to Mummy when he realises his new bride can’t cook. By contrast, ‘The London Boys’ opens with Bow Bells striking another night, and its protagonist returning wearily to seedy digs without electricity. Both options – living with your mum in cossetted security into your thirties (‘he gets his pocket money, he’s well fed’), and scrounging for food and friends as a seventeen-year-old in Soho – are presented as imperfect. Arthur experiments with freedom and quickly abandons it; the ‘London Boy’ pretends he’s having fun, but secretly regrets that he can’t go home. Even in their vaudeville disguise, then, Bowie’s songs from 1967 work through his own experiences as a young man who’d toured widely with bands and secured a regular gig at a club in Soho, but kept returning to his home base in Bromley; a solo artist who still needed his dad’s signature, who depended on his parents for support, and who couldn’t seem fully to get away from the street where he’d grown up.
But all this was behind him now. It was June 1967, and he had a solo record out, with his name and face on the cover. He’d made it, surely.
He hadn’t made it. The singles, ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, flopped, and the album tanked at 125 in the UK charts. Another possible future for Bowie closed down: as Chris O’Leary suggests, ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ was a strong enough contender in the lacklustre music market of summer 1967 to have reached the top ten. With a successful follow-up, O’Leary speculates, it could have led to an alternate path of cabaret, Vegas shows, duets with Petula Clark and Nancy Sinatra, Bacharach covers and a disco crossover hit in the 1970s. That Bowie remains in a parallel universe, with all the other what-ifs and might-have-beens.
He was dropped by Deram the following year. The experience would surely have destroyed the confidence and drive of many twenty-year-old artists: he’d had his shot, and the world didn’t want to listen. Instead, he branched out into other fields. Some of his attempts were rewarded with small success; most were met with failure, but still he kept going.
Bowie kept busy over the next eighteen months. He had what Ken Pitt called, in a letter to John Jones, a ‘very brave try’ at writing the music for Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet: the director chose Donovan instead. He took up mime and movement with Lindsay Kemp, who has variously described his protégé as both ‘a joy to direct … an ideal student’ and, more recently, ‘a load of shit’. Bowie performed in Kemp’s stage play Pierrot in Turquoise,and explored Buddhism, professing that he hoped, at age twenty-five, ‘to be in Tibet studying Eastern philosophy … money doesn’t mean all that much to me.’ He auditioned unsuccessfully for musicals and feature films and won a role in a short called The Image, followed by a tiny cameo in The Virgin Soldiers. He sent a television play to the BBC and had it rejected; to placate his dad, who was worried about his son’s career, he tried a cabaret act, which came to nothing. One booking agent advised Ken Pitt: ‘Let him have a good day job … he’s never going to get anywhere.’ Instead, Bowie started his own dance and mime group, Feathers, with his new girlfriend Hermione Farthingale and his friend Tony ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson. ‘He’d try one thing, try another,’ Hermione later remembered. ‘He wasn’t lost. He just wasn’t found, either.’ He never stopped trying; but he didn’t release any records during 1968.
In early 1969 the relationship with Hermione ended, and Bowie moved back to Plaistow Grove, briefly, for the final time. He filmed a commercial for Luv ice lollies: the advert performed so badly that the product was taken off the market. With Pitt’s encouragement, Bowie shot his own promotional film, Love You Till Tuesday, going to the trouble of getting cosmetic work on his teeth, and wearing hairpieces to disguise his Virgin Soldiers short back and sides. Costs escalated, and experimental sections were scrapped. When the film was finished, Pitt arranged private screenings: TV stations and film distributors were unmoved. The project was shelved; but as part of its production, Bowie had written a new song, ‘Space Oddity’.
Once more, we reach a point of recognition. Surely, now, Bowie has done it. This is the hit single we all know. This is the brink of fame. ‘Space Oddity’ would open the album most of us recognise as his first – it was also named David Bowie – after the false start of the Deram LP. Bowie himself, typically, wrote his debut out of history, claiming in a 1972 interview that ‘I was still working as a commercial artist then and I made it in my spare time, taking days off work and all that. I never followed it up … sent my tape into Decca and they said they’d make an album.’ According to the popular myth of Bowie, this is the real beginning. It’s worth freeze-framing him again here, and asking how he reached this point, after the crashing failure of 1967. How did he get past the disappointment, and retain his drive? Why did he keep trying?
