Starman

by Paul Trynka

  The Manish Boys worked more closely with David than any outfit right up to The Spiders from Mars. It was with them that he first attracted notice as a singer; it was likewise with them that he discovered the cornucopia of sexual options available in a country eagerly unshackling itself from the prurience and dreariness of the fifties. Together they crafted a horn-heavy, versatile R&B, based on one of David’s musical obsessions, the band Sounds Incorporated, and together they made David’s first decent record. Their achievements were all the more surprising, considering that their first meeting was so sketchy.

  After their disappointment at realising that the ‘skinny white kid’ was from Bromley, rather than an American ghetto, The Manish Boys had only the briefest conversation with him. Les insisted on playing The King Bees’ single, which, after the build-up, was ‘disappointing. But David wasn’t,’ says keyboardist Bob Solly. ‘He was a good lively personality, an obvious showman. And he looked good.’ The band’s leaders, Solly and sax player Paul Rodriguez, ultimately decided to recruit their new singer because they liked his clothing and – hilariously – appreciated his punctuality. As Solly points out, ‘His appearance struck us more than anything. And the fact he was reliable. Ninety per cent of people who join bands should be working in a cupboard somewhere on their own – because they have no idea about working with other people. From that first meeting, David was absolutely spot-on punctual – like he was working in a theatre. And theatre people, however bizarre they are, tend to be very, very punctual.’

  For all his love of anarchic rock ‘n’ rollers, David Jones was an old-fashioned trouper, with a sense of style, and a sense of timing. The new kid fitted right in to The Manish Boys, for they too were troupers. They were mostly, like David, only children, ‘hence more pushy,’ says Solly, ‘because we only had ourselves to think about’. They were all filled with a child-like obsession with music, which for all of them represented an escape from the austerity of their upbringing.

  The band revolved round Solly and Rodriguez, both three years older than David – or Davie, as he styled himself. John Watson played bass and sang. Guitarist Johnny Flux joined the band a fortnight before David, and was another natural-born hustler who had previously sold newspaper advertising space (and went on to create kids’ TV robot Metal Mickey). Woolf Byrne, on baritone sax, also drove and maintained the band’s rickety Bedford van, while drummer Mick Whitehead had been persuaded to walk out of his job as an apprentice barber.

  During that first meeting, the band were impressed by David’s statement that he was writing his own numbers, although they thought the only song he played, ‘Don’t Try to Stop Me’, sounded suspiciously like a Marvin Gaye number. David was upfront about suggesting new material, most notably from James Brown’s Live at the Apollo; The Manish Boys’ own set soon included material by Ray Charles (‘What’d I Say’), Solomon Burke (‘Stupidity’) and even Conway Twitty (‘Make Me Know Your Mind’) and in August they hit the road with their new singer.

  A couple of The Manish Boys, including Woolf Byrne, had initially been unimpressed by the new recruit. Yet during that autumn’s shows around the south of England, to audiences ranging from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred, Woolf began observing something curious: ‘I had thought that Johnny’s voice was better – deeper and growlier. Then we realised, very soon, that when John sang the kids kept on dancing and behaving the way they did before. When David sang a number they stopped to look.’

  Byrne observed how, bit by bit, Davie started using the microphone, getting close up to it when singing in a softer, Dylan-esque drawl, or pulling back for a James Brown-style squeal. He sang in an English, rather than a fake American, accent. As they racked up more shows, Jones’ delivery became more powerful – occasionally he was so carried away by the music that he’d smash the maracas he used on ‘Bo Diddley’ into the mike-stand. Eventually, Bob Solly got into the habit of bringing a small knife with him, to pry out the maracas’ little ball-bearings from the keys of his Vox Continental organ. ‘Then I realised he had changed us completely,’ says Woolf. ‘We used to simply stand on stage and play, that changed, then the music we played was different, then our dress became different as well.’ ‘It was simple enough, what he did,’ says Paul Rodriguez, ‘he simply knew how to grab a microphone and perform.’

