CHAPTER 2

1968–1970

All the Madmen

In the spring of 1967, Bowie’s career took an intriguing new turn when Ralph Horton quit the music industry for a job in the motor industry, leaving Ken Pitt as Bowie’s sole manager. For the next three years, it would be the urbane, gentlemanly Pitt who would steer the singer’s career and help unlock the boundless creativity whirling around inside him. During this period, Bowie would experiment with mime, acting, scriptwriting, and even Buddhism, interests that would divert him from his music career but prove crucial to germinating the singular collision of rock, theater, costume, and mysticism that propelled him to superstardom in the early 1970s.

When Pitt took over, not long before the Deram release of David Bowie, he thought it appropriate to travel to South London to meet Bowie’s father and reassure him that, despite his son’s poor record sales, his future lay in the arts. “We met at the local station,” Pitt told Chris Welch. “He was a nice man, although I don’t think he really understood what David was trying to do. He was nervous about the idea of David being in show business.” A few weeks later, both to spare his parents from the noise of his nocturnal music sessions and to make space for his half-brother, Terry, who’d recently returned to Plaistow Grove after a serious mental episode, Bowie took up Pitt’s offer of a spare room in his flat on Manchester Street in Central London. Ever supportive, and perhaps also glad of some peace and quiet, his father helped Bowie move his belongings in his tiny Fiat 500.

Somebody up there likes me: Bowie in Paddington, London, in 1968.

Bowie outside the imposing entrance to Haddon Hall in Beckenham, South London, where he lived from October 1970 until spring 1973.

Ken Pitt, who took over as Bowie’s manager in 1967 and produced his first two albums.

Pitt had long recognized that his twenty-year-old charge had an uncommon and far-reaching talent that needed nurturing and that, after nine flop singles, the time was right to explore new artistic avenues. His attempts to further the singer’s career sometimes went unappreciated, however. “We were invited to a party attended by people who could give David broadcasts and TV work,” Pitt recalled in MOJO. “I was chatting them up, which was obviously a big bore for him. Then a producer said, ‘Is that your wonderful David Bowie?’ I turned round and saw him with some bird sprawled all over him. I thought they were going to copulate in front of the British music industry. I left without him.”

Bowie spent his free days—of which there were plenty in 1967, after David Bowie had slipped out largely unnoticed—devouring his host’s impressive library of books and classical records. Holst’s The Planets suite became a particular favorite, as did Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and a book on Egon Schiele, the controversial German painter who committed incest with his sister and died at twenty-eight. Pitt’s interest in art rubbed off on Bowie, who began to read about the subject ravenously. A curious synergy between the two men was already becoming apparent, as evidenced around Easter of 1967 when Bowie became the first musician ever to cover a Velvet Underground track, at a time when Lou Reed’s legendary group was virtually unknown in its native Manhattan, let alone in London.

At the end of 1966, around the time the Buzz split up, Pitt had flown to New York on business and took the opportunity to drop in at Andy Warhol’s Factory. He was given a signed test pressing of the then-unreleased The Velvet Underground & Nico album, which he brought back to London. “Not being [Ken’s] particular cup of tea, he gave it to me to see what I made of them,” Bowie informed the author in 2002. “Everything I both felt and didn’t know about rock music was opened to me on one unreleased disc.… This music was savagely indifferent to my feelings. It didn’t care if I liked it or not.” His mind blown, a few weeks later the singer recruited a band called the Riot Squad to record a cover version of “Waiting for the Man” and a new song of his own, “Little Toy Soldier,” which liberally borrowed from “Venus in Furs.” Nothing came of the project, but it was an interesting indication of how Pitt’s and Bowie’s enthusiasms interacted to make the singer even hipper than he’d been before.

Following the David Bowie album, Pitt brokered a new publishing deal with Essex Music, leading to a final session that year that produced the wonderful “Let Me Sleep Beside You.” For Decca, the timeless, conventional rocker was too little too late, and it rejected it as a single (though Bowie would later tell a BBC interviewer it was never released because “my mother thought the lyrics were dirty”). Bowie’s music career was, for the time being, put on ice; instead, he enjoyed his first taste of another area of performance that he seemed born to try: acting.