We can only speculate, while acknowledging that every decision can have several motivations: a need to live up to Ken Pitt’s expectations and investment; perhaps a desire to please his dad, who, as Bowie told an interviewer in 1968, ‘tries so hard’ and still supported him; certainly, Bowie seemed to retain an almost untouchable core of self-belief. In a conversation with George Tremlett in 1969, he explained, ‘smiling but firm’, that ‘I shall be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty.’ Tremlett comments that ‘by the way he said it, I saw the possibility that he might not make it had barely crossed his mind.’ There is another possible reason, concealed within the frantic comedy of ‘The Laughing Gnome’, his single from 1967. This novelty song failed to make it onto the Deram LP, was reviewed at the time as ‘the flop it deserved to be’, and haunted Bowie’s subsequent career. Understandably, it remained part of the 1960s he’d rather forget.
But while its high-pitched vocals and Christmas-cracker jokes make it an even broader music-hall number than ‘Uncle Arthur’, it shares intriguingly similar motifs with Bowie’s other work of the time: a local high street, a quirky older character, threats of authority (‘I ought to report you to the Gnome Office’), and forced exile via the railway station (‘I put him on a train to Eastbourne’). The narrator in ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ leaves his family in ‘never-never land’, and sets out towards an uncertain future, ‘on my own’; the gnome is asked, ‘haven’t you got a home to go to,’ and replies that he’s from ‘gnome-man’s land’, a ‘gnome-ad’. Like the ‘London Boy’ and ‘Uncle Arthur’, the gnome is drawn back from his wandering towards suburbia and home comforts: when the narrator puts him on a train to the coast, he appears again next morning, bringing his brother. Even the references to success, described in terms of eating well (‘living on caviar and honey, cause they’re earning me lots of money’) echo the rhyming contrasts between family security and precarious independence in ‘Uncle Arthur’ and ‘The London Boys’ (‘he gets his pocket money, he’s well fed’; ‘you’ve bought some coffee, butter and bread, you can’t make a thing cause the meter’s dead.’) Behind the frenetic gags, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ explores the same tension as Bowie’s more anguished singles from the same period: the push and pull of comforting, dull safety versus risky adventure. The same dynamic recurs, more metaphorically, throughout his later work, and can even be seen to structure Bowie’s career; we’ll return to it later. Already, though, we can see that this song has more to it than meets the eye.
It’s easy to dismiss ‘The Laughing Gnome’ as a convenient vehicle for packing in as many gnome jokes as possible. But as we’ve already seen, Bowie was tempted by puns in his more serious tracks, too. ‘Rubber Band’ may be frivolous, but ‘Maid of Bond Street’, also built around a play on words, isn’t meant to be funny. ‘Space Oddity’followed – ostensibly spoofing 2001: A Space Odyssey (the name ‘David Bowie’ even sounds like a parody riff on the movie’s protagonist, Dave Bowman) but far from a comedy song – and then ‘Aladdin Sane’, containing the hidden confession ‘A Lad Insane’. The cover of Low is a visual joke on ‘low profile’. ‘New Killer Star’, from 2003, puns on George W. Bush’s pronunciation of ‘nuclear’, but the song is no joke: it opens with a reflection on the ‘great white scar’ of the former World Trade Center.
In 1997, Bowie returned self-consciously to ‘grumpy gnomes’ with ‘Little Wonder’, which includes the names of the Seven Dwarves in its lyrics and has a twist in its title: depending on context, the phrase is used to imply both ‘no wonder, then’, and ‘you little marvel’. Linguistic gags in Bowie’s work are not, then, a cue for us to disregard the song as meaningless cabaret. In fact, the hysterical surplus of double meaning in ‘The Laughing Gnome’ could even be seen as an invitation to read more into the lyrics, like a dream bursting with symbolism that begs for analysis. ‘Gnomic’, after all, also signifies a mysterious expression of truth, and leads us, in turn, to Bowie’s description for the mousy-haired girl in ‘Life on Mars’. In a 2008 article he called her an ‘anomic (not a “gnomic”) heroine’. He knew the word could be read in other ways.
If we accept that the song can be taken more seriously, then the gnome’s brother, who appears at the end of the narrator’s bed one morning, is the key to further interpretation. David Jones had, more than once, woken up to find his half-brother, Terry, back from his nomadic travels and sharing his bedroom. Terry was ten when he first joined the Jones family at Stansfield Road in Brixton; but when they moved to Bromley in 1953, Terry, who hated John Jones, stayed behind. In June 1955 he came back, taking the bedroom next to David’s on Plaistow Grove; in November, he left again for the air force, and didn’t return for three years. He couldn’t stay, Peggy explained when Terry turned up again, unkempt and disturbed – the back bedrooms had been merged into one, and there was no room – so he moved out to Forest Hill, but still caught the bus regularly to Bromley, to visit David. Terry was already a major influence on his younger half-brother, helping him, as Peter and Leni Gillman put it, to ‘discover a new world beyond the drab confines of the suburbs’. He took David to jazz clubs in Soho, gave him a copy of Kerouac’s On the Road, and encouraged him towards saxophone lessons. ‘I thought the world of David,’ he later said, ‘and he thought the world of me.’ An intermittent resident at Plaistow Grove over the next decade, Terry was also in and out of local hospitals for the mentally ill. He was developing schizophrenia.
In February 1967, David and Terry – now both adults – walked down to the Bromel Club to see Cream in concert. ‘I was very disturbed,’ Bowie later recalled, ‘because the music was affecting him adversely. His particular illness was somewhere between schizophrenia and manic depressiveness … I remember having to take him home.’ According to Buckley’s biography, Terry ‘began pawing the road’ after the gig. ‘He could see cracks in the tarmac and flames rising up, as if from the underworld. Bowie was scared witless … this example of someone so close being possessed was horrifying.’ He was, Buckley goes on, ‘frightened that his own mind would split down the middle, too’. Bowie’s own recollection is, as we’ve seen, less melodramatic, but he confirmed in another interview, with a formality that suggests he was choosing his words carefully, that ‘one puts oneself through such psychological damage trying to avoid the threat of insanity, you start to approach the very thing that you’re scared of. Because of the tragedy inflicted, especially on my mother’s side … that was something I was terribly fearful of.’ His grandmother, Margaret, had also suffered from mental illness, as had his aunts Una, Nora and Vivienne; Terry’s episode at the Bromel Club brought it closer to home, though it’s worth noting that cousin Kristina dismissed Terry’s experience as a ‘bad acid trip’, and the idea of insanity in the family as one of David’s long-term lies, or ‘porkies’. ‘It just wasn’t true,’ she told Francis Whately in 2019.
Terry features obliquely in at least two of Bowie’s songs. ‘Jump They Say’ (1993), Bowie explained, was ‘semi-based on my impression of my stepbrother’; he was cagier about ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ (1971), throwing out various decoy explanations before admitting, in 1977, that it was about himself and Terry, with ‘Bewlay’ as an echo of his own stage name. ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is never discussed in this context – it is, at best, accepted by critics as a bit of fun, or in the words of Peter and Leni Gillman, ‘a delightful children’s record’ – but it’s tempting to add it to the list of songs inspired by Bowie’s half-brother, especially if we bear in mind a story that Kristina tells about Terry and their grandmother. Little Terry had nervously smiled after being scolded. ‘Nanny said, “Go on, laugh again,” and he smirked again, and she smacked him across the ear and said, “That’ll teach you to laugh at me.”’ Ha ha ha. Hee hee hee.
It’s a persuasive reading. But to label ‘The Laughing Gnome’ with a single interpretation – a song about Terry Burns, the manic outsider who kept turning up at David’s house, and was sent away – would be reductive. Any Bowie song is, like the man who wrote it, a matrix of information, with multiple possible patterns of connection. Even single words can be loaded, and can pivot in various directions, suggesting different links. We can join the dots of those words and phrases in several ways and create a convincing structure, but with a twist, and from a new perspective, the picture changes. As I’ve suggested, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ also explores Bowie’s to-and-fro tension between independent adventure and the security of home. It’s also, let’s face it, a comedy song, a novelty number, a ‘delightful children’s record’. It can be all those things and more. An interview with novelist Hanif Kureishi gives a further quick twist and suggests a final angle.
Kureishi recalls that, when they worked on Buddha of Suburbia together, Bowie ‘would talk about how awkward it was in the house for his mother and father when Terry was around, how difficult and disturbing it was’. But he immediately goes on, without changing the subject, to describe his own experiences with Bowie on the phone. ‘I got the sense you have with some psychotic people when they’re just talking to themselves. It’s just a monologue, and he is just sharing with you what’s going round and round in his head.’ From Terry’s schizophrenia to David’s seeming psychosis, without a jump: the seamless segue is telling, and it’s a short step from there to Chris O’Leary’s suggestion that ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is ‘a man losing his mind, a schizophrenic’s conversation with himself’.
It would seem overly simplistic to suggest that Bowie channelled a fear of insanity directly into his work – ‘All the Madmen’ (1970), for instance, or the ‘crack in the sky and the hand reaching down to me’ from ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971) – unless he’d admitted it himself. ‘I felt I was the lucky one because I was an artist and it would never happen to me because I could put all my psychological excesses into my music and then I could be always throwing it off.’ This confession, included in Dylan Jones’sbook, follows directly on from the quotation above (‘one puts oneself through such psychological damage …’). Note how Bowie’s formal poise switches into a rushed incantation; an attempt to make something true by saying it quickly.
In this sense, then, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is not just about Terry, but about what Terry meant to his younger half-brother: a troubled alter-ego who always comes back when he’s sent away, a reminder of what Bowie could have been, and what he feared he could still become. The laughing gnome is a figure embodying both madness and truth: manic laughter and gnomic warnings. You can’t catch him, and you can’t get away from him. He can’t be successfully repressed, but he can be accepted and embraced, not just peaceably but profitably (‘we’re living on caviar and honey, cause they’re earning me lots of money’). If we follow this interpretation to its conclusion, Bowie was not just pushing himself because he hungered for fame. He was driven to keep creating because he wanted to expel the ideas from his head into his art; he preferred to make the hallucination into a comedy character, rather than hear that high-pitched chuckling confined to his own head. He wanted to exorcise the energy before it could drive him crazy. He felt his art would save him, and perhaps it did; as the song predicts, it certainly earned him success.
Was his creative drive really fuelled, at least in part, by this fear of mental illness? We can’t be sure: we can only try to read back through Bowie’s public art into his private motivations, using the facts of his life as a framework. But it’s a valid way of seeing, and it makes a good story.
Bowie kept trying, despite all the setbacks, and kept working, and kept moving. After another brief stay at Plaistow Grove in January 1969, he’d relocated to 24 Foxgrove Road in Beckenham, which he shared with Barrie Jackson, a childhood friend from his old street. The following month he moved in with Mary Finnigan, in the ground-floor flat of the same house. His relationship with Finnigan quickly changed from neighbours to lovers, and then adapted again when he met Angie Barnett on Wednesday 9 April. In August, David and Angie moved to Haddon Hall, at 42 Southend Road, Beckenham, where they rented the entire ground floor of a Victorian villa.
Both Haddon Hall and 24 Foxgrove Road have been demolished and replaced with flats. You can still visit both sites, though, and realise how close they are to each other; Foxgrove Road is five minutes up the hill from Beckenham Junction Station, and 42 Southend Road less than ten minutes’ further walk in the same direction. Beckenham Junction, in turn, is just two stops down the line from Bromley. Again, Bowie’s sense of adventure, experiment and escape was tempered with caution. He’d moved out of his parents’ home, and in with a neighbour from his childhood street; he then relocated downstairs with Mary Finnigan, making friends with her young children and becoming part of a new family household. When he finally rented his own place with a long-term girlfriend, he was still only a couple of miles from his childhood home; easily close enough for his mother to come round and prepare Sunday lunches for Bowie and his friends. Peggy later moved to a flat in Beckenham, even nearer to her adult son, and when Bowie and Angie married, they held the ceremony at Bromley Register Office, with the reception in the Swan and Mitre pub. However, while Haddon Hall was only a few miles from Plaistow Grove, it was a world away from the tiny terraced house where David had grown up: a gothic playground with a grand piano, stained-glass windows, heavy oak and crushed velvet upholstery. Bowie and Angie would go out to clubs together and bring dates back; band members slept on mattresses across the landing, and the basement was converted into a rehearsal studio.
Finally, he’d found what he’d been working towards. His former lover Mary had made friends with his new girlfriend Angie; he invited his friend, producer Tony Visconti, to move in with them. Together, David and Mary Finnigan developed an Arts Lab at the Three Tuns, down the hill on Beckenham High Street. Bowie was the star act, backed by psychedelic liquid light shows, and the audience reached over two hundred during the summer. They organised an open-air festival for the same day as Woodstock, at Croydon Road Recreation Ground (the bandstand is still there). Bowie started to record a new album in July, and released ‘Space Oddity’ as a single on 11 July, in time to catch the buzz around the moon landing. John Jones wrote to Ken Pitt that ‘David is keeping very cheerful and seems to be keeping himself fully occupied.’ It was summer 1969. After seven years of trying, Bowie had made it.
But there was another heavy blow in his step-by-step progress towards greater independence. His move into Haddon Hall immediately followed the death of John Jones, at age fifty-six, on 5 August. Bowie had just returned from a festival in Malta, and had come back in time to perform at the Arts Lab. Mary Finnigan informed him after the set that his father was seriously ill, and Bowie arrived at Plaistow Grove to find him semi-conscious. He struggled through the Free Festival, in what he understandably called ‘one of my terrible moods’. Later, he explained that he’d lost his father ‘at a point where I was just beginning to grow up a little bit and appreciate that I would have to stretch out my hand a little for us ever to get to know each other. He just died at the wrong damn time …’
‘Space Oddity’ started slowly in the chart, then rose to number 25, earning Bowie his first appearance on Top of the Pops in early October. The single reached number 5 at the start of November, the perfect lead-in to his second album on Friday 14 of that month. With a youthful mixture of humility and arrogance, Bowie told the NME,‘I’ve been the male equivalent of a dumb blonde for a few years, and I was beginning to despair of people accepting me for my music. It may be fine for a male model to be told he’s a great looking guy but that doesn’t help a singer much.’ In early 1970 he formed a new band, the Hype, teaming up for the first time with guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey. The team we know as the Spiders from Mars was almost entirely in place, adopting larger-than-life stage personae (‘Spaceman’, ‘Hypeman’, ‘Gangsterman’): with hindsight, it looks like the start of glam rock. And then in March 1970 Bowie released his follow-up to ‘Space Oddity’, ‘The Prettiest Star’. It sold 798 copies and died. He wouldn’t have another hit single for two years. He hadn’t made it after all.
I sat in the Zizzi on Beckenham High Street, which is now decorated with a mural of Bowie and key quotations from his songs in the windows. At the next table, three teenage lads ordered bashfully from a blonde waitress, in front of the lyrics ‘When you’re a boy, you can wear a uniform; when you’re a boy, other boys check you out.’ Fifty years ago, Bowie sat here with his acoustic guitar, playing for a crowd of regulars. This Zizzi was the Three Tuns until 1995, then the Rat and Parrot. In 2001, Mary Finnigan and supporters installed a plaque celebrating the Arts Lab and anticipating that the pub’s former name would be restored: it was, but only for a year. The plaque is still out front, with its perhaps overambitious boast that Bowie launched his career here; a Three Tuns sign hangs alongside the Zizzi logo.
It’s hard to know the truth about any period in Bowie’s life. Some stories are built on more solid foundations, and some are shakier. The popular idea that Bowie shocked the world in the early 1970s as a fully-formed genius makes him easier to idolise, perhaps, but harder to aspire to, and harder to identify with. It is easier to treat him as a creature of uncanny talent, an unearthly one-off, because it erases the years of struggle behind his success and allows us to think of him as different to the rest of us. But in many ways, he wasn’t different to the rest of us. He wasn’t trained as a singer. He didn’t show early signs of musical ability. He was an uncertain frontman as a teenager, insecure about his own vocal abilities. You can hear him improving from single to single during the 1960s. He taught himself saxophone at the age of fifteen, learning to play along with his favourite records, and focused on it while he was convalescing from his eye injury: he took lessons, but only from spring until summer 1962. He could pick out chords on a guitar and piano, but couldn’t read or write music; he used descriptions in a book to choose the instruments for his debut album, and relied on colour-coded charts, instead of conventional notation, for ‘Space Oddity’. As a dancer, an artist and an actor he was an enthusiastic amateur. He had the privileges of being a white, lower-middle-class teenager in a little house in a safe neighbourhood; but he also had to deal with a troubled half-brother who clashed with his parents, a family history of mental illness and the early loss of his father.
In September 1972, David Jones sailed with his wife Angie to New York on the QE2. He was now not just David Bowie, but Ziggy Stardust, complete with the crimson hair, jumpsuits and platform boots. They checked into the Plaza Hotel on Central Park and went up to their suite. ‘Babe,’ said Angie – or so the story goes – as she looked around at the decor, the view and the gifts from the production company, ‘we’ve made it.’
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