Starman

by Paul Trynka

  The three had been hanging out around Denmark Street for only a week or so when they had their first sight of the young David Jones in La Gioconda. ‘Blimey, I thought,’ says Denis Taylor, ‘there goes Keith Relf of The Yardbirds!’ The band had put out word they needed a singer and arranged auditions at La Discotheque on Wardour Street, a regular haunt where they’d played as a five piece. ‘But the funny thing was, he came along with an alto sax, so we thought he was a saxophonist.’

  David had brought along moral support in the form of singer Stevie Marriott, whom David had first met at a Manish Boys rehearsal earlier that year. A jam session followed, based around a funky version of Little Richard’s ‘Rip it Up’. ‘Steve was great,’ remembers Taylor, ‘probably a better singer than David.’

  Then, puzzlingly, Stevie left and David took the microphone, sounding ‘exactly like Keith Relf’ on their version of The Yardbirds’ ‘I Wish You Would’. Soon he’d convinced The Lower Third of his impeccable connections. ‘He told us a few tricks of the trade – I got the impression that Shel had taught him a lot. And he looked amazing. So we decided to get him in.’

  The meeting took place just as The Manish Boys were falling apart, depressed at their failure. There was no hint of this in David’s demeanour – in fact, his confidence had increased. In both The King Bees and The Manish Boys, Davie Jones had shared the singing and the leadership of the band. With The Lower Third, the eighteen-year-old took creative control, pushing Taylor, who was three years older, to learn new songs as well as assisting with David’s own compositions. Their cranked-up version of ‘I Wish You Would’ became a cornerstone of their live set; David aped Keith Relf’s vocal style perfectly – he’d started playing the harmonica, too, for an even better carbon copy. Other obvious influences were The Kinks, whose ‘All Day and All of the Night’ was also pressed into service, and The Who. In his first few months with The Lower Third, David saw them several times and pressured Taylor to adopt a similar bombastic guitar sound. ‘That was a learning curve, that was,’ Taylor shudders today.

  True to form, David had already penned a press release within a few weeks of joining the band, detailing how the new group, Davie Jones and The Lower Third, featured ‘TEA-CUP on lead, DEATH on bass and LES on drums’. The one-page document reminded its readers of ‘the legendary Banned Hair tale’, and promised another appearance on Gadzooks, plus a new single, ‘Born of the Night’, which was ‘destined to rush up the charts’. (The song was a demo, cobbled together at a friend’s rehearsal space, and was never released.)

  Now that he’d taken over leadership of a band, David seemed liberated; there was an irrepressible energy about the way he’d throw himself into a project. Just eight or ten weeks after securing his first songwriting credit with ‘Take My Tip’, Davie was already describing himself as a songwriter, dropping in at Shel’s studio to demo material, and submitting songs to other performers. He’d had his first song covered thanks to Les Conn, who’d arranged a Kenny Miller recording of ‘Take My Tip’ in February. Most of those early songs were dreadful, but he kept submitting them; stylistically they veered from Dylan imitations to Gene Pitney knock-offs. Talmy noticed David, ‘sounded like lots of different people at different times’ and that a lot of the material was ‘not great’ – still, there was something about David that he liked; like many, he was attracted by David’s ‘energy’, the way he kept coming up with ideas. Whereas George Underwood would get depressed by setbacks, David seemed untouched by them; the fleeting taste of success he’d enjoyed so far simply fed his appetite for more. Today, he points out how such setbacks ‘never, ever’ made him feel pessimistic, ‘because I still liked the process. I liked writing and recording – it was a lot of fun for a kid. I might have had moments of, “God, I don’t think anything is ever going to happen for me.” But I would bounce up pretty fast.’

  As David spent more time in the West End around Denmark St, he started to hang out at the FD&H publishing house and record shop on Charing Cross Road, strumming on guitars or chatting with shop manager Wayne Bardell, and the two became friends. Bardell had accompanied David to the first Manish Boys recording date, and, like so many others, he noticed David was ‘very confident, without being arrogant – this was not a person who got stressed’. He watched David progress from being a part of the band with The Manish Boys, to being the leader of The Lower Third. Then one day, as David came in to the shop, and sat down behind the counter, he made a ‘very curious’ remark. ‘It was, you know, “Wayne? When I’m famous I’m not gonna speak to anybody – not even the band.” It was a strange thing to say – it stuck in my head.’ Only then did he reflect how David was always ‘friendly. But I suppose he was never really giving much away.’

