He was a postwar baby, born in London in 1947. He was part of the new world, two years after the end of the old. A London baby. He went to school in Brixton before being cast out to the suburbs. Even when he was young he knew he wanted to be bigger than he was, wanted to be a bigger man. When he started to work in advertising he thought he’d broken through, but he had no idea what was to come. In the beginning, he was feeling his way—he was in the Kon-Rads, the King Bees, the Mannish Boys, David Jones and the Buzz, Davey Jones and the Lower Third, Feathers, the Hype—but he had no idea who he was going to be when he’d finished.
David Jones was born on January 8, 1947, at 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, the son of a cinema usherette and a promotions officer for Barnardo’s. He lived there until he was six, when his family moved farther out to Bromley in Kent. While his father was middle class, his mother came from a poor, working-class family. David used to say that there was a dark cloud over her side of the family, as it was full of mental instability. When he let his guard down, or when he wanted to amplify that side of his upbringing, he would say that “tragically” two or three of his aunts committed suicide. He would say that this seemed to be something he would hear constantly while growing up: How so-and-so has left us now. He said once, “I guess most of us have battled with reality and something else all of our lives. I think [my elder half-brother] Terry probably gave me the greatest, serviceable education that I ever could have had. He just introduced me to the outside things. The first real major event for me was when he passed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on to me, which really changed my life. He also introduced me to people like John Coltrane, which was way above my head, but I saw the magic and I caught the enthusiasm for it because of his enthusiasm for it. And I kinda wanted to be like him.” Terry—the savant of cool jazz—would adumbrate his life as a sort of ticking clock of impending, accelerated mortality. As for his mother’s sisters, his aunt Vivienne was diagnosed with schizophrenia, his aunt Una died in her late thirties having experienced periods in a mental institution as well as electric shock treatment, while Aunt Nora actually had a lobotomy because of her “bad nerves.”
DAVID BOWIE: I had a very happy childhood, seriously nothing wrong with it. I was lonely but I never really wanted and certainly never went hungry, but I obviously saw people deprived around me and kids going to school with their shoes falling apart and kids looking like urchins. It left an impression on me that I never ever wanted to be hungry, or at the wrong end of society.
KRISTINA AMADEUS (DAVID’S COUSIN): David’s parents, especially his father, “John” Jones, encouraged him from the time he was a toddler. His mother, Peggy, spoke often of our deceased grandfather, who was a bandmaster in the army and played many wind instruments. David’s first instruments, a plastic saxophone, a tin guitar, and a xylophone, were given to him before he was an adolescent. He also owned a record player when few children had one. When he was eleven we danced like possessed elves to the records of Bill Haley, Fats Domino, and Elvis Presley. David’s father took him to meet singers and other performers preparing for the Royal Variety Performance. I remember one afternoon in the late ’50s when David was introduced to Dave King, Alma Cogan, and Tommy Steele. “My son is going to be an entertainer too,” he said. “Aren’t you, David?” “Yes, Daddy,” David squeaked in his childish high-pitched voice, his face flushed and beaming with pride. Although Uncle John never lived to see David’s huge success, he was convinced it would become a reality.
WENDY LEIGH (BIOGRAPHER): David grew up petted and privileged. He wasn’t a working-class hero by any stretch. It was actually quite a suburban life, even though it was in south London, in Brixton. His father was the number-one PR at Dr. Barnardo’s, so David was immersed in the idea of presentation from a very young age. He was taken to all the shows by his father, introduced to celebrities, and he learned how to promote, how to sell himself. No one ever talks about the fact that he was incredibly influenced by his father, who had access to this exciting outside world. Every performer needs to be a great seducer, and David learned that from an early age. His father showed him a lot of love. He showed him how to get on, how to charm, and how to practice the art of being nice.
GEORGE UNDERWOOD (CHILDHOOD FRIEND): His dad was lovely, a really nice gentle man. His mum, well, even David didn’t like his mum. She wasn’t an easy person to get on with. She was very cold. Very insular. I think that’s why he liked coming round to my house, because my parents were totally different. “Hello, David, want a cup of tea, David?” My parents were very welcoming, but this wasn’t what would happen round at his house. Mrs. Jones would hardly ever say anything to me. I’m not sure what it was, but she was never happy. She always gave David such a hard time.
DAVID ARDEN (MANAGER): I was brought up in Brixton around the same time as David Bowie, and everyone thinks it was a tough place, but it was actually rather nice and full of variety artists. Half the houses were owned by [Trinidadian pianist] Winifred Atwell, who had bought them for investment purposes, and she used to rent them out to music-hall acts and light entertainers. John Major lived a few streets away from me, and his dad was an acrobat and juggler. It later turned into a rougher neighborhood, but at the time we were brought up there it was very arty-crafty. If you were an artist in London, in music hall or variety, or in showbiz of one kind or another, that’s where you lived. So Bowie was surrounded by this extremely artistic community. It was vibrant in that way. He wasn’t just a performer, wasn’t just a singer-songwriter, he was an artist, and he got that because of where he was brought up. I’d go into the arcade in Brixton, under the railway arches, and buy my reggae and jazz records there, and David would do the same thing. We had local people round to dinner all the time, and they were all in the business, people like Dickie Henderson. There were also lots of places to go and see acts too, as the area fed off the people who lived there. So it’s no surprise he turned out the way he did.
ANNE BRIGGS (NEIGHBOR): For a time as children we lived at Clapham in South London and were regular visitors to Brixton Market. There were all manner of traders, hawkers, stalls selling anything—Technicolor clothing which only the new residents of Brixton would wear, fruit piled up on shiny green fake grass cloths, vegetables of all kinds, and barrow boys with such constant and witty sales patter that people would gather round to listen and heckle. There were the West Indian traders with their Caribbean vegetables and lilting speech encouraging passersby to try their vegetables and fruit. Then there were buskers, always with their promoters, either providing music or awe-inspiring feats of physical flexibility, juggling or occasionally sword swallowers, all with their constant conversation attracting the crowd. Tanks of writhing eels in slightly murky water alongside stalls shrouded in white selling the little pots of jellied eels—no doubt to emphasize their freshness…cockles, winkles and shrimps were measured in old half pint and pint tankards. Pills and potions offering miracle cures of some sort or another—if we hovered to try and read the packets we were whisked away.
GEOFF MACCORMACK (CHILDHOOD FRIEND): I first met David when I was seven, at Burnt Ash Primary School, when he moved to Bromley—we had little brown uniforms. I’d already met George Underwood when I was four, at the local church school, St. Mary’s. I was in the cubs with David, in the choir together. We bonded over music, and both loved rock and roll, and as we grew older loved Little Richard. The Britain we grew up in was really quite grubby. There were still rations until the ’50s, and you’d walk to school via bomb sites. The music was bad, there was no decent food, and everything was gray, so when American music came along it completely changed everything. David’s father used to fund-raise with the stars of the day, people like Dickie Henderson and Tommy Steele.
I initially thought David was an only child, as he was only ever the only child in the house. I only found out much later that he had a brother. We never discussed it. I think it was a mutual understanding, as I had a brother who left home early to join the forces. He moved abroad and he wasn’t in my life either. So it was almost a mirror thing. David had a good relationship with his father, and he was always quite generous. He would always buy him records, and he got a lot of records through work. His father used to get American music that we’d never heard before and most of the country have never heard before. Most of the rock and roll we heard in this country was rerecorded by British artists for labels like Embassy that we used to buy in Woolworths. So to hear the real thing was quite rare and a real treat. David had Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” when that came out, “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley. He also had “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, although David’s mother wouldn’t let him play it in the house as she thought it was the devil’s music, which I suppose it was in a way. Our favorite was Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent.” When he did The Next Day, I told him I loved it, and he actually said, “It’s not ‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent,’ but it’ll do.” I remember him lending me a couple of records and I left them on the windowsill in the breakfast room at home, and they melted in the sun. It was really upsetting to him when I gave them back to him. About seven years ago I came across a bunch of 78s, including Frankie Lymon and “Hound Dog,” and I had a case made and sent them to him.
We had an upbeat relationship that was based around stupidity and silliness. It was always like that, and that’s what we provided, fun in each other’s lives. So it never occurred to me to ask questions about his family, as it seemed intrusive. And not what we were about. He never asked me about family life either. Everything was at face value. But David was a born performer. That was the drive, the ambition. He wanted to express himself. We drifted apart for a while when we went to different schools. George and David were art school boys, whereas I went to a secondary modern. I was a mod. I would go up to the West End, get some purple hearts, go to the Scene, the Flamingo, Discotheque. Whereas George and David were on the fringes, going to jazz clubs. We always stayed in contact but then reconnected when we were living in the same area around South Kensington in the ’60s. I suppose we were pseudo-French then, trousers with turn-ups, brogues, and bikes with an engine on the front wheel.