Pitt had always encouraged Bowie’s wider interests in the arts, and one of Bowie’s earliest excursions outside music was a radio play called The Champion Flower Grower. Though this was rejected by the BBC, Pitt saw Bowie’s future in TV and theater. “David already wanted to be an actor and was capable of so many different things,” Pitt told Chris Welch. “He wanted to write musicals. It was all down to evolution, and David was evolving constantly, sometimes from day to day. It was difficult to keep up with his train of thought.” Rather than regard Bowie’s Deram album as a failure, Pitt saw it as a useful CV of his talents. He bought fifty copies and distributed them to contacts in film, TV, and theater. One of the recipients was the mime artist Lindsay Kemp, with whom Bowie enrolled for dance lessons at his studio in Covent Garden. Kemp was yet to find the celebrity his appearance at 1968’s Edinburgh Festival would bring, but the talented mime artist was already making waves on London’s fringe theater scene.

Lindsay Kemp, Bowie’s dance teacher and mentor in the late ’60s, photographed backstage during a run of his show Flowers at the Bush Theatre, London, in 1974.

Bowie and Kemp hit it off instantly, bonding over their love for musicals, the circus, Expressionist art, and Berlin cabarets. Bowie waxed lyrical about his newfound interest in Buddhism, then fashionable in hippie London, while the dancer turned his new friend onto Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, and performance art. “I taught him how to project, to enchant and how to hypnotise the public when you step on to a stage,” said Kemp, ten years Bowie’s senior, to writer Martin Aston in 2004. “David absorbed everything, like a sponge.” The pair began collaborating on a play titled Pierrot in Turquoise, for which Bowie provided music and took the role of Cloud. (Turquoise, the Buddhist symbol for eternity, reflected Bowie’s influence on the project.) The work premiered at Oxford on December 28, 1967, before enjoying a two-week run in London in March 1968. During this time, Bowie had an affair with the openly gay Kemp, which ended in tears when Kemp discovered Bowie was also sleeping with the beautiful Russian set designer Natasha Korniloff.

With his then-girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale, in their performance group at Turquoise, London, 1968.

Adding to the emotional tangle, Bowie had earlier in the year fallen for Hermione Farthingale, a striking red-headed dancer with whom, on Kemp’s recommendation, he created a minuet for a BBC television play based on Alexander Pushkin’s The Shot. After Pierrot in Turquoise ended its run, Bowie moved out of Pitt’s home and took the top flat of a house off Old Brompton Road to live with Farthingale. Bowie spent a quiet summer enjoying his girlfriend’s company, UFO-spotting on Hampstead with various acid-head friends, listening to Jacques Brel records (he’d discovered him via Scott Walker’s albums), and sporadically performing his own mime routines at venues including the Middle Earth club and Roundhouse. He also appeared—fleetingly—as an extra in the film The Virgin Soldiers, for which he was required to have a military-style short-back-and-sides haircut.

Photographed at home around the time of his first screen role in The Virgin Soldiers.

Bowie’s first forays into theater and acting had been less than stellar, and it hadn’t escaped his notice either that while he was pursuing a life outside pop music, many of his direct contemporaries—including the Who and the Kinks, both of whom also released debut singles in 1964—had become internationally famous. That autumn, he was stung when another of his peers, Marc Bolan, broke into the Top 30, with his duo Tyrannosaurus Rex’s single “One Inch Rock.” Bolan’s success was the most painful for Bowie. The peculiar yin and yang of the two suburban Londoners’ relationship can be sensed from an incident from around that time, when Bowie invited Bolan and his girlfriend June to spend the day at Farthingale’s parents’ house in rural Edenbridge, Kent. Without Bowie’s knowledge, Bolan brought along his percussionist Steve Took and photographer Ray Stevenson and took over the Farthingales’ verdant country garden for a photo shoot. Bowie felt he’d been used and stayed inside the house, while Bolan and Took posed flamboyantly outside in the shrubbery. “They never even spoke to David or thanked Hermione for the use of her parents’ garden,” observed Tony Visconti, the Brooklyn-raised producer who oversaw Bolan’s records, in an interview with Bolan biographer Mark Paytress. Bowie, understandably, didn’t speak to Bolan for several months afterward.

Bowie wrote few, if any, songs of note in 1968, but that winter, a haunting new tune could be heard wafting down from his and Hermione’s top-floor flat. Written after Bowie had seen Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, released that year, “Space Oddity” told the story of Major Tom, an astronaut who after blasting into the sky ends up drifting alone in space, never to return to Earth. Both endearingly childlike and devilishly clever, musically and lyrically, it eclipsed everything Bowie had previously written. At its heart were profound questions about the space race: What did it all amount to? What did winning it mean?

Bowie gives a mime performance at the Middle Earth in London, May 19, 1968.