  A few weeks after David teamed up with The Lower Third, drummer Les Mighall went back to Margate for the weekend and never returned. David located a new drummer, Phil Lancaster, who helped complete the band’s transformation into a cranked-up, super-violent style heavily influenced by The Who, a sound honed during the band’s busy summer, spent gigging in Margate and other south-east resorts.

  It was a blissful period for the band and David, working on songs and hanging out together – in their London flat, at Plaistow Grove or in Margate. David seemed a natural band member: up for a laugh, knowing when to take the piss and when to snap into focus. And on the side, David and Denis worked on commercials for Youthquake Clothing and Puritan, both cooked up and recorded in their Who-influenced style at RG Jones Studio in Wimbledon, where David made most of his demos through 1966.

  In retrospect, it’s slightly bizarre that Talmy, who’d helped define the sound of The Who and The Kinks, should have produced an unashamed pastiche of his own work, in the form of ‘You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving Me’, David’s next single. The song spliced ‘My Generation’s’ two-chord trick with ‘Tired of Waiting for You’s’ languid melody. Worse still, David had abandoned the vocal distinctiveness he was reaching for on ‘Pity the Fool’. Only in the final seconds does the single take off, as Denis Taylor smashes into a heavy, rolling three-chord sequence and the rest of the band freak out. But those final moments, too, are a rip-off, copied almost note-for-note from The Who’s ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’.

  The single, according to legend, featured Les Conn’s singing on its flip, the Herman’s Hermits pastiche, ‘Baby Loves That Way’. In fact, says Conn, he didn’t attend the session – nor did the single benefit from his consummate schmoozing skills, and it promptly disappeared without trace. By now, Les was disenchanted with the music business; he’d subsidised David and Mark Feld for months, his only payback the time the two of them painted his office ‘in a shitty green colour’, he recalls. ‘And it didn’t look very good.’ Les had also helped Mark score a singles deal with Decca for ‘The Wizard’ that November. It met with as little success as David’s efforts: ‘I was going broke looking after them. And I was getting very depressed with the music business – so I had to say goodbye.’

  With by now familiar resourcefulness, David had a replacement in mind, another regular at La Gioconda, named Ralph Horton. Horton became a crucial figure over the next year. There was never any doubt about his commitment. ‘He would have done anything to further David’s career,’ says John Hutchinson, who worked with him, ‘so he could have made a good manager.’ Yet Horton’s time with David was dominated by troubles with money and disputes with David’s musicians who, like Denis Taylor, ‘didn’t like Ralph from the start’. Bassist Graham Rivens is even more vehement: ‘I hated him. It wasn’t just the fact he was a fuckin’ poofta – I hated everything about him.’

  Ralph Horton was in his late twenties, but the slightly pudgy, invariably stressed-out manager seemed older, despite the black leather gloves he usually wore – a rock ‘n’ roll affectation – combined with dark suit, dark shirt and black-framed Buddy Holly specs. Horton had grown up in Handsworth, just outside Birmingham, where his family ran a butcher’s shop. By 1964, he’d built up The Ralph John A
gency with John Singer, booking out local acts including The Tuxedos and Denny Laine, then with The Diplomats. When Denny Laine and the Moody Blues moved to London, Horton came with them, and by 1965 he was working as a booking agent at The Kings Agency at 7, Denmark Street, next door to La Gioconda.

  Horton appeared on the scene just as David’s progress had hit another road bump, when EMI pressurised Shel Talmy, who had enough on his plate with The Kinks and The Who, to terminate David’s singles deal. ‘David was good, but not great,’ says the producer. ‘He was going to get better, but wasn’t in the same league as Pete Townshend and Ray Davies. And EMI simply felt the market wasn’t buying it.’ The split was amicable. David seemed unconcerned, for Horton assured him he could drum up another deal; even so, the aspiring manager did sense his own limitations, for on 15 September Horton called a well-known publicist named Ken Pitt to discuss involving him in David’s management. Pitt explained he was too busy to take on another client; he also suggested that Davie Jones’ name was a problem – he already knew of the David Jones who would go on to join the Monkees, as well as the south London war poet and painter of the same name.

