Starman

by Paul Trynka

  A few weeks later, the effects of The Lower Third’s departure became more obvious, when The Buzz turned up at Pye’s Marble Arch studios to record a follow-up to ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’. There were no tempo changes or cranked-up guitars on ‘Do Anything You Say’ – it was neat, and well played, but the Spector-ish gloss and Motown-style on-beat drums couldn’t mask a horrible blandness. The thrill had gone – David sounded like a bad Tom Jones imitator.

  Released to capitalise on a near-hit, ‘Do Anything You Say’ stalled; David’s career seemed to have done the same. And while David had built up a small following at the Marquee, when they ventured outside of London for a short tour in April to mark the single’s release, according to Derek Fearnley their set left audiences confused, which included dates in Scotland where, ‘to be honest, the kids didn’t really get it’. Realising the audience wanted some familiar songs, David introduced a cover of ‘Knock on Wood’, and Tim Hardin’s ‘If I Were a Carpenter’. The Buzz were ‘competent, but not dynamic’, according to Hutch. David’s musical confusion, without the foil of The Lower Third, would become obvious, to the extent that his period with The Buzz would soon be airbrushed out of history – notably, by himself. Much later he would claim, ‘For a number of years I worked with rhythm and blues bands – my participation in them formed my own black ties.’ It’s understandable that he’d forgotten his most forgettable music.

  Many fans and friends of the time remembered David’s work with The Lower Third; few of them mention The Buzz, who worked up a funkier, more jazzy style than their predecessors, but were milder and tamer, in both music and mentality. Sacking The Lower Third might have suited Ralph Horton, but it seemed an act of self-sabotage. David appeared unconcerned. As The Buzz observed, he liked hanging out with a band, sharing his obsessions and flights of fancy. But he was fundamentally a loner: his main fantasy was of a ‘nomad’ lifestyle. This was the primary attraction of hanging out at Horton’s flat, for by now he was open about the claustrophobia that living with his mother and father inspired. This claustrophobia also inspired the rapid turnover of people with whom he worked – the moment they started seeing themselves as a permanent fixture, or making demands, David started seeing them as part of the dullness and convention that oppressed him. As Dek Fearnley, the man closest to David in 1966, observed even at the time, ‘He wanted to get away from home. And he wanted to get away from being in a band, in exactly the same way, if that makes sense.’

  For those close to him, David’s ‘dreaminess’, his desire to escape the humdrum, was his most powerful and charming character trait. He knew how to make boring situations, like waiting for a bus or train, entertaining. ‘He was on a higher plane, really,’ says Fearnley. ‘He wouldn’t be talking about the weather or the latest Who single, he was simply off in his own world.’ This man-child blend of escapism and hard-nosed careerism was intriguing – there would be constant flights of fantasy or obsessions that he would draw his friends into. In essence, this seemed to be a mind-control technique, to blot out the everyday details of life in Bromley. In other personalities, such escapist tendencies or daydreaming would have been the mark of an ineffectual, Walter Mitty character, but David worked at turning his fantasies into reality, spending long hours working on arrangements, or planning the next step in his career.

  In fact, with the failure of ‘Do Anything You Say’, it seemed that David didn’t actually have a career; but that hardly impaired his ability to move on. This time around, it wouldn’t be the band that was ditched in order to break the deadlock, but the man who had, just a few months earlier, seen off The Lower Third. According to Kenny Bell, Ralph Horton was aware he was becoming surplus to requirements, ‘He came to the end of any money he had to spend on David, and realised David would probably be off. So the best thing he could do was score a deal with somebody else and at least retain something.’ Desperate to secure help – and, just as crucially, money – Horton reapproached Ken Pitt.

