TONY ZANETTA: The retirement happened for a variety of reasons. Number one: we couldn’t get the dates for tour three. Number two: everybody was exhausted, shattered. Number three: the publishing glitch, and David not wanting to give any more money away. He was already starting to have problems with Tony Defries, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. Which is why he did Pin Ups, which had no original songs on it. So it was a perfect time to take a break and regroup.
TONY PARSONS: I think he stopped Ziggy when he did because the reality of fame was more than he could handle. He had wanted it all his life, and had tried to get it for over a decade, but when it finally came it frightened the living daylights out of him. I remember the Earls Court gig, when he came out in the Japanese robe as the music from A Clockwork Orange came blasting out, there were all these Australians taking their clothes off and getting in fights and vomiting on girls in the front row—[this was when Australians could still afford to live in Earls Court, that is]. And the reality for Bowie was that he couldn’t contain it anymore. He was owned by everyone. You always see that, when it’s not your private property anymore, when suddenly you’ve seen the Jam on Top of the Pops, or the Clash play in a stadium, or David Bowie at Earls Court, it’s not him talking to you in your bedroom anymore, it’s an industry. And I think he recoiled from that. Because he was big, a big star, and people were ready for something new, ready for the new thing, and he was so flash—everything was choreographed, everything was thought about, everything looked great and the songs were great, and he looked great. And so it went into the mainstream, and he had an aversion to the mainstream. He’d been poor, and he’d been ripped off, and he wanted to be successful, but the reality was too much for him. He was a very astute businessman at the end, and I think that was very important to him; he saw that as an expression of love, making money for your family and providing for them after you’ve gone. He was like Sinatra, in that he was an artist, but he knew when he needed to replenish the coffers. I think a lot of the gigs that I really loved were when he needed the money. When he wanted hit records, he got in Nile Rodgers, and said, “I want you to do what you do.” And Nile said, “I’m going to make that funky,” and Bowie’d say, “No, make hits.” He knew he wanted hits, he knew he needed hits. And I think because Bowie had been so badly managed, he managed his own career brilliantly, he knew the moves he had to make. These very high-end compilations, his hands are all over them. So I think he liked success, but he didn’t like the dumbness.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: The retirement wasn’t a real retirement, because he went straight off to France to cut Pin Ups, and then he did the 1984 Floor Show. The reason he got rid of the Spiders was because he was going in a soul direction and he didn’t think they would be comfortable with it.
With Diamond Dogs it was almost him saying I can make a rough rocking guitar album without Ronno. Mick felt he’d been betrayed and hung out to dry with the solo thing, which he didn’t want to do. It wasn’t really his idea. It wasn’t that he couldn’t cope with the musical challenges, but psychologically Mick was totally unsuited to that role. He was one of the greatest second bananas in the business. He was a great problem solver. Bowie decides at eleven p.m. that he wants a string quartet on a particular song the next day in the studio, and so Mick stays up all night with a bottle of wine and some spliff and does the charts for the arrangement. He was always throwing his coat over puddles. A genuinely sweet man. But the retirement was all about a new chapter.
JUSTIN DE VILLENEUVE (MANAGER): Twiggy and I were no longer a couple but I was still managing her. We were staying in the Hotel Bel-Air in L.A., as we were in California talking to studios and agents and having a high old time. Peter Frampton, who I had known for ages, asked me if I’d heard Aladdin Sane by David Bowie. I wasn’t really aware of his music at the time, but he’d referred to Twiggy as “Twig the Wonder Kid” on the album, and as soon as I heard it I knew he was something special. You could tell immediately that he was at the top of his game.
Bowie wanted to meet Twiggy, and we wanted to meet him, so I arranged for them to see each other. Bowie really wanted to be on the cover of Vogue, as it was one of the magazine covers he hadn’t appeared on. Vogue had never had a man and a woman on the cover before and I thought it would be a great coup to have both him and Twiggy on the cover. I knew Bea Miller, the editor, and Barney Wan, the art director, so I called them up and off we went. I wasn’t strictly a photographer, in fact at that time I wasn’t a photographer at all, but I’d seen a lot of snappers take pictures of Twigs, and I thought it couldn’t actually be that difficult. And it wasn’t.
Twigs and I flew to Paris because Bowie was in France, at the Château d’Hérouville, the Honky Chateau, recording Pin Ups. Vogue booked the studio, and all of us converged there. We had a huge entourage—I even had a butler at the time, I’m ashamed to say, as did Bowie. The thing is, Twiggy and I had just come back from a holiday in Bermuda, and so we were both incredibly tanned. And so the picture looked ridiculous, as Twiggy was completely brown, brown as a berry, and he was snow white, deathly white. When he took his shirt off I was actually quite taken aback by how pale he was. He was like a sheet. He really was the Thin White Duke. So the lovely Pierre La Roche worked wonders. I’d always been obsessed by masks, as people do interesting things when they have a mask on. So I asked Pierre to give them both masks, and it was perfect. They both look oddly enigmatic. The cover picture was actually the very first frame I took. I did a couple of Polaroids and then just stormed into it. They got on brilliantly, and it clicked. Thing is, it wasn’t until I looked at Bowie through the lens that I realized he had different colored eyes. He did have an aura about him, something you could never quite put your finger on. He was always surrounded by lovely-looking girls, wherever you saw him. Girls everywhere. That always made me very intrigued.
I knew Vogue was going to love the picture, but a few days after the shoot Bowie called up and asked if he could use it for his album cover. I asked him how much it was going to sell, and he thought about it for a while and then said, “Well, probably about a million.” So I said to Twigs, “Well, I think he can have it then.” Vogue was furious, and Barney didn’t talk to me for ages. In fact no one from Vogue ever talked to me again. Twiggy and I were in L.A. a few months later and we were driving down Sunset Boulevard and we saw the cover on a huge billboard, and I turned to Twiggy and said, I think we made the right decision. It sounds silly but I have to say it was one of the most glorious moments of my career.
