by Paul Trynka
Underwood wonders to this day how the gig would have sounded if his friend had appeared on stage with him. By the summer term, their friendship was repaired, although Underwood suffered pangs of guilt for years afterwards. ‘I was always looking at him, thinking, Oh God, I did that.’ Eventually, David would thank George for the notorious eye injury – ‘he told me it gave him a kind of mystique’ – although for decades afterwards George would get irritated when David said he had no idea why his friend had punched him. ‘He gave the impression he doesn’t know why I did it. And he should have known.’
Underwood’s disappointment that his best friend missed George and the Dragons’ Easter show was as short-lived as the band. George went on to play in both The Hillsiders and The Spitfires over this period, and soon after Easter teamed up with the Kon-Rads, a rather old-fashioned dance-based band formed a few months earlier by drummer Dave Crook and guitarist Neville Wills. Once George was in, he invited David along, too, asking him to join the band on saxophone, with the proviso, ‘I’m the singer, but you can do a couple of numbers.’ David brought his Grafton down to rehearsals. ‘He looked a bit like Joe Brown at the time, so we said you can do “A Picture of You”, and “A Night at Daddy G’s”.’
David Bowie’s first public performance took place just a few weeks later, on 12 June, 1962, at the Bromley Tech PTA School Fête. This was the Tech’s biggest ever summertime event – the PTA bought a new PA system for the show, and four thousand parents and locals attended. No one got to hear David’s Joe Brown impression that afternoon, though – the Kon-Rads set consisted strictly of instrumentals.
David, his hair arranged in a blonde quiff, stood with his cream sax slung to one side, next to George Underwood, who picked out Shadows’ riffs on his Hofner guitar. David looked ‘cool, well dressed’ according to schoolmate Nick Brookes. It was a pretty impressive debut, but there was a clear consensus among most of the audience about who would go on to stardom: David’s taller, better-looking, more popular friend. ‘It was George who was the singer, who did a great Elvis impression,’ says Tech pupil Roger Bevan, who remembers, like many other pupils, Underwood’s dark, glossy hair and Elvis sneer. ‘Everyone reckoned he was going to be big.’
2
‘Numero Uno, Mate!’
I was ambitious. But not like he was.
George Underwood
In late 1962, reputations were fast being made in south-east London, as a new wave of rock ‘n’ roll young bucks set out to kill off England’s staid, suffocating music scene. Kent schoolboys Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were bonding over Chess Records albums and renewing their childhood friendship at Alexis Korner shows, and the future Pretty Things were emerging from the same Kent scene. This was matched by similar setups in west London, Surrey or Newcastle as dozens of musicians, from Eric Clapton to Eric Burdon, Paul Jones to Keith Relf embarked on a fast-lane to fame.
So, what was an under-age kid with a sax to do? David Jones, just a couple of years younger than most of those figures, was marooned, destined to miss the wave that everyone else was catching. While Clapton was becoming God, David was merely the cool kid in class: well liked, noted for his skinny trousers and blond hair, cheerful and indulgent with the younger students who’d follow him around the playground, asking about music or baseball. The damaged eye added a dangerous, disconcerting glamour to his otherwise conventional pretty-boy looks, but as far as native talent goes, David seemed like a supporting act to his friend George Underwood – more relaxed, more masculine – who remained the centre of attention at Bromley Tech.
Most of the kids who saw the Kon-Rads remember few details of their first couple of shows, but that wasn’t the point; they were out there, living out the new DIY ethos. Today, their Conway Twitty and Joe Brown covers would sound gauche and naive, but to their peers, they were sweeping away England’s suffocating conformity, its smug dance bands and crooners.
Yet before their career had even got going, it turned out that the Kon-Rads were not unified fighters for the cause. Late in 1962, when drummer Dave Crook left their always fluid line-up, a putsch in the ranks saw George Underwood booted out. To this day, the central characters dispute what happened in their schoolboy band. As far as George Underwood is concerned, the new drummer was the villain of the story: ‘He just didn’t like me for some reason. He was trying to get me out of the band and got one of his friends, not to beat me up, but to give me some kind of warning. It was really intimidating, I was almost crying – it was horrible.’ George, for all his talent, was simply too nice – ‘a gentleman’, he explains. He didn’t protest; he even lent them his guitar amp. ‘Without it, they were fucked.’ It was an early lesson in the ruthlessness of the music industry for Underwood, albeit one he never took to heart.