DAVID BOWIE: My cousin Kristina was a huge Fats Domino fan and had “Blueberry Hill” and I had Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” and we did a trade because I preferred the sound of that. What I liked about it was that I couldn’t understand the lyrics and that really made an impression on me—there was some secret information there that I didn’t have. I think that’s been something that’s been important to me ever since. It was [Little Richard’s] sax lineup he had behind him that impressed me more than anything else, because I’d only heard the saxophone through my brother’s records as being a jazz thing and that was too complicated for me. I was always very vain. I always liked clothes a lot, I guess it was my way of confirming I had a personality, not really being sure if I did or didn’t. If you wore clothes of a certain nature you automatically were a personality because clothes maketh men, but going up [to London] on the train there was a guy with makeup on and he was a mod. He wore eye shadow and he looked rather peculiar and I thought he looked rather good. One of my keenest memories of the Marquee club in the mid-’60s is having a permanent erection because there were so many fantastic girls coming over from Europe. All these Swedish girls were flocking to London to come and get an R&B star, so you grew your hair really long and hoped that they recognized you as [the Yardbirds’] Keith Relf—I made a better Keith Relf than Brian Jones. Anyway I hung out with Jonesy a few times and he was too short and fat.
KRISTINA AMADEUS: I don’t remember him being worried about being lower middle class. His father was from a very affluent family who were partners in the Public Benefit Boot Company. He went to a good public school and inherited money when he came of age. David’s grandfather was killed at the end of World War I and his wife died the following year, so John inherited from both his parents and his own grandfather. But David did, like Jagger, adopt an almost Cockney accent for a while because it was trendy.
DAVID BOWIE: Elvis had the choreography, he had a way of looking at the world that was totally original, totally naïve, and totally available as a blueprint. Who wouldn’t want to copy Elvis? Elvis had it all. It wasn’t just the music that was interesting, it was everything else. And he had a lot of everything else. (There was once talk between our offices that I should be introduced to Elvis and maybe start working with him in a production-writer capacity, but it never came to pass. I would have loved working with him. God, I would have adored it. He did send me a note once: “All the best and have a great tour.”)
GEORGE UNDERWOOD: I was nine at the time, and I was enrolling for the cub scouts in Bromley, the 18th Bromley Cub Pack, and David was enrolling on the same day. He’d lived in Brixton, near Stockwell, until he was six, so had only been in the area a few years. We immediately started talking, and the subject was mostly music—what we were listening to on the radio, how much we liked Lonnie Donegan, et cetera. We went to Bognor Regis camping with the cubs, and then when we went to the Isle of Wight David took a tea-chest bass and I took a ukulele. That was our first public performance, round the campfire. There was a café not too far away, with a jukebox, and “Tom Hark,” which was number one at the time, and “All I Have to Do Is Dream” by the Everly Brothers were both on the jukebox and I remember us harmonizing to them. Then we both went to Bromley Technical High School, after we did our eleven plus. One day David asked me if I wanted to see the Cisco Kid. His father organized celebrities to entertain the kids, and he’d arranged for the Cisco Kid to come and perform for them. At the time he was quite a popular TV cowboy, and of course he was from America, which gave him a lot of kudos. Both David and I loved anything from America, especially the music. So we went down to see him, and there he was in all his regalia, in his black-and-silver suit. His real name was Duncan Ronaldo, and he had this short, stubby guy who used to follow him around, a sidekick who was about twenty years older than him called Pancho, played by Leo Carrillo. And after we’d chatted to the Cisco Kid for a while, he leaned in and whispered to us, and, in a strong Mexican accent, said, “He is the real Cisco Kid.” We all thought he was a fictional character, but it stuck with us. David actually wrote to the American embassy, saying how much he loved American culture and American football and could they let him know if anything interesting was going on in London. He really loved American football. David could become an expert on something very quickly and then turn round and dismiss it a couple of weeks later. So they invited him to go up to the embassy and he asked me to go with him. They presented him with a set of shoulder pads, a helmet, and a ball. We were photographed for the Bromley & Kentish Times. David loved all that. We also joined the Bluejays, which was a baseball team who played in Beckenham Place Park. He loved all the paraphernalia, all the dressing up. David was a faddist, and that was another one of his fads.
My first gig was Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the Elephant & Castle Trocadero. It was the first gig of his UK tour, March 1, 1958, in the largest cinema in Britain, and I think David was a bit jealous that I’d gone. I got his autograph, and the rest of the band, and I came to school the next day and I was really proud of it, but David didn’t like it. He was more of a Little Richard fan, but he didn’t like the fact I’d got there first. I remember coming home and telling my mum it was the best day of my life. And she said, “Do you wanna cup of tea before you go to bed?” When Buddy Holly died the following February, I didn’t want to go to school, as I was so upset. David and a guy called Peter Hamilton clubbed together to buy me a bar of chocolate to try and make me feel better.
A little bit later we went to see Little Richard together, at the Woolwich Granada I think, and Sam Cooke was on the same bill. In the audience was Gene Vincent, who wasn’t allowed onstage because of some contractual agreement. Sounds Incorporated were backing everyone, and at one point the emcee came out and said, “We’ve got an unexpected guest who’s going to come out and do a number for us now, so please welcome Mr. Gene Vincent!” So he stood on the side of the stage and performed “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” When Little Richard was performing, we thought he’d had a heart attack. We were only six or seven rows back from the stage and saw everything really close up. He did this amazing thing where he stood on this white grand piano, and then started to make groaning sounds and holding his heart. David and I both looked at each other and wondered what was going on, and thought we were about to watch Little Richard die. David was always prone to exaggeration, and he started saying that Little Richard was going to die. So he fell onto the stage, lying there with the microphone right by his side. Then the emcee came on and asked if there was a doctor in the house, and then we noticed that all of the musicians had started to go back to their instruments, and all of a sudden Little Richard lifted his head up and shouted “Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom!” and the crowd went mad. David was flabbergasted, and he obviously never forgot it. What stagecraft. David loved oddities, loved people who were somehow different. Who else would champion the Legendary Stardust Cowboy?
I bought an electric guitar and started to play it, and I was in a little band in Orpington with the son of a friend of my dad’s. And then David started to take an interest, as we talked about it all the time. We were always singing at school, doing harmonies and whatnot. Whenever there was a wet break—when it was raining and you weren’t allowed to go outside—we’d get our guitars out and start singing. Peter Frampton would join in too. He was only in the first year and we were in the fifth, but he was good. This is when I hit David in the eye. It was coming up to David’s fifteenth birthday, and we both sort of liked the same girl, Carol Goldsmith. I invited her to a party, and David got absolutely drunk, but I stayed sober and asked Carol out, and she said, “Yes, next Wednesday at the youth club.” David was a competitive sort, and he was furious. On the day, he phoned me and said, “She doesn’t want to go out with you; she asked me to tell you.” I thought, Oh well, but went out anyway, and another friend said, “You’re late. Carol waited and then left.” David’s call was complete rubbish, and when I later heard him boasting about how he’d got off with her, I saw red. I hit him. I didn’t know until a week later that he’d been rushed to hospital, so I went to see him and said, “It’s not worth it over a girl,” and we stayed friends. Just before we left school, a career person came along, and we’d line up and [she’d] ask us what we wanted to be when we left. People said, well, I’m going to work in my dad’s firm, or I want to be a bus driver or whatever. And then there’s David, who’s right in front of me in the queue, and said to this woman, “I want to be a saxophonist in a modern jazz quartet.” And I burst out laughing.
DAVID BOWIE: Some of the earliest music that I remember having an effect on me was ska and Blue Beat, those kind of musics. I had a brother, a half-brother, Terry, who was a jazz and soul fan and he would bring home albums by Tony Bennett, he was his favorite. He always thought Tony Bennett was better than Frank Sinatra; I think he was probably right actually. Looking back I think Bennett was actually quite a master. [Rock and roll] definitely represented a lifestyle, along with the celluloid images of people like James Dean and Monty Clift and Brando and clothes that had flecks in the material; we didn’t have much of that in England. It was a new kind of language or culture and the only way that you could really receive it at the time was either Radio Luxembourg or the American Forces Network, which was sort of one of those under the sheets and listening to the top ten once a week. It was doled out in such small doses it seems to me unless you found a café with a jukebox. When you feel that you are privy to secret information it always becomes so much more personalized. So Little Richard was really the one because he was the first one that I actually saw perform. My mother took me to see, at my insistence, Jukebox Jamboree it was called over here. He had one song in that and then he had another in Rock! Rock! Rock!, and it was the sax lineup that he had behind him which impressed me more than anything else because I had only heard the saxophone through my brother’s records as being a sort of jazz thing, and it was too complicated for me. I didn’t get it, but hearing it pump just sort of…well it made me ask my father if he’d loan me the money to buy a saxophone—he bought me a saxophone and I paid him back with pocket money from a meat round that I had to get on Saturdays so I could afford to pay him back, which I did reluctantly eventually.
