Starman

by Paul Trynka

  For The King Bees’ tiny audience – perhaps a couple of dozen local kids – they were torchbearers for a new music. ‘This was a completely different animal from Sonny Boy Williamson’s blues,’ says Dorothy Bass, ‘that was where it came from, this was where it was going. People like us were taking something old, forgotten, and used it to create a new sound, something that spoke to us.’

  Bass was probably The King Bees’ closest follower, hanging out with them at the Wimpy Bars, coffee shops, parties and gigs. She knew David well: likeable, cheerful, enthusiastic, but almost bland and boring in his single-mindedness. ‘All he wanted to do was practise, and listen to tapes or records that he’d got hold of. That was his life. Everybody regarded themselves as an expert in music – but he really was. What made him different was he would pass a party, or anything up if there was something he needed to do for his music. For the other kids, that was inconceivable.’

  For David, the lesson of the Kon-Rads ran deep: he was convinced that seeking out new, hip music before the competition was the key to success. When he and George discovered Bob Dylan’s debut album at Dobell’s, David remembers how, ‘we added drums to “House of the Rising Sun”, thinking we’d made some kind of musical breakthrough. We were gutted when The Animals released the song to stupendous reaction.’ The Animals, of course, had learned their trade playing night after night at Newcastle’s Club A-Gogo; David would never pay his dues in such a yeoman’s fashion. For a start, although he, rather than George, had taken on the role of lead singer, he was still reticent as a front man. When Dorothy Bass was roped in to drive The Pretty Things to their shows in south-east London, David would often come up and chat to singer Phil May and the band’s founder, Dick Taylor, who says, ‘We did like him. Skinny little blond fella. Though I don’t think I ever saw him sing.’

  As a singer, skinny and likeable was about it. ‘He was very self-contained,’ says Bass, who saw most of The King Bees’ shows. ‘I didn’t think he reached out to the audience very much, maybe he was concentrating on what he was singing. He didn’t actually seem sexy to me. George was gorgeous … I wouldn’t say I dismissed David, he was blond, he was OK, but I didn’t see him as a sex symbol. There was no interacting or giving anything to the audience. Not that that bothered us. They were people on stage, our age, and that’s all that mattered.’

  On stage, David hadn’t mastered the swagger of contemporaries like Mick Jagger or Phil May. Off stage, though, he was a natural, a hustler. Aided by his father, who’d now worked in PR for nearly a decade, he also had an innate understanding of the fact that a hustler loves another hustler. For this reason, the letter that helped him score his debut single became better-known than the single itself.

  History would have it that David Bowie grew up estranged from his parents. Peggy certainly became irritated by his musical ambitions, and given that David was firmly attached to the family purse-strings for the next half-decade, her intolerance would have been shared by most parents. Haywood’s reaction was more complex: he was conventional, but indulgent. He and David were more alike than many realised; calm, but both with a nervous fizziness. The most obvious sign of this in Haywood was his chain-smoking, which David soon imitated – to the extent of using the same brand, Player’s Weights. There was the conventional generation gap between father and son yet Haywood’s youthful obsession with the entertainment world had not been entirely extinguished. So it was Haywood and David who, in January 1964, ‘concocted’ a sales pitch for David’s new band. Shameless and ‘over the top’ according to George Underwood, Haywood and David’s joint ‘sales pitch’ would kick off David’s career.

  Around Christmas 1963, David had noticed news headlines generated by John Bloom, an aggressive entrepreneur who’d blazed a famously fiery trail through Britain’s white-goods industry, starting with washing machines, then moving on to dishwashers and refrigerators. He seemed to have a financial Midas touch, and father and son typed out a letter suggesting he put his golden touch to work in the most up-and-coming industry of all, pop music. ‘If you can sell my group the way you sell washing machines,’ David suggested, ‘you’ll be on to a winner.’

  Before sending the letter, David showed it to George, who protested. ‘His dad helped him concoct the letter – and it was concocted in that it said things like that famous quote, “Brian Epstein’s got The Beatles and you should have us”.’ Undeterred, David assured him, ‘don’t worry. It will be all right.’ His instincts were on the money. Bloom, amused by the youngster’s chutzpah, passed the letter on to Les Conn, a friend from the Jewish scene in Stamford Hill. Within a couple of days, a telegram arrived at David’s house, instructing him to call Conn’s Temple Bar number.