At first, David was unconcerned by his friend’s departure. He was fascinated by the new drummer, David Hadfield, who already seemed like a pro compared to the rest of the Kon-Rads. Hadfield had grown up in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, where he’d teamed up with Harry Webb, later famous as Britain’s first home-grown rock ‘n’ roller Cliff Richard, at secondary school. Hadfield had hyped his Cliff credentials in a ‘Drummer Seeks Work’ advert placed in Furlong’s music shop. David, along with guitarist Neville Wills, was intrigued, questioning the drummer closely over coffees at the Bromley Wimpy. Rhythm guitarist Alan Dodds joined them for a rehearsal in Neville’s front room a few days later, and they all agreed that Hadfield was in. The drummer would become David’s closest musical confidant for nearly a year; together, they’d hustle for shows, paint backdrops and update their set list.
Over the following weeks, Hadfield discovered the skinny blond-haired sax player, who looked younger than his fifteen years, was by far the most ambitious band member. ‘He was very very boyish, blond, and didn’t look his age at all. But he carried himself well – and he just wanted to be part of show business. You could feel it.’
Hadfield was ambitious, too, although he’s adamant that he played no part in the ousting of George Underwood, and didn’t even know that the Kon-Rads had ever played in public. David would become his main friend but the sax player was also, as far as the other Kon-Rads were concerned, a pain: he didn’t understand the way the music business worked. The Kon-Rads were the first musicians to encounter David’s restlessness, his urge to keep pushing relentlessly forward. In the main, they resisted his pressure, and the results were a key part of the sax player’s musical education, for the Kon-Rads were, in David’s terms, a failure. They hit the London scene at a time when the most amazing breaks were available – and they blew every one of them.
Over the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1963, Jones and Hadfield spent every minute avoiding their day jobs. David was supposedly studying for his O-Levels, while Hadfield had recently found a position as an invoice clerk in Borough, but the band rehearsed so intensively at Bromley’s St Mary’s Church Hall that they were hounded out after complaints about the noise and forced to move to a damp prefab building down the street. Soon the Kon-Rads were playing most weekends in small halls and pubs around south-east London, including Bromley, Beckenham, Orpington and Blackheath.
Over their year-long existence, the Kon-Rads changed line-up continually, with the addition of bassist Rocky Shahan, and later a singer, Roger Ferris, while Hadfield brought in girlfriend Stella Patton and her sister Christine as backing vocalists. Over that year, the two Davids spent nearly all their spare time working together. The younger David was good company, energetic, enthusiastic and practised incessantly on the saxophone. His schoolwork languished, but he became a good sax player, mastering a raunchy King Curtis-style tone on the Conn tenor to which he’d recently switched, and there was something about the way he stood, relaxed on stage, that was effortlessly cool. But his fellow Kon-Rads were unimpressed by many of David’s ideas for updating their outfits or their set-list. ‘When you’ve got seven people in the band you can’t change things overnight,’ says Hadfield. ‘Our attitude was, if we go out on a
limb we’re going to lose all our local bookings – and lose what popularity we have.’
But there was a bigger world out there than local bookings, a world populated by people like Joe Meek, who had scored a huge hit that summer with his space-rock hit ‘Telstar’. The pioneering, gay producer had recorded some of the UK’s most radical early rock ‘n’ roll hits in a self-built studio, crammed into a tiny flat above a leather goods store on the Holloway Road. Meek was an obsessive; he recorded day after day without a break, auditioning hundreds of bands, lavishing each session with sonic adornments. Within a few weeks of Hadfield joining the Kon-Rads, the band made their way up to Meek’s flat for an audition session. The producer was already known for becoming obsessed with some of the young musicians in his studio, often hassling young, blond lookers – but for the Kon-Rads session he was uncommunicative and surly, unimpressed by their best shot, an MOR version of ‘Mockingbird’. The sappy, undistinguished ditty, sung by Roger Ferris, was later consigned to one of Meek’s notorious tea-chests full of rejected material. David was the only band member who chatted with the producer for more than a couple of minutes, quizzing him about his productions. But their conversation was cut short when he was called to help carry the band’s gear down to their old Evening News delivery van, waiting outside. Meek never called them back, and in their postmortem the band acknowledged the possibility they weren’t ‘original enough’. David’s suggestion that they write their own material was ignored by Hadfield and Neville Wills, though, who insisted that their live audience preferred familiar cover songs. (Perhaps the session was not a total dead loss, though, for it’s possible the concept of ‘Telstar’ – a quirky, otherworldly novelty song based on a celebrated spaceshot – lodged in the young David Jones’ mind.)