PETER FRAMPTON (CHILDHOOD FRIEND): I actually saw Dave about a year before I went to Bromley Technical High School, in 1961. He was in a band called the Kon-Rads at that stage, playing sax and singing, basically the front man. They were doing low-level gigs, like playing at schools and open-air fetes, raising money for the school, or the RSPCA, or whatever. I first saw him on the steps of the school. My dad and mum took me there on the weekend, and this band were playing at the entrance, the Kon-Rads. Dave was singing everything from Elvis Presley songs to playing instrumentals on the sax. Dave was great. I soon got to know him and his closest friend, George Underwood. They were very close. I got to know them through my dad, because before I went to the school I asked him who was into rock and roll, and who played guitar. And my dad said, “Well, I think that Jones and Underwood are pretty much into that.” So I made a beeline for both of them, and ended up jamming with them on the art block stairs. My dad would hide the guitars in the office that we’d brought to school, and at lunchtime we’d get them out and that was when I learned my first Eddie Cochran song, “C’mon Everybody,” which was taught to me by David.
HANIF KUREISHI (AUTHOR AND PLAYWRIGHT): David started to explore London, traveling all over the city, and became great friends with Marc Bolan, even though they came from different parts of the city. As well as stealing clothes from Carnaby Street they used to do painting and decorating together.
RICHARD YOUNG (PHOTOGRAPHER): I grew up in Stamford Hill in north London, and went to a really rough, tumbly secondary modern school in Stoke Newington High Street called William Wordsworth. It was horrible. My best friend at school was Mark Feld, and we were inseparable. We used to sit next to each other, play together, bunk off school together. He used to come to school in handmade suits, handmade shoes, handmade shirts. This was 1961, ’62. I knew he was going to be famous, and he did, when he became Marc Bolan. We both got expelled on the same day for the same reason. We both got caught for the umpteenth time on a Friday afternoon because we didn’t want to go and play with the other haddocks—that’s what Mark called the other kids at the school—on a really muddy playing field in Dagenham. There was a really long coach drive to Dagenham, and we’d shoot off into Soho instead. At the time Mark and I started going to a club in Princes Street, just off Regent Street called Le Bataclan, where all the French au pair girls went to, all the ones who worked for the nice Jewish families in St. John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage. They played the most incredible music, all soul and R&B. And one night I was down there I met this guy called Geoff MacCormack, and we were both into the same kind of music—blues, soul, early Motown, Mary Wells, James Brown, things like that. He was a very good-looking boy. And his friend was this guy called David, who was also into the music, really into it. He was always dancing with the au pair girls, who always took us back to their houses because they were empty, because the families who owned them had other houses elsewhere in the country, elsewhere in the world, maybe in the Caribbean come wintertime. Geoff lived with his mum down in Blackheath, and I used to go down there some Sunday afternoons to listen to records—Stax, Chess, blues, and soul. And David used to join us. We used to sit on the carpet together, eating cheese sandwiches and cakes and tea or coffee, whatever Geoff’s mum was making. David was already trying to be a singer, but he usually just sat there listening to the records.
Mark, myself, and David were all the same age. Mark once told me that the name Bolan came from two names: “Bo” for Bowie, and “lan” from Dylan. I’m not sure if this is true, but after all Bowie was the godfather of Marc’s son Rolan. They were very competitive but they were very good friends to each other. He wasn’t like Marc in those days, who always had a great dress sense. Marc was in Man About Town magazine, and was always considered to be a bit of a face, in three-piece suits and leather waistcoats. With Bowie you could tell that all he was interested in was music and fashion, music and fashion. He was in [the boutiques] John Michael, then John Stephen, then Vince, then Hung On You. He’d go to the Giaconda Coffee Bar, the Ship, the Edwardian pub. Both Marc and David would pick up rubbish bags of clothes behind the shops in Carnaby Street.
DAVID BOWIE: There were two sets of mods in England, there were the mods that happened around ’61 out of the modernists who were the spin-off from the Kennedy thing. That was really the first teenage fashion that was relevant to my lot—the Kennedy look, and from that developed this Italian thing with the shorter hair and the Italian suits, mods with their fluorescent socks and their ankle swingers [trousers that] came about three inches above the ankle. And short jackets that were worn about fourteen to fifteen inches from the nape of the neck to the small of the back, and again I got my father to advance me the money to buy a suit from Burtons. I chose a very nice dark-green tweed with the fourteen-inch bum-freezer jacket. Going to work when I first left school, I worked in an advertising agency in London. I was what was called pompously a Junior Visualizer, which meant in between making the tea I would do paste-up jobs for adverts for the newspapers. One of our products was AYDS Slimming Biscuit. Going up on the train [to London] there was a guy that had makeup on, I think his name was Michael, and he was a mod. I’d never seen that before; I’d seen the clothes, but he wore eye shadow and I thought that was really peculiar and I thought it looked rather good. Then I found out that up in London all the mods wore makeup. This is the first bunch of mods. Later on of course they became the mods that wore the anoraks and had the Lambrettas, but I was no longer a mod by then.
[When you come from] suburbia you find yourself in the middle of two worlds. There’s the extreme values of people who grow up in the countryside and the very urban feel of the city, and in suburbia you’re given the impression that nothing culturally belongs to you, that you are sort of in this wasteland. I think there is a passion for most people, a sort of curiosity about them to escape and get out and try and find who one is and find some kind of roots, and both of us got out for the same reasons, exactly that, the desperation and exhaustion with the blandness of where we grew up. So many of the people that I knew at the time were either artists [who became] musicians, or musicians who became artists. Everybody went to St. Martins or Sidcup or something and my stream at school went to this place called Bromley Tech. We were lucky enough to have a master called Owen Frampton, who was Peter Frampton’s father, and…he was quite an innovative guy inasmuch as he developed the first art course for ten-year-olds upwards, so it was sort of pre–art school art school, so the bulk of our day was preparing us for the art world. Some of us who were greedier than others like myself went straight from school to a job rather than go to art school because we wanted to get the readies as fast as possible. The trouble is you ended up in an agency.
Anyway, in the evening I was playing also with several bands playing saxophone. I found that I could make just about the same amount of money by playing sax in the evening as I was getting during the day.
PETER FRAMPTON: When I went to Bromley Tech in 1962, I realized how well loved my father was as a teacher. And David loved my dad’s course. I’m not privy to the relationship that David had with his own father, but I don’t think it was that great. That’s all I know. But I know that he kinda had more of a relationship with my dad. They had a very strong relationship. He looked up to him, respected him.
MARY LOVETT (TEENAGE FRIEND): David was just always a part of our group somehow. I grew up in West Wickham, so I hung around in Bromley and Beckenham, and my first husband was Peter Frampton. Peter and I used to meet after school. So, David was always a part of his history, and mine. He and his friend George Underwood were just always there somehow. Beckenham was very affluent; it had been built as an upper Victorian suburb I believe, and a lot of the roads were still unmade-up as they would have been for horses and carriages. In fact, the road that David lived on was unmade-up. The house that he lived in was one of those huge, old, redbrick houses. Beckenham was still quite upper class, I suppose, in a way, but Bromley was very working class.
My lovely father-in-law, Owen Frampton, although he had a wicked sense of humor, was rather strict in a way—quite military. It’s funny to even imagine him teaching David, but Owen obviously sensed a talent and had a sense of humor about his students. He was the one who told Peter about David and kind of put them together. There were a lot of little bands in that area at that time and they were kind of school bands. There was a sort of circuit of gigs in our area and amazing people played them and I know that David played them too. There was a little church hall on my road, Gates Green Road, called the Assembly Rooms, where we had our Youth Fellowship and I know David played there. And another church hall called Justin Hall in West Wickham, which almost all the bands played. The Beatles were responsible for so many people’s lives changing and they certainly were for mine. When I was at Beckenham Grammar School, I started listening to Radio Luxembourg and heard the Beatles, Buddy Holly, and everyone else. I started meeting local musicians, and one of them was Peter Frampton. He was fourteen when we met. He was at school with David, although he had to change schools because his father taught there, and it was too uncomfortable for him. So, David lived in Bromley and there was a really good gig called Bromley Court Hotel that everyone played at, including Jimi Hendrix and Spencer Davis, the Yardbirds and Graham Bond. Really amazing bands. So good, and it had a stage that was about this high off the ground, so you were standing so close. Peter and I would go there a lot. It was fantastic and I just became completely enthralled with the music scene and it was amazing in that area. Then Peter joined the Herd, and David was on the periphery for a while, until Peter formed Humble Pie and David started opening the show for them. David was very arty at the time, like Marc Bolan, and I’m not sure any of us quite understood what he was doing.