To this day, so many people think it’s Angie on the cover. The first pressing of the album had a beautiful inner sleeve with all the credits on, which I thought was very slick at the time, but every pressing after that was just a plain inner sleeve, and as they didn’t reprint the cover, there were no credits on it. So not only did they not know I’d taken the photograph, but no one knew it was Twiggy either. But the cover made perfect sense as Pin Ups was an homage to the ’60s, all David’s favorite records from ’64 to ’67, and Twiggy was the face of the ’60s. Bowie looked brilliant at the time, as he got all his clothes from City Lights, which was run by my old friend Tommy Roberts. It’s a shame that we didn’t get the Vogue cover, but years later I saw a copy with Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson on the cover, so they got their double act after all.
TOMMY ROBERTS (DESIGNER): City Lights Studio in Covent Garden was always my favorite shop, more so than Mr. Freedom or Practical Styling, my other shops, because I actually liked the clothes. It never made any money but all the pop stars at the time came in—Bryan Ferry, Bowie. Angela Bowie started coming in before her husband, and she was always picking out things for him as well as stuff for herself. She’d always pick up a suit or jacket for him. The suit he wore on the cover of Pin Ups was one of ours, and when people got wind that we’d made it, all these kids started coming into the shop. After that, whenever any of them pointed to something and asked if Bowie had worn it I automatically said yes. Why wouldn’t I? By then he was already a cult.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: Bowie championed the power of the imagination in rock music, and almost gave his audiences permission to unleash their own imaginations. Not in the same way as the Beatles in their psychedelic phase, or Dylan with his literary influences, that weird mixture of French symbolist poets and dustbowl folkies. Bowie championed the power of the imagination. He took his time, he tried a lot of different things, and flitted from one thing to another, but he always picked something up and took it with him to his next destination. He had a lot of resources, almost handpicked from all the places he’d visited. Even “The Laughing Gnome,” which everyone laughs at, quite rightly, because it’s not nearly as good a kid’s song as “Yellow Submarine,” had vari-speed voices, which he would use to far more serious and chilling effect in things like “The Bewlay Brothers” or “Fame.” On the version of “See Emily Play” on Pin Ups he uses vari-speed voices incredibly impressively. I actually saw him putting down the backing vocals in the studio. He sang one part, and the engineer Ken Scott asked if he wanted to hear it back and he said, “No, just set me up another track.” And then he put another vocal down. And then he said, “I want this to be speeded up.” And then he sang the third track and asked for it to be slowed down a certain amount, and then he sang the fourth one. He sang all four parts without hearing any of it back and then said, “Right, play them back to me.” And it was absolutely perfect. He was an absolute maestro in the studio, both as a singer and as a producer, and also as a visionary who obviously had to imagine it and hear it in his head before any of it was actually put down on tape. It was just bam, bam, bam, bam. Perfect. No fucking about, boy, it was there. The man knew what he was doing. Remember the coke blowout was still a year or two away, and all he seemed to be doing at this time was having a couple of drinks and the odd spliff. There was no serious dopery going on.
MARIANNE FAITHFULL (SINGER): He was actually on the first tour I did, in 1965. He was called David Jones then and he was at the bottom of the bill. I remember the Hollies and Freddie and the Dreamers and all sorts of other funny people, but I don’t remember David at all. I only really became aware of him when he did Pin Ups. I got rather interested in him then because he did some beautiful versions of a lot of ’60s songs. That’s when I got to know him, and I liked him very much, I could see how clever he was. When we did The 1980 Floor Show, I thought the costumes were amazing but I thought it was all a bit frightening in all honesty. I thought it was very sweet of him to ask me to be on the show, and I was happy to be there, and to be doing it with him, but I just found it a bit weird. I think he just liked me, and I certainly liked him. I first met him in a very sort of non-weird place in the studio when he was making Pin Ups. He was just very good, very professional, beautiful, very good voice I thought. He actually had lots of different voices. I liked the voice he used on “Sorrow”—which was just gorgeous—not the Anthony Newley voice. In the studio I just watched him work, as I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to say anything. Then we slowly became friends. In the beginning I went for lunch with him and his wife Angela, which was frightening as they were both putting on an act, and putting on the style, as you might say. I went with [old boyfriend] Oliver Musker, just the four of us, with them putting on an act. That’s what they did, especially Angela. I think they both decided to sort of be like that. It must have worked, but it didn’t really work on me. David wasn’t being himself. Certainly Angela wasn’t being herself, whatever herself is I have no idea. [With them] it was that sort of first love, and they seemed very close but their relationship obviously did deteriorate, because of infidelity and drugs and orgies, things like that. I didn’t want anything to do with all that. I kind of stayed out of it. I’d had enough of that kind of shit in the ’60s. I didn’t like it in the ’60s and I wasn’t going to start liking it then. We sort of lost contact after Oakley Street. I expect I was sort of getting into drugs too, you know, and he was, and maybe I don’t really remember. I’m not sure if my drug thing really coincided with his. You know, he didn’t want me around anyway in that period. I didn’t fit in. He was on his trip, with all his friends. Angela wasn’t really my cup of tea, and as for the androgynous thing, it wasn’t a new thing at all. It was just like Keith [Richards] wearing eye makeup and Brian [Jones] dressing up like Anita [Pallenberg].
