Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Bowie approached this crucial rite of passage with the sense of calm and organisation that had so impressed The Manish Boys, and with two characteristics that would come to define his career: a willingness to take creative risks and a genius for delegation. He had assured Mendl and Vernon that he would oversee all the arrangements for the album – a task usually looked after by a specialist. Then he told bassist Dek Fearnley that the two of them would do this crucial job, together.

  Fearnley’s sole qualification was childhood piano lessons and he was intimidated by the prospect, but David confidently steered him well beyond his comfort zone. Aided by a dog-eared edition of Frida Dinn’s Observer’s Book of Music, a guide to the principal orchestral instruments, they attacked their task. ‘It was bloody hard work,’ says Fearnley. ‘I knew how to read the staves and that a bar had four crotchets, David had never seen or written a note, so I was the one qualified to write stuff out.’

  The two worked for hours at Dek’s brother Gerald’s piano: David humming, Dek scribbling. The arrangement for ‘Rubber Band’ was their first experiment with this working method. The quirky, Heath Robinson feel enhanced the song’s off-kilter charm, but as work on the album proper started at Decca’s Studio 2 in Hampstead on 14 November, 1966, the pressure was ratcheted up. ‘We didn’t have enough time,’ says Dek, ‘and it got embarrassing handing over these scribbles to these musicians from the London Philharmonic!’ By Christmas, the two were behind schedule, and Fearnley was left to arrange a couple of songs on his own, including ‘The Laughing Gnome’, and explain the charts to the musicians, while David oversaw proceedings from the control room.

  Mike Vernon remembers being handed a pile of papers and helping assemble each song ‘like a jigsaw puzzle’, but he and engineer Gus Dudgeon enjoyed the challenge of recording comedy voices and miking up gravel. Most of the musicians were supportive, transposing parts written in the wrong key, although one ‘absolute bastard’ clarinettist did simply hand his manuscript back to Fearnley, saying, ‘there are five notes in this bar. There should be four,’ and refused to play.

  Just before Christmas, Neil Slaven, who oversaw the artwork for many of Decca’s sleeves, dropped in on the session. Mike introduced him, briefly. David chatted with Slaven – ‘Hello, Mike’s told me all about you!’ – interrogating the blues fan about his record collection, seemingly fascinated by his expertise on obscure Chess singles. Bowie seemed a world apart from the rock and blues musicians Slaven and Vernon normally hung out with. A slightly bizarre, undeniably impressive young man: slight, with floppy, collar-length hair and somehow schoolboyish, with a fey, ‘theatrical’ air. And then Slaven watched from the control room, dumbstruck, as Vernon rolled the tapes, seeing this intense but camp apparition shuffling around Decca Studio Two, crunching underfoot some scattered pebbles and stones which he had shaken over the studio floor, apparently to make some kind of backing track for a spoken-word piece.

  When Slaven heard a rough mix of the epic that Vernon and Bowie were crafting, he was even more disconcerted: a monologue, in a theatrical cockney voice which sounded nasal, as if he had a bad cold, delivered over found sounds, like the crunching gravel and the rustle of driving rain. The subject was apparently a Lambeth gravedigger, ‘a little old man with a shovel in his hand’. Although Slaven heard this ‘song’ just once or twice, it stuck with him, and he never got the strange spectacle he had witnessed out of his head. What was most striking was the way this studio neophyte delivered this extravagant confection without a trace of embarrassment. It should have been ludicrous, but despite himself, Slaven was impressed. ‘I thought, Here is someone who really is an individual talent – someone who truly follows his own ideas.’

  The track in question, ‘Please Mr. Gravedigger’, was, by most objective standards, dreadful. Its description of ‘Mary Ann who [was] ten, full of life’ obviously refers to ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, who was tortured and murdered by Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. The song was tasteless and exploitative, but it also illustrated how the nineteen-year-old David Bowie had learned to use the recording studio as an instrument in itself, a lesson which was at the heart of his future career. Today, it ranks as both a bad-taste period piece and an example of artistic courage.

  The drawn-out sessions – complete with French horns and English whimsy, just like The Beatles’ sessions for Sgt Pepper recorded over the same timeframe – resumed after the Christmas break, with ‘The Laughing Gnome’ completed in January, and the final three tracks including a re-recorded ‘Rubber Band’ finished later in February 1967.

