Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  Still without a hit to his name, Vince could always fascinate the press with stories of the life he’d left behind in America. He said he’d been in the US Army, just like Elvis Presley, who was currently serving out his draft in Friedberg, Germany. He said he’d been a member of a Los Angeles hot-rod gang called The Roadmasters. That he came close to being mortally wounded in a knife fight, just like James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. That he’d been discovered battered and bruised by a kindly stranger who allowed him to convalesce in their home for three days while he reassessed his life, coming to the conclusion he should travel to England and become a rock ’n’ roll star. Always ready with a great story was Vince Taylor.

  Except there was no Vince Taylor. While it was true he’d grown up in Hollywood, he wasn’t American. He was British, born in July 1939 in Isleworth, west London, before his family emigrated to California when he was seven years-old. And his name wasn’t Vince Taylor. He’d taken the ‘Vince’ from Elvis’s character in Jailhouse Rock and the ‘Taylor’ from actor Robert Taylor, star of Quo Vadis and Ivanhoe. His real name was Brian Holden. Vince was merely a character 18-year-old Brian created out of thin air in an intrepid, if doomed, bid to conquer British rock ’n’ roll. A singing, shaking figment conjured by a fragile, feeble mind …

  VINCE TAYLOR DIDN’T officially exist but neither did David Jones until 5 April 1960. The boy who would be Ziggy had lived the first thirteen years of his life without a birth certificate. Born out of wedlock, he’d been left absent from all parish records until he needed a passport for a family trip to France.

  Stepping into adolescence, young David’s was a world where rock ’n’ roll and death were already interchangeable. The previous year Buddy Holly had been killed in a plane crash alongside Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper. In the spring of 1960 their spectres were joined by that of Eddie Cochran, cut off in his 21-year-old prime in a car collision while touring England. Cochran’s disembodied croon, a message from the other side frozen in black vinylite, would haunt David’s ears in the listening booth of Medhurst’s department store on Bromley High Street where he’d spend most afternoons after school, investing all his pocket money and boyish charm in special discounts from the 17-year-old sales girl. Two months after Cochran died he reached the top of the UK singles chart with the clairvoyant ‘Queen Bitch’-alike shake of ‘Three Steps To Heaven’. Cochran had paid the ultimate price but was finally number one. Three steps from Earth, Ziggy took note.

  While a nation of rockers swooned over Cochran, nobody paid much attention to the deteriorating fortunes of Vince Taylor and his ever-changing Playboys, slipping further off the pop radar with their third and fourth singles, unable to compete against the stronger Brit beats of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates or Cliff Richard and The Shadows. By the end of 1960 England had seen and heard enough of Vince Taylor, sweeping his sham existence off the White Cliffs of Dover. Across the channel, the rebel-starved French were more than happy to dredge him ashore.

  In Paris, Brian Holden began his hip-swivelling medicine show all over again, now stealing the same guise of demonic Black Leather Prince adopted by Gene Vincent, the American ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ idol who narrowly avoided death in the same crash as Cochran. Unlike the British, the French knew no immunity to the Vince Taylor virus. Flapping on the floor of Parisian nightclubs in a leather blouson and oversized medallion, black-gloved hands shaking a bicycle chain, legs bandying back and forth in rubbery spasms as if his bone marrow were made of gin, while pouting and screaming his way through popular American hits, Taylor was everything the French believed rock ’n’ roll ought to be. A handsome, oily-quiffed cartoon amalgam of hoodlum and heartthrob straight from the finger-clicking script of a Hollywood B-movie.

  Signed by record boss Eddie Barclay, Vince Taylor became the fake American labelmate of some of France’s biggest singing stars. Among them was Belgian-born chansonnier Jacques Brel, who’d move to Barclay’s eponymous label having already made his name on Philips with a string of albums toxic with mad love, loneliness, disease, the devil and death, including his own: 1959’s ‘La Mort’; ‘My Death’. Brel’s third album for Barclay, a 1964 live recording from the Paris Olympia, would also include his ode to the drunken sailors, whores and fish heads waltzing around the port of ‘Amsterdam’.