In her autobiography, Marianne says she and Musker spent a lot of time with David and Angie at this point, especially in Oakley Street. “One night we were all a bit drunk at David’s house and David began coming on to me. We went into the corridor. I unzipped his trousers. I was trying to give him a blow job, but David was scared to death of Oliver.” So scared that he couldn’t perform.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: On October 20, 1973, I was at the taping of The 1980 Floor Show at the Marquee, and I remember marveling at Bowie’s ability to switch his charisma on and off: he could enter a crowded room, full of people for whom he was the focus of attention, and not be noticed until he was ready to be noticed. A little while later I was attending an industry lunch at which Bowie was being presented with about a zillion gold and silver discs, and ended up at the house he was then renting in Cheyne Walk, a few doors down from Mick Jagger’s place, where Bowie played me some extracts from his current work-in-progress, which turned out to be Diamond Dogs. I was wearing a promo T-shirt for one of Bowie’s contemporaries, and Bowie was mildly offended. “He’s a real cunt,” he said, “and one day I’ll tell you why.”
AVA CHERRY: All his team thought that I was going to be someone that he’s having a fling with and it would be over in a couple of weeks. Everybody underestimated me. Angie obviously didn’t like the fact that I was sticking around. After I moved into Oakley Street she used to scream, “I don’t want her in my house, I don’t want her in my house!” He was giving me a lot of attention and affection but she should never have agreed to me staying in her house. It just seemed so stupid to me. But she was so sure that I was just going to be a flash in the pan that that’s what she did. Mick Jagger knew David, and I was friends with both of them. So all three of us used to hang out a lot, and yes we did have some fun together. We were staying at the Sherry-Netherland one night in New York, where David had given a party for Rudolph Nureyev. At the end of the party, everyone was gone apart from me and David and Mick, so it just ended up with the three of us sleeping together. That was it. And we had a wonderful time, and we had a lot of fun.
NINA SIMONE (MUSICIAN): [When we met in New York in July 1974] he said, “The first thing I want you to know is that you’re not crazy—don’t let anybody tell you you’re crazy, because where you’re coming from, there are very few of us out there.” He looked just like Charlie Chaplin, a clown suit, a big black hat. He told me that he was not a gifted singer and he knew it. He said, “What’s wrong with you is you were gifted—you have to play. Your genius overshadows the money, and you don’t know what to do to get your money, whereas I wasn’t a genius, but I planned, I wanted to be a rock and roll singer and I just got the right formula.” He [had] more sense than anybody I’ve ever known. It’s not human—David [wasn’t] from here.
KEVIN ARMSTRONG (MUSICIAN): Tony Defries I think did a lot of damage with Bowie’s finances. He was a sort of bloodsucker.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: Bowie had everything under control apart from the fact that he had the worst deal in the world with his manager Defries. The deal was reportedly, we split everything fifty-fifty. Even by the standards of independent black record companies of the ’40s and ’50s, that’s outrageous. It shows you how desperate Bowie was to make it, and how confident he was that he was going to make it this time, that he accepted the terms. He was prepared to sign away virtually all of the income from what he was doing in order to get over and make the impact.
SIMON NAPIER-BELL: Bowie and Tony Defries obviously helped each other move up a step in the industry, but Defries would never have become a top manager without Bowie, whereas Bowie obviously had the thrust and ruthlessness to keep pushing his way to the top one way or another. I would say Tony Defries’s success was all down to Bowie.
NICK KENT: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and Mott the Hoople were all signed to MainMan, and they realized quite quickly that Tony Defries was only interested in Bowie, and while he may have been ostensibly looking after them, through MainMan, he was only interested in protecting Bowie. He saw Bowie as his Elvis and just saw the others as afterthoughts, as Carl Perkins. Bowie was the only star. Bowie had cracked the mainstream, and Iggy and Lou Reed never did. There were times when Iggy was in a bad way and he would reach out to Bowie, and there was always a connection between them, a respect and genuine affection. Bowie didn’t have that for other people. Bowie genuinely loved Iggy, but then Iggy is very lovable. He had an unlovable side, but he was lovable too. When Iggy was in the Stooges he was the general of his own army, but when he went to work for David Bowie he was the lone soldier on the hill, standing with mercenaries.
WENDY LEIGH: Tony Defries was very good for David. He really moved him on. David learned a lot from Defries.
TONY ZANETTA: Defries was a real businessman, whereas David didn’t know a thing about it. It was all Chinese to David. Tony Defries was totally a force for good, he was fantastic. He had told David not to worry about money. He might also have said sign on the dotted line, but the dotted line wasn’t that different from what a lot of other artists signed with a lot of other managers. He said, don’t worry, you don’t have to have a side job, I’ll pay your bills, and I’m going to get you a fantastic record deal and make you a star. If you had that kind of ambition and someone came along and told you that, you’d think, Oh, that sounds good. Someone who was interested in your every move, who discussed every move you made, who never got bored with any of your nonsense or personal problems or overdraft, and who was always there for you. This was who Tony Defries was. They discussed every part of David’s career step by step by step. Nothing was not discussed to the nth degree. This is what I stepped into. Tony Defries started coming to New York by himself. As David wasn’t signed to RCA UK but RCA global, it gave Defries more leverage. He was signed to the mother company. And every time he came to New York he called me. You know, to basically do errands. We became closer and closer and closer, and I looked forward to his visits. I could always do with the hundred or two hundred bucks he would throw my way. He would also listen to what I had to say, which no one had ever done before.
In the beginning David talked about his brother a lot. In the early days of the Warwick Hotel in New York he talked about his family, as his cousin Kristina was living there. She was a little older. Her mother I think had been institutionalized. They were close because they had been close as children. She was his main link to the family. According to him everyone was schizophrenic—the sisters, the aunts were crazy; the brother was schizophrenic; there was a lot of madness in the family. The undercurrent to that was, I’m mad, I’m insane, and this is my way out of it. After a while it wasn’t really spoken of, so much, but it was always there. His personality definitely became erratic as the Ziggy thing took over him and it took over all of us. In some way we all became Ziggy, even after David dropped him. It was kinda neurotic. We started to treat him like an object, not like David Bowie the person. He was David the star, and his peculiarities were definitely indulged. So he could be tense, he could be this, that, or the other thing, and it was just part of the package. David was really wild at the time.
