by Marc Spitz
“Unfortunately, prior to our moving in, twenty-seven cats had lived there with a professor of history and his wife, who were a little eccentric,” Angie recalled. “There were a lot of plants and the cats felt they were in a jungle of their own in the hall. You can imagine the smell.”
They painted the walls and ceilings hunter green in the living room and a light blue in the bedroom and scrubbed the tile in the fireplace. Bowie began a series of collages on the bathroom walls by pasting up magazine and book clippings. Angie also insisted that they install a telephone so that they could stay on top of business affairs. She soon regretted the decision, as many of the calls were not from Kenneth Pitt reporting increasing sales and bookings, but rather from Bowie’s mother, who made no secret of the fact that she felt abandoned as soon as her son officially moved out of Plaistow Grove. Angie would take Peggy shopping and lend an ear to her self-pitying declarations that her life had lost meaning—this while taking care of the extensive maintenance of Haddon Hall, as well as helping roadie the small gigs Bowie managed to get in local cabarets and workingman clubs. Seeing this end of his career firsthand, and how he went over, Angie fully realized the extent to which her boyfriend was being, in her opinion, mismanaged. Soon she was loudly complaining about Pitt, and Bowie felt even more supported and understood. It was a problem.
“I think David was beginning to turn to me in place of his father,” she writes in Backstage Passes. “John Jones had always been the supportive, accepting person in his life and a strong force standing between his son and Peggy’s disapproval. Now that he was gone, David needed someone else in that role.”
Famously, before they moved in together, Bowie asked Angie if she could “deal” with the fact that he did not love her. There are at least three ways of looking at this disclaimer. One, perhaps he closed that door after Hermione and did not open it up again until he encountered the supermodel Iman (his second wife) in the early nineties; two, perhaps his mother and father’s lack of demonstration toward one another made him wary of any effusion or confirmation of emotions; or three, maybe he actually did love her but it simply wasn’t hip to say so. “The truth of the matter is that later it became obvious that he may have said what he thought sounded cool, but that may not have been what he felt, because he acted like a jilted lover [years later] when I left him,” says Angie. According to her, she took to saying “In your ear” instead of “I love you” as a term of endearment. While she wanted some form of exclusivity, and was very nearly having it, she was aware that times were changing, as were the notions of cohabitation and monogamy. “While I was in love with David and ready to share him with anyone he nominated, I still wanted to hold that privileged and treasured place as his wife,” she writes in Free Spirit. “I was prepared to bow to convention that much. I wish now I had subscribed to convention more because it would take its natural revenge.”
In order for Angie to remain in England at length, and, in the long run, for Bowie to be able to stay in America, it was decided that they would have a civil ceremony and marry as a matter of course. “If it hadn’t been for that we probably wouldn’t have gotten married,” Bowie told journalist George Tremlett. “To use the legal ceremonies of marriage are just a formality that don’t mean very much if a couple cease to be in love with each other afterwards. Although we were in love with each other, we don’t feel the need to get married to prove it. The actual ceremony didn’t mean that much to us.”
They would eventually marry on March 19, 1970. Angie, dressed in a pink and purple dress, and Bowie, in a shearling-trimmed long coat, exchanged vows and four silver wedding bracelets at Bromley’s register offices. Peggy Jones was a witness, as was Tony Visconti’s girlfriend Liz Hartley and drummer John Cambridge. Ken Pitt was not present. The couple “honeymooned” at their new home in Haddon Hall, relatively as exotic in its comfort and expanse as anywhere else they might have considered.
Bowie’s devotion to Angie, although technically without “love,” can be detected quite plainly in his first composition of the 1970s, “The Prettiest Star.” The track, which would later appear on Aladdin Sane, was recorded at Trident Studios on January 8, 1970, Bowie’s twenty-third birthday. Phillips/Mercury issued it as a single, hoping that the poppy and romantic tune might become a proper follow-up to “Space Oddity” and demonstrate Bowie’s range as a songwriter. It did not sell, however. Worse, Marc Bolan, who laid down his guest guitar work, according to legend, in just one hour, would, within a year, become the biggest pop star in all of England.