  Horton would not give up on Pitt and continued to call him. He also took Pitt’s reservations about David’s name seriously. It turned out David already had an alternative in mind. He had already tried out different names for size, including his nom de saxophone, David Jay. During his Kon-Rads period he had seen the movie The Alamo, and become obsessed with the character played by Richard Widmark: Jim Bowie. ‘He called himself Bowie at least once in the dressing room,’ says Kon-Rads drummer David Hadfield, ‘and started dressing in this tasselled leather jacket.’ The day after their initial telephone conversation, Horton wrote to Pitt, telling him his protégé would henceforth be known as David Bowie. All those involved were enthusiastic about the new name, although it would, of course, generate arguments in playgrounds and sixth-form common rooms over its pronunciation over the next decade. David always pronounced the name to rhyme with Snowy, TinTin’s faithful terrier, although many Northern colleagues pronounced it ‘Bow’ to rhyme with ‘plough’.

  The new name epitomised David’s fantasies of glamour and stardom, and also helped consign his earlier, failed single to history. Mark Feld, who recorded his debut single at Decca Studio 2, followed his example. By the time ‘The Wizard’ was released on 19 November, Mark had christened himself Marc Bolan and concocted, with Les Conn’s encouragement, an engagingly ludicrous press release about a wizard-inspired trip to Paris. Friends and rivals, David and Marc kept close tabs on each other’s progress.

  Throughout the summer and autumn, Horton put his contacts to good use, booking repeat appearances at the Marquee and the 100 Club, a run of shows in Bournemouth, where the band was already building a following, and the Isle Of Wight. The shows saw the band at their peak. ‘Brilliant,’ says Taylor. ‘They were really good,’ says musician John Hutchinson, ‘a proper band.’ David and The Lower Third shared bills with The Pretty Things, Gene Vincent and The Who (whose Pete Townshend remarked to David and the band, ‘Shit, was that one of my songs you just played?’). The Lower Third often drew a better response than their guest stars, and built up a rapport with most of them, sailing out on the Isle Of Wight ferry every week, sharing a tiny caravan and hanging out on the beach. Horton’s contacts with the Marquee helped score them a string of shows on Saturday mornings at the club, playing live in support to guest artists like The Kinks or Stevie Wonder, who would mime to their own records, which were then broadcast on Radio London complete with audience applause. The optimistic mood brightened further with a trip to Paris in November for dates at the Club Drouot.

  Between shows, David worked on songs, often with the whole band crammed into his bedroom at Plaistow Grove. Today, David voices the insecurities that he would never admit back then: ‘I didn’t know how to write a song – I wasn’t particularly good at it. I had no natural talents whatsoever … and the only way I could learn was to see how other people did it. I wasn’t one of those people who came dancing out of the womb like Marc – I was stumbling around,’ he says. But he was persistent, struggling to build a basic musical vocabulary, humming lines and tunes that Denis Taylor had to interpret, varying the chords until they found one that David liked. It was slow work, like feeling their way through a maze in the dark. David ‘wanted the music done straight away – but he was very patient, too,’ says Taylor, ‘and this would go on for days.’ On ‘You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving Me’, David had simply told Denis to move his hand up and down the fretboard. Now they added new tricks, ninths, sevenths and minor chords, which brought a new complexity to David’s material. ‘Some of it was morbid. Quite miserable,’ says Taylor. During these extended writing sessions throughout the end of 1965, David worked on ‘The London Boys’, a vignette of pill-popping boys dressed in their finery that was obviously influenced by the wistful feel of Ray Davies’ songs like ‘See My Friends’.

  A little clunky in places – which only adds to its charm – ‘The London Boys’ was an anthem for a new generation of kids, an obvious ancestor of Bowie epics like ‘Lady Stardust’ and ‘All the Young Dudes’: a celebration of otherness, right down to the clothing, the hint of homo-eroticism, and the evocation of Judy Garland in its ‘too late now, ‘cos you’re on the run’ climax. Its combination of world-weariness and naiveté embodies the persona that David would inhabit for a decade or more; a man-child, someone who as a youth was strangely calm and mature, and who as an adult seemed waif-like, with a childish earnestness. In future years, David Bowie’s androgyny would be widely – and justifiably – celebrated, but this man-child aura was just as important a part of his personal, often devastating charm.