A second failure was harder to stomach, for this time it involved one of David’s friends and rivals. After sending a demo recording to the Rediffusion TV company, the Kon-Rads won a slot on Ready Steady Win – the talent contest spin-off from the super-hip music show Ready, Steady, Go!. There was snickering from the audience and judges during the heat, as the Kon-Rads, in matching suits, set up their lavish backdrop, drum riser and lights, before launching into an impeccably played set of covers. The winning band, The Trubeats, played their own songs and gave a stripped-down performance highlighting their blond, good-looking, teenage guitarist, Peter Frampton – now a student at Bromley Grammar School – who won over boys and girls alike. The Kon-Rads’ performance was mocked in a press report, which declared that ‘the band has nothing original to offer’.
It was David, the youngest member, still at school, who always rebounded from such setbacks. ‘He kept pushing,’ says Hadfield. ‘He wanted to write more things, change how we dressed, [saying] “We’ve got to go out on a limb.”’ The older musicians tried to persuade David that he was being impractical. They were convinced he was addicted to gimmicks – an impression reinforced when he announced one day that he was assuming a new name, ‘David Jay’. David persisted in his schemes, persuading Neville to write the music to his lyrics for several songs, including ‘I Never Dreamed’. The composition – with dark lyrics inspired by newspaper reports of a train crash, and a poppy tune reminiscent of The Tremeloes – was slotted into their set, alongside their predictable line-up of Chris Montez, Shadows and Beatles numbers. And as he started to influence their material, David also started to make an impression live. ‘He looked good, he had a way of standing with his sax slung round his neck – it was very manly, if that’s the right word. He was getting noticed more, guys and girls seemed to like him.’
Two breaks had ended in failure, but then, in the summer of 1963, it looked like it might be third time lucky. Bob Knight, a Bromley entrepreneur, managed to interest his friend Eric Easton in the band. Easton was the co-manager of The Rolling Stones – who were on the brink of the big-time – and soon the Kon-Rads were hanging out in his office on Oxford Street, being introduced to Brian Epstein and finally, via Easton, scoring their big break: a trial session for Decca, the Stones’ label, on 30 August, 1963.
Determined not to repeat their previous mistakes, the band showcased their own material, including ‘I Never Dreamed’. But their first formal studio session, complete with engineers in white coats, was a disaster. Hadfield was ‘a nervous wreck’, the rhythm tracks were a mess and the results weren’t even deemed worthy of a playback. By the time Decca confirmed they weren’t interested in the band, David had already announced he was leaving.
David gave little explanation: ‘There was no arguing with him. He simply said he wanted to do his own thing,’ says Hadfield, who insists that the young sax player, having deserted the band after their first setback, was ‘not a band kind of person’. Years later, David explained his defection was inspired by very different reasons. ‘I wanted to do a version of [Marvin Gaye’s] “Can I Get a Witness” – and they didn’t. That was why I left the Kon-Rads.’ George Underwood, David’s co-conspirator, backs up his version: ‘We were determined to do music we enjoyed playing – not copying what was in the Top 10.’
David had coaxed Underwood to make some guest appearances with the Kon-Rads earlier that summer, and the two had spent months sharing their musical obsessions as they plotted their own band. By now David spent all of his free time rehearsing, hanging out at Vic Furlong’s, Medhurst’s, Bromley’s two Wimpy Bars or at George’s house – his voracious appetite for music now bordering on the obsessive. The two friends enjoyed a glorious summer, despite the fact that when David’s O-Level results arrived, it turned out he’d failed every one but art. He seemed blithely unconcerned; his mother was unsupportive, dismissive of his music, but Haywood seemed, as far as friends could tell, to indulge David’s fantasies. Nonetheless, David finally caved in to the pressure to get a ‘proper’ job, and Owen Frampton used his connections to find him a position as a runner and paste-up artist at the New Bond Street office of Nevin D. Hirst, a small Yorkshire-based ad agency.