ANGIE BOWIE: The orgies we had in London tended to be just me, David, and one other person. The most charming orgy description I’ve ever had was by Lindsay Kemp. “I seem to remember that I was the ham in that sandwich!”
WENDY LEIGH: I knew Angie and I didn’t like Angie. I thought she was a confection. She was too much, and perhaps too little as well. She was always very mannered, always doing a bad am-dram performance, always needing to be the center of attention, always needing everyone in the room to take notice of her. She was frightfully self-inflated. I had lunch with Angie and her friend Vicki Hodge in Casserole in the Kings Road one day in 1974 and went back to their house in Oakley Street for coffee. I was interviewing her for a book I was writing called Speaking Frankly, about what really happens in bed, and she was telling me about how much sex she was having. She was brazen about it. I remember thinking at the time that anyone who married Angie was going through the door to a place near the wilder shores of sexual experimentation. David definitely fell into bad hands. I’m sure she taught him a trick or two, but she was too much, too flamboyant.
David and Angie presided over her own personal Sodom and Gomorrah, the focal point of which was “The Pit,” a fur-covered bed in the sitting room, where, in front of a series of audiences, who generally ended up participating themselves, everyone had sex. Seriously, it was like a sexual cocoon. Vicki said that David and Angie used to have the most amazing orgies at Oakley Street. She even told me that her boyfriend, the gangster John Bindon, saw Mick Jagger having sex with Angie while David watched. Bindon was later employed as security on one of David’s tours, but at this pit he was treated like a freak because of his huge member. Angie gave a very good impression of proudly saying that they were both in an open marriage, but secretly she was incredibly jealous of all the people David was sleeping with. She was possessive and she didn’t actually want to be in that situation. She just went along with it.
A bodyguard, small-time actor, and sometime gangster, Bindon became notorious not just for his antics (in 1978 he was famously acquitted of the brutal murder of underworld figure John Darke at the Ranelagh Yacht Club, in Fulham, even though Bindon had administered the stabbing), but also for his affair with Princess Margaret, a shocking liaison that would have serious ramifications for both of them. But while his film parts are largely forgotten, and his thuggery appreciated only by his biographers, it’s his prowess in the bedroom that still captures people’s imagination. Two things set Bindon apart from your average petty criminal. The first was his ability to ingratiate himself with pretty much anyone he met and, rather more impressively, his twelve-inch penis. His member was almost certainly what made him attractive to Princess Margaret, who used to “entertain” Bindon both at her home in Kensington Palace in London, and also at her holiday home in Mustique (he was photographed with her on a beach there wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Enjoy Cocaine”).
Angie Bowie also allegedly fell under Bindon’s spell, and was apparently so enamored with his johnson (she christened it “The Mighty Marrow”) that as well as enjoying it herself, once got five of her friends to sleep with him at the same time, apparently while she watched. Around this time, in the early ’70s, Bindon was also something of a stud for hire, hired by frustrated middle-aged women, often while their husbands watched.
In 1979, when Bowie went to visit Iggy Pop at Rockfield Studios in Wales, when he was recording the follow-up to his New Values album, Bowie tried to cheer his friend up by regaling him with stories about the gangster-turned-penis (or penis-turned-gangster); bizarrely, the pair of them turned Bowie’s monologue into “Play It Safe,” a song that would appear on Iggy’s next LP, Soldier. By the time the album was released, a chorus referencing Princess Margaret had been excised.
PETER YORK: There was a really beautiful mixed-race girl who stalked Bowie when he moved to Oakley Street from Haddon Hall [via a brief sojourn in Maida Vale]. She was literally the girl who came in through the bathroom window. In the early ’70s she went to a provincial Bowie gig—Reading, let’s say—climbed in through a window, found his dressing room, and then demanded David have his wicked way with her. Which he did. Thereafter she pursued him everywhere, and her main concern in life was to stalk David Bowie. To the vast irritation of Angie she had gone to Oakley Street dozens of times, and clearly it had all ended up very, very badly. She ended up throwing milk bottles into the basement. She took stalking to new heights. She was extraordinary, and frightening, too. Years later she rang me once from Geneva, saying she’d just been to the house and been told he wasn’t there. At some level I think he quite liked the flattery and the attention. He was the lance of love, and she was utterly obsessed with him. At one point she had been referred to an NHS shrink and unsuccessfully tried to have an affair with him. As he wasn’t coming across she threatened to report him to the authorities.
MICK RONSON: I never really left. David stopped working on the road and wanted to sit down for a little rest, so if I had stayed with him I would have sat down and done nothing. I didn’t know how long he was gonna stop for—as far as I was concerned he was stopping, that was it. Then David got the itch and so I went back on the road with him for Diamond Dogs. Then they arranged for me to do one or two concerts [on my own], and then it started getting good so I decided to carry on and do a bit more. When David was getting back to going on the road again, I was busy doing my own thing so I never went with him on the road again.
In an interview for the Mail on Sunday in 2008 to accompany a Bowie cover-mounted CD, Bowie told me that the Diamond Dogs “Sweet Thing” medley was originally written for his aborted musical 1984.