  It was a lucky happenstance. Invariably described as a small-time manager, Les Conn was, in fact, neither small-time, nor a manager. His connections were impeccable, including Beatles publisher Dick James, movie star Doris Day, and emerging music moguls like Mickie Most and Shel Talmy; he played vital roles in advancing the careers of The Shadows, Clodagh Rodgers and The Bachelors. However, to describe him as a manager would imply some degree of organisation, or of the ability to oversee someone’s career – qualities which were noticeable by their absence in this charming, supremely scatty man.

  Musician Bob Solly, who also met Les that spring, remembers the aspiring mogul proclaiming, ‘Conn’s the name, con’s the game!’ before showing off his credentials in the form of a suitcase full of parking tickets he was hoping to evade. A short, slightly pudgy bundle of energy, he’d shoot out rapid-fire yarns and schemes in a cheeky, vaguely posh voice, often punctuated by sudden pauses as he searched for the vital document or press cutting he’d been brandishing just a few seconds earlier.

  Conn epitomised the charming amateurism of the British music scene. He had set up Melcher Music UK for Doris Day before being recruited by Beatles publisher Dick James as a song plugger. He was a moderately successful publisher, a dreadful songwriter, and a genius at spotting talent. In just a few short months he would take on both the future David Bowie and the future Marc Bolan, giving both of them their first career breaks.

  Bloom had asked Conn to check out The King Bees to see to whether it was worth booking them, cheaply of course, for his upcoming wedding anniversary party, on 12 February, 1964. Conn remembers The King Bees playing in his flat. ‘They were a nice bunch,’ he remembers. ‘It wasn’t commercial music they played, it was underground, really. But David had charisma, George too.’ And that was enough to get them the gig.

  Their debut, though, was a disaster. Some of The King Bees’ blues evangelism started to desert them when they turned up at the Jack Club for the party in jeans and suede Robin Hood boots, and noticed disapproving looks from the moneyed crowd, which included Sir Isaac Wolfson and Lord Thomson of Fleet. The King Bees were asked to follow The Naturals, a well-scrubbed Beatles cover band with a pristine backline of Vox amplifiers, which The King Bees plugged into as they launched into their opening song, ‘Got My Mojo Workin’’. Unfortunately, David’s mojo just didn’t work with Bloom, who sidled over to Conn and yelled, ‘Get them off! They’re ruining my party.’ The King Bees shuffled off the stage to make way for the highlight of the evening, a duet between rocker Adam Faith and forces sweetheart Vera Lynn. ‘David did cry when I told him to leave the stage,’ says Conn, ‘but I said to him, “Don’t worry, one person was impressed – and that was me.”’

  Conn would become David Bowie’s first champion in the music business, and a few weeks later pulled up in his Jag outside Plaistow Grove for a meeting with David’s parents, who needed to co-sign their seventeen-year-old son’s management contract. Peggy, Conn noted, was the chattier of the two; Haywood was ‘friendly – but very serious, a civil-servant type’. Both parents were impressed, that just a few months into his career, David had signed with such a self-styled mogul, with connections to The Beatles, who assured them it would take him little time to conjure up a record deal, and that David was on the brink of th
e big time.

  David, however, showed no surprise at all; he boasted a bright-eyed teenage confidence that meant he reacted to every break as if it was his by right. Years later, he’d claim that much of this apparent confidence was bravado, and that he suffered from low self-esteem. Some of this seems to be fashionable therapy speak, for while he was restrained on stage, when it came to chatting up girls or greeting a room full of strangers his confidence was unshakeable. In later years he’d learn to be more subtle, but the seventeen-year-old David Jones seemed almost ruthless in his self-promotion. Enthusiastic, receptive, with a sometimes brilliant deadpan humour, he was also, say observers like Les Conn, brash. ‘He was sure he was going to be big. But the charm came later as he got more success.’