  Those first months with The Manish Boys were confused, carefree, rarely boring. The band shared each others’ clothes, sleeping on friends’ floors while cadging off their parents for food, shelter and cash. Over this summer, David redesigned his own life. By now he’d quit his job at Nevin D. Hirst, and seemed to base his new image on the beat novels he was reading. He was the most nomadic of the group; the others might stay away from home for a day, he would bum around friends’ for a week. This fitted in with his often-voiced love of Dylan, Jack Kerouac, or J. Saunders Redding’s On Being Negro in America, one of many books he picked up in paperback at Bromley South Station. Throughout their gigs, practice sessions at Charlie Chester’s Casino or a warren of rooms and brothels on Windmill Street, or socialising at the Regency Club – a hangout for the Kray Twins – The Manish Boys developed an intense, jokey bond, like soldiers on a gruelling campaign. Their intimacy extended to the girls who, that autumn of 1964, were omnipresent – their names and phone numbers written in pink lipstick all over the band’s green Bedford van. At the end of a show, while his friends packed away amplifiers and equipment, David was out on the dancefloor, chatting up his female audience: ‘getting in there first’, as the lingo went.

  In many respects The Manish Boys’ lives were identical to those of teenagers from the first half of the century; they had few clothes; each would walk for miles to see their friends, many of whom didn’t own a phone; chatting with their mums for hours over endless cups of tea; waiting ages for buses; eating egg and chips in cheap ‘caffs’. But in the most crucial respect, their lifestyles were transformed: along with music, sex became the driving force of their existence. There was a winning charm and jokiness about David’s approach, but in his bandmates’ opinion he became obsessive in his pursuit of women. Solly cites one time when David tried to interest him in Sue, a blonde he was trying to cast off: ‘I tell you Bob,’ David assured him earnestly, ‘she’s clean as a whistle!’ They were open about their sexual escapades, such as the time David and Johnny simultaneously shagged two sisters, alongside each other, in their Gillingham B&B – but at times, Davie’s friends accused him of being completely out of control. Driving home one foggy evening, the band spotted a woman hitching a lift, pulled over and let her into the van, where David sat next to her, chatting intensely. A short distance down the road, Woolf, who was at the wheel, suddenly shouted out, ‘Eeeuurgh, what’s that smell?’ Realising the woman was a vagrant, he pulled over and, mercilessly, insisted their passenger get out. David’s annoyance at this, the others speculated, was nothing to do with sympathy for the homeless woman. ‘Would he have?’ they asked each other, before responding in chorus, ‘Yes, he would!’

  After uniting David with The Manish Boys, Les Conn had declined to take his managerial cut of the band’s intermittent live earnings, but he still hustled on their behalf. At the end of September he secured an audition with Mickie Most, who, in the wake of The Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’, was probably the biggest independent producer in London. After setting up at one of their regular haunts, the comedian Charlie Chester’s casino on Archer Street, the band ran through a couple of numbers. As was his habit, Most made his decision on the spot, asking, ‘Do you want to record for me, boys?’ In unison, they shouted, ‘Yes!’

  There was another meeting with Mickie Most to talk through their material on the evening before the recording session at Regent Sound on 6 October, overseen by Decca’s Mike Smith. As the band ran through their three songs, ‘Hello Stranger’, ‘Duke of Earl’ and ‘Love is Strange’, David’s singing was flawless, but on every take of ‘Love is Strange’, John Watson and Johnny Flux’s backing vocals were ragged an
d out-of-sync. As Smith played back the song, pointing out the problem, tension mounted and the singers got more nervous. Except, that is, for David; he was ‘totally cool and calm’, Solly remembers, easing the tension with deadpan jokes, not for a moment betraying any concern as they struggled for a decent take. Their three hours ran out; their big break had turned to dust. ‘Don’t worry,’ David assured the others, his confidence apparently undented. ‘We’ll get it next time.’

  This was the most potent sign that the band’s youngest member was ‘mature beyond his years’, as Woolf remembers. He could astutely work out the politics of a meeting well before his friends. The most notable example was when The Manish Boys auditioned at the London Palladium that winter, hoping for a residency at Hamburg’s legendary Star Club.

  The set had gone well, and Bob Solly looked on as the Star Club’s promoter called David over. The two exchanged a few words and smiles before David returned to the stage. ‘What did he say?’ Solly asked, eagerly.