DAVID BOWIE: I’d failed to obtain the theatrical rights from George Orwell’s widow, and having written three or more songs for it already, I did a fast about-face and recobbled the idea into Diamond Dogs: teen punks on rusty skates living on the roofs of the dystopian Hunger City; a postapocalyptic landscape. A centerpiece for this would-be stage production was to be “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing,” which I wrote using William Burroughs’s cut-up method. You write down a paragraph or two describing several different subjects creating a kind of story ingredients list, I suppose, and then cut the sentences into four or five-word sections; mix ’em up and reconnect them. You can get some pretty interesting idea combinations like this. You can use them as-is or, if you have a craven need to not lose control, bounce off these ideas and write whole new sections.
I was looking to create a profligate world that could have been inhabited by characters from Kurt Weill or John Rechy—that sort of atmosphere. A bridge between Enid Blyton’s Beckenham and the Velvet Underground’s New York. Without Noddy, though. I thought it evocative to wander between the melodramatic “Sweet Thing” croon into the dirty sound of “Candidate” and back again. For no clear reason (what’s new?) I stopped singing this song around the mid-’70s. Though I’ve never had the patience or discipline to get down to finishing a musical theatre idea other than the rock shows I’m known for, I know what I’d try to produce if I did. I’ve never been keen on traditional musicals. I find it awfully hard to suspend my disbelief when dialogue is suddenly sung. I suppose one of the few people who can make this work is Stephen Sondheim with works such as Assassins. I much prefer through-sung pieces where there is little if any dialogue at all. Sweeney Todd is a good example, of course. Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw, both operas by Benjamin Britten, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Weill. How fantastic to be able to create something like that.
GUY PEELLAERT (ARTIST): I had this idea to adapt Nik Cohn’s book Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom into a series of small films. I wanted to invent little animated scenarios involving real pop stars. One idea was to have Elvis or Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis as truckers. But I couldn’t make it work, so I called Nik, went to meet him, and we decided to make a book together, Rock Dreams. I wanted the book to be full of myths and legends, and although it was thought to be a cynical book, it was full of love, full of affection for the music and the people who made it. Rock Dreams was always meant to be a monument to a dream, a monument to a myth. For Diamond Dogs, Bowie wanted something futuristic but something sensual. He had seen the work I was doing for Rock Dreams and he had obviously liked it, although I think far more important to him was the knowledge that Mick Jagger had asked me to do the cover of It’s Only Rock ’n Roll. He managed to get his record out first and he liked to say that Jagger didn’t speak to him for ages because of it. For a while the Diamond Dogs cover became the thing that I was known for, especially because there was a real sensation about the original version, the banned version, with Bowie’s cock. He loved the idea but I think he also knew that the record company wouldn’t be happy. And when they saw it they weren’t happy. Rock Dreams was all about the extremes of possibility, the flash and fire of pop music, and you have to have that excitement or else it’s not working. Diamond Dogs was meant to be flashy, over the top, extreme, a freak show.
OLIVER JAMES: Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, and Hunky Dory were all about him being scared of becoming insane. Hunky Dory is very clever in the way it conceals the fact that it is all about madness. Those records are about him saying, “I’m not scared of you, I’m going to take you on.” He was confronting his madness, and turning it into art. By the time he got to Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs he was worried about being driven insane because he was having a huge amount of sex, a huge amount of drugs, and becoming famous. By this point he’d run to the end of his runway, he’d taken too many drugs, he’d had too much sex.
DAVID BOWIE: Diamond Dogs scared me because I was mutating into something I just didn’t believe in anymore, and the dreadful thing was, it was so easy. The Diamond Dogs period was just an extension of Aladdin Sane, which in itself was just an extrapolation of Ziggy Stardust. But by the time of Diamond Dogs that persona had started to feel claustrophobic, and I needed a change. I had spent most of the ’60s trying to get a break, trying to find a hit in amongst all the material I had written, but when “Space Oddity” came around then I knew that this new persona was going to work. I believe passionately in the creative spark, although judging by how long it took me to find something that worked, I’m not sure I used it properly initially. Diamond Dogs was making me sick, both physically and creatively, and I was shifting into melodrama.
ORSON PEELLAERT (CURATOR): My father was a living mystery, as he would get up at five in the morning, go down to his studio by 5:10, come back up in the evening for dinner, and then go back again. He was the cliché of the artist, and was immersed in his world. My father definitely had the time-intensive side of the work. He had three assistants working on the images day and night because they were so complex. This was Photoshop before Photoshop existed. He couldn’t afford permission fees, and so had to distort images while finding ones with the exact angles. He took hundreds of Polaroids of source material. People have no idea how much work he put into these—every image is like a Stanley Kubrick movie. People take images for granted these days, but this whole project was so labor intensive. It was hyperreal, which at the time was not considered to be art. These images played with reality and there was an incredible tension between fantasy and reality.
The whole story of how my father got to work with Bowie was a trick. Mick Jagger had already commissioned my father to produce the cover of It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, and had invited my father to spend some time on the European leg of the 1974 tour in order for him to collect imagery. He shot lots of pictures backstage for source material for the project. When he returned he didn’t hear back from Jagger, so he thought he was behaving like a rock-star diva. And then there was an exhibition of my father’s work at Biba in London, which is when Bowie approached him about Diamond Dogs. Bowie had already been introduced to his work by Jagger, and he made it a mission to outsmart Jagger and get him to produce something first. On the day of the shoot with the dog and Terry O’Neill, Bowie invited my father to breakfast, as he was in town for the Biba show. And then Bowie asked him to come with him to the shoot, and very quickly my father realized it was a trick, and he ended up art directing that shoot, even though the images were only going to be used as the source material for his paintings for the album cover. He didn’t put up much resistance as he admired Bowie. Then when Diamond Dogs came out, Jagger was furious, and said that in future he would never show anything to Bowie, as he would make it his own and make it better. David had the original of the Diamond Dogs cover as he lent it to the V&A for the exhibition, and I think Jagger has the original of It’s Only Rock ’n Roll somewhere too.