In January 1969, Ken Pitt began assembling material for a short demonstration film, Love You Till Tuesday, to promote Bowie’s talent as a multifaceted, all-singing, all-dancing, all-miming artist. Several segments featured David, Hermione, and the Buzz’s John “Hutch” Hutchinson performing new songs and a mime routine as “Feathers,” while another saw Bowie, dressed in white tights and a codpiece, acting out a piece he’d devised called The Mask—a prescient comment on the price that fame exacts, ending with the protagonist’s death on stage. Promo clips were also created for the two-year-old chart miss “Love You Till Tuesday” and unreleased “Let Me Sleep Beside You.” Pitt asked the film’s director, Malcolm Thomson, for another song to complete the show reel; he suggested “Space Oddity,” which he’d heard the singer strumming. “David sat on the edge of my chaise longue and sang me ‘Space Oddity,’” Pitt recalled to MOJO of the song’s audition. “It was incredible.” A sequence with Bowie dressed as a spaceman was duly shot to accompany an early demo version of the song.

A promotional photograph taken during the period between Bowie’s first and second self-titled albums.

Viewed today, the Love You Till Tuesday film is a fascinating period piece, oozing 1960s grooviness while rather gauchely marketing its twenty-two-year-old subject as an all-around entertainer. The month it was shot, Bowie appeared in a TV commercial for Lyons Maid’s Luv ice cream, seemingly just the kind of job the film aimed to bag him. Bowie remembered it as “a happy time,” but not long after Love You Till Tuesday was finished, Farthingale dropped the bombshell that she’d been offered a part in the movie version of the Song of Norway musical and was leaving for location shooting overseas. When she fell in love with an actor on set, it spelled the end of their relationship.

Bowie later admitted to being “devastated” by the breakup, so much so that he underwent a radical image change and had his hair permed. But he soon moved on. A few weeks later, while visiting an old friend in Beckenham, near his parents’ home in Bromley, one of the neighbors heard him playing the guitar. She introduced herself as Mary Finnigan, a writer for the counterculture newspaper the International Times, and offered Bowie some cannabis oil. They began an affair and Bowie moved into her flat, which she shared with her two small children. The previous December, Bowie and Farthingale had staged two Arts Lab events in Central London featuring mime, poetry, Buddhist chants, and music, and now Bowie proposed to Finnigan that they revive the idea in suburban Beckenham. In May 1969, Finnigan booked the back room of the mock-Tudor pub, the Three Tuns, in the town center for a series of weekly Sunday evening gatherings. “Come for the fun of it and for instant identification with the vibrations,” ran the publicity blurb, with Bowie declaring that the Arts Lab should “take over from the youth club concept as a social service.” The hippie happening, where Bowie would perform on his twelve-string acoustic guitar, proved a winner and became a regular weekly gig. It did little to raise Bowie’s profile outside South London, of course, but it did mean he was playing music again. Show reel in hand, meanwhile, Ken Pitt was busy trying to secure a new record deal on the strength of “Space Oddity.” He found a useful ally in Calvin Lee, a colorful music industry character who wore a glittering circle on his forehead—as Bowie would in 1973. Through Lee’s contacts at Mercury, Pitt was able to negotiate a contract with its UK partner Philips with a view to release “Space Oddity” to coincide with NASA’s proposed moon landing in July 1969.

A still of Bowie performing “Space Oddity” in the half-hour promotional film Love You Till Tuesday, shot in 1969 but not released in full until 1984.

Bowie (left) with Hermione Farthingale (center) and John Hutchinson (right) in the dance/folk group Feathers, 1968.

Tony Visconti, now a good friend of Bowie’s, was tasked with recording the song. Dismissing it as a novelty record (“a cheap shot”), he passed the job on to Gus Dudgeon. Assembling a crack team of session men, including bassist Herbie Flowers and keyboard player Rick Wakeman, then still at music college, Dudgeon nailed the session, complete with Bowie’s futuristic parts played on a new toy electronic instrument, the Stylophone. The single was released on July 11 and used during the BBC’s coverage of the moon landing nine days later, which, like most of Britain, Bowie stayed up all night to watch. Just in case the launch ended in tragedy, BBC Radio wouldn’t play the record until the Apollo 11 astronauts had safely returned to Earth, which slowed the single’s ascent on the charts. In fact, it wouldn’t be a hit until October, when it reached No. 5 in the UK. In the United States, jittery executives at Mercury demanded an edit that fudged Major Tom’s unpleasant fate, then got cold feet and refused to promote the release.

Bowie gives a reading at Beckenham Arts Lab during the spring of 1969, a few months before the release of his era-defining “Space Oddity” single.

