Bowie Read online

  BOWIE

  The Illustrated Story

  Pat Gilbert

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 London Boy, 1947–1967

  2 All the Madmen, 1968–1970

  3 Leper Messiah, 1971–1972

  4 Fame, 1973–1974

  5 Cracked Actor, 1975–1976

  6 Subterraneans, 1977–1979

  7 It’s No Game, 1980–1984

  8 Little Wonder, 1985–2016

  Sources

  Image Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Introduction

  When David Bowie passed away on January 10, 2016, two days after his sixty-ninth birthday, the outpouring of emotion was unusually intense. Something about Bowie’s loss seemed uncommonly personal and deeply moving. It felt inconceivable that an artist with such limitless imagination and ceaseless drive could leave the world without any warning, having just released the brilliant, genre-defying Blackstar, his twenty-fifth studio album.

  For fifty years, Bowie had been a byword for cool. Back in the early 1970s, he’d introduced the idea of adding theater to rock music when he assumed the character of the flame-haired, glam-rock messiah Ziggy Stardust. Thereafter came a series of iconic personas, each signaling an evolution in the form his music took. Aladdin Sane, with his razored-off eyebrows, distinctive lightning flash, and fluid sexuality, heralded a move into avant-garde art-rock. The zoot-suited “Gouster” image fanfared his dramatic left turn into contemporary American soul music. Then came the pale, alien-looking Thin White Duke, mixing soul, rock, esoterica, and electronica; the nameless, dressed-down hipster of his experimental Berlin Trilogy years; the Pierrot-costumed dandy of the New Romantic era; and the dashing men’s fashion icon of the 1980s and beyond.

  Each of these amazing transformations, which this illustrated history profiles, was propelled by a new philosophy, interest, location, or idea, usually coupled with the arrival of a different key musical collaborator, whether it was glam guitar god Mick Ronson, soul man Carlos Alomar, sonic visionary Brian Eno, punk avatar Iggy Pop, disco king Nile Rodgers, or multi-instrumentalist Reeves Gabrels.

  Bowie surveys the audience at the 2002 Meltdown Festival in London, which he curated, and at which he performed in full his 1977 album Low alongside his then latest work, Heathen.

  But one thing remained constant: something in Bowie’s music spoke directly, and intimately, to those who heard it. No one familiar with his catalog will ever forget the haunting image of the tragic astronaut Major Tom in his first hit, “Space Oddity,” the “girl with the mousey hair” in “Life on Mars?,” the lovers kissing by the Berlin Wall in “Heroes,” or the Asian siren who sensuously whispers, “Shhh… shut your mouth” in “China Girl.” Nor will they ever forget the timeless, bewitching melodies of songs such as “Starman,” “Golden Years,” “Ashes to Ashes,” “Loving the Alien,” or “Little Wonder.”

  But while Bowie’s extraordinary body of recorded work arguably remains unrivaled in music—as does his influence on street fashion—his work went way beyond the rock and pop world. From his teenage years, he was fascinated by film and theater, and in the 1970s and 1980s he enjoyed a parallel career as an actor, giving classic performances as John Merrick in the Broadway staging of The Elephant Man in 1980 and as the conflicted British army officer in 1983’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. It was his starring role as the visiting alien in the 1975 cult movie The Man Who Fell to Earth that was his big-screen triumph, his character Thomas Newton blending with his own mid-’70s persona to create the otherworldly, drug-addicted Thin White Duke.

  After Bowie’s commercial peak in the mid-1980s with Let’s Dance and Tonight and the hugely lucrative world tours that followed, his boundless imagination and artistic restlessness never waned, and lesser-selling later albums such as 1. Outside, Earthling, and Reality demonstrated that he’d lost none of his gift for peerless artistry that had informed his 1970s and 1980s canon. His last two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar, suggested that he still had so much more to give the world had his life not been cut short by cancer. But then, as his friend and producer Tony Visconti points out, even Bowie’s death was turned into a powerful artistic statement: the video for the Blackstar single “Lazarus” showed him writhing on a hospital bed, blindfolded, mouthing the chilling lyric, “Look up here, I’m in heaven.”