  A crucial character in David Bowie’s history, Ken Pitt is also one of the most complex and misunderstood. Generally depicted as a traditional, old-school figure – a gay showbiz manager in the tradition of Brian Epstein – Ken Pitt is in reality far more complicated and intriguing. Born and raised in Southall, Middlesex, Pitt had studied art at the School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography at Fleet Street, and worked briefly for two London print companies before joining the army in March 1941. He worked in signals, landed at Gold Beach on D-Day, was among the first Allied troops to arrive at Belsen, and served briefly in Palestine before returning to the family home in Southall, where he joined the music business as MC for a local dance band. Pitt soon established himself as a key PR figure in the UK’s nascent record industry, and by 1956 he was already representing Stan Kenton, Billy Eckstine, Billy Daniels and Liberace. In 1966, Pitt had built a thriving business operating in both management and PR, his major acts including David Anthony’s Moods and Manfred Mann. At the beginning of the year, he had turned down a plea from Mike Prustin to co-manage the recently renamed Marc Bolan. But when Ralph Horton came to see Pitt in his office on 5 April, insisting that Pitt ‘had the keys to the doors that are being slammed in our face at the moment’, Pitt was interested enough to turn up for a show at the Marquee on 17 April, without having heard any of David Bowie’s music beforehand.

  Winston Churchill, hailed by many as the ultimate Great Briton, once explained his crucial achievement of bringing America into the Second World War with the words, ‘No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.’ David Bowie, self-styled Great Briton, showed a similar mastery of political realities. His performance on 17 April was one of the most important in his life – and he delivered. As Pitt puts it, ‘if you went to see David Bowie and David Bowie knew you were coming, he would put on a show for you. Which he did for me. And yes, I was greatly impressed. With everything. Everything.’

  The band, Pitt says, were forgettable, playing vaguely Mod music. David himself was another matter. Pitt had worked with Sinatra and Bob Dylan and could recognise charisma. David had it. Although Pitt retained few details of the songs David and The Buzz played, he remembered David’s beige jumper, with buttons down one shoulder. ‘It looked like something your mother had made, but I noticed it fitted him very well. It was … different.’

  The band ran through their set, without any number particularly registering, before their last song. At which point, says Pitt, the lights went down, with a single spot on David, who launched into an impassioned version of ‘When You Walk Through a Storm’ – a classic show-business tune, which Ken knew from Judy Garland’s version. Pitt was transfixed, ‘I had simply never seen anything like that before.’

  After the show, David came up to greet Pitt and with Ralph they went back to Ralph’s flat, where they chatted for a very long time. Pitt noticed that when he raised a subject that was new to David, the young singer became animated: ‘He had this habit, of sitting on one leg and then rocking backwards and forwards in a chair when he got excited. I noticed after I discussed something he would have this look, and his eyes were bright. That impressed me very very much.’ Then, taking command of the situation, this man-child, who seemed as eager to learn as he was to take control, turned to Ralph and said, ‘Let’s do a deal with Ken.’

  There is an intriguing footnote to David Bowie’s acquisition of the manager who steered his career over the next four years. Ken Pitt ascribes his conversion to David Bowie as being inspired by his performance of a Judy Garland song. But Bowie’s MD and bassist Dek Fearnley, who arranged most of the material, is adamant that, at that performance, The Buzz closed their show with an entirely different song, Tony Newley’s ‘What Kind of Fool am I?’. The discrepancy perfectly illustrates David Bowie’s ability to be whatever the object of his attention wanted him to be.

  In later years, Bowie fans and writers would make much of the subtext of that night’s conversation, which saw Ralph Horton hand control to
Ken Pitt, and in some imaginations many of the undercurrents of that evening were comparable to Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane, the play that immortalised London’s gay culture. But the participants were more complex than the clichés we’ve inherited. Ken Pitt, a fan of Judy Garland, devotee of Oscar Wilde, and supporter of the emerging Campaign for Homosexual Equality, was also a married man, who often mentioned his romances with Hollywood glamour models.

  Tall and gangly, rather refined and formal-looking, Pitt could expound with equal enthusiasm on the virtue of Keats and The Velvet Underground in his clipped, measured tones, and was a master of the elegantly phrased, slightly waspish letters that were an essential management tool in London’s old-school music industry. Pitt ‘doesn’t believe’ in applying labels to sexuality. ‘People always have to say now. It was better when people didn’t have to say.’ His vagueness is consistent with other rock managers like Andrew Loog Oldham, who was straight but loved camping it up to seem more like Brian Epstein or Kit Lambert – the gay managerial archetypes in the swinging London of 1966.