  ‘The London Boys’ was a harbinger of another typical Bowie technique: to hitch a ride on a youth movement, and simultaneously to distance himself from it. In the Mod scene, as in others, David was a late-comer, trailing behind pioneers like Marc Bolan, who’d made his mark early in a seven-page feature in Town magazine back in September 1962, shot by celebrated war photographer Don McCullin. Late he may have been, but David was instantly accepted by Mod pioneers like Jeff Dexter, the DJ and leading Face who’d been comparing lapels and partings with Marc Bolan for years. ‘I checked out David at the Bromel Club in 1964; he was sharp.’ Marc and David’s obsession with clothes cemented their relationship; together, they ventured down Carnaby Street looking for reject garments in the bins outside the stores.

  More significantly, for just a few weeks, David joined forces with the band who would become the leading lights of the Mod movement. In the days following his Lower Third audition, David had also continued hanging out with Steve Marriott at La Gioconda and then, when Marriott teamed up with the future Small Faces, David sat in on their rehearsals and helped them hump their gear around. For the first couple of shows he guested on vocals. ‘He was great,’ says drummer Kenney Jones. ‘He was absolutely one of us. A wonderful Mod, with a great hairdo, a great personality and a great look – really cared about his image.’ Over this period, David became the ‘fifth Small Face’. Yet he would never mention this intriguing collaboration with the Small Faces – because it foundered thanks to the drawback that had plagued most of his efforts, namely his shameless imitation of others’ styles. ‘We were not into protest songs,’ says Jones, ‘and David was. In the end, we decided he was too Dylanish.’

  The band’s rejection was presumably a crushing blow, for he would never mention it to any of his confidants. To this day, says Jones, who of course went on to play with both the Faces and The Who, ‘I still think about David, personally, and hang on to those memories of our misspent youth.’ Although David never publicised his involvement with the Small Faces, he remained respectful of Stevie Marriott who, propelled by his glorious voice and his songwriting partnership with bassist Ronnie Lane, would soon achieve the fame for which David yearned.

  Despite such setbacks, Bowie’s brief career as a Mod was crucial, for the youth move
ment established all the essential principles with which he outraged Britain in 1972. In most respects, seventies glam was modernism pushed to the max, and it’s no coincidence that the founding troika of glam – Bowie, Bolan and Bryan Ferry – were all definitive Mods. (The only difference in philosophy was that the Mod ideal was exclusive, aimed only at peers, whereas glam was designed to be publicised – knowingly pimped, with an ironic giggle.) In 1964, the notion of preening, peacock males, who bonded with fellow males over a side-vent or suit lining, oblivious to the scorn of outsiders, was outrageous – and powerful – in the monochrome backdrop where simply wearing a pink shirt was a provocative statement. There were no famous role models you could point to, to deflect the scorn of the un-hip; apart from your peers, you were on your own. Mod was the domain of the unashamed narcissist; and David Bowie and Marc Bolan became two of the most committed narcissists in London.

  There was an obvious gay frisson about Mod, and indeed ‘The London Boys’. The city’s Mod and gay crowds shared the same clubs and many values. Le Duce on D’Arblay Street was nominally gay, whereas The Scene, in nearby Ham Yard, was nominally Mod, but you could pose or dance to Bluebeat in either one. Plenty of Mod boys experimented with their sexuality, as well as their clothing, around Soho in 1964 and 1965 – it was no surprise to anyone that David was one of them.

  Mike Berry was one of many kids who’d somehow fallen into a dream job, working for the publishers, Sparta Music. History has never recorded how this man signed David to his first significant publishing deal, but Mike met him through their mutual music-shop friend, Wayne Bardell, and used to drop in on David when he was earning odd pennies at the publishers Southern Music over the winter, packing up manuscripts to send out to arrangers. They went out for a drink, ‘and I fell in love with the boy, in more ways than one’.

  For Berry, as for David, this was an electrifying period. ‘Life seemed black and white until 1964. Then it suddenly burst into colour.’ Like many of his generation, the rebellion against monochrome, strait-laced values included his sex life, too. ‘They were incredible times,’ he says. ‘I knew I was bisexual, I had a girlfriend and fancied other people – then we all suddenly thought, Nobody cares! Anything goes!’