  ‘Oh, he asked me, “Which way do you swing, Davie, boys or girls?”’ David told him.

  ‘So what did you say?’

  ‘Oh, I told him, “Boys, of course”!’

  The story illustrated his growing talent for hustling a deal, and it came as no surprise when they heard the audition was a success and they would be booked into the Star Club the following summer. The same skills came to the fore when Woolf and David were nursing a coffee in La Gioconda – the hip wood-panelled coffee bar in Denmark Street that was a favourite musicians’ hangout – and a BBC researcher approached them to ask if their long hair had ever caused them problems. Both of them fancied a TV appearance and five-guinea fee, but it was David who came up with the idea of a ‘League for the Protection of Animal Filament’ – a support group for oppressed longhairs that existed entirely in his own imagination.

  That chance meeting with the researcher led to a ninety-second interview on Tonight with Cliff Michelmore, broadcast on 12 November, 1964, which was destined to be one of David’s great TV appearances – because he does such a consummate, humorous job of selling nothing. The ‘league’ that this cool-as-a-cucumber youth was promoting was a convenient fiction, but everyone was in on the joke, and any prejudice the viewer might have felt at such an unashamed self-publicist was dispelled by David’s self-mocking complaints: ‘We’re all fairly tolerant, but for the last two years we’ve had comments like “Darlin’” and “Can I carry your handbag?” thrown at us. And it has to stop!’

  The Manish Boys’ other singer, John Watson, was three years older, with a better voice, experience, and education, but was completely invisible in comparison to his upstart colleague. Although in future years, manager Ken Pitt schooled David Bowie in how to deal with the media, this short snippet, now a YouTube classic, shows Pitt was working with a natural. Where Davie Jones’ debut as a singer had been forgettable at best, his debut as a self-publicist was unimpeachable.

  The TV slot convinced the band they were headed for the big-time, a conviction reinforced when Les Conn negotiated a deal with the Arthur Howes organisation – Britain’s leading promoters of package tours – for a string of dates headlined by Gene Pitney alongside Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Kinks and Marianne Faithfull, opening on 1 December, 1964. It was a cheerily intimate affair; the artists shared the same bus which picked them all up one-by-one across London as they started the tour. Pitney was avuncular and good-humoured – the troupe’s Alpha male, which sadly sabotaged David’s efforts to chat to Marianne Faithfull, who sat alongside Gene throughout the tour, immune to David’s charm. The Kinks also kept themselves to themselves – ‘hoity toity’ recalls Bob Solly – and rarely mingled. David was unoffended, and promptly introduced a cover of ‘You Really Got Me’ into The Manish Boys’ set.

  The tour was a perfect opportunity to trial a new number, ‘Pity the Fool’, picked out as the band’s debut single by Shel Talmy, an American producer who shared an office building with Howes. A one-time child prodigy who’d appeared on NBC’s Quiz Kids programme, Talmy had ‘bullshitted’ his way into the UK by claiming to have produced The Beach Boys, then backed up his bullshit by producing a string of super-compressed high-energy hits for The Who and The Kinks. Shel was intrigued by the band and their singer: ‘Les Conn told me I should listen to this guy – and Les was right, he always had a great ear for talent.’

  ‘Pity the Fool’ was perfect for The Manish Boys’ dense, horn-heavy sound – although copying the grizzled vocal on the original acetate, by Memphis bluesman Bobby Bland, was an intimidating task for a Bromley teenager. The afternoon before the session the pressure on guitarist Johnny Flux was ratcheted up, too, when the band bumped into Jimmy Page – fast emerging as London’s leading session guitarist – at the 2i’s coffee bar, and Page mentioned he was playing guitar on the session, and would be bringing his brand-new fuzzbox with him.

  For all their bullishness, The Manish Boys were nervous during the session at London’s IBC studio, on 15 January, 1965. ‘But David was certainly not intimidated,’ says Talmy, ‘that was what I liked about him.’ In fact, David’s singing was transformed, compared to his forgettable debut. Confident, impassioned, with perfect microphone technique, the vocals demonstrate a man who, like Shel Talmy, bullshitted his way into a job – and then delivered.