OWEN FRAMPTON (TEACHER): Whatever the necessary ingredients are to produce vintage school years, they must have been mixed in exactly the right proportions in the years 1960–66. He [Bowie] was quite unpredictable. He was completely misunderstood by most of my teaching colleagues, but in those days cults were unfashionable and David, by the age of fourteen, was already a cult figure. At this point in my teaching career, I was thoroughly used to individualistic pupils and was rarely surprised by anything that happened. Even when David varied the color of his hair or cropped it short, or plucked his eyebrows, I accepted his actions as a means of projecting his personality, and of that he had plenty!
HANIF KUREISHI: I went to Bromley Tech, seven years behind David, from 1966 to 1970. It was during a time of the so-called Bromley contingent, along with Billy Idol and Siouxsie Sioux. We were really influenced by semi-decadent things like Cabaret, and Bowie was this ruling god. He was a figurehead for us. He was feminine, extreme, dressed-up. He was a local hero, and played some of the local pubs and clubs, and was a really big deal to us. There was a picture of him in school, and the teachers would say, “If you don’t behave yourself, Kureishi, you’ll end up like him.” He liberated all suburban teenagers. So I think he knew about publicity and PR and how he appeared when he was dressing up and being photographed and all that. He looked great with his hair and suit on and all that. He always had a strong sense of that. It was a standard shit school and we were considered to be no-hopers—we were bums. We were lucky if we got a job in the civil service or in insurance—we were lower middle class, H. G. Wells clerks. But the idea that someone like us from round the corner could become a rock star was very inspirational. It was quite creative down there in Bromley, despite the utter boredom and awfulness of the suburbs. It was Sunday night in the rain waiting at the bus stop. But actually everyone had underground records, they had clothes.
PETER FRAMPTON: When you’re three years apart in your very early teens, twelve and fifteen, it might as well be “I’m two and he’s sixty.” Because you usually hang with your age group. But the thing that kept us close together was the music. Anything at the school that was to do with music, I was part of, as was David. My father encouraged us. At the end of my only year at the school, we grew closer because my dad put on an end-of-year concert for the school and another for the parents, so there was a show during the day and one at night. There were a lot of different performers on the show, and the headline act was George and the Dragons, which was George Underwood and Dave and a drummer and possibly a keyboard player. They didn’t have a bass player and my band—the Little Ravens, named after Ravens Wood School—didn’t have a drummer, so we shared. We were the support act, although I even played with the lost property lady; we sang “There’s a Hole in My Bucket.”
GEORGE UNDERWOOD: When I got a job as a singer with the Kon-Rads, I’d go to school with big black rings under my eyes because I hadn’t got to bed before two or three o’clock in the morning. I was only fifteen. David had just started to play the sax, so I asked him to come along and meet the guys. So he joined the Kon-Rads and I left soon after, even though they still had my amplifier.
David always used to get these fabulous records from Dobell’s on the Charing Cross Road. There was a guy at David’s agency who was a bit of muso who used to ask David to go and get records for him, and David was like a kid in a sweet shop. Dr. John. Charlie Mingus. Bob Dylan. And then John Lee Hooker. He had a great style. Quite simple, not too many changes, but really raw. Authentic. We both tried so hard to emulate his sound, and after a while we thought we should try and play it live. So we found a drummer, and performed under the name the Hooker Brothers. I think we only did two gigs, and one was at the Bromley Court Hotel, in the interval between Mike Cotton Sounds’ set. And Mike Cotton came up to us afterwards and said, “That’s brave.” Very unusual, anyway, two young white kids singing about the blues. We didn’t know. Then we had a few more stabs at groups before David found something in the classified section of the Melody Maker, where you went if you were looking for singers or musicians. He’d been looking in the paper, and had seen an ad for a band who were looking for a singer, and they were based in Fulham. Which was a long way from Bromley. So he asked me to go with him. It turned out to be the King Bees, and we started rehearsing together. I was still at the art school and David was still at the ad agency, although David started saying that he wanted to pursue music, that music was going to be his thing. He wanted to be professional. The dynamic in the King Bees was fine, but it turned into David and me against the others, because I don’t think they were into the blues as much as we were. Everyone was into the blues at that time, I know, but the lead guitarist was a bit too Chet Atkins; it wasn’t raw enough.
David wrote to the entrepreneur John Bloom, who was the Alan Sugar of his day, and in the letter—which David’s father helped write—David said, “Brian Epstein’s got the Beatles, you need us…” or something precocious like that. And lo and behold a few days later we got a telegram asking us to go to a meeting with a show-business manager called Leslie Conn, who Bloom had passed the letter on to. So we went down to see him in this little office in Soho, and we took our equipment and played “Got My Mojo Workin’.” I don’t think he was into the music but he thought there was something there, and asked us to come round and play at a friend’s flat and do the same sort of thing again. It was an opulent house somewhere in Golders Green. Then we played at John Bloom’s wedding anniversary in the basement of a restaurant in Soho. A group called the Naturals were also playing, and they were like a Beatles tribute band, and the crowd thought they were very acceptable. But then we came on with our scruffy jeans and long hair and they didn’t like us too much. I remember Adam Faith was in the crowd, as well as Shirley Bassey, Roger Moore, and Vera Lynn. We played “Got My Mojo Workin’ ” and various other Muddy Waters songs and we came off with our tails between our legs. David actually burst out crying. That was his first professional disappointment. After that we did Ready Steady Go, and I remember dancing with Patti Boyd. That was the night the Animals played “House of the Rising Sun” live, because up until that night everyone had been miming. Lo and behold the band in the next dressing room to us was the Crickets, who had just come off a plane from the US. And then next door to them was John Lee Hooker. David came in and said, “You’ll never believe who’s down the corridor!” He told me to go and look at his hands, and so I did. And they were amazing. He used to work in a steel mill, and they were very long and elegant, worn, and he had this amazing technique where his little finger would almost go down the fret board. He had a huge span. Only David would have noticed that. He was always good at finding things. People say he was a magpie, and he was, but he always made that thing he stole his own.
DANA GILLESPIE (GIRLFRIEND): When I was thirteen or fourteen I discovered the joys of the blues, and so would regularly go down to the Marquee in Soho whenever someone interesting was playing. It was easy to get in in those days. I saw the High Numbers, who later became the Who, the Yardbirds, anyone playing blues or R&B. One night the King Bees were playing, and David came onstage looking like Robin Hood, with thigh-length suede fringed boots, and flowing lemon-yellow hair. It was the first time I’d see them. After the set, I was standing at the back of the club brushing my hair, and this guy came up from behind and took the hairbrush and started brushing it for me. And then he asked if he could come home with me. So, one thing led to another and I said yes, and we walked home. Of course I soon realized that one of the reasons he wanted to come and stay was that the trains didn’t run all the way to Bromley that night….My quarters were on the top floor, so I brought him up to the top floor….I don’t need to tell you what went on that night, but we were very young. The next morning I had to take him downstairs and he met my parents on the landing because their bedroom was two floors below. And my father said that he thought it was a girl coming down from the top floor. Because in those days no one had seen such long hair. From then on he would come round all the time, and he would stay over and creep upstairs past my parents’ bedroom.
Bowie’s determination to flout convention, even the relatively recent convention of the pop orthodoxy, was evident even then. Stella Patton, one of the Kon-Rads’ backing singers, says, “I could always remember David as being difficult. The band all wore the same clothes, but he didn’t like that. He always had an exercise book with him and he would always be scribbling, writing down lyrics.” His sexuality, at least his interpretation of it, started to manifest itself too. “I remember him saying he was bisexual,” says Kon-Rads’ guitarist Alan Dodds. “But I have to say there was absolutely no evidence for that. I think he was just up for anything that was a bit different.” It was a perception that was to stick. “We thought Marc Bolan was gay, we thought David Bowie was gay,” the Who’s Pete Townshend said once. “We thought all the cool people were gay.”