Meanwhile, Pitt was still trying to get his distracted client to organize his schedule, increasingly from a distance, as he did not feel completely welcome in Beckenham. “Haddon Hall started with the best intentions but it soon became a pseudo-hippie commune with A [Angie] as earth mother,” he says via letter. “Even Tony Visconti, who has said that HH [Haddon Hall] was a lot of fun, finally fell out with A and quit, but not before he had caused mayhem with D’s recording sessions. He could never understand my role in David’s career and daily affairs and that recording sessions had to be arranged with me. He always seemed to be unaware of the fact that it was I who gave him the job of producing D’s recordings. He would arrange dates with A and D only to find that they clashed with D’s live engagements. It was finally agreed that a list of D’s engagements should be displayed at HH for all to see, but A, who had attended a business studies course at Kingston, proved to be incapable of maintaining such a list. If only she stuck to costumery, for which she had flair.”
While Bolan was lustily celebrating “hot love,” Bowie was either dispassionately scrawling a song list for Pitt—“Can’t Get Used to Losing You” (a number made famous by Andy Williams and later covered by the English Beat), “Sunny” and the now perilously dated “I Dig Everything” among them—or spending the remainder of his “Space Oddity” royalties on antiques. “I think he just got some royalty money and he showed off his new coal scuttle,” Ray Stevenson, who frequented Haddon Hall at this time, says. “He was really proud of it. It’s an English thing. In the old days, we had a fireplace and a pile of coal out in the yard. You’d leave the bucket and scuttle next to the fire. David’s was an art deco one. Beautiful shapes and lines to the thing. It was the beginning of him collecting whole loads of art nouveau and art deco for years.”
Kenneth Pitt was ahead of the curve in one respect, as he encouraged David to give an interview to a local gay magazine, Jeremy, around this time. Pitt hoped to turn Bowie into a gay icon à la Judy Garland, who’d recently died while performing in London. Twenty thousand fans, most of them gay men, attended her funeral in New York City that summer. “Having worked with Judy Garland, I had seen how gay men adored her,” Pitt told journalist George Tremlett, “thronged to her concerts, filled her dressing room with flowers and mobbed her at the stage door. Men who loved men, those women held strange platonic attraction for them.”
Published on May 10, 1970, the interview is not especially intriguing. Bowie talks plainly about painting, Buddhism, the Arts Lab puppeteers (“I’m trying to get them a TV show at the moment”), his older brother, Terry, and his most embarrassing moment (“When I was singing with a group called the Buzz four or five years ago. I forgot the words to three songs in a row. That was dreadful”). Yawn. While a champion of sexual liberation, Angie Bowie was having none of what she considered Pitt’s flummoxed machinations.
“People who wanted to watch Judy Garland should just stay home and rent The Wizard of Oz,” Angie wrote of the cultural shift that eluded Pitt. “This was 1970 for God’s sake. Anyone illuminated by even the dimmest of bulbs knew whatever flavor you came in, you just had to rock.”
Detecting the flow of the zeitgeist and boldly challenging accepted notions of sexuality were integral to Bowie’s crucial transition from sixties also-ran to seventies visionary, but in rock ’n’ roll vision needs sound, and it’s fairly safe to surmise that even with Visconti on board, none of what they were all about to achieve would have happened without the
addition of Mick Ronson. If Visconti provided focus and sonic clarity, Ronson made David Bowie’s new music bigger, tougher and sexier. He was the muscle in the mix.
“Mick came from a place called Hull,” Dana Gillespie says, “where they speak in an accent that is pretty ugly on the ear. Unpronounceable and difficult. He was quite a simple lad from up north. He didn’t have the kind of crawl-your-way-to-the-top attitude. He was just a working musician. All he ever wanted to do was work.”
Michael Ronson was born on May 26, 1946, at his parents’ modest home on Beverley Road in the northern city of Hull. His parents, Mini and George Ronson, were strict Mormons, and young Michael was schooled in the faith. “I have no idea how they came to be Mormons,” says his widow Suzi Ronson (formerly Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust–period hairdresser Suzi Fussey). “Probably someone knocking on her door and talking her into it. Mick wasn’t a devout Mormon by any means but that’s the way he was raised.”