While “Space Oddity” floated up the UK charts, Bowie’s life changed immeasurably due to two dramatic events: first, the death of his father from pneumonia on August 5 and, second, his deepening relationship with Angie Barnett, the American girlfriend of Bowie’s music industry champion Calvin Lee, with whom Bowie had enjoyed a brief liaison. He would later quip that he and Angie met “because we were both fucking the same bloke.” Both Haywood Jones’s passing and Barnett’s arrival cast shadows over the free festival Bowie staged on Saturday, August 16, at Beckenham Recreation Ground, just a two-minute walk from the Three Tuns pub. Several thousand souls turned up to Bowie’s answer to Woodstock—taking place in Upstate New York that same weekend—to watch performances by Bowie and folk artists the Strawbs, Keith Christmas, and Bridget St. John, and soak up the hippie vibes.

The original Phillips release of “Space Oddity,” backed with “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud.”

“In the middle of the little green was a beautiful pagoda like bandstand, where we all sat and played,” recalled Bridget St. John to writer Lois Wilson in 2016. “Then surrounding it were stalls selling jewellery and ceramics.… there were Tarot readings, astrologers, the Tibetan shop. Angie was making hamburgers in a wheelbarrow, the Brian Moore Puppet Theatre performed, there were lots of kids running around. It was a really beautiful day.”

Bowie’s second LP was initially released in the UK as David Bowie and in the US as Man of Words/Man of Music, but has been known since 1972 by the title of its most famous song, “Space Oddity.”

But Bowie’s mood darkened as his own headlining appearance approached. His father’s funeral had taken place just a few days before, and an Arts Lab associate remembers the singer being “detached. He wanted to go home.” When Bowie spotted Mary Finnigan and Lee totaling up the day’s takings, he blasted them as “materialistic wankers.” The dark cloud quickly passed. Within days, he’d commemorated the event in a new song, “Memory of a Free Festival,” in which he reminisced, “It was ragged and naïve / it was heaven.” The song was among the last recorded for a new album he’d been working on at Trident Studios in Soho, with Visconti in charge. The producer recalled the music taking shape haphazardly; Bowie sat on a stool strumming his twelve-string while the musicians around him—essentially the same crew that cut “Space Oddity”—fleshed out the arrangements. One new recruit was Keith Christmas, one of Bowie’s favorites from the Arts Lab and its attendant festival.

“David wasn’t a guy that was particularly easy to know,” Christmas told the author. “He was quite a guarded soul but also very engaging and easy to be around. I remember we worked in the studio pretty spontaneously. There were two seats and just three mics—one on David’s guitar, one for his vocal, and one on my guitar. I hadn’t heard the tracks at all. He played ‘Letter to Hermione’ first and tried some different things out. I did this run that we liked and became part of the song. We made it up as we went along.”

None of the new songs quite topped the progressive, science-fiction magic of “Space Oddity,” but the music had impressive depth and originality. The confessional “Letter to Hermione” and euphoric psychedelic rave-up of “Memories of a Free Festival” were evidence of Bowie’s unusual melodic and harmonic approach, and the ambitious prog-folk opus “Cygnet Committee,” with its embittered hippie messiah figure and cynicism about the counterculture, provided the first glimpse of the dystopian ideas more fully explored in the key Bowie records of the early 1970s. Strong echoes of Dylan reverberated around “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” and “God Knows I’m Good,” but the overall flavor of the record—as good a musical summation of 1969 as any other, if a somewhat uneven affair—was all Bowie’s own. The album was released in November 1969, confusingly with the same title in the UK as his 1967 Deram album, David Bowie, while in the States it was bestowed the appalling name Man of Words/Man of Music. Not that it mattered, as it didn’t sell in either territory. Visconti’s fear that “Space Oddity” would mimic the fate of most novelty records was proved correct too, and Bowie wouldn’t see the higher reaches of the charts again for another three years.

A promotional shot of Bowie and his trusty twelve-string, taken around the time of the release of his second album.

Following his father’s death, Bowie and Angie Barnett had moved into Plaistow Grove to look after Peggy, but at the end of September, they took out a lease on their own home, a capacious ground-floor flat within a crumbling, converted Edwardian mansion in Beckenham, with the grand name Haddon Hall. Within the walls of this neo-Gothic palace, lit at night by candles and flames from its large open fireplace, Bowie would spend much of late 1969 and 1970 in semi-reclusion, fermenting the ideas that would shape his future work. Playing a major part in his development was the formidable Barnett, who increasingly exerted her influence over Bowie’s career choices, much to the annoyance Ken Pitt. Loud, smart, and domineering, Barnett had arrived in London in 1967 to take a business course but soon found her way onto the music scene. Her bright mind and indifference to Bowie’s promiscuity—she herself was bisexual and uninhibited—made her an attractive partner, and Bowie’s feelings for his new girlfriend were encapsulated in one of the few new songs he wrote in the winter of 1969/1970, “The Prettiest Star,” a nostalgic rock ’n’ roll number recorded at Trident on January 8, 1970.

Now back on equal pegging with Marc Bolan thanks to “Space Oddity,” Bowie agreed to Visconti’s suggestion that Bolan play electric guitar on the track. The session was good humored—it was, after all, Bowie’s twenty-third birthday—until Marc’s girlfriend June screamed at the playback, “This song is crap! The best thing about it is Marc’s guitar!” Bolan didn’t demur and packed his guitar away, and the couple left without bidding goodbye. As far as Bowie was concerned, “The Prettiest Star” had already worked its magic, since at Christmas Barnett had agreed to marriage after he had serenaded her with the song over a telephone line, as she was abroad visiting family at the time. At Haddon Hall, the couple’s nest building continued apace, the royalties for “Space Oddity” now flowing in, funding shopping sprees for expensive antiques, rugs, drapes, and furniture. One purchase was a seven-foot Regency bed, conveniently sleeping three or more. For the first time in his life, Bowie had money in the bank, and he enjoyed spending it. He took driving lessons, passed his test, and brought a car. Meanwhile, he continued to perform at the Arts Lab every Sunday evening, drawing crowds curious to see Beckenham’s biggest star.

Bowie’s casual approach to life was a hallmark of his early days—as were unexpected strokes of luck that would prove critical in advancing his career. The BBC approached him to headline a prestigious new In Concert radio program on February 5. The singer needed a band and recruited Visconti on bass and drummer John Cambridge from Junior’s Eyes, who had backed him on an autumn promoting David Bowie. The job of guitarist was initially to be filled by Junior’s Eyes’ Tim Renwick, but Cambridge proposed instead they audition a musician he knew in Hull. So Cambridge headed 150 miles north to seek out the Rats’ Mick Ronson, an extraordinary guitarist who was set to play a huge part in Bowie’s story.

In early 1970, Ronson had all but retired from music and was making a steady living working for the local council marking out rugby pitches. Having made little money from the no-hope bands he’d played in, he was reluctant to re-enter the world of rock ’n’ roll, but Cambridge persevered, luring him to the capital on February 3 to watch Bowie at the Marquee. After the show, Ronson returned to Haddon Hall, where a late-night jam convinced Bowie that “Ronno” was the missing ingredient they needed. The following day, the band frantically rehearsed for the radio show, tackling several tunes from Bowie’s last album and a new song, “The Width of a Circle.” Bowie also rehearsed a solo version of Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam.”

A serious-looking Bowie sits among the falling leaves in Hyde Park, London, 1969.

The Hype—featuring Tony Visconti on bass—at the Roundhouse, London, in March 1970.

At the recording, Bowie warned the audience that he’d met his guitarist “Michael” only two days before, but the performance proved to be electrifying. With Ronson now on board, Bowie prepared for a gig at the Roundhouse two weeks later supporting ex–Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding’s band Fat Mattress. Bowie decided would be his own group’s inaugural show as the Hype, a name suggested by Ken Pitt after Bowie had told him, “This needs a strong element of hype,” or something to that effect. The Roundhouse concert on February 22 has gone down in history as a potential candidate for glam rock’s Big Bang. Tickled by the idea that the group should dress up as cartoon characters, Angie Barnett ventured into London to purchase suitable garments which she and Visconti’s partner Liz Hartley then ran up into stage costumes. “David was Rainbow Man, dressed in Lurex, pirate boots and with diaphanous scarves pinned to his clothes,” Visconti recalled to Mark Paytress. “I was Hype Man in a mock Superman costume with a white leotard, crocheted silver knickers and a big red cape.” Meanwhile, Cambridge appeared as Pirate Man, and Ronson, his guitar turned up deafeningly loud, was a Chicago gangster. “I thought it would be interested if each of us adopted a persona,” Bowie later recalled, “because it was all jeans at the time. But we got booed all the way through the show. People loathed what we were doing. It was great!”

A poster advertising Bowie’s September 1970 performance at what would become a regular haunt, Friars in Aylesbury.