GEORGE UNDERWOOD: The King Bees ended when David turned up one day and said he’d got another band. He’d been rehearsing with another band and had decided it was time to move on. I’d heard that [the producer] Mickie Most was looking for a solo artist, and he recorded me under the name Calvin James, as Calvin was the name of his new son. When David found out, he was really pissed off that I’d jumped through all the hoops and somehow got a record deal. He thought it should have been his. Suddenly I was at the top, and this was the thing he was desperate to do. He said it was unfair as I always had my art to fall back on, yet for him it was everything. Anyway we had a huge row and we didn’t see each other for a while. As it was it didn’t work out and I did go back to my art. David went on to the Mannish Boys, the Lower Third, and the rest. The next time I saw him was at the Dominion when he was doing all the mime stuff, and he was great. By that time he had hooked up with his manager Ken Pitt, and had started to become very effeminate. I thought he’d turned slightly. He was mixing with very theatrical people at the time. He was fine with me because as he was very competitive, he liked the fact I was no longer in the business. I wouldn’t say he was ambitious so much, he just had this zest for life, a zest for music. It was like a worm, an itch you have to scratch. When he joined the Kon-Rads I could tell that he was determined. I think he almost dreamed it before he did it. It was a dream that came true. And as he went on, everything he did had roots back to the ’60s.
PAUL REEVES (CHILDHOOD FRIEND): I knew him as Bromley Dave, as that is where we were both from. I first met him in 1965, when we all used to congregate in the record store inside Medhurst’s, the department store in Bromley. I always liked him and knew he had talent, but I have to say we all thought that George Underwood was the one who was going to be the big rock star. I thought David was a bit of a dilettante, dabbling in any kind of pop that came along. He was interested in being a crooner, an entertainer, and you could tell that when he started making records like “The Laughing Gnome.” George was my friend, and he was sulkingly good-looking, and when he got signed by Mickie Most we all thought that George would be the one that would really make it big.
NICK KENT (JOURNALIST): The first time I ever saw Bowie was in 1964, when he was the leader of the longhair brigade. I must have been thirteen years old, and he was seventeen. Bowie was the founder of “The Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men” and he was on the Tonight show on television to argue his case to a presenter who had suggested that longhaired men looked just like women. He was funny. He said, “For the last two years we’ve had comments like ‘Darlin’!’ and ‘Can I carry your handbag?’ thrown at us.” You could tell it was a bit of a put-on, but I remember thinking, Now, this fellow we’ll probably be seeing again. It wasn’t a good show and he was rather shallow, and it wasn’t a great first introduction to David Bowie, but that’s where it started. Then you started to read about him in the music press, throughout the ’60s. David Bowie was always going to be the next big thing. At the end of every year, all the music papers would make their predictions for the coming year, and they invariably said that next year was going to be David Bowie’s year, and it never was. They said he was just too talented and too good-looking not to make it. So he became a known quantity. He was someone who was very promising.
BERNARD GLAZIER (NEIGHBOR): In 1964, I was living at Grove Park and had recently started working in advertising. One morning this lad about my age got in my carriage at Grove Park station, two stops up-line from Bromley North. His name was David Jones. He was carrying what looked like a saxophone case, and I had a guitar with me—so we talked about music and the world of design and advertising in which he was also employed as a junior. We met quite a few times like that—he seemed a rather quiet, enigmatic lad. One morning, three lads I vaguely knew from the Downham estate got into our carriage and started to take the piss out of David’s somewhat “gentle” appearance. After a bit of persuasion, I managed to convince them he was “OK” and they backed off. They were not nice people. Shortly after that I moved and no longer used that train. I forgot all about David Jones.
DANA GILLESPIE: I went once to his parents’ place, as he asked me to go there and meet them, in Bromley. I was thirteen or fourteen, just after we met. And I go there and they’re in this tiny little working-class house, and I’ve never seen a house like this before. I walk in and the parents are sitting there and there’s a television blasting away in the corner, and nobody spoke. I think we had little tuna sandwiches. I came from a house where everyone chatted away and had a lot of social intercourse, but his parents didn’t say anything. It was a really cold house, a very chilly atmosphere. It was a tiny little house, the smallest I’d ever been in. Our house in South Kensington was enormous, but this looked like everything had been squeezed into it. I could immediately tell that David didn’t really like living at home. He was uncomfortable during the entire visit. When his parents went out, David said to me, “I want to get out of here. I have to get out of here. I want to go up in the world.” So he went up in the world….He was ambitious from an early age, but then he had the talent. He had great interest in so many things.
MICK ROCK (PHOTOGRAPHER): David didn’t really talk about his brother. You could say that he went through life looking for people to replace his brother, although he probably knew he couldn’t really replace him. He obviously loved him. But David was light, not dark. He was so, so positive.
CHRIS CHARLESWORTH (JOURNALIST): There were always rumors about David’s half-brother, but the truth didn’t really come out until the Peter and Leni Gillman Alias book was published in the mid-’80s. It gave a detailed account of the schizophrenia in the family, and David absolutely hated that book. He thought it was all behind him, but they dredged everything up.
HUGH PADGHAM (PRODUCER): I think he was embarrassed by his brother.
MICK GARSON (PIANIST): He talked about his brother a little, as he was worried that he might have that potential gene, and that he could go off the rails the same way. Maybe it was true, but he just channeled whatever it was into a different direction. He probably had a genetic disposition. But he loved his brother. He expressed guilt, but he didn’t go into it in any great detail. You could just tell that it was hurting him. It was delicate. He talked to me, as I had my own spiritual pursuit. Kindness, connection. He said that in this lifetime he wasn’t going to pursue that spirituality, as his life—this life—was based on his fame and his career and he was going to see it out. He absolutely knew he had more than one life.
DAVID BOWIE: 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 of the family, there were too many suicides for my liking—that was something I was terribly fearful of. 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 always be throwing it off.
OLIVER JAMES (PSYCHOLOGIST): His mother’s curse was part of the family folklore, like we all have folklore in our family, and Margaret used to talk about it all the time. It even had a name: Margaret’s curse. But what interested me about the relationship between [his brother] Terry and Margaret and Bowie’s father was that he was such a good example of how schizophrenia is caused without anyone being actually sexually abused or physically abused, although he was a little bit, but primarily emotionally abused. It is fair to say that Margaret was good with babies, and she couldn’t stand them after that. Simply put, David developed differently than his brother because he was nurtured as a child, whereas Terry wasn’t.
He possibly had guilt about not making more of an effort to protect Terry. Later in life, when Terry was incarcerated in Cane Hill, he didn’t go to the hospital to meet him until his mother grassed him up. Terry was an important person, there’s not a question about that, in his childhood, and in his teenage years, and he was a very cool guy. Him being cool helped Bowie to develop his own cool. I guess he would have felt guilt about the favoritism from his father, because as Terry had a different father, David’s father didn’t want Terry in the house. David was certainly the chosen one. So he must have felt guilt, as he was treated better, he was loved, and he appeared to have some control over his life, at least to a certain extent. His mother was vain and she encouraged the same in him. He was very preoccupied with his looks from a young age, and you can see he got that from his mother. But I wonder how much he knew about his mother’s past. She messed around, and I wonder how much she told him about that. He presumably knew about Terry’s father at some point because Terry had a picture of him. Maybe she used to brag, maybe she wanted to show Bowie what a goer she’d been in her youth. Either way, David’s father was horrid to Terry because he represented Jack Rosenberg, his father.
David was someone who was capable of presenting tremendous charm, and it’s absolutely staggering that long before he was famous, people would get the impression of meeting someone very, very special, someone with a very special connection. And he could only have achieved that by putting on a face, which is something he learned to do as a child, at home. He presented himself as someone feeling different emotions to the emotions he actually was feeling. He obviously got a great deal of pleasure from his sex life, and he wanted to have a relationship with each individual woman; he didn’t just want to have sex with them. I think he enjoyed the experience of seduction. My friend who did the V&A exhibition, Victoria Broakes, said that after meeting him she couldn’t remember anything he said, so in a way he trained himself to be effectively invisible.
HANIF KUREISHI: He talked about his brother quite a lot. He was really quite interested in that side of the family, the schizophrenic side, and the fact that his mum had had two previous children. He’d obviously had quite a strange life as a child because his mother had had two previous children who she had in a sense lost. She was living with David and his dad. And his dad worked for an organization that looked after lost children. I often wonder what it was like. Terry had quite an influence on him in terms of things like he gave him books and introduced him to American culture and jazz and the Beats. It must have been very puzzling for David as a child, having this mad brother and the lost sister. I remember him talking about being introduced at a young age to [John] Coltrane by his brother, and not understanding it but thinking it was something good to know. I always got the sense that he couldn’t quite work out the Terry element of his life. He found it confusing. He 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. And I’ve often wondered if the whole alien thing didn’t come from that. Someone who is sort of slightly to one side who doesn’t quite get what’s going on. He always wrote in character, even in the early days. He wasn’t a great polemicist. There weren’t narratives. Sometimes when I spoke to him 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. You probably wouldn’t call that madness really, but there’s a sense of sort of solipsism. But as you know on the other hand he was incredibly together, organized, busy, interested…so you wouldn’t say that he was psychotic or disturbed in any way that disabled him. His mother must have been quite disturbed, to have lost two children, and one of them’s schizophrenic. She’s going to be quite creeped out, isn’t she? He said he came from a cold family and yet he did have that feeling of specialness about himself. Of being a very loved child. He didn’t seem like an unloved child to me. You didn’t think, Oh, he’s been pissed about by his parents.