His father was also a musician and encouraged his boy, a shy and unassuming child, to play. “Mick,” as he was called early on, took to the piano initially, and there was talk of formal, classical study. He also expressed interest in string instruments and for a while studied violin and cello. This forced the quiet child to toughen up, as it prompted puerile taunts from some of his classmates. “He used to carry his violin case around, so [if he was] put in a corner he could fight,” Suzi says.
As with Bowie, the advent of rock ’n’ roll, however, dovetailed with Mick Ronson’s adolescence and soon he was asking his parents for a guitar. His father purchased an acoustic guitar with trade stamps, and Mick soon began playing along to rockabilly and blues on the radio. By his teens Ronson had grown into a lean, handsome man with a strong chin, aquiline profile and thick, shoulder-length hair who played in several local bands, like the Crestas and the Mariners. By 1965, Ronson was obsessed with the Yardbirds’ guitarist Jeff Beck and went down to London himself in an effort to emulate him. He would hang around local cafés like the Giaconda and may have very well crossed paths with Bowie without knowing it. Both men were hungry and searching at the time.
“I never had any money and I used to sit there with one cup for five or six hours,” Ronson, who died in 1993, once said. “I’d just sit there and sort of bump into someone by accident and say, ‘What do you do?’ I was terrified. I used to get really depressed.” There he joined an up-and-coming band called the Voice, which was affiliated with the Process Church of the Final Judgment cult (which worshipped both Jesus and the Devil). Clearly this wasn’t his thing, and it wasn’t long before he was toiling in another obscure act, the soul combo the Wanted, whose name can only be considered ironic.
“He tried so hard,” Suzi says. “He starved in London a couple of times. Can-of-beans-a-week kind of thing. One night the band got pulled over by the police and everyone else ran out of the van, leaving Mick and all the equipment. He had no license, no insurance. He got into so much trouble. He kind of quit after that. He decided to be something else. A school gardener is what he became. Took a lot of persuading to get back down and do it again.”
Back in Hull, Ronson—a naturally gifted musician who wrote the dazzling string arrangements for both Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” and Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” just to name a pair of immortal tracks, simply by ear—spent his days working as a gardener. He figured he was done with rock for good. “There was something about it, cutting grass, pruning roses. I had sheep to look after too. I really enjoyed it,” he said years later. “I thought maybe this is what I’d end up doing.”
“He had no idea how good he was really,” Suzi says. “Never had any idea. When you are good at something naturally you kind of assume everybody else is like that. So easy. Mick was a bit like that. He thought he was okay.”
Eventually he was persuaded to audition to fill a vacancy in the Rats, one of Hull’s biggest bands (this, of course, being a highly relative distinction). The Rats toured and filled clubs and halls with their loud party blues rock. Ronson made enough money on the road to quit his gardening job. He figured he had it made but soon recognized the Rats’ creative limitations. Bolstered by Ronson’s talent and scope, the band were soon laying down an acid rock number called “The Rise and Fall of Bernie Gripplestone.” By the end of the sixties, Cambridge had left the band and was in London recording with Bowie and Visconti on the Space Oddity album. He was replaced by another Hull musician named Mick. To avoid confusion, everyone called Mick Woodmansey “Woody.” The band continued to tour and record commercially inconsequential tracks.
Soon Ronson was gardening once again, and he might have continued on that way if John Cambridge hadn’t returned to Hull in spring of 1970 with the express purpose of drafting Ronson to be David Bowie’s new player. According to legend, he found him one afternoon grooming a rugby pitch for the Hull City Parks Department. Ronson met Cambridge with skepticism. He’d been to London once already and failed to generate anything at all. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Is it going to take me another two or three yeas to pay this lot off?’” Ronson said. “I told him, ‘I’m not sure about this, John.’ Then I decided I had to go.”
Ronson packed up his guitar and a small suitcase and headed south to Beckenham. He met Bowie and Angie in Haddon Hall. Bowie was sitting in the living room, playing his twelve-string. “He was sitting playing the guitar and I picked up a guitar and started playing with him,” Ronson has said. Bowie began singing and Ronson found himself impressed by just how sophisticated and different Bowie’s original tracks were. He had a great voice. “I thought, ‘Well, here we go.’ I really liked David and his songs. It was real classy. It was different. I was in London. I was all set.”