The Hype’s extravagant threads and heavy-metal thunder may have been two years ahead of their time, but there could be little excuse for the audience reportedly booing “Quicksand,” one of the finest songs Bowie would ever write, granted its first airing that night with a full band arrangement. But the Roundhouse and other Hype shows in the following weeks did little to help the cause of “The Prettiest Star” single, which leaked out in March 1970 and whose failure—it sold only a few hundred copies—all but ended Bowie’s faith in Ken Pitt to oversee his career. Pitt’s suspicions that his managerial role was threatened were confirmed on March 20, when Bowie and Barnett married at Bromley Registry Office, having spent the previous night in a threesome with an actress following a show at the Three Tuns. Pitt only heard about the wedding secondhand and was deeply hurt. The sense that an era in Bowie’s life was ending was underlined by the closure of the Arts Lab, which, Bowie felt, had lost its numinous qualities and was now simply an opportunity to see Bromley’s famous one-hit wonder in person.

The UK and US editions of Bowie’s third album, The Man Who Sold the World. For the British edition, Bowie was photographed wearing a dress by fashion designer Michael Fish; the American release features a cartoon image by Bowie’s friend Michael J. Weller.

Bypassing Pitt, Angie badgered Philips directly for a £4,000 advance to fund the Hype’s living expenses and some new recordings. The label coughed up, and the group began work in the tiny room under the staircase at Haddon Hall, now transformed into a makeshift rehearsal room/studio. The first fruits included a new arrangement of “Memory of a Free Festival,” which was released in the United States as a follow-up to “Space Oddity.” A radio recording in late March convinced Ronson that John Cambridge wasn’t up to the job, and he was replaced by another drummer from the Hull music scene, Woody Woodmansey. After intensive rehearsals, sessions for what would become The Man Who Sold the World began at Trident in April, with Ronson driving the songs forward with his fluid, transformational guitar playing. Visconti would later gripe that Bowie, distracted by his infatuation with Barnett, had limited input into the backing tracks for the hard rockin’ “She Shook Me Cold” and “Black Country Rock” or the prog-rock excursions within “The Width of a Circle.”

But the end results were remarkable. The Man Who Sold the World was unquestionably Bowie’s first classic album, a dark, psychologically complex work where science-fiction, theosophy, and empathy with society’s outsiders collided, and a warm (if dysfunctional) human spirit prevailed. Bowie’s interest in Buddhism and the occult permeated the disturbing visions of “The Width of a Circle,” where the narrator seemingly has sex with Satan—or God, or himself—while the chilling “Saviour Machine” described a dictator who builds a computer that turns on the human populace. “The Supermen”—using a chord change “given” to the Bowie by Jimmy Page at the session for “I Pity the Fool” back in 1965—referenced Nietzsche’s idea of the exiled super-race so beloved by the Nazis.

It was “All the Madmen” that was the most revealing song lyrically, though few outside Bowie’s inner circle could have guessed its significance. In early 1969, Bowie’s half-brother, Terry Burns, had become a regular visitor to Haddon Hall at a time when his mental state was fast deteriorating. The first indication of his worsening schizophrenia had been an episode in 1967, when on a visit to Chislehurst Caves he saw Christ, then a vision of the ground opening up before him revealing the fires of hell burning down below. After sleeping roughly for a week, he turned up at Plaistow Grove, where Bowie was profoundly shaken by the sight of his deeply distressed sibling (it was soon after this that Bowie moved in with Ken Pitt). Burns was subsequently treated at Cane Hill psychiatric hospital, a grim former Victorian lunatic asylum a few miles away from Bromley. The references to the “cold and grey” Cane Hill in “All the Madmen” are clear, and Bowie’s sympathy for his brother’s illness, coupled with an awareness of his own possible proximity to madness, is deeply touching. Yet its inspiration remained hidden to outsiders, as did the origin of the line, “He struck the ground, a cavern appeared / And I smelt the burning pit of fear,” in “The Width of a Circle.”

The conclusion of The Man Who Sold the World sessions—with Bowie’s vocal takes for the title track a disquieting meditation on being, identity, and death—coincided with Pitt’s formal dismissal in May. The coup de grâce came from a litigation clerk named Tony Defries, whom Bowie appointed as his legal advisor on the advice of Olav Wyper at Philips. The showdown took place at Pitt’s home on Manchester Street, where the manager agreed to step aside—if he was adequately compensated for the time and money he’d invested in his charge. Defries, the forthright son of a West London antiques dealer, assured Pitt that they could come to an arrangement. Defries’s next move was to inform Bowie’s publisher Essex Music that the singer would not be renewing his contract with them. (A lengthy legal battle ensued, eventually settled by Essex acquiring ownership of several Bowie songs.) Visconti, who retained close ties with Essex, was unimpressed with Bowie’s new legal advisor and buried himself in other projects. Adding to the confusion, that summer Philips dismissed Wyper, one of Bowie’s few fans at the label, leaving the tapes of The Man Who Sold the World in limbo. Ronson and Woodmansey signaled their unease with Bowie’s floundering career by moving back to Hull; when they did return to London later that year, it was to record a single with their new band, Ronno. The producer was none other than Tony Visconti, no longer a lodger at Haddon Hall and busy working with Marc Bolan’s T. Rex.