  In other respects, Pitt was anything but vague. First of all, he injected some professionalism into David’s business affairs, and paid the bills that started to cascade into his office. Pitt’s trademark acerbity shows in his comments that Ralph’s management of David’s affairs, notably using David’s income to pay his own bills, ‘was not the usual way of doing things’. Over subsequent months, Pitt paid for outstanding phone bills, new shirts and endless running costs for the band van, all marks of his devotion to David’s cause.

  Pitt’s enthusiasm was in stark contrast to the situation at Pye; in June, Hatch started producing ‘I Dig Everything’ then, dissatisfied with The Buzz’s performance, replaced them all with session musicians. The resulting single, with its cheesy, chirrupy organ, and Austin Powers grooviness, bore more of Hatch’s production trademarks than any of his previous Bowie sides, and the result, says Hatch himself, was ‘that it didn’t work at all. We were getting further away from what we had with The Lower Third single, rough as it was.’

  Although it was obvious that ‘I Dig Everything’ was destined for oblivion, David was unconcerned. ‘He knew those songs weren’t that good, it’s just what was needed at the time,’ says John Hutchinson, who sensed that Bowie was ready to move on. Hutch, meanwhile, was pessimistic about The Buzz’s future and confided to David that he planned to get married and find a conventional job. David found the notion of getting married bizarre and, the night before the wedding, tried to talk Hutch out of it. ‘We were in Dunstable, he’d found these two girls, and he wanted me to go off with him and the girls instead.’ David was supposed to turn up for the wedding, but was unsurprisingly absent the next day. Hutch left in search of married bliss and a regular paycheck in Yorkshire, and was replaced by Billy Gray.

  Despite the attractions of the female fans who turned up at his shows, David was fast becoming disenchanted with live performances, live audiences and, seemingly, rock ‘n’ roll in general. By the autumn of 1966, the British beatboom was subsiding. With The Beatles retiring from live shows, and the presence of Frank Sinatra and Tom Jones in the Top 10 alongside David’s contemporaries like The Kinks and the Small Faces, the charts were charmingly diverse and kitsch, with none of today’s predictable rock conformity.

  Much of David’s day-to-day existence was similarly kitsch and charming, for over the summer of 1966 he spent many of his afternoons at places like Dek Fearnley’s brother’s house in Sussex, observing the family comings and goings, playing with Fearnley’s nieces and nephews. He was relaxed, soaking up what was a carefree environment compared to his own strait-laced, claustrophobic family home. The silly, or comic, moments were what struck him most – including the moment when a shame-faced Fearnley admitted he’d subtracted seven years from his age when he joined The Buzz, and was in fact twenty-seven. ‘You’re joking?’ asked David, incredulous at the thought that he was hanging out with such an ancient codger – an uncle no less – who hadn’t settled down yet. It was three months later, when David started to run through a new song, named ‘Uncle Arthur’ – about a thirty-two-year-old who ‘still reads comics, follows Batman’ – that Dek realised he had been immortalised in song.

  Alan Mair, whose group The Beatstalkers were managed by Ken Pitt, also spent many afternoons with David, being shown his songs, and later hanging out in the office. He sometimes brought his three-year-old son, Frankie, with him, and the two built up such a rapport that a couple of times Mair left the toddler in his care. Like Uncle Dek, Frankie and his toy soldiers were captured in song, as ‘The Little Bombardier’. Again, the situation was altered into a story where ‘Little Frankie Mair’ is the adult figure who, like David, enjoys hanging out with kids, and attracts suspicion. The song, a playtime waltz, perfectly illustrates David’s mindset of cheeky humour, child-like wonder and adult cynicism. This wasn’t Bowie’s only baby-sitting job, for in quiet times he looked after Lucy, the daughter of Tom Parker, a friend from Kent who played piano with The New Animals. ‘Kids just trust and gravitate towards some people,’ says Mair. ‘David is one of them.’

  Mair knew both Pitt and Bowie well, and saw the manager’s influence on Bowie at close hand. In later years, Pitt’s detractors would contend he wanted to turn Bowie into an all-round entertainer. In fact, Bowie had joined Pitt as a singer in a rock band; soon he would change into a songwriter, with a unique world view. In that respect, Pitt’s influence was the making of him. ‘His intentions were right. He was saying, Put make-up on, dress flamboyantly – be gregarious!’ says Mair. Pitt’s role was not so much to educate David as to give him licence to see himself as an artist, at the same time encouraging him to write more, pushing his songs to other artists.