  David’s attitude was exactly like that of another aspiring singer, whom Conn met later that year at Denmark Street’s La Gioconda coffee bar: Mark Feld, who at this point had yet to metamorphose into Marc Bolan. The two were, says Conn, ‘very similar. They totally believed in themselves, both of them. It was me that brought the two of them together, and they both had exactly the same attitude, which was, We are going to make it.’ The two would practise their far-fetched stories on each other, both becoming masters of bullshit, as David fondly recalls: ‘Marc was very much the Mod, and I was a kind of neo-beat hippie. So there’s me and this Mod, and he goes, “Where d’you get those shoes man? Where’d you get your shirt?” We immediately started talking about clothes and sewing machines: “Oh, I’m gonna be a singer and I’m gonna be so big you’re not gonna believe it.” “Oh, right! Well, I’ll probably write a musical for you one day, ‘cos I’m gonna be the greatest writer, ever!” “No, no, man, you gotta hear my stuff ‘cos I write great things. And I knew a wizard in Paris!” And [this was when] we were just whitewashing walls in our manager’s office!’

  The pair shared a talent for rabid self-promotion and an unabashed flirtatiousness, with both men and women. David’s confidence was always tempered by his interest in people and how they ticked; Marc was far more abrasive. Over the next decade, their careers became intertwined; friends, like the DJ and scenester Jeff Dexter, described them as ‘like brothers’. Each took pride in, and was sometimes tortured by jealousy of, the other’s achievements. For the time being, their relationship revolved around trading grandiose fantasies in La Gioconda, over cups of coffee cadged from Les Conn.

  Over the spring of 1964, Conn used his contacts to arrange The King Bees’ first West End gigs, including the Roundhouse. When it came to sorting out publishing and record deals he stayed close to home. Dick James Music looked after the publishing, while Conn used his freelance A&R role at Decca to arrange a session at the company’s studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead. For the A-side, the band were presented with an acetate of a song by Paul Revere and The Raiders, ‘Louie Louie Go Home’ – published, naturally, by Dick James Music. ‘We were simply given the single and told to learn it,’ says Underwood, adding that in the hurried production process the band ‘soon started to feel like cogs in a machine’. The band were left to arrange their own B-side, for which David and George reworked the traditional folk song, ‘Little Liza Jane’, modifying the lyrics and adding a guitar line borrowed from Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’. ‘It took around fifteen minutes, sitting in my mum’s kitchen,’ says Underwood, ‘the big influence was Huey “Piano” Smith’s version.’

  The recording was brisk, the standard three-hour session. Underwood was nervous; David was unflappable: ‘You’d better get used to this!’ he told the others, and when it came time for him to do the singing, with the rest of the band adding backing vocals, there was not a hint of nerves. ‘He was very confident. Certain he was going to make it,’ says Conn.

  Yet it was obvious he wasn’t going to make it with this record.

  There have been few recording debuts as undistinguished as that of David Bowie. Both sides of the single plodded along in drearily conventional beatboom fashion: on ‘Liza Jane’, the wonderful energy and sprightliness of Huey Smith’s famous hit was bowdlerised – where Huey’s song was simple, The King Bees’ version was trite. David’s voice was horribly generic, a John Lennon wannabe with a phoney London accent. The single sounded exactly like what it was: a rushed attempt to cash in on the emerging blues boom. Conn had to call in all his favours even to get Decca to release the single, which came out on their revived Vocalion label. ‘Peter Stevens, who was in charge of releases, didn’t rate it at all,’ says Conn, who nonetheless got to work exploiting all his contacts for radio and jukebox play and overseeing a press release extolling the, ‘action-packed disc which features the direct no-holds-barred Davie Jones vocal delivery!’

  Conn’s press release didn’t mention the other King Bees. It also revealed that the single had been flipped to make ‘Liza Jane’ the A-side. When the band received their copies, they were surprised to see that the writing credit on ‘Liza Jane’ was assigned to ‘Les Conn’. Conn remained adamant that he had written the song, pointing out that, ‘if I had done that to David, why would he have continued to work with me?’ Yet his memories of the writing were vague, for instance his suggestion the song title ‘maybe came from a girl David was going out with’. Although today David says he can’t remember anything about how the song was written, Underwood’s story of how ‘Liza Jane’ was cooked up in his mum’s kitchen from a Huey Smith recipe is the one that rings true. But as George explains, ‘We didn’t want to rock the boat, and figured if Les wanted a piece of the action, he could have it.’ Ironically, Conn’s manipulation of the songwriting credits prevented Dick James Music, which famously owned The Beatles’ songs, from securing an option on the future David Bowie’s material, too.

  June 1964 was the high point of The King Bees’ brief existence. David and George spent most of it hanging out in Bromley: talking music, sipping coffees, or being bought drinks at Henekey’s winebar on the High Street, while the remaining King Bees stayed in Fulham. There was a show at the Justin Hall in West Wickham on 5 June to mark the record’s official release date, and parties throughout the week. Then on Friday 19 June, David Jones returned with his band to the Rediffusion studio – the scene of his humiliation with the Kon-Rads – to celebrate the sweet victory of his TV debut, on Ready, Steady, Go!. They devoured the experience like the teenagers they were, overawed by The Crickets – who woke up briefly from a jetlag-induced sleep to acknowledge George’s exclamation that he’d witnessed their 1955 show at the Elephant and Castle’s Trocadero cinema – and by John Lee Hooker, who was in a nearby dressing room to record another Rediffusion show. ‘I’ve seen him close-up!’ David breathlessly informed George. ‘Go and look at those hands, those fingers!’ The King Bees’ performance passed in a flurry of excitement – and then passed into oblivion.

  Over the next few days, David and George basked in their temporary fame, wearing new mohair suits and playing more shows. But as they sat in the Bromley South Wimpy Bar, scouring that week’s Melody Maker, it became obvious that ‘Liza Jane’ was not going to trouble the charts.

  For George Underwood the release of ‘Liza Jane’ was ‘an achievement in itself’. But for David – who had been singing for less than a year, whose voice was mediocre, and who had yet to write a song on his own – this wasn’t good enough. There had been some talk about David or George joining other bands even before the single was released, but George was shocked by the way his old school friend, one day in July, simply announced: ‘I’ve decided to break the band up – and I’ve found another band.’

  The guitarist was devastated. ‘At the time it was something like, You bastard! Are you just gonna leave us in the lurch?’ Only later did he realise how David had been sounding out how committed he was for some months. ‘I was ambitious in my head – but not like he was. He’d decided to throw everything into it.’ In later years, he’d read about other ambitious types like Neil Young, recognise the same brutality with which they would drop an approach, or a band, that didn’t
work, and realise how it made sense. ‘What’s the point of sticking with it, if it’s not working?’ At seventeen, David was a second-rate singer, but he already boasted first-class ambition.

  For George, being in a band was a passion, one to be shared with your friends. Discovering David had an entirely different agenda was a shock. Just as striking was how unapologetic George’s bandmate was; David’s selfishness was cheerful, instinctive, almost child-like in its lack of malevolence. George was one of the first, but not the last, to hear what would become a guiding philosophy: ‘Numero Uno, mate!’

  3

  Thinking About Me

  There’d be six girls at the front of the Marquee – and half a dozen of us queens at the back, watching his every move.

  Simon White

  London, 1964, has been immortalised in popular history as swinging, racy; its joyous heart beating to the throb of Jaguar engines and pill-popping Mod anthems, buzzing with the illicit thrills of cheap sex and gangster cool. In reality, this glorious state of affairs was confined to the tiniest group of insiders. David Jones was one of them. That fateful year, David Jones sashayed confidently into the epicentre of swinging London, hanging out with the scene’s hippest stars, participating in the shag-tastic promiscuity, convincing many he had more right to be there than they did. Within a year, he had become a leading Face in the scene, distinguished in every respect bar one: the music.

  The nerve with which the seventeen-year-old engineered his next career move illustrated perfectly how he worked. It was on 19 July, 1964, that he walked into the smoke-filled living room of a suburban semi in Coxheath, Kent, and surprised its occupants, a six-piece called The Manish Boys, who’d assumed the ‘amazing’ singer Les Conn had told them about was David Jones, a black R&B singer who could give their horn-heavy blues vital grit and credibility. They were surprised when – accompanied by the fast-talking Conn – a blond, skinny, suede-booted youth walked in through the sliding picture windows. They were even more surprised, around a half-hour later, to realise they’d hired him as their singer.