The sole nine-to-five job of David Jones’ life would enable him, in future years, to pronounce on the world of design, marketing and manipulation as a self-styled expert. In his later career he’d talk about how the advertising industry had been the prime force, alongside rock ‘n’ roll, in shaping the latter half of the twentieth century, and the fact he’d worked ‘as an illustrator in advertising’ became a key component of his self-image. Yet as he admits, his involvement with the industry was brief. ‘I loathed [it]. I had romantic visions of artists’ garrets – though I didn’t fancy starving. [Hirst’s] main product was Ayds slimming biscuits, and I also remember lots of felt-tip drawings and paste-ups of bloody raincoats. And in the evening I dodged from one dodgy rock band to another.’
Although his commitment to the job was faint, David was lucky to have a hip boss, Ian – an indulgent, Chelsea-booted, crop-haired blues fan – who sent David on errands to the celebrated Dobell’s Record Shop, ten minutes’ walk away on Charing Cross Road. This was the mother-lode of hip blues, the place Eric Clapton shopped for obscure imports which he’d then replicate, astounding audiences who figured he’d invented the riffs he’d lifted from Albert King or Buddy Guy. David embarked on a similar search for source material; when Ian suggested he pick up John Lee Hooker’s Country Blues on Riverside, he spotted Bob Dylan’s debut on the racks, too. ‘Within weeks George and I had changed the name of our little R&B outfit to “The Hooker Brothers”, and included both Hooker’s “Tupelo” and Dylan’s “House of the Rising Sun” in our set.’ The pair were so carried away with enthusiasm that they started playing shows as a trio with drummer Viv Andrews before they’d even got a proper band together. Billed as The Hooker Brothers, or David’s Red and Blues (a druggy reference to the Mods’ favourite barbiturate pills) they guested between sets at the Bromel Club, at Bromley’s Royal Court Hotel. Today, as Underwood admits, the notion of two kids from Bromley reinventing themselves as Mississippi Bluesmen seems ludicrous, ‘but it was something we needed to get out of our system!�
� David’s first compliment from an ‘experienced’ musician came from those early shows, when The Hooker Brothers shared a bill with jazzman Mike Cotton at the Bromel Club. It was a brief performance, sandwiched between the two halves of The Mike Cotton Sound’s trad jazz-influenced set. ‘Well done,’ the venerable twenty-six-year-old congratulated the wannabe bluesmen after their set, ‘you must be very brave’.
Brave they seemed in the autumn of 1963, when they played several brief shows at the Bromel. Yet by December, when The Rolling Stones cracked the Top 20 with ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, a tiny nucleus of British musicians were about to refashion British rock ‘n’ roll. Two bands emerged in the Stones’ wake: The Yardbirds, who’d taken over their residence at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, and The Pretty Things, whose Dick Taylor had played with Keith Richards in an early incarnation of the Stones. The Pretties were known around the Bromley scene thanks to Dorothy Bass, David’s schoolmate (and, briefly, George’s girlfriend), who owned a car and was therefore recruited as the Pretties’ roadie.
With the sense that they were about to catch a wave, David and George stepped up their efforts to form a full band. It was David who spotted a classified ad in Melody Maker from a Fulham outfit seeking a singer. The trio – guitarist Roger Bluck, bassist Dave Howard and drummer Robert Allen – were, in truth, more in tune with the spirit of Chet Atkins than Muddy Waters, but Jones and Underwood both worked on ‘roughen[ing] them up’. Their set was based on songs which countless Brit blues-boomers would cover: Elmore James’ ‘Early One Morning’, Howlin Wolf’s ‘Spoonful’ and ‘Howling for My Baby’. The band’s name, The King Bees, came from another blues classic, Slim Harpo’s ‘I’m a King Bee’.