DANA GILLESPIE: People would say to me, “Ooh, you’re dating David Bowie!” But it wasn’t just the sex, we were just really good friends, and it was more of a musical relationship. He would play my guitar, or listen to my songs, and play me his. I was also learning the drums then. I went to a very upmarket day school in Sloane Square, and he’d come to pick me up and walk me home, carrying my ballet pumps for me. He did the same thing when I moved to a stage school, the Arts Educational, at Hyde Park Corner. I used to go with him to Ready Steady Go, where we’d hang out in the green room. They had dancers on the show, so we used to do that too. When I started getting serious about recording, he suggested a song called “Love Is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, and sang the bass line—I’ll always remember that. I never thought that we were just boy- and girlfriend and that we were going out. From an early age I never felt that musicians kind of fit into normal boy/girl relationships, especially not the young ones. Fidelity is not the type of thing you would expect from a musician, especially from a front man or a male lead guitarist. It goes with the territory. So I came into the relationship with my eyes open, even at that young age.
PAUL SMITH (FASHION DESIGNER): When I was eighteen I got myself a car, a 1945 Morris Minor, and I started driving down to London at the weekends. I don’t know how, but I got to know a lot of interesting people quite quickly. It was a very exciting time. I met Tommy Roberts and Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart and Jimmy Page, all these amazing people in the early stages of their career. We’d drive down to Soho, and Bowie was always around. He was everywhere. There were a lot of scene-y people, and there were still a lot of mods about, but Bowie was everywhere. There was always a group of people who never rated him because of his interest in dressing up. He was a bit theatrical for everyday guys. They had mixed feelings about the theatrical aspect. They liked the music very much, but a lot of people who were more about blues thought it was not about the music, it was something else, but of course it was. It was self-expression.
DAVID BOWIE: I don’t think I would have had the strength of mind at the time to want to go out and just sing my songs straight off. For me, it was always about developing an interesting character.
SIMON NAPIER-BELL (MANAGER): Since the mid-’60s I’d been aware of a chap called David Jones who was hustling round town trying to find the right group and image for himself. He had an unsuccessful single out, “The Laughing Gnome.” Then he started studying mime with Lindsay Kemp and changed his name from Jones to Bowie, on one occasion appearing as a mime act supporting Marc Bolan when Marc was still performing acoustically as Tyrannosaurus Rex. But to me David was just someone on the scene rather than an actual pop star. I was phoned one day by someone I didn’t know, who introduced himself as a manager with a hot act. This was Ralph Horton, who was managing David Bowie and the Lower Third. Horton said he needed an established co-manager to work with him to realize the act’s potential. I went to meet him at his flat in Pimlico. In the corner of the room there was a not particularly attractive young man who I’d never seen before. Ralph introduced him as David and said he was going to be a superstar. He said if I agreed to jointly manage, I could have sex with him. The sheer sleaziness of the proposal (not to mention the grubbiness of the flat in which the proposal was being made) was enough to make me run—which I did. As far as I was concerned, I was never offered a 50 percent share of Bowie’s management (nor a taste of his sexual favors) but simply asked to take on a total unknown (called David Jones) whose current manager seemed to be little more than a pimp. Later, of course, Bowie moved his management to Ken Pitt. I often wondered if Horton made the same offer to him, and whether that was the basis for the change of management. When Ralph Horton suggested the deal, Bowie didn’t exactly interrupt to stop him. So presumably he was in on what was being offered.
DAVID ARDEN: My family used to make fun of everyone at the time—cripples, Jews, everybody, that’s just the way we were. We were in the music business. It was protection in a way. And the Old Man [Don Arden] always used to call Ken Pitt the accountant, because that’s what he was like, very straight. He wasn’t rock and roll at all, he wasn’t even music hall. He was the accountant, a bit of a makeweight, an average man.
DAVID BOWIE: Even when I was struggling in the ’60s, before I had any success, even before I had had a hit record, I wanted to chop and change and do different things. In those days I was trying to find a voice, trying to find something that worked with people who were buying records, but it was always about change. I wanted to express myself, and who can express themselves if they just do the same thing all the time? Everyone back then was trying to do something different, so why would you want to do something different and then just repeat it, because then you’d be just like everyone else. And I never wanted to be like everyone else. I think back to some of the material I recorded before “Space Oddity” and I know it doesn’t fit in with the whole narrative of what I do, but if you look at it through my eyes then it absolutely does, because I was exploring a mainstream, almost music-hall stream of work. I was being a song-and-dance man, and I wanted to compete with the Sinatras and the Anthony Newleys of this world. I covered a lot of standards at the time because I wanted to learn how I could do it better than anyone else.
TIM HOLLIER (MUSICIAN): Eventually David needed a manager that would take him to the next level, and so he hired Ken Pitt, who was very old-school. He moved into Pitt’s flat in Manchester Street in June 1967, and started writing novelty songs about bombardiers and gnomes. David used to say to me, “I’ve got to go and see David Essex tonight, even though I don’t want to, I’ve got to. And I’ve got to see Cliff Richard….” Ken Pitt was sending him to these shows to learn the trade, to learn the stagecraft. So he spent six months just concentrating on what he was going to do next, independently of Ken Pitt. I respected the fact Ken was trying to make David a performer, but David didn’t like doing it.
KEN PITT (BOWIE’S MANAGER): Initially I thought that David was someone who could be groomed. I first saw him down the Marquee, and just loved the way he moved onstage. His songs were actually very good, really outstanding for someone of his age.
WENDY LEIGH: Ken Pitt was in love with David. I don’t think the affair was ever consummated, and Ken never said it was, but Ken was madly in love with him and David used that. David could make people fall in love with him. David used to walk around naked in front of Ken when they were living together, so he was almost goading him. The persona that David liked to adopt was the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, with a little bit of little boy lost. He did have an amazing body, very lithe with these amazing hips, and incredible skin, and David worked it. David was Ken’s boy, or at least he always thought so. David even went to see Ken just before Ken died. I would be very surprised if he didn’t help Ken financially. He only walked away from people when it was cold-blooded professionalism, but he didn’t walk away from people he liked. The only one he really walked away from is Mick Ronson. David was a bit sociopathic, but then aren’t all stars?
HARVEY GOLDSMITH (PROMOTER): Ken Pitt was quite a character. He was flamboyant, an old-fashioned showbiz character, a bit vicious when he needed to be. Essentially he was in the crossover theatrical world. He and Ken Pitt were like chalk and cheese. He wanted to turn Bowie into a light entertainer, as he didn’t really know anything else, and didn’t understand the rock and roll world. He could handle Manfred Mann or Tommy Steele, Anthony Newley or Cliff Richard, but not someone like David Bowie.
WENDY LEIGH: Bowie was a voiceprint of Anthony Newley, Anthony Newley’s double really. And Newley was furious.
SIMON NAPIER-BELL: Ken Pitt wasn’t exactly a white-hot manipulator, but he was a pleasant enough man, and had managed a hit act before [Manfred Mann]. He knew about PR and probably taught Bowie a bit, and maybe helped him financially too. But Bowie was always going to be the type of artist who moved from person to person to get what he needed most at any one time. At the time he moved to Ken Pitt, Pitt was obviously a step up the ladder from Ralph Horton, his previous manager.
KEN PITT: My mind naturally keeps going back to that time in the Marquee club when I saw this David Jones and his band the Lower Third—and you find the dreams getting all mixed up with the hard facts.
When I started with him he knew nothing about the media. He’s got to take the credit because he had a lot of natural charm. One lady who fell for him was Penny Valentine, and also George Tremlett [both journalists]. It got around amongst journalists that he was a very bright boy, a lot of fun to interview. I certainly gave him advice from the very beginning. He was anxious about what to say. I would tell him exactly what the interviewer’s interests were, and I told him that whatever you do, don’t argue, don’t get into a heated conversation. I never put him up to saying anything that wasn’t true. I told him you’ve got to try to anticipate the interviewer, tell him or her what they want to hear, and adopt a different style according to the different types of media. I would never sit in on an interview. He’s interesting to talk to and he gives interesting answers to questions. I think the reason why David managed to maintain a good relationship with the media was his ability to reinvent himself. He was never boring.