TERRY O’NEILL (PHOTOGRAPHER): The first time I photographed Bowie I was completely enchanted. He didn’t say very much but you sort of gravitated towards him. This was 1972 and I was photographing him and Angie for the fashion editor Felicity Green at the Daily Mirror. Angie ran the session—do this, do that. David just stood there in different outfits. She was incredibly bossy. So I became friendly with Tony Defries, who used to call me up from time to time whenever he wanted something done. And one of the jobs was to shoot the art for the Diamond Dogs album cover. The idea was that they’d bring a Great Dane to the studio, along with Bowie, and then I’d shoot the dog, and David would copy them. I showed all the Polaroids to David, then he posed like the dog, and I shot him like the dog. Then all the art was given to Guy Peellaert, who drew the album cover. He wasn’t on the shoot, I just gave it to Tony Defries. When we’d finished I just said, “Let’s do a couple of shots with the dog,” and David’s sitting there and suddenly this dog leaps up in the air, trying to bite the strobe light. Every time the strobe went off, the dog jumped up. It was supposed to just sit at David’s feet obediently, but the strobe lights going off freaked the animal out, and suddenly it leapt up on his hind legs, barking loud enough to wake the devil. Everybody scarpered as the dog ran around the studio—everyone apart from me and David that is. I was behind the camera and a photographer always feels more remote and disconnected when he’s looking through the lens—and thank God I had a wide-angle lens on. As for David, he didn’t move at all. He was completely focused.
David Bowie didn’t do sequels. On the 1974 Diamond Dogs tour of Canada and North America—which began in Montreal on June 14—his fans went berserk. He hadn’t appeared live in the country since the previous March, and in that time had become the kind of pop star who attracted limpet-like adoration. The concertgoers on the Diamond Dogs tour seemed obsessed. Having not toured the United States for over a year, his followers were expecting him to turn up onstage wearing his Ziggy clothes; instead he appeared wearing baggy pleated trousers, suspenders, a white cotton shirt, and black ballet pumps, with his hair slicked back. During the show’s intermission—a convention borrowed from the theatre—the more heavily made up audience members could be seen heading for the bathrooms, where they would wet down their spiky hair, rub off the lightning bolts from their faces, and alter their clothing. The obsessives would stalk him at the hotels on the tour, hanging out in the lobby, forcing themselves into the elevators and stealing David’s hairs from the backseat of his limos parked outside, and occasionally emptying his cigarette butts from the car ashtrays. If they couldn’t sleep with him, other souvenirs would have to do.
EARL SLICK (GUITARIST): I met David somewhere around spring in 1974. It was an audition for the Diamond Dogs tour. I was the replacement for Mick Ronson. I knew about his work, and I damn well knew David was a very big star, but at the time I wasn’t all that knowledgeable about him because I was in the blues world. At heart I’m a blues guitar player. Which I think he liked, but then he must have, or else he wouldn’t have hired me. My friend Michael Kamen had mentioned my name to him, which is how I got my shot at the audition. I was twenty-one, and I figured this was a great opportunity. I purposefully didn’t tell anyone about it in case I didn’t get it. The actual audition has to be the weirdest experience I’ve had in my entire career. I got a call from Coco Schwab, and turned up at RCA Studios in New York City, where they were mixing Diamond Dogs. She brought me into the main studio. There was the amp I’d requested, a hundred-watt Marshall, and I’d brought a guitar with me. I put these headphones on and a voice came over and said, “Hello.” I couldn’t see the control room as they blacked it out. They asked me to play along with the stuff, and they played some tracks from Diamond Dogs, and I just played along. This went on for twenty minutes. And then David came in the room, we sat down and played some guitars and bullshitted for a while, and that was that. It was weird. I thought there’d be a band, but there was nothing.
Next day I get the call and I’m in. I went up to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, and hung out for a while. The disparity between the blues world and David’s world was quite extensive. I would have been more shocked at his world if I hadn’t already have played in the backup band for Hair. Talk about fucking weird. I’d already been exposed to way stranger than David. The only thing that was odd was that the guy had no eyebrows, which was kind of weird. When I got talking to him he was down-to-earth as hell. Totally fucking down-to-earth. Not what you would expect. Focused. He was picking my brain, sizing me up, but then I was doing the same thing.
He wasn’t focused on the tour though. He was focused most of the time, but not all of the time. There were times when he was not just there. There’s no doubt about that. No way. I don’t polish shit over. I tell the truth. Trust me, I was no angel, and I had serious fucking drug and alcohol problems myself. But I do have enough memory to know that there were some nights when he was just not there. It didn’t make for a functioning band relationship. I know that drug [cocaine] very well, and what will happen is the drug just makes you isolate yourself emotionally from everybody. He wasn’t as forthcoming as he could be, couldn’t engage in conversations. He was completely isolated from the rest of the band before the shows, after the shows. It was like him and then it was us. It was not a band by any stretch. Except onstage, which was scripted. And that was mostly with the dogs [backing singers], Gui Andrisano and Warren Peace, Geoffrey.
Diamond Dogs was a weird period, because everything that David had done up to that point suddenly exploded. It was like a nuclear explosion. Ziggy, the retirement, this, all of a sudden David skyrocketed. It was Bowiemania. I was grooving like hell, man, I was twenty-one years old! What do you think I was doing? All of a sudden I’m this little rock-star guy, you know? Then he decided to just abandon the whole thing. Diamond Dogs is probably one of the most iconic things he did in his entire career, but it wasn’t that long, it didn’t even make the West Coast. He went straight into the Philly Soul period, when we did Young Americans.