  In his first few months on Barclay, Vince jiggled off some half dozen singles, all knockabout covers of Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Kidd and Eddie Cochran. It seemed in France the ruse was finally working. Barclay were smart to exploit his image in a series of short films for the popular Scopitone cine-jukeboxes, Vince acting out his role as the licentious leather hooligan, leaping up on pool tables wielding his bike chain with a come-hither sneer. In interviews he’d shyly try to play down the violence. ‘My stage act is an act,’ he’d stutter. ‘As far as in the street or a way of life, I’m like everyone else. I’m a normal person.’ Only Vince’s fans weren’t interested in normality.

  In November 1961 he was due to headline the third Paris Festival of Rock at the Palais Des Sports. Before Vince had so much as walked on stage the three-thousand-strong audience ran riot. Fourteen gendarmes were injured and one girl seriously hurt as his French fans spontaneously destroyed over two thousand seats in a slam-bang exorcism of raw, teenage anarchy. After the hall was cleared of fans, Vince crept from his dressing room and skulked through the wreckage, still dressed in his black leathers, press photographers capturing his glazed expression as he fondled the shards of devastation. Brian Holden had wanted to convince a nation he was a rock ’n’ roll bad boy. Bike chains, broken glass and, ‘If you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the right place.’ This was his reward. Splinters of wood and twisted metal. The hollow spoils of victory for the legendary lie that was Vince Taylor.

  BACK IN BROMLEY, Terry continued to drip-feed David’s appetite for the wilder sides of American jazz and beat literature on weekend trips to the record booths and coffee bars of London’s West End. The allure of performance beckoned ever lustier after he was taken to see the new musical co-written by and starring Anthony Newley at the Queen’s Theatre, Stop The World, I Want To Get Off. The only male actor in an otherwise female cast, Newley mixed singing, comedy and elements of mime in his central role as Littlechap, the Cockney clown who achieves success at the expense of love and happiness, bowing out with his equivalent rock ’n’ roll suicide ballad ‘What Kind Of Fool Am I?’

  On Christmas Day, 1961, David’s perpetual pleas for a saxophone were finally answered when he received his first, a white acrylic Grafton model with gold keys. Alone in his bedroom, he squawked on his new best friend in tuneless dreams of Little Richard and heading west with Sal and Dean. But from the outside, he still looked like a normal teenage boy. Time and space had chosen David Jones as the one who would be Ziggy Stardust. Now, with just ten years before he was due, the moment had arrived to properly brand him. The extraterrestrial circumcision. A rite of passage from human to alien from which there could be no return.

  Her name was Carol and David fancied her. So did his best friend, George. It was George who asked Carol if she’d like to go out with him to the youth club that Friday. Carol accepted. George was thrilled. David was jealous.

  The night of their date, David rang George out of the blue to tell him Carol had asked him to cancel the date on her behalf. David was lying. George believed him. Carol waited at the youth club in vain.

  The following Monday morning, David regaled his friends on the bus to Bromley Technical College with the news he was now going out with Carol. George realised he’d been had. When they arrived at school, George grabbed David in the playground and threw a single punch at his face, striking the left side of his head like a lightning bolt.

  The deed was done.

  George had only meant a retributive thump but realised immediately he’d hit David harder than he should have. So hard the headmaster drove David to the emergency department of Farnborough Hospital while he clutched hi
s face in agony.

  Two days later he was taken to specialists at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital. He’d suffered lasting damage to the sphincter muscles in his left eye, leaving its pupil permanently dilated. He could still see but would spend the rest of his life with different sized pupils, the medical condition known as anisocoria. His right eye was blue but his enlarged left pupil made its surrounding iris look green. David Jones, just 15-years-old, suddenly had different coloured eyes. The boy who would be was now the boy who could only be Ziggy.

  Once branded, the paving stones of David’s and Ziggy’s destinies rapidly fell into place towards their due crossroads. Recuperating from the accident, his friendship with George remarkably unscathed, he devoted himself to his saxophone. Looking through old copies of Melody Maker he found the number for popular jazz bandleader Ronnie Ross, six miles away in Orpington. David cajoled Ross into giving him lessons, spending Saturday mornings being taught the basics of blowing and breathing control. Terry was impressed, as much by his half-brother’s sax progress as his continued passions for bebop pioneer Charlie Parker and more modern jazz albums. In particular, Oh Yeah by Charles Mingus, released in 1962 but, to David’s ears, sounding ‘very 2001’, especially the pulpit raving ‘Ecclusiastics’ and the car-jam chaos of ‘Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am’, a phrase Mingus attributed to drummer Max Roach. ‘I’m trying to play the truth of what I am,’ said Mingus on the album’s back cover. ‘The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.’ Ziggy’s teenage chrysalis softly crinkled in solidarity.