  Bowie was a one-off, a pioneer, a messenger, a starman, a charming English gentleman, and a genius. But for all his ever-changing looks, extraordinary musical innovations, and effortless personification of cool, he was also the suburban London boy next door who, as the story in this book shows, transformed himself by sheer willpower into an exotic, outlandish creature with a healthy and enthusiastic disregard for straight society’s hang-ups and norms. Perhaps Bowie’s death hit us so hard because, somewhere deep down in our souls, we know he was actually just one of us.

  But, of course, he wasn’t. He was David Bowie.

  Pat Gilbert

  London, February 2017

  Angie, Zowie, and David at a press conference at the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam, February 7, 1974.

  CHAPTER 1

  1947–1967

  London Boy

  It’s perhaps fitting that David Bowie, an artist who combined music, image, theater, and myth with such boldness and originality, should have had a touch of the exotic in his background. At twenty-one years old, his father Haywood Jones, known as “John,” inherited a sizeable sum of money, which he invested in—of all the options available in 1930s Depression-era Britain—a nightclub revue featuring his first wife, Hilda. Clearly the young Jones had a liking for music and colorful characters, for when that venture failed, he ploughed the £1,000 he had left into a glitzy piano bar in London’s West End. But by the time World War II arrived in 1939, he’d lost all his money and taken a clerical job at Dr. Barnardo’s, a famous charity that provided homes for abandoned and abused children.

  Bowie’s father left his job to fight in the war but returned to Dr. Barnardo’s in 1945. Soon afterward, he met a waitress named Peggy Burns while on business in Royal Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Peggy already had a son, Terry, born in 1937, and a wartime daughter, Myra, who’d been given up for adoption. While the couple waited for John’s divorce from Hilda to be finalized, they settled at 40 Stansfield Road, a Victorian house in inner-city Brixton that John had bought cheaply at the end of the war for £500. It was there that Peggy gave birth to a son, David Robert Jones, on January 8, 1947. Fair haired and nice looking, he would be the last addition to the family.

  David Robert Jones in the mid-1950s, around seven years old.

  Terry Burns came to live with the family, but his presence caused friction with Bowie’s father, by nature a reserved and taciturn character. John had fathered a daughter, Annette, in a prewar affair, and she too stayed at the house for a time. Stansfield Road was therefore a place of secrets and veiled tensions. But the overwhelming tone of Bowie’s early home life—and the thing that also seemed to drive him to escape into the outlandish, colorful world of rock ’n’ roll—would be something far more commonplace: the claustrophobia of drab, suburban normality.

  Performing on television for the first time as David Bowie, at a taping of Ready Steady Go!, March 4, 1966.

  Bowie was six when the family uprooted to Bromley, a small town on the edge of South London that by the 1950s had long been swallowed up by the ever-expanding metropolis. The Joneses eventually settled in a small terraced house in Plaistow Grove, just behind the Sundridge Park railway station. The area was characterized by its wide, leafy avenues and solid, middle-class homes, a stark contrast from the hubbub and poverty of war-damaged Brixton. Terry remained at Stansfield Road, ostensibly because of his job nearby, but also because the mental ins
tability that characterized his adult years—and heavily shaded his younger half-brother’s best work in the 1970s—was already making life for those around him difficult. But even without Terry, the mood at Plaistow Grove was subdued and oppressive.

  Visiting the house in the mid-1960s, singer Dana Gillespie noted how joyless the house felt; John’s history as a frivolous young nightclub impresario was long hidden behind the serious-minded front of a respected charity worker. “I went down to this little house, where everything was neatly laid out,” recalled Gillespie, whose own parents enjoyed an affluent, bohemian lifestyle in West London. “There was plastic lino, which I hadn’t seen before, and the sofa had one of those things to catch the Brylcreem. It was a place totally without humour or deep conversation.”

