DOWN THE YEARS the songs accumulate, almost all of them destined for a fleeting moment in the sun, fondly remembered by a few, forgotten by most. Some live on, or are reincarnated, as emblematic of a bygone time, remaining for ever trapped in their era; others inspire or influence new music. A few, a very few, become immortal in the form in which they were originally recorded, sounding as fresh to each new generation as they did to their own.
As an avid reader of Melody Maker and the Record Mirror, I kept myself informed on all emerging new acts, no matter how obscure. So David Bowie had been on my radar for a couple of years. I’d heard some of the tracks from his eponymous first LP and was mildly impressed, although I dismissed his ‘Laughing Gnome’ single, which sank without trace on its first release, as risible. Its only distinctive feature was a vocal similarity to Anthony Newley.
With the release of ‘Space Oddity’ in the summer of 1969, all was forgiven and (in the case of ‘The Laughing Gnome’) forgotten.
With my young family, I had just moved out of North Kensington, for good – and, for the first time in my life, out of London – to the council house we’d been allocated at 234 Long Furlong Drive on the Britwell estate in Slough, twenty miles away in the Buckinghamshire countryside.
Camelford Road was next on the demolition schedule – the entire street was to be wiped off the map in the great Westway advance that had already seen two of my previous addresses disappear. The council were obliged to rehouse all those affected but, having been on their waiting list for less than a year, we had one chance, take it or leave it. The house we were offered was semi-detached with two bedrooms, an indoor toilet, a bath and not just one garden but two, front and back. Judy and I felt as if we’d won the pools. We accepted the offer.
Judy’s grandmother, who’d been on the waiting list for years, was entitled to at least three choices. She wanted to remain in London living independently, which was a relief to me, if not to Judy. Nan and I had never got on. She had been close to Judy’s Italian fiancé and was understandably baffled as to what her well-educated granddaughter (Judy was a Burlington grammar-school girl who’d gone on to teacher training college before switching to nursery nursing) was doing with a teenage shelf-stacker-turned-postman. Nan moved to a cosy flat in sheltered accommodation on the Cuckoo estate in Hanwell.
The only problem with our move was the timing. It had to take place over the July weekend when the Rolling Stones were giving a free concert in Hyde Park, which Judy and I had been planning to attend.
I was ambivalent about the Stones. Having been excited by their live performances at the Wimbledon Palais before they’d conquered the world, I was less impressed by their records. The media had been keen to manufacture a division between the Stones and the Beatles that remained artificial for most music fans who listened to both. More crudely, the Beatles were portrayed, in their pre-psychedelic phase at least, as ideal son-in-law material and the longer-haired Stones as the kind of unwashed wasters that any decent father would guard his daughters against. When rivalry between the two sets of fans arose, those supporting the Beatles would be quick to point out that not only had the Stones’ second single, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, been a Lennon/McCartney composition (they’d gone to Chuck Berry for their first), it was one considered so insignificant that it had been given to Ringo to sing on the Beatles’ second album.
While Lennon and McCartney had written hundreds of songs before they were famous, Jagger and Richards had written none, even during the early days of their success. ‘It’s All Over Now’ was an American R&B number and ‘Not Fade Away’ an old Buddy Holly ‘B’ side. In fact nothing written by ‘Jagger/Richards’ emerged until the third Stones album, on which a couple of mediocre tracks were originals.
By their fourth album (my favourite, Aftermath), every song was suddenly by Mick and Keith. They’d progressed in a short while from writing nothing to coming up with songs as sophisticated as ‘Out of Time’ and ‘Mother’s Little Helper’. The rumour was that Andrew Loog Oldham, the band’s manager, had asked his Beatles counterpart, Brian Epstein, if John and Paul could spend a weekend with Mick and Keith to teach them the art of songwriting. This had a ring of truth to it. It was the kind of crash course in songwriting that wouldn’t be available at evening classes and would help to explain how Mick and Keith had managed such a steep learning curve.
By July 1969 I had enough appreciation for the Stones to want to be at that Hyde Park concert. It would have taken us only twenty minutes to walk to the park from Camelford Road. And the fact that the event was taking place only two days after Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool made it a particularly poignant occasion. But while Mick Jagger was reading Shelley and hundreds of white butterflies were being released in tribute to Jones, we were driving off in a small removals van to begin a new life on one of the biggest council estates in Britain.
I had transferred my Post Office employment from Barnes to Slough, and by the Monday morning we were settling in and I was cycling into the sorting office.
It was on the Friday of that same week that ‘Space Oddity’ was released. Bowie, pre-Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, had made his first attempt to put the mysteries of outer space to music. Such was the originality of the song and the otherworldliness of its production that the record could itself have been beamed in from another planet. It was certainly in tune with the zeitgeist. Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, from which Bowie must have taken his inspiration and (with an ironic twist) his song title, had been released the previous year, and the books of writers such as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Brian Aldiss were surging in popularity.
Clarke collaborated with Kubrick on his film, writing the novel on which it was based – at the same time as the movie was being made, as it turned out. A unique modus operandi, not to say a labour-intensive and expensive one. Now viewed as one of the most influential films of all time, it also brought the music of Strauss to a new audience, as well as that of contemporary composers Aram Khachaturian and Györgi Ligeti.
Bowie’s record company had picked the release date carefully. Five days later, the Apollo 11 space mission was launched and Bowie’s little science-fiction story about Major Tom and his lonely exile in space became intertwined with the giant leap for mankind.
Over half a billion people around the world watched those grainy black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, gaping in awe as the event unfolded in real time. Judy and I were among them. For us the sense that we were entering a new era was emphasised by the dramatic change in our own world. Only a fortnight before, we had been living in the slums of west London. Now here we were in our own comfortable home, with the majestic beauty of Burnham Beeches just down the road. We couldn’t have been more content. Whereas my mother had died with the council house she’d dreamed of still beyond her grasp, I had been allocated one at just nineteen. (I wasn’t even old enough to hold the tenancy: it had to be put in Judy’s sole name.)
And now we were privileged to witness something unimaginable when my parents were born: human beings stepping on to another planet. As I saw those two men in their spacesuits cavorting like kids against the backdrop of the earth spinning below, a constant question ran on a loop through my mind to the chords of D7, C and G: ‘Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear me Major Tom?’