Typically relaxed, Bowie shrugged off the departure of his key musical allies and spent the summer of 1970 ensconced with Angie in their strange, suburban imaginarium—whose bedroom was likened by one visitor to “Dracula’s living room”—where they hosted sex parties and held late-night discussions on philosophy, religion, and the occult. Occultist diviner Aleister Crowley’s concept of enlightenment via sexual intercourse—so-called “Sexmagick”—was enthusiastically explored, though by day Bowie wasn’t beyond more prosaic preoccupations such as fiddling around under the hood of his old Riley sports car. A year after the release of “Space Oddity,” it once again looked as if sustained success was destined to elude Bowie. Without an album to promote, or a band, he saw little point in playing live, and besides a handful of solo shows in July and August, he retreated from public view.

The first fruits of Bowie’s new deal with Chrysalis: the “Holy Holy” single.

His inaction wouldn’t last long. In October, Defries netted Bowie a publishing deal with Chrysalis, which came with an astonishingly generous advance of £5,000. Chrysalis’s liberal terms reflected the enormous potential that one of the company’s partners, Bob Grace, saw in the singer. Over the next few months, he encouraged Bowie to disregard himself as a budding pop star and instead view himself as one-man Brill Building, writing hit material for other artists. This was more than fine with Defries, who advised the singer to wait until his contract with Mercury expired the following June before he recorded another solo album. Grace also arranged access to Radio Luxembourg’s demo studios in Mayfair, a welcome progression from the makeshift facility under the staircase at Haddon Hall. The first song recorded under Bowie’s new contract was “Holy Holy,” featuring Herbie Flowers on bass and, doing his old boss a favor in between his Ronno work, Mick Ronson on guitar.

Bowie and Grace’s relationship fast evolved into a close friendship, permitting the publisher a unique insight into the singer’s increasingly otherworldly existence. On several occasions, he accompanied Bowie and Angie—now pregnant—to outré night spots such as El Sombrero in Kensington, where they’d hang out with London’s fashionable gay elite, including Oliver! composer Lionel Bart, the Who’s manager Kit Lambert, and fashion designer Ossie Clark, as well as exotic young scenesters such as stylist Freddie Burretti and boy-about-town Mickey King. At this time, Grace believed that Bowie “was convinced he was bisexual,” though others, such as his Beckenham Arts Lab partner Mary Finnigan, preferred to consider his bisexuality “opportunistic and contrived.” Bowie, of course, reveled in the confusion his flirtation with gay society provoked and relished even more the strange looks he received for wearing the latest addition to his wardrobe—a velvet “man-dress” from the Mr. Fish boutique in Mayfair.

If Grace was struck by Bowie’s flamboyant social circle and intriguing sexual ambiguity, he was even more impressed by Bowie’s determination to develop as a songwriter. Previously, the singer had tended to write songs on the twelve-string guitar, but in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1970, he acquired a piano and installed it in Visconti’s old room at Haddon Hall, overlooking the back garden. With the pregnant Angie attending his every need, he would sit for hours each day toying with unusual chord sequences and melodies. It was amid this period of suburban exile and periodic dissipation that the first songs for Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, his first truly great works, began to take shape. “I forced myself to be a good songwriter, and I became one,” Bowie admitted to MOJO in 2002 of his determination to improve his craft. “I made a job of work, of getting good.”

Bowie and his new American wife, Angie (born Mary Angela Barnett), at Haddon Hall in 1971.

Yet Bowie’s new life as a cross-dressing, stay-at-home songwriter was soon interrupted by the unlikely intervention of Mercury’s offices in New York. In November, although still not available in the UK, The Man Who Sold the World album, with a cartoon cover by artist Michael J. Weller showing a cowboy and Cane Hill hospital, had crept out in the United States, selling a somewhat risible 1,300 copies or so. Bowie and Defries had already discussed the idea—or, at that time, possibly the fantasy—of breaking the singer in the United States before launching him in Britain, so when a call came from Mercury’s publicity department suggesting a short US promo trip to boost the album’s profile, Bowie jumped at the chance. The singer arrived in the country that had enchanted him since boyhood on Wednesday, January 27, 1971, only to be greeted by an hour’s wait at Washington Dulles International Airport while customs officials tried to figure out why their London embassy had issued a visa to an unknown foreign musician with women’s clothing and flowing long blond hair. Unusually, the ever-forceful Angie wasn’t there to be in her husband’s corner; five months pregnant, she’d opted to stay at home in London. Absent too was Defries, leaving Bowie to make his grand adventure alone.