When the session was over, they piled into the Bowies’ Jaguar and drove to a local fish and chips shop to hash out the details, such as where Ronson would live and how much he would earn. One of the first practical tasks, once Ronson was fully moved in to Haddon Hall, was converting the space under the vast stairway into a rehearsal and recording studio. Ronson, unlike Bowie, was strapping and handy, and with the assistance of Angie and Tony Visconti, they soon began renovating the tiny, six-foot-by-ten-foot space.
“I’ve never seen so much joy centered on a Black and Decker in many years,” Angie writes in Backstage Passes. “In seemingly no time, they had soundproofed and brightly lit a natural little bunker for us kids to play in.”
That spring Alice Cooper, and his Detroit-based garage combo known for their onstage theatrics, played England, and Bowie and Ronson caught the show. Bowie had seen this schtick before in cheeky British “horror rockers” like Screaming Lord Sutch (whose “Jack the Ripper” is a gothabilly classic). Fellow Beckenham resident Arthur Brown’s 1968 single “Fire” reached number one in the UK largely due to his flamboyant promotional appearances, which found the typically hippie-ish beardo screaming, “I am the God of hellfire and I bring you …,” while wearing flame-spurting headgear. Alice’s songs were loud, fun and trashy, and his sense of shock theater was not unlike that of Lindsay Kemp, only much more accessible to a mass audience. But like Sutch and Brown, he offered little beyond the macabre. It seemed like theatricality and serious song-writing, not to mention real sex appeal, were not an easy match. Nobody had pulled it off yet.
Back in Haddon Hall ideas were brewing and the living room, kitchen and tiny rehearsal bunker were hopping with energy and feedback around the clock as Bowie, Ronson, Visconti and Cambridge wrote and played. “Memory of a Free Festival,” the second single from Man of Words, was issued in June of 1970, split into two parts, on the A and B sides. An ode to the Arts Lab, it failed to capitalize on “Space Oddity”’s success. David was starting to worry that he was going to be remembered as a one-hit wonder.
As they plotted their next moves, Angie presided over the salon, typically as hostess and muse, feeding and advising her mates. “Angie was real cool,” says Dana Gillespie, who attended many meals at the Haddon Hall salon during this period. “You could literally g
ive her a potato, an onion and a carrot and she’d feed four musicians and three friends. I used to go down there and hang out with them. Angie was always supportive of David. She always listened to his songs as they came off the production line and she’d always say, ‘That’s fabulous.’”
Angie says, “I would do my best plotting during what other people would think was my downtime—when I was washing dishes or ironing shirts. Because there’s something about menial tasks that makes one very creative. And in those times, I would have all kinds of brilliant ideas and more schemes and more plots …”
When she wasn’t cooking and critiquing, Angie was costuming. “Determined to make David’s band the smartest in the land, I would preach to the boys about their day-to-day appearances,” she recalled. “It’s just as essential to look handsome off stage as it is on.”
“It was theater that I was interested in,” she tells me. “I wanted the band to be big, huge and musical. I wanted it to look as great as theater looked. Be as brilliantly lit as theater. It was to be an experience. I’d spent seven years going to classical concerts every week at school. Just the venues were magnificent. They raised your spirits, and raised your heart. So when I got involved with David’s career, all I could really add to the mix, because the music was great, was the theater. I thought if I could mix serious theater and the music, no one’s doing that.”
Ray Stevenson, who became a member of the informal salon that was being conducted inside Haddon Hall, insists that that idea to create a highly theatrical and colorful rock experience was his.
“I had this philosophy: observe the trend and do the opposite,” he says. “I mentioned this to David. Who said it before? Possibly the surrealists. Duchamp. Or maybe back to da Vinci. The trend was denim, singer-songwriter stuff. These people in denim pretending to be just like the audience and they really weren’t. And then doing the opposite would be rebelling against that. ‘We are superheroes.’ It was one of those evening conversations that kind of finished. We moved on to, I don’t know, cooking after that. Just the next time I went back to Haddon Hall, Angie was sewing all the costumes. Ever since there has never been any acknowledgment of that conversation. It all comes back to ambition. I didn’t realize how ambitious he was. There’d be a bunch of people including myself sitting around smoking dope and he wouldn’t. He just wanted to absorb and use whatever was said.”