  Bowie admitted in later life to finding his mother, Peggy, emotionally distant and being unable to make conversation with his father, whom he nevertheless loved. There were also unspoken worries that Terry’s illness, which ran through the Burns family line, might one day also claim Peggy or David. Plaistow Grove’s strained atmosphere spurred the singer to greedily consume whatever entertainment was available, even if he had to create it himself. By the age of eleven, in 1958, he was already the proud owner of a ukulele and tea-chest bass, two key ingredients for making “skiffle,” a homegrown hybrid of blues and country music popularized by Lonnie Donegan’s hit cover of “Rock Island Line” in 1956. He also possessed a bag of records that his father brought home from work, the most thrilling of which was Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” whose camp squeals and wild energy filled the house with what he described as “colour and outrageous defiance.” Bowie was convinced at that moment that he’d “heard God.”

  The first hint that Bowie, who delighted in the fact that he shared a birthday with Elvis Presley, wanted to be a star himself came in August 1958. That month he entertained his fellow Boy Scouts around a troop campfire on the Isle of Wight, singing the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and “Tom Hark” by Elias and His Zig Zag Jive Flutes (both hits that summer). He was joined by his school friend George Underwood, who would be a close musical ally throughout his teenage years. A further sign that Bowie was eager to take an artistic path through life occurred around the same time, when he convinced his parents to let him enroll at Bromley Technical High School, even though his borderline exam results entitled him to attend the far more prestigious and academic Bromley Grammar School.

  His choice of school turned out to be a crucial move: with its emphasis on creativity and craftsmanship, Bromley Tech boasted a first-class art department headed by forward-thinking teacher Owen Frampton, whose son Peter, later of the group Humble Pie and then a successful solo artist, joined the school in 1961. Bowie and his best mate Underwood enjoyed a schedule where whole days were sometimes spent in art classes. It was a progressive regime that, as Bowie later explained, “was an experiment to try to get us [pupils] involved in art at a younger age.” Owen Frampton encouraged Bowie, Underwood, and Geoff MacCormack (another friend) to bring their instruments to school, where they’d harmonize rock ’n’ roll hits in the echoey stone stairwell of the art block. Even at that tender age, to them the road ahead seemed straightforward. “We saw the glint of stardom and we wanted to go after it,” Underwood recalled.

  In 1959, Terry Burns had completed his compulsory three years’ National Service and moved into Plaistow Grove. Together with a degree of disquiet, he also brought with him a collection of jazz records and beat literature, including Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. These exotic totems helped fuel Bowie’s growing fascination with all things American, including the newly appointed President Kennedy’s haircut, which, to considerable amusement, Bowie requested at his local barber shop. He also developed a liking for baseball and American football—or at least the glamorous image of baseball players and NFL players—and wrote to the US Embassy declaring the fact. His enthusiasm was rewarded by an invitation to the embassy, where he and Underwood were each presented with an NFL helmet.

  A key early influence, “Pop Goes the Weasel” by Anthony Newley.

  The visit made the local paper, an early instance of Bowie’s knack for self-promotion and deep curiosity in subjects he’d quickly lose interest in. What remained constant was his obsession with music—everything from Charles Mingus and John Coltrane to novelty hits such as Anthony Newley’s “Pop Goes the Weasel” and the caveman rock of the Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley Oop.” He was, increasingly, also fascinated with girls. It was the latter interest that led him to acquire a startling physical trait that in years to come would add immeasurably to his otherworldly allure.

  The incident took place in the playground at Bromley Tech around Easter 1962, when Bowie and Underwood fell out over a girl they both fancied. Though each has given a different account of what happened, Underwood maintains that Bowie phoned him to say that his date with a girl named Carol was off—a fabrication, it transpired, to enable Bowie to snare her for himself. The ensuing row between the two boys boiled over into a fight, during which an irate Underwood threw a punch that connected with his friend’s eyeball. The pupil in Bowie’s left eye was permanently dilated as a result, giving his eye the appearance of having a different color—brown rather than blue.

  Fifteen-year-old David Jones with his first group, the Kon-rads. Among the band’s members was his childhood friend, George Underwood.

  Bowie was out of school for several weeks while he underwent treatment at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital, while a mortified Underwood tried to convince John and Peggy that he’d meant no real harm. “I was always looking at him thinking, oh God, I did that,” Underwood told Paul Trynka, author of the acclaimed Bowie biography David Bowie: Starman. Later, Bowie would thank his friend for blessing him with “a kind of mystique,” though in the immediate aftermath, they didn’t talk for a while.