  Clunky, naive, and all the better for it, the song became an unsung classic of British blues, a fact spotted right away by Jimmy Page. ‘Good session,’ he complimented the band as he packed away his Fender Telecaster, ‘but I don’t think it’s a hit.’ He softened the blow by donating a riff he’d played while warming up, telling David he was welcome to use it in one of his own songs (it turned up years later, as ‘The Supermen’). David was already telling people about his work as a songwriter, although on the evidence of ‘Take My Tip’, the B-side of their single, he didn’t have much of a future. Set to a clunky, clichéd chord sequence, distinguished only by intricate lyrics, the song was an undistinguished pastiche of Georgie Fame, one of the band’s current obsessions.

  The run-up to the release of ‘Pity the Fool’ on 5 March was filled with more live dates, and more plotting by the irrepressible Les Conn, who hyped the single with his usual brio, once more stoking up the ‘furore’ over long hair that had kicked off in November. Conn had persuaded an old friend, BBC producer Barry Langford, to feature The Manish Boys on the show Gadzooks, but publicly floated the fiction that the BBC had refused to allow the band into the studio until the singer cut his flowing blond locks. ‘I had big placards made, “Let’s be fair to long hair”,’ remembers Les Conn, gleefully, ‘and we said we’d parade around the BBC building until they relented!’ The artificial controversy – which itself was based, shamelessly, on similar media shenanigans arranged for The Pretty Things and The Rolling Stones – helped David win press in the London Evening Standard, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror.

  Despite the bogus controversy, the record disappeared into oblivion. The Manish Boys hoped that ‘Pity the Fool’ would catapult them into the big time; instead, their live dates began to dry up, and the Star Club dates fell through, leaving a huge gap in their schedule. There were arguments about billing; David, who invariably had the shows around Bromley advertised as ‘Davie Jones and The Manish Boys’, expected the single to be released under the same banner. Solly maintains it was a shortage of cash, rather than arguments about the name, that dealt the death blow; the band’s van, their most vital asset, broke down and Woolf had already left before the band’s split was finally announced in the Kent Messenger in April. ‘We were dragging it out,’ says Solly, ‘but we’d all had enough.’

  The slow death of The Manish Boys was made more painful for David by the runaway success of his friend George Underwood. Les Conn had continued hustling for George, whom he considered ‘just as talented as David. And really, he was a much nicer guy, he didn’t have that “I’m the cat’s whiskers’ [mentality]”.’ Les had taken both George and David to see Mickie Most, and it
turned out that Mickie ‘simply liked George better’. Most treated Underwood almost like a son, driving him around town in his Rolls Royce, advising him on life, money and the music business, before deciding he needed a more glamorous name. Underwood was therefore given the nom de rock of Calvin James, after Mickie’s son Calvin, and was treated like a star every time he dropped into the offices of Most’s record label, RAK. David did not seem to take his friend’s success well. Every time they bumped into each other on Bromley High Street, George felt David looking at him ‘like daggers’.

  The last few Manish Boys shows were riotous: at Cromer on 13 March, David and Johnny Flux, who’d started camping it up together more and more after their Gillingham escapade, were banned from the venue. Their final show was at Bletchley, on 24 April, and the band returned to Maidstone on their own, without David, who had disappeared with a female fan who hosted a party in the town. There were no formal goodbyes: the next time Solly and Rodriguez saw David was in Shel Talmy’s office building, obviously planning something new. And this time, there would be no doubt about whose name would get top billing.

  The Lower Third had formed in 1964 in Margate, a bustling Regency resort on the coast of Kent, then a lively holiday destination with its tea dances, donkey rides and old-fashioned sideshows complete with a headless lady. After propping up the bills at a variety of local shows, guitarist Denis Taylor, drummer Les Mighall and bassist Graham Rivens decided it was time to turn professional. Leaving pianist Terry Boulton and guitarist Robin Wyatt behind, they decided to head for the bright lights, packed up supplies of food and toilet rolls in their converted ambulance, and rented a flat in Pimlico, central London.