Bowie performs at a party for deejay Rodney Bingenheimer in Los Angeles, January 1971.

The Bowies at home with three-week-old Zowie, now better known as Duncan Jones, in June 1971.

The promotional tour, organized by Mercury’s new PR agent Ron Oberman—a fervent Bowie apostle—moved on from the US capital to Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Houston before winding up in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In New York, Bowie was introduced to the eccentric musician-poet Moondog and was thrilled to watch his heroes the Velvet Underground perform at the Electric Circus, cornering its ice-cool frontman afterward to explain what a huge fan he was. Only later would he learn that he’d been talking to Doug Yule and not Lou Reed, who had left the group a few months before. For the West Coast leg of his trip, Bowie was shadowed by Rolling Stone writer John Mendelsohn, who was intrigued to discover that the obscure British “folk singer” he’d been dispatched to meet at San Francisco International Airport wore a dress and carried a purse. Interviewing Bowie in a hotel room, Mendelsohn was enchanted by Bowie’s humor, roving intellect, and gift for self-promotion. He also admitted to developing a crush on him, though that night he would lose out to Bowie in a competition to bed a female groupie.

“He referred to pop music as the ‘Pierrot medium,’” Mendelsohn later noted in a Q magazine Bowie special. “I hadn’t a clue what he was on about. He seemed to have an extensive agenda and was happy to pose his own questions. He said something about being caught in bed with Raquel Welch’s husband.… I suspect he thought it would make it into print and get him some attention. It made it into print—in Rolling Stone.” It was while journalist and singer were visiting a radio station in San Jose that, according to Mendelsohn, Bowie first heard “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by Iggy Pop’s group the Stooges. The song had a profound effect on Bowie, his radar ever attuned to the hip and unusual. By the time he returned to the UK a few days later, he’d already completed three new songs with heavy shades of both the Stooges and the Velvet Underground that would, in time, ensure his immortality: “Moonage Daydream,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and “Hang On to Yourself,” the latter loosely demoed in Los Angeles with rocker Gene Vincent on backing vocals.

The original single release of “Moonage Daydream,” credited to the Arnold Corns.

Back in London, the poor sales of “Holy Holy,” issued as a single in January, provided further evidence that Bowie’s career as a solo artist was all but dead in the water and that he should indeed concentrate on the role of backroom songwriter. For this purpose, he planned to create a fictitious group called Arnold Corns (after the Pink Floyd song “Arnold Layne”), to be fronted by Freddie Burretti, his flamboyant friend from El Sombrero. Arnold Corns—in reality a youthful trio called Rungk—set to work recording “Moonage Daydream” and “Hang On to Yourself” but encountered a major stumbling block: Burretti couldn’t sing a note. This meant Bowie had to step in to record the vocals, but lame backing tracks did the songs few favors, and the resulting single barely registered on its release in May.

Meanwhile, Chrysalis, understandably eager for a return on their £5,000 investment, punted another new Bowie song to Herman’s Hermits singer Peter Noone, then launching his solo career. His almost comically cheesy version of the future Bowie touchstone, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” featuring Bowie on piano, reached No. 15 in May, at last vindicating Bob Grace’s faith in Bowie’s talent. Amid this flurry of activity, Philips finally released The Man Who Sold the World in Britain, with a different cover showing Bowie, resplendent in his favorite Mr. Fish man-dress, reclining like a wilting fin-de-siècle aesthete on the chaise longue at Haddon Hall. Bowie did virtually nothing to promote the year-old album except perform at a BBC live session in June. By then, with his Mercury contract due to expire, the game plan had dramatically changed. Recognizing the exceptional quality of his recent material, he decided to piece together a brand-new band to work on a new solo album. The group, soon to known as the Spiders from Mars, featured two familiar faces, Mick Ronson and Woody Woodmansey, plus yet another of their friends from Hull, bassist Trevor Bolder. All three moved into Haddon Hall, where Bowie and Angie were coping with another new occupant—their baby, Zowie Duncan Haywood Jones, born on May 30.

With this unusual domestic setup, the scene was set for the creation of two of the greatest and most influential albums in rock history—and the evocation of a fictional musical character who would become almost as famous as his creator.

The space oddity in his “space shirt,” December 1969.