  Predictably, most of the personnel involved remembered ‘The Laughing Gnome’ – which was released as a single on 14 April – as one of their favourite sessions. Vernon forgot his doubts and dived in, suggesting even more varispeeded effects, and engineer Gus Dudgeon ‘totally went crazy’, says Vernon, suggesting gnome puns and chirpy voices.

  In future years, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ was the early Bowie song especially singled out for ridicule. Yet as long as you’re happy to abandon all notions of taste, the song is brilliantly crafted, from Dek Fearnley’s opening oboe melody, through to the breakdown after the chorus, as David intones ‘… said the laughing gnome’. One of the rare songs on the album where the execution matches its ambition, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is infectious – like a skin ailment – and charmingly redolent of those summer afternoons spent playing with little Frankie Mair. In the admittedly narrow niche of pseudo-psychedelic cockney music-hall children’s songs, it reigns supreme.

  When Vernon wrapped up the sessions on 25 February, the producer felt a profound sense of achievement merely to have realised Bowie’s kitchen sink epics. But the satisfaction didn’t extend to optimism about the album’s prospects. ‘If I’m honest, I really thought it didn’t have any chance of commercial success – whatsoever.’

  The end of the album also marked the official end of David’s relationship with Ralph Horton, for on 19 January, David’s joint manager retired from the music business, later joining the RAC. Haywood Jones was left to deal with the letters from Raymond Cook that arrived at Plaistow Grove, plaintively asking about Horton’s whereabouts, in hope of the payback of his ‘loan’.

  David, meanwhile, was buoyed with the enthusiasm of Deram’s executives, most of whom thought ‘The Laughing Gnome’, plus ‘Love You till Tuesday’, were sure-fire hits. But even as the biggest artistic achievement of his life approached its release, he was – in what would become characteristic fashion – preparing to move on.

  The inspiration arrived via a white-label acetate that Ken Pitt had acquired on his trip to New York. As an art enthusiast, Pitt had engineered a trip to Andy Warhol’s Factory on 47th Street. Initially unaware of Warhol’s involvement in the music scene, he had nonetheless briefly met Lou Reed and was given an acetate of The Velvet Underground’s as yet unreleased debut album. After a promotional trip to Australia with another management charge, Christian St Peters, Pitt returned to London on 16 December, and handed over the acetate to David. The album is still a treasured possession, and a source of pride that ‘not only was I to cover [a] Velvets’ song before anyone else in the world, I actually did it before the album came out. Now that’s the essence of Mod.’

  In forthcoming years, David Bowie would become the world’s best-known champion for the Velvets; but in 1967, his attempts to assimilate their narco-deadpan thuggery resulted in some of his most ludicrous music.

  Some of the inspiration came in the form of The Riot Squad, a London five-piece, which, through various line-ups, had worked with both Larry Page and Joe Meek, led throughout by Bob Flag. The feisty, eccentric sax player had bumped into Bowie during a Buzz show at the Marquee the previous August and renewed his acquaintance over coffees at La Gioconda, mentioning his band were holding auditions for a singer. Bowie volunteered, partly for a laugh, partly to help them out, and partly so he could experiment with some new material – for, although Dek was still on the scene, keyboardist Chow h
ad bailed out halfway through the Deram sessions.

  The new band worked through new material at The Swan pub in Leytonstone on 15 and 16 March, readying David for The Riot Squad’s support slot with Cream in Basildon on the 17th. Seven shows later, David enlisted the band’s help for an after-hours Decca session with Gus Dudgeon, to record his cover version of the Velvets’ ‘Waiting for the Man’, plus David’s own ‘Little Toy Soldier’.

  ‘Waiting for the Man’ would become a touchstone of David’s career, and this early version was effective; stripped down and funky, with taut sax and harmonica embellishing the stomping onbeat drums and a rangy bass riff, all neatly underpinning David’s carbon-copy Lou Reed drawl. However, it is David’s own – using the term loosely – ‘Little Toy Soldier’ that was truly arresting. A juxtaposition of cockney music hall with the Marquis de Sade, the song is the aural equivalent of a P. T. Barnum fairground monstrosity: a monkey body stitched to a fishtail. David’s hearty main melody introducing Little Sadie sounds like cheery English rocker Tommy Steele; then eight bars in, he drops an entire section – ‘taste the whip, and bleed for me’ – from the Velvets’ ‘Venus in Furs’. This fascinating curio seemed designed primarily as a provocative live song, where its mix of comedy and sado-masochism echoed some of the art-college craziness of the Bonzo Dog band; this was New York noir, reborn as Victorian music hall. Although David Bowie was the first European musician to appreciate the importance of The Velvet Underground, it would be years before he learned to assimilate it.