PETER FRAMPTON: By 1966, I was in the Herd, just starting out. And I remember David saying that he was watching Top of the Pops one evening and did a double-take—“Hold on, that’s Peter! And why isn’t he at school?” So in that respect I beat him on TV, whereas George Underwood beat us both as he was on Thank Your Lucky Stars, produced by Mickie Most, when he was only fifteen. David at that point was still doing Davy Jones and the Night Timers, and Davy Jones and the Lower Third, and then as soon as Davy Jones and the Monkees came out, he changed his name to David Bowie.
TOMMY HILFIGER (FASHION DESIGNER): He told me that the real reason he changed his name to David Bowie wasn’t anything to do with Davy Jones. He said it was the New Musical Express starting to call Mick “Jagger Dagger.” He said if he can be Jagger Dagger then I can be David Bowie, like the Bowie knife.
DAVID BOWIE: There is an energy about London that never died away, something about the extraordinary mix of people here. I felt it growing up, especially in the ’60s, when I was trying to get a foothold as a performer, and I feel it whenever I perform here. London is in a perpetual cycle of reinvention, which means as an artist you can never take it for granted, as the people who like you can be very demanding. When I was writing about the London experience, it was easy to hold a mirror up to what was going on, as I was there myself, trying to get involved.
DANA GILLESPIE: He would go down to Carnaby Street and get himself kitted out in a fancy outfit, because he was very into his image. You would never see him walking around like a slob. He didn’t do slob. We would sit in the Gioconda café in Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street, having a cup of tea or showing off. That was the place you would go if you wanted something like a backing singer or a bass guitarist. One time he rushed in and grabbed me by the hand and took me round the corner to Francis Day and Hunter, which was a music store back then, grabbed me into a tiny booth and said, “Listen to this, it’s my first single.” And of course it was “I Pity the Fool,” which I really liked, and then on the flip side “Take My Tip.” Because I lived in the same place for so many years, David used to often come over. One night he rang up and said, “I’ve just written a song, I’m coming over in half an hour.” And half an hour later he was at my front door, and I was there with the photographer Gered Mankowitz, and Gered and I listened to him sing the first version of “Space Oddity.” In the early days, before “The Laughing Gnome” or “Space Oddity,” he had been very theatrical, especially when he was with Lindsay Kemp. I couldn’t have said he was a great lead guitarist because he wasn’t, but he was a good strummer, and things went on in his head that he was able to articulate to people around him. And that is an art in itself. Because he knew exactly what he wanted. He was a great leader.
JULIEN TEMPLE (DIRECTOR): The ’60s were a very difficult time for David because he was in the middle of all this frenetic activity, yet he wasn’t part of it. It was as though his face was pushed up against the glass, and he could see what was going on but couldn’t join in. He saw it all happening right before his eyes but he wasn’t there. It was a decade of constant frustration for him as nothing he tried, worked. He was reinventing himself every eighteen months in an attempt to get some attention and yet nothing he did appeared to work in any meaningful way. He was an artist, only one who hadn’t yet found the right way to express himself.
JASON HELLER (WRITER AT PITCHFORK): Science-fiction legend Robert Heinlein’s Starman Jones was published in 1953, when Jones was six years old, and the sci-fi-loving English lad who would grow up to become David Bowie considered it a favorite. Surely he was captivated by the fact that the story’s astronautical hero shared his last name—and that, with a bit of imagination, he might someday become his own kind of Starman Jones.
During the formative years of the mid-’60s, Bowie was the front man of a short-lived group named the Lower Third. And that rock band incorporated an odd choice of song into their repertoire: “Mars, the Bringer of War,” a movement from The Planets, the orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst. The suite was known to British audiences of Bowie’s generation primarily from its use as the theme to the popular Quatermass science-fiction serials produced by the BBC in the ’50s. Bowie was a huge fan of Quatermass, once admitting that as a boy he would watch it “from behind the sofa when my parents thought I had gone to bed. After each episode I would tiptoe back to my bedroom rigid with fear, so powerful did the action seem to me.”
As the amphetamine-fueled mod scene morphed into the acid-fueled psychedelic scene, London became the laboratory in which Bowie began conducting experiments of his own—ones that sought to transmute science fiction and fantasy into the sounds of popular music. Like most of his pre–“Space Oddity” output, Bowie’s 1967 song “Karma Man” made little impact on the public consciousness. The song, however, vividly depicts a tattooed man whose elaborate body art tells wondrous and hideous tales….Nineteen sixty-seven also saw the release of “The Laughing Gnome,” a novelty single that’s been dismissed by many Bowie fans as fluff. It’s a curious song, a pastiche of singer Anthony Newley’s silly, music-hall style, sped-up voices, and a bizarre, retro-Victorian vibe. But it also taps into a newfound cultural fascination with mythic creatures like gnomes, elves, and goblins, thanks in large part to a late-’60s resurgence of interest in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, originally published in the mid-’50s, as well as its predecessor, 1937’s The Hobbit. But unlike the earnest appropriation of hobbits and elves that had begun to pop up in folk and progressive rock in the late ’60s, Bowie’s emerging style pointed more toward the future rather than the past. And not in an optimistic way.
PAUL MCCARTNEY (MUSICIAN): I have fond memories of David in the ’60s where I used to live in London, and still live actually. And I was bachelor free then. And it was a bit like a salon in my house; anyone could drop in. Just to hang out. Anyway there was this young boy lying about, hanging around outside, and I said, “Come on in then.” I invited everyone in. And it was a guy in a floppy cap, with curly hair. And I said who are you, and he said David Jones, Davy Jones. And he had a demo for me. He played me the demo, and I thought, That’s really good. I must admit I thought his voice was a little like Anthony Newley, with the same kind of similarities, you know. But I thought he was great—a very personable, cool guy. I wished him well.
BOB HARRIS (DJ): I had moved to London in 1966, as I was absolutely fascinated by the whole atmosphere of the city at that time, and the whole counterculture, as it was bursting into color. By 1968 I was an aspiring broadcaster and journalist, and along with Tony Elliott had just launched Time Out magazine. At the weekend I was also going regularly to an underground venue called Middle Earth in Covent Garden. This was an all-nighter, and was the first time I saw David perform, in a mixed-media group called Feathers, with Hermione Farthingale and Tony Hutchinson. I think Marc Bolan introduced us, as I was hanging out with Marc a lot at the time at Trident Studios, where Tony Visconti was producing Tyrannosaurus Rex. David of course then began to work with Visconti, which is where I started seeing him. David was around a lot, and we started spending so much time together that my first wife and I invited him over to our flat for supper. And he came over, but as he had been working on a film [Virgin Soldiers], he’d just had a short back and sides. It really did look so funny seeing him at the time, because the whole fashion was for long hair. He was charming, very polite, and very English. Very gentlemanly. One of the common ground points for us was Anthony Newley, because Newley was such a hero of David’s. And those records that Newley was making in the early ’60s, like “Strawberry Fair,” were incredibly influential for David. He really loved the theatrical aspect of “What Kind of Fool Am I” and the novelty of “That Noise,” which was a single of Newley’s that was a big hit. But you listen to those records, and you compare them to, say, “The Laughing Gnome,” and you can draw an absolute straight line from one to the other. I remember those early conversations with David, exploring our record collections, and of course Newley was writ large.
As Terry was eleven years older than his half-brother, he would show David around London—when he was around himself, that is—introducing him to the dive bars and flesh pots of the West End, immersing him in the world of jazz. He wasn’t around much, but when he was, he was the dominant sibling. As a way to reciprocate, in February 1967, Bowie took Terry to his first rock concert, to see Cream at the Bromel Club in Bromley. The rock world was alien to Terry, and the gig had a colossal effect on him. They were walking home and suddenly Terry started behaving in an extremely strange fashion; it was as though he were having a vision. He saw the road opening up. He saw fire in the cracks in the road, and he went down onto all fours, trying to hold the road, saying that he was being sucked off into the skies from the Earth. Bowie had never seen anyone in that kind of metaphysical change before, and it scared the hell out of him.
These attacks would happen again. Chislehurst Caves are not far from Bromley. Cut from Cretaceous chalk, they were apparently built by the Druids, at least according to legend. During the First World War they were used to store ammunition, and during the Second World War used as an air-raid shelter—a big one. By the ’60s, bands had started performing there, flattered by the fact that they were actually “underground.” Siouxsie Sioux, who hailed from Bromley, said they used to freak her out. “They were very dangerous,” she says. “They used to cordon off bits you couldn’t go down. Kids would sometimes go down there and get caved in.” This is where Terry Burns ended up one day in 1967, when he turned up at his aunt Pat’s house in Bromley, where he was living, only to find that they’d suddenly moved to Australia. As he tended to go AWOL, Pat and her husband had no way of letting him know. So he went wandering, ending up in the caves, where he stayed for eight days straight. When the police eventually found him he was taken briefly to David’s home before being taken back to Cane Hill Asylum, a place that would become something of a home away from home.
TONY VISCONTI (PRODUCER): The first time I met David was late in 1967 and he was a young songwriter signed to the publishing company that I worked for in London. My boss, David Platz [who ran an independent production company], said you seem to have a knack for working with weird artists…and he used that word exactly…“weird.” And he said, I’ll play another artist you might enjoy working with, and then he played me some music by a twenty-year-old David Bowie. He played me the first album David had just made for Deram—there was a song on there called “Uncle Arthur” and another called “Mr. Gravedigger”—they all had very silly titles, but it was really cool and I said he’s great. I said he’s really talented but he’s all over the place, he doesn’t write in any particular style. And my boss said that’s the problem. “If you work with him, could you get him to write in one style?” I said I would have a go, as I really liked him. David was actually in the next room, and so my boss opened the door and there was the young twenty-year-old David Bowie. He knew all about me and he was prepared to meet me, so we had a lovely first meeting. We spoke for hours in the office and then spent the day together. We talked about his music and what we liked, and we were both drawn towards the same artists at the time, underground music like Frank Zappa….We were both big Zappa fans and we were talking about films that we liked, and anything that was from far away and anything that was black and white and made in France or Czechoslovakia or Germany and all that, so we had a lot in common. The office closed, and it was a beautiful autumn day so we decided to go for a walk. We walked from Oxford Street to the King’s Road. It was quite a long walk, and then we saw that the cinema there was playing the latest Roman Polanski film, Knife in the Water, and we went in and watched it. First day. So it ended at like nine in the evening. We said good night to each other, and we became good friends immediately. We really enjoyed each other’s company.
LINDSAY KEMP (MIME ARTIST): It was 1967. I was performing in a show called Clowns at a little theater, sadly no longer here, off St. Martins Lane in Covent Garden. It could only fit about fifty but we squeezed about a hundred in. We did very good business. My agency used to get me the occasional gig as a warm-up mime act to rock bands at the time. They were also helping David find some work, and one of the girls in the office said I should listen to his record. So they gave me a copy of his first LP [David Bowie]. I took it home and fell in love with him before I’d even met him. He looked very nice on the cover. Very pretty, very lovely. The next night I played one of the tracks on the record, “When I Live My Dream,” before the show started, and that night the secretary actually brought David along to see the show. She was a mutual friend but I think he was probably going out with her. He went out with most people. And she said to him, “You’re going to love Lindsay Kemp.” He was pleased to hear his record played, as very few people had heard it; no one was buying his music at that time. And of course David loved me too. It was love at first sight really. He came backstage after the show and was enchanted by it, by my world, by the Pierrot Harlequin, the backstage dramas that the show was about. It was a commedia dell’arte musical, a sort of backstage circus with songs. The show was very much inspired by Picasso’s early paintings of the blue and pink period, of the hungry harlequins and Pierrot and their families and so on. When he knocked on my dressing-room door it was like the archangel Gabriel standing there. He was in a beam of light, glowing, I mean beautiful. It was love at first sight. I can see him standing there now, shining. I was like the Virgin Mary. I didn’t fall onto my knees at that time; the dressing room was too crowded. He asked if he could come and study with me. That’s all we talked about. In a few words, he just asked if I could teach him. I said yes of course, let’s talk about it, come and see me tomorrow. So he visited me at my flat in Bateman Street in Soho. We chatted about our mutual passions for the musical and certain singers and music and so on. Jacques Brel, French singers like Catherine Sauvage, the theatre. The next day he began doing classes with me at the Covent Garden Dance Centre. He was a very promising student, very diligent. Much fancied by all the women in the class, especially when doing the improvisations. They took every opportunity to jump on him and start rolling around with him on the floor. He was attractive to men and women. He was charming, and beautiful on the outside. He was very charismatic and very humorous. I think his humor as well as his beauty attracted so many people to him. In those classes I can say that I taught him to dance and I taught him how to communicate, how to express himself through his body, mostly through improvisations. Then within hours after the class we spent that evening together in my flat in Soho and we mucked about a little. That’s when we consummated our relationship. If David was nineteen when I met him, I was nine years older. He was considering giving up music altogether and going out to a monastery on the borders of Scotland. He had been studying Buddhism very seriously for a few years. He really thought that music had given him up. He wasn’t getting anywhere when I met him. He was working in an advertising office doing mostly photocopying. He became my muse. For Pierrot in Turquoise he was very beautiful. He played a balladeer called Cloud. So he drifted on and off the stage like he drifted in and out of my flat on Bateman Street. He drifted in and out of different rows in that little show. He was a great inspiration. I don’t think his love was as deep as mine. We split for a few months while he went on to do various gigs organized by Ken Pitt, but we continued to meet up. He stayed over occasionally in Soho and we created this little Pierrot show in December 1967 at the Oxford Playhouse, which then went on to the Mercury Theatre in London. It was a very big success.
There were always lots of other women. He was very sneaky. He was even having an affair with a girl called Natasha, who was one of my costume designers that I didn’t find out about for ages. I really don’t blame him for that, for having others on the side. He made no commitment to me; we weren’t married or engaged. We were once at this little theater in Whitehaven, and we had beautiful rooms in a farm near the theater. We nicknamed it Jollity Farm but it turned out to be far from jolly, needless to say. I climbed into my four-poster bed whilst David was having a shower and I waited and waited. And I thought, What is he up to? And so reluctantly I fell asleep. Then I woke up and I heard noises, coming through the walls. Oh! Groans! Sighs! Oh God, I thought I would die. From the room of my best friend Natasha! I hovered outside her door for a few moments. Oh, it was awful. It was the most painful experience of my life. I wanted to end it. We had the premiere of the show the following evening. I couldn’t bear it, I didn’t want to live. So I ran out into the freezing cold weather and I decided I wanted to run out into the sea. The sea was too far away, however. So I thought, OK I’ll get a bicycle and I’ll bicycle into the sea. But it was hell, it was so cold. I had seen this in a movie, in The 400 Blows or something. I thought, Oh, that’s a lovely way to end it…to bicycle into the sea and disappear forever. But I didn’t have a bicycle and it was too cold and the tide was out. So instead I scratched my wrist. But not very deeply and I was found later that morning slumped on the floor of my dressing room. I remember coming round and hearing sacred music and thinking: “I’ve made it!” But then I realized it was the piano at the start of the show. I was taken to Whitehaven Hospital, where the doctors gave me a plaster and they told me not to be so daft. The show opened that night and the plaster came unstuck from my wrist and the blood started seeping into the white silk of my Pierrot costume. It was all very, very dramatic. That night David couldn’t go to my room, and Natasha was rattling a bottle of sleeping pills and so the poor fellow ended up sleeping in a chair in a freezing cold hallway.
PETER FRAMPTON: When I left the Herd I joined Humble Pie with Steve Marriott, as we both wanted to be in a band where we played music, rather than just being screamed at. Humble Pie’s first package tour was called Changes ’69, and our special guest was David, and while we were on the tour, he suddenly became famous, as “Space Oddity” went to number one, and “Natural Born Boogie,” our record, was number two. We were traveling in Andrew Oldham’s Rolls-Royce Phantom 5, and unfortunately they all smoked hash, and I didn’t, at that point. I caught up later. I’d done it a couple of times and it made me feel sick. One day we’re driving up to a gig in Birmingham, and they’re all smoking and I’m going green in the backseat. So when we arrived at the venue I was just about to pass out, and I remember David saying, “What the hell have you done to him?” I passed out in Dana Gillespie’s breasts. David was always looking after me, and he became my elder brother at that point. He was like my stepbrother. I remember the day I showed my dad the cover of Hunky Dory, and he just went, “Oh my God.” He didn’t quite get it, but he respected him for doing it. We would crisscross the globe and bump into each other during the ’70s. I bumped into David when I was making my first solo album, Wind of Change, in 1972, at Olympic Studios in Barnes, while he was there producing “All The Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople, and we would speak on the phone a lot. I was in Australia after my car accident in 1978 [Frampton was nearly killed when he was involved in a crash in the Bahamas], and I wanted to get out onto the road to prove that I could still do it, which was obviously a down period for me. David was there at the same time, and reached out to me, coming to see me at the hotel in Sydney. He said that I shouldn’t be on the road yet, and that I should still be recuperating. He was always looking after me, always wanted to know how my family was doing, how my dad was.