I was in Glasgow in May 2016 with Lulu to film a digital James Corden–style car karaoke short for a car company. One of the sections was devoted to her relationship with David Bowie, a relationship which resulted in one of her biggest hits, a saxophone-driven cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” in 1974. She was sitting in a hotel lobby in Sheffield, discussing a forthcoming TV series when in walked “this stick-insect man with a white face and orange hair, not red, but bright orange.” He invited her to his gig that night, one thing led to another, and soon they were lovers. “He was lovely, although my mum and dad thought he was a bit odd. He could be very funny and down-to-earth, but he was also extraordinarily beautiful, which was quite disconcerting.” He also suggested that they record together, although Lulu didn’t believe it at first: “I thought, yeah right, I’ll believe that when I see it, but he came through. We recorded ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and ‘Watch That Man’ but I don’t think they’re great versions. I got a hit, but I’m not so sure they were that great.” Bowie also encouraged her to lose weight, and told her that smoking would improve her voice—“He never stopped, always smoking Disque Bleu or Gitanes.” They later recorded a song that he had written specifically for her, “Can You Hear Me,” which would later appear on Young Americans. “He was having terrible problems with his record company at the time, and the record stayed unreleased. It’s probably in a vault somewhere.”
TONI BASIL (CHOREOGRAPHER): We launched the Lockers in 1973, which was the first American street dance group to ever break through into the mainstream. We did TV specials, we opened up for Sinatra at Carnegie Hall, we opened up for Funkadelic at Radio City. So we had a wide audience. Bowie had the same agent we did, and Angie was in America and saw what was happening. They also knew that I had a history of choreography, working for Dick Clark and the T.A.M.I. Show. So Bowie asked me to go to London for a meeting. I knew about Ziggy, and had seen the Pennebaker film about him. When I saw the film I thought to myself, Oh my God, he’s straight. He had this androgynous approach, which gave him a style of moment that people had never seen before. I met Bowie, met his management—who appeared to be spending a lot of David’s money on their own dinners and their own wine—and he sent me to see Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Show, because it had just opened in the West End and it was the hot thing. Then when I got back to L.A., I got a call from my agency asking if I wanted to go to New York and choreograph the opening number of the Diamond Dogs show. I said, “Make a good deal because I’m gonna do the whole show.” I knew it, I just knew it. I knew his aesthetics and mine were really similar, and even though he was British and I was American, we both came from a background of research. I came from a showbiz family and had stood on the side of the stage all my life. I knew that what I had, he didn’t, and what he had, I didn’t. I met him in his hotel and brought this drawing of a silhouette of a body looming over a city. It was based on a Man Ray. That’s how we opened the show. Originally his backup singers were going to be the Diamond Dogs on leashes, and Michael Bennett, who was involved with the choreography, was uncomfortable with that. I didn’t see it that way. I remember him screaming into another room: “Coco, the dogs are back in the show!” When you could get past him being so drop-dead gorgeous—he was always the most beautiful thing in the room, male or female, children or whatever—he was alluring, elegant, never raised his voice. He was wow. And fantastic to work with. Because we were alone together working a lot, I really had to do my homework. I always came in armed with more than one idea, because he knew the music back and forth and he was armed with a jillion ideas. He taught me so much. I saw him come up with the boxing gloves and rope routine for “Panic in Detroit” in the space of a minute. I wanted so badly to make a proper exchange. This was taking rock to theatre and taking theatre to rock. I do know that I walked into our first New York meeting with peg pants, and when I told him they were from Jenny Waterbags, we went down there immediately and bought a pair. That became his look for the tour.
The show changed my career, as suddenly a lot of people starting taking an interest in my work, including After Dark magazine. They ended up putting me on the cover, which was copied by David for the cover of Young Americans. He used the same photographer—Eric Jacobs—and the same concept. But then he made me co-director of the show, which was a gift he didn’t have to give.
GEOFF MACCORMACK: Toni Basil was a ballsy lady. She had a dance group called the Lockers, who did street dance, and they were amazing. David was always after her. I don’t know whether he got her, but he was always after her, always grabbing hold of her during rehearsals.
GEORGE UNDERWOOD: I remember at the height of it all in the ’70s, he said to me, “You know what? I might not see you for ten years. But it doesn’t matter. I’m going off on this journey, but it doesn’t matter because we’ll still be the same when we see each other.” It was almost as if he was saying goodbye. But of course we did see each other. He could cut people. He could be backstage, walking down to the stage, and people would come up to him and say, “Hi, David, remember me?” and he would have his face on and he’d just walk straight past them. I would always try and make them feel better by telling them he was in the zone. But then at the height of the Ziggy thing his personality was completely taken over by this new persona.
CHERRY VANILLA: When I worked for MainMan I suppose our relationship was a bit more formalized, but all it really meant is that I saw him more. I was getting $100 a week and my rent paid just to tell people they couldn’t speak with David. We had charge accounts at Max’s Kansas City and a limo service. But now we were promoting David Bowie. MainMan was the first time in the history of rock that the office help had a following just like David had a following, because the magazines wrote about us. They knew all about us and what we were doing, who we were having sex with. I know I used the line at the time as it was sassy and generated column inches, but I didn’t really trade blowjobs for record plays. I had sex with DJs who became important or were important, but that was before David. And on the road, promoting him, there was one DJ I had sex with, but he was already a David Bowie fan. I was like a sacrificial whore for David, and I didn’t care, because playing a sacrificial whore was a role I liked. It opened doors for other sacrificial whores. I was in love with him. And the only person I really wanted to have sex with at the time was David Bowie. Then there was the moment when that was really the most convenient thing for both of us. It happened a few times, and sometimes during his druggie days. But that was that. It was efficient, and fabulous, because he was great sex. I hope I was for him as well.