  A fierier baptism awaited David that October when he saw ‘God’ in person: Little Richard, now back on the live frontlines of rock ’n’ roll after his brief Sputnik-inspired holy meltdown. Halfway through his set at the Woolwich Granada, Richard stood on top of his grand piano, suddenly grabbing at his chest, face wrinkled in agony. The band slowed to an uneasy halt. Richard collapsed on the floor. The compere pelted on stage, took the mic and asked if there was a doctor in the house. David was convinced he was watching the death of God in front of his very eyes. Moments later, Richard was back, coolly cocking a leg over his piano, a smile the size of Saturn. The whole dying stunt was merely a regular feature of Richard’s act.

  So time took a cigarette and delicately put it to David’s spluttering young mouth.

  BRITISH ROCK ’n’ roll in 1962 was still anchored to the ground by the terrestrial yodels of Frank Ifield, the bruvverly bop of Joe Brown and the clean Telecaster prangs of The Shadows. The only stardust to fall between was in that year’s joint Anglo-American pop showcase film It’s Trad, Dad! where a white leather Gene Vincent (looking like Vince Taylor in negative) serenaded his strange, discordant ‘Spaceship To Mars’, and the interstellar crackles and ice-rink screech of The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’, the first, and very probably last, number one hit written in honour of a communications satellite.

  ‘Telstar’s creator was Gloucestershire eccentric Joe Meek, famous for working in his home studio above a leather goods shop on London’s Holloway Road. Along with séances, Buddy Holly and his unhealthy lust for the Tornados’ blond-haired teenage bassist Heinz Burt, space ranked high among Meek’s obsessions. Two years earlier he’d produced a concept album about extraterrestrial life called I Hear A New World. Meek and his writing partner Geoff Goddard were also habitual UFO spotters: the source of inspiration for their wonderfully wonky and commercially doomed country-bumpkin ‘Starman’ prototype, ‘Sky Men’.

  Yet as ‘Telstar’ slid down the charts in November, the writing for the likes of Meek, The Tornados and even The Shadows was already boring through the concrete of pop history as a song called ‘Love Me Do’ craftily shunted its way towards the top 20. David was the first boy in his class to buy a copy of The Beatles’ debut, its wobbling grandpa’s harmonica one of many seeds now planting itself deep in his starry subconscious for future use. Another was sown the second time he saw Little Richard, in the puckering sight and precious sound of the young London blues band supporting called The Rolling Stones. Others, in Dobell’s jazz shop on Charing Cross Road, the seeds of John Lee Hooker and the first album by new American folk sensation Bob Dylan. Seeds which effortlessly took root and flowered with the realisation David’s saxophone skills weren’t up to those of a jazz musician. He’d never be a John Coltrane or a Roland Kirk. But he could, as he’d later confess, ‘fake it pretty well on rock ’n’ roll’.

  And so David faked it, his life’s blinding bright pretence beginning as saxophone player and co-vocalist in dear, eye-denting George’s covers band, The Konrads. Soon he was experimenting with his first aliases. ‘Dave Day’, ‘Alexis Jay’, ‘Luther Jay’. He tried, in vain, to convince the band to swap their tidy bowtie and dinner-jacket image for a cowboy theme, similar to that already tried by another of Joe Meek’s instrumental acts, The Outlaws. He even suggested they call themselves The Ghost Riders so he could take the name of Alamo folk hero ‘Jim Bowie’. The Konrads were happy as they were.

  Splintering away from the band with George, he nailed his colours to American R&B as The Hooker Brothers. Until The Hooker Brothers became The Bow Street Runners who in turn became Dave’s Reds & Blues, his now the face in front of the mic and the name above the title. Until he changed his Mingus-quick mind again and thought about calling himself after Henry Fielding’s rakish hero Tom Jones; at that time the other Tom Jones was still ‘Tommy Scott’, trying to repel the amorous advances of his first producer, Joe Meek. Until, in temporary defeat, David Jones decided to become simply Davie Jones and call his band The King Bees.