  Recorded too late for inclusion on the Deram album, the two songs would become a highpoint of The Riot Squad’s live set. For ‘Little Toy Soldier’, David, in psychedelic make-up, his hair back-combed, would brandish a whip and lash Bob Flag, who wore white face and bowler hat – like one of Clockwork Orange’s Droogs – plus protective padding. The shows were anarchic, hilarious – like contemporaries The Bonzo Dog Band, whom Flag later joined – and reminiscent of Marc Bolan’s chaotic shows with hippie outfit John’s Children. Unsurprisingly, the audience were confused. ‘But David was always a laugh. He liked us because we’d do anything,’ says Flag. The same could be said of David, who occasionally would reach over and fondle Flag’s hair; the audience were left unaware this was a shared joke about the wig the thirty-six-year-old sax player wore to disguise his advanced years.

  Although The Riot Squad provided back-up to David at his 13 April show at the Tiles club to mark the following day’s release of ‘The Laughing Gnome’, David otherwise remained an anonymous member of the band for their performances right through to the end of May. Although in later years he often mentioned how early he’d picked up on The Velvet Underground, for his own career he stuck to the mainstream in search of a breakthrough. Certainly, there was no connection between The Riot Squad’s loveably cranky recordings, and the smug, show-business gloss of ‘Love You till Tuesday’, which was re-recorded on with an orchestra directed by Ivor Raymonde, best known for ‘I Only Want to Be with You’.

  With its gelatinous strings, and trite, complacent lyrics, ‘Love You till Tuesday’ was a naked statement of David’s yearning for a hit, without any of the charming eccentricity of David Bowie, which was released on 1 June, the same day as The Beatles’ rather more successful Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. By the time he’d completed the album, David had jettisoned no less than five bands in his drive for mainstream success. The failure of ‘Love You till Tuesday’ demonstrated that ruthlessness and ambition alone were not enough.

  Yet as just a few people at the time noticed, ambition was not the only thing that drove David Bowie. For over that early summer of 1967 – much of it spent lovingly teaching The Riot Squad his songs line by line, or playing them Frank Zappa records up in his bedroom at Plaistow Grove – his friends grew to appreciate another compulsion: an intoxicating, child-like obsession with music, which had deepened and crystallised in the years since he had since pored over album sleeves at Medhurst’s in Bromley. At heart earnest, obsessive, David Bowie was a simple fan-boy, with this compulsion sometimes battling, sometimes complementing, his ruthlessness. Only with failure would the fan-boy part of him be allowed to surface once more. Failure, it turned out, would be the making of David Bowie.

  5

  I Wish Something Would Happen

  It was a bit like the Warhol Factory – if you wanted to hang out you had to learn heavy manners. And David came in, learning moves. He was clearly absorbing a lot: mutating.

  Mick Farren

  The sudden inactivity following the polite, but restrained reception for David’s Deram debut was a shock. He had stalled: 1968 would be a year that David Bowie would sit around Ken Pitt’s flat in Manchester Street, his legs tucked under him in trademark fashion, sighing, ‘I wish something would happen.’

  Despite its negligible sales, the album did win some prominent supporters. Melody Maker’s Chris Welch had been turned on to the album by The Nice. Penny Valentine, of Disc, was even more influential: a lucid, widely fêted but unpretentious critic, she had an unerring ear both for talent and for a hit. She supported David faithfully over the next five years, celebrating his talent without, for the time being, predicting success. ‘She did love him,’ says Chris Welch, ‘but she did mention how he wouldn’t stop ringing her up.’

  Haywood Jones, in the meantime, was in regular contact with Ken Pitt. As ever, he was politely grateful for Pitt’s efforts on behalf of his son, but David’s nocturnal songwriting activities were adding to the stress in Plaistow Grove. It was around this time that Terry, David’s half-brother, had reappeared at the house. After his National Service in the Royal Air Force, Terry had lived intermittently with Peggy’s sister, Pat, but now he had become reconciled with his step-father Haywood, