It’s a Monday evening in 1958 and eleven-year-old David Jones is waiting by the radio for The Goon Show to begin. Itching with impatience, he has already read the latest edition of The Eagle three times. Now he wants a dose of pure, subversive silliness, the sort of humor he will later, when he’s a bit more grown-up, recognize as “surreal.” He wants to hear more about characters like Neddie Seagoon, Eccles, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, and especially Bluebottle, played by Peter Sellers—a schoolboy tempted by the promise of dolly mixture sweets into doing dangerous, stupid things and whose catchphrase is “You dirty, rotten swine, you! You have deaded me!”
Because he is interested already in how things are made and by whom, he knows that the main writer of The Goon Show—as well as one of its star performers—is Spike Milligan, who went to school just down the road in the southeast London suburb of Brockley. He would also have known the price Milligan paid for the show’s success—regular stress-induced mental breakdowns. He wonders, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, if there is a connection between artistic genius and what people still call madness. Of all the Goons, Milligan was the most special—“always the one we would mimic as kids,” as Bowie’s childhood friend George Underwood told me.
It’s now 1963. David is sixteen and has a mass of competing interests—girls, jazz, Little Richard, girls, forming a band. But he’s kept faith with Spike Milligan down the years and reads the funnyman’s first novel as soon as it’s published. Happily, it’s everything he wants it to be. Puckoon is a small Irish town that is cut in two when the Boundary Commission decides the new border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State is going to pass through it. In one of the novel’s best conceits, half the pub is in one country (and has lower taxes on alcohol), while the other half is in the other. The funniest character is lazy Dan Milligan, who keeps breaking the fourth wall to complain about his lot.
Most people who knew him agree that Bowie had an endearing capacity to be very, very silly indeed. Think of Puckoon as the university where he studied for his silliness PhD.