  In the summer term, the guitar-playing Underwood joined the Kon-rads, a band that copied the beat and rock ’n’ roll hits of the day. When the frosty relations between the two boys thawed, Underwood persuaded them to recruit Bowie, who by now had become proficient on a plastic alto saxophone his father had bought him two years earlier. It was wielding that instrument that Bowie made his first proper stage debut, at the Kon-rads’ slot at a Bromley Tech school fete on June 16, 1962, honking along to a set of Shadows numbers.

  A teenaged David Jones poses with a violin and a female model in a photograph taken for Boyfriend magazine on Kingly Street, London, in 1963.

  The Kon-rads play a school dance in Bromley, South London, in 1964.

  Bowie’s last year at school was dominated by dates with girls (“they loved him,” a contemporary observed), trips to the record store in Bromley’s Medhurst’s department store, and rehearsals and gigs with the Kon-rads, who ironically booted Underwood out at the end of 1962 while keeping hold of his blond-haired, smartly dressed friend, now the proud owner of a proper brass tenor saxophone. Bowie—styling himself as “Davey J”—proved to be a huge hit with the group’s female fans, who melted at his winning smile and young, pretty-boy looks. As Kon-rads singer Roger Ferris told MOJO magazine, “I was a better singer, but I had nowhere near David’s personality and charisma on stage.”

  What many didn’t recognize, however, was that Bowie’s cool, easygoing manner masked what the singer would describe as “an unbearable shyness,” which he disguised by throwing himself into roles and personas and which seemed to evaporate when he performed on stage. That autumn, the Kon-rads acquired a new drummer whose tenuous connection with fame deeply impressed their young saxophonist. “Dave Hadfield had apparently played with Cliff and the Shadows when they were called something else,” Bowie informed the author in 2002. “He married one of our backing singers.” Galvanized by the idea he might one day achieve similar fame, Bowie became ever more focused on becoming a star and began to take control of the group’s direction. Intriguingly, the band caught the ear of Joe Meek, the visionary producer of “Telstar,” but a
demo session at his Holloway Road studio came to nothing. The group also auditioned for Decca with an original song called “I Never Dreamed,” which Bowie may or may not have co-written (the jury’s out on that one), but Decca wasn’t impressed either. In late summer of 1963, the Kon-rads’ swinging saxophonist quit.

  Bowie’s sudden departure baffled his bandmates, but in an interview years later, he revealed his reasoning was simple. As would happen again in the mid-1970s, he’d discovered the attraction of soul music. “I wanted to play [Marvin Gaye’s] ‘Can I Get a Witness’ and they didn’t,” he explained to writer Paul Du Noyer. There may have been other things on the sixteen-year-old’s mind too: that summer, he’d left school with just one O-Level pass—in art—and now had to face the unthinkable and find himself a job. Asked by his career advisor at school what he wanted to do, Bowie had replied, in all seriousness, that he wanted to be “a sax player in a modern jazz quartet.” The closest to that position the advisor could find was a job at a harp factory in Bromley. Thankfully, his art teacher Owen Frampton intervened and arranged for Bowie to start work as a runner at an advertising agency on Bond Street in Central London. The idea of succumbing to the nine-to-five slog filled Bowie with horror. “I didn’t wanna go down to Bromley South station and take the train to Victoria and work in a bloody advertising office,” he told Q magazine’s David Quantick.

  Marc Feld, soon to be known as Marc Bolan, photographed in London in October 1965.

  Though Bowie “loathed it,” the job meant he could spend his lunch hour exploring the music shops in London’s West End. These included the storied Dobell’s jazz record store on Charing Cross Road, where he picked up a copy of Bob Dylan’s first album. The record had a profound effect: for the next few months, he and George Underwood, sporting jeans and cotton work shirts, performed raunchy folk and blues numbers as the Hooker Brothers (or else David’s Reds and Blues). The ecstatic reaction from local audiences suggested they could do worse than expand into a fully electrified R & B combo. An advert in the Melody Maker soon led them to team up with a West London–based group called the King Bees.