  It was as ‘Davie Jones With The King Bees’ that he’d finally hear his teenage voice chiselled for all eternity in the crannies of a black plastic seven-inch disc. David’s tenacity in firing off requests for professional investment paid off when he caught the interest of 34-year-old pop hustler Leslie Conn. By June 1964 The King Bees were on a contract with Conn and on record with Decca’s Vocalion subsidiary. The Starman-in-waiting’s vinyl debut was ‘Liza Jane’, a song cheekily credited to Conn but freely adapted from a traditional American folk standard. David sang lead, played saxophone and proved, above all else, that he wasn’t lying when he’d said he could fake rock ’n’ roll, wailing desire for his woman with mock Memphis grit over a cutthroat twang and his own seductive sax tooting. ‘Liza Jane’ was a song about lust and screaming, about girls and madness (‘she drives me insane!’) but above all else about a 17-year-old kid from Bromley being given his chance to convince the world he was as potentially godlike as Little Richard. Even if in press photos, dressed in a dustman’s leather waistcoat and hunting boots, he looked unnervingly like Tommy Steele in panto as Robin Hood.

  Barely a month after the single’s release, between its failure to sell and David’s restless Mingusitis, he was driven away from The King Bees into the arms of another of Conn’s groups, The Manish Boys. He also packed in the day job he’d been struggling to hold down since leaving school with one art O-level, a junior paste-up artist with Nevundy–Hurst, a commercial graphic company in Mayfair. With some financial support from his dad, David turned to Conn for any chance to earn an extra few bob. As it happened, Conn did have a chore, one that made the lightest of demands on David’s artistic streak. Repainting the walls of his Denmark Street management office.

  When David turned up for work he discovered his boss wasn’t so daft as to overestimate his enthusiasm to finish the job alone. Conn had roped in another of his skint and eager young charges, a short 18-year-old kid from Hackney who fancied himself as King Mod.

  ‘Hello,’ said David. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a singer,’ said the other boy.

  ‘Oh, yeah? So am I.’

  The air spat and crackled over the paint pots between them.

  ‘Are you a mod?’ asked David

  ‘Yeah, I’m King Mod.’

  Fizzle!

  ‘Your shoes are crap,’ said the boy.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’


  SNAP!

  ‘Well, you’re short,’ said David.

  The tense air steamed and popped until it finally cooled, revealing the brittle frame of a strange, fragile new friendship. By the time Conn returned to his office, David and King Mod had downed brushes and scarpered, leaving a tardy half-finished undercoat.

  THE MANISH BOYS offered David only marginally more satisfaction than interior decorating. Unable to steer their sound away from the strict confines of R&B, he instead concentrated on their image, leading by example as a long-haired Carnaby Street dandy and leader of the entirely fictitious International League for the Preservation of Animal Filament. ‘It’s really for the protection of pop musicians and those who wear their hair long,’ he told the Evening Standard. ‘It’s time we united and stood up for our curls.’ Aged 17, he was fast becoming a master faker.

  The BBC gobbled the same bait, inviting the Fauntleroy-locked David, his best friend George and the shaggy members of The Manish Boys to discuss the issue on the Tonight programme with Cliff Michelmore. The League had since changed its name to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. ‘I think we’re all fairly tolerant,’ David told Michelmore, ‘but for the last two years we’ve had comments like, “Darlin’” and, “Can I carry your handbag?” thrown at us. I think it’s just had to stop now.’

  It was David’s first interview on national television and he was talking about something which didn’t actually exist. He never even mentioned The Manish Boys, who’d record just one single with him before disbanding. A cover of Bobby Bland’s soul ballad ‘I Pity The Fool’, it fell on a nation of deaf ears in March 1965. At least its B-side marked the first ‘Davie Jones’ original to make it on record, a stomping beatnik-jive called ‘Take My Tip’, which saw the phrase ‘playing with the spider’ bubble between his jinky teeth. He’d have sung it twice but the second time fluffed the line as ‘bider’, time constraints leaving the take as it was. It wouldn’t matter. ‘Spider.’ A sleek word with a precise punch. Given time, David Jones would learn to sing it better.