  Pitt knew that David was going nowhere with Pye, where Hatch was being pressured by MD Louis Benjamin to drop David’s contract, and he already had a new record company in mind. Early in October he funded a recording session with The Buzz, once more at RG Jones in Wimbledon, where David produced a second version of ‘The London Boys’, plus new songs ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Please Mr. Gravedigger’. Together, these quirky, observational songs represented a radical about-turn from David’s Pye material, and Pitt was confident that they would help him score a record deal. ‘What I wanted was an album that would act like a CV,’ says Pitt. ‘I had not come across another nineteen-year-old who wrote songs like that. I went to Decca determined to get an album deal – although that was theoretically impossible, because they didn’t make albums except if you’d had a hit.’

  Pitt made his approach to Decca via Tony Hall, the company’s Promotions Manager. Hall had become the key figure in the establishment of the label’s ‘hip’ Deram imprint. He was taken with Bowie’s songs – ‘they sounded like Anthony Newley 2’ – and passed Pitt along to Hugh Mendl, who became transfixed. ‘I think I would have signed him even if he didn’t have such obvious musical talent. But he did have talent. He was bursting with creativity.’

  Mendl was one of the most senior executives in the British music industry: in fact, he had literally invented a huge section of it, through his discovery of Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele, and he launched many significant careers throughout the sixties, often while battling Decca’s innate conservatism. He rated the nineteen-year-old singer, with a string of failed singles behind him, as one of the most inspirational talents with whom he had ever worked. ‘I had a minor obsession about David – I just thought he was the most talented, magical person.’ Mendl was well aware of the resemblance between Bowie’s voice and that of Anthony Newley, another Mendl signing, but was untroubled by it. ‘The [resemblance] was purely vocal. They were entirely different. Tony was an actor. David was … David Bowie.’

  An effusive but rather patrician character, Mendl had been expected to join the diplomatic service after graduating from Oxford, but despite the scepticism of his grandfather, Sir Sigismund Mendl, then chairman of Decca, he worked his way up through the ‘family’ company.
Better educated and more worldly than Tony Hatch, the man who had signed David to Pye, Mendl’s near-obsession with David is recognisable as the same ‘heterosexual crush’ that writer Charles Shaar Murray remembers David Bowie exploiting so potently in the seventies. David’s discovery of this power was as significant a breakthrough as his improving skills at songwriting. David Bowie had grasped a fundamental truth: before you can be a genius, you have to seem like a genius.

  Mendl’s fascination with Bowie inspired him to release Bowie’s self-produced ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘The London Boys’ as his single debut, while in-house producer Mike Vernon would oversee the album. Vernon had his own impressive track record, championing acts like Eric Clapton and Fleetwood Mac, and he too was impressed with the young singer’s intellect. ‘There was talk of a lot of things, concepts and poetry that went right over my head,’ he remembers, leaving the impression he wasn’t totally convinced by David’s young genius persona. But there was no denying Bowie’s creativity, for with the prospect of an outlet for the songs and pictures that were flowing through his head, music was pouring out of him.

  Over the autumn of 1966, David was writing frenetically; in one early list of contenders for his debut album, he and Pitt itemised over thirty songs including ‘Over the Wall’, and now-forgotten compositions such as ‘Say Goodbye to Mr Mind’ and ‘Lincoln House’. His ambition extended to abandoning traditional instrumentation in favour of a more orchestral approach, influenced both by Brian Wilson’s ground-breaking Pet Sounds, released that summer, and by the fact he no longer had his own backing band. Guitarist Billy Gray left The Buzz in late November, and the others were ‘let go’ a week later. Ralph Horton, still acting as a kind of co-manager, wrote to Pitt, who had left for a trip to America and then Australia, explaining that they had decided to give up live performances, telling him that David ‘hates ballrooms and the kids’. Poignantly, Dek, Chow and John ‘Ego’ Eager offered to stay on without pay after their last show, in Shrewsbury on 2 December, and also to help out with his album, inspiring another flood of tears from David.