AMANDA LEAR (SINGER): Well, personally I owe a lot to David because he was the first one to insist that I should become a singer. When I first met him I was a fashion model working for Ossie Clark, Mary Quant…and just being a model wasn’t very satisfying, but I had no other possibilities to express myself and David was the first one to say, “Why don’t you sing?” He actually paid for my first singing lessons, with Florence Norberg. He also put me on a contract and made me sign with Tony Defries and MainMan, and wrote my very first recording, “Star.” MainMan were paying my rent and flying me to New York. On the side, of course, I was also having an affair with David, with the blessing of his wife, Angie. Their marriage was not very, I don’t think, happy towards the end. Angie was a very busy girl. She desperately wanted to make a career for herself. She wanted to get into everything and organize everyone’s life.
I remember little Zowie playing on my knee. At the time we lived right next to each other in Chelsea. I lived in Glebe Place in a flat with Susannah York, and David was just in Oakley Street. You could see into my flat from his house. We met through Marianne Faithfull. She called me one night and said, “David is madly in love with you and is dying to meet you.”
The first image he saw of me was the cover of the Roxy Music album, the picture of me with Bryan Ferry [For Your Pleasure]. He thought to himself, I like the look of this girl. I must say, Antony Price did this incredible styling, and it was new. In those days we had British girls with long hair. And then suddenly here comes this incredible woman, clad in black leather, stiletto heels, all very Hitchcock. So David saw the photograph, loved it, and wanted to meet the girl, which was me. But of course he expected me to be exactly like the girl in the picture. There was a big misunderstanding right from the start. He fell in love with a photograph, not a person. He expected me to be dominating. But I was completely the opposite. When I finally came out with my album I called it I am a Photograph, because I realized that being a fashion model, I was not a person. I was an illusion. And that was because of David.
When Marianne called I said, “It’s two o’clock in the morning, and I’m actually sleeping,” but then she put him on the phone. It was a bit rotten to do this because I was half asleep, but he was asking me to come over. He sent his car for me, and even though he had a cold—he had a red nose, and looked absolutely terrible—we decided to go to Tramp. We spent the whole night with Mick Jagger and Bianca. He wasn’t very attractive, as he was very pale, very white with red hair and no eyebrows. Honestly that wasn’t my type of boy….I was going out with Bryan Ferry at the time and I was going out with good-looking boys and Bowie was very peculiar. But he had something absolutely fascinating and we spent the whole night talking and talking and talking….I realized that there was something missing in his education because he didn’t go much to school and there was a lot of things he was dying to learn. He knew about me and Salvador Dalí so he wanted to know all about Dalí and Surrealism, which he didn’t know much about. Then it was like that all the time. I remember on his birthday in January, I said, “Look, for your birthday I’ve got a present for you, I’m gonna take you to a little cinema in North London to see Metropolis by Fritz Lang.” And David Bowie had no idea what German Expressionism was and had never heard of Metropolis, had never heard of Fritz Lang. That was it, the next day he was straight into Fritz Lang and wanted to know all about this black-and-white German thing. And immediately he decided to change the set for his new tour. All the stage, the décor of the stage, he wanted to turn into German Expressionism. Every time you would mention something to him he would immediately jump—there was no cell phone and no Google, but that’s what he would’ve done, look up everything immediately. For example, when I mentioned William Burroughs, he’d never heard of him, and so the next day he rushed out to buy Naked Lunch. He was a man who wanted to learn and I liked that very much because most people, the musicians and the rock stars that I had been out with, were only interested in their own music. They would listen to music endlessly morning to night, talk about recording, but that’s it; they were not interested in anything else to do with geography, history, antiquity, or whatever. Bowie was different; he really had this great passion to learn things and to progress. He was not just a copycat, you see. I also turned him onto Barbarella, and all those sexy cartoons. There was one called Octobriana, a Russian cartoon about a crazy woman who could fly, who could do everything that people in Russia couldn’t do at the time—so Octobriana was saving the world, she was jumping into a volcano. She was sort of a Lara Croft superwoman, and Bowie got really interested in these drawings—this very sexy woman—and decided to produce a movie based on the story of Octobriana.
So we started seeing each other quite a lot and he was sleeping most of the time in my place and I had Angie calling first thing in the morning saying, “Can I speak to my husband,” which was very peculiar. Angie was very understanding and she knew that David was in love and she wanted me to please him. We went shopping together, and she would buy me lovely things, like lovely silky underwear from Janet Reger. She’d say, “You must wear this because David will like it.” Even when I said I didn’t like it, she’d say that David would, and, “I’m buying it for you, to seduce him.” It was very weird, although he was a nice romantic sometimes. He would surprise me with flowers or something, or an amazing present. He was lovely. But I must say he spent a lot of time on his career. He spent a long time in the studio, a long time preparing his tour. We discussed Diamond Dogs because he was preparing the Diamond Dogs tour and he spoke to this French Belgian cartoon artist called Guy Peellaert and he had made cartoons like Barbarella. And he was quite clever in the way he was doing it. And Guy Peellaert did the cover of Diamond Dogs. So I introduced them both, yes. David was very selfish. All musicians are selfish and surrounded by secretaries and managers. They’re not like everyone else.
CHERRY VANILLA: We were planning an album together called Electric Beatnik, which was going to be a mix of his synthesizer music and my poetry. We talked about it a lot on the phone, and in person in Canada, and then a friend was throwing a cocaine party for him in New York, and we were both there. I mentioned the album to him, he said something to me in German and walked away. And that’s the last time I spoke to him. The last time I saw him was in the ’80s when he was going out with Susan Sarandon. They were both at this charity event in New York. There was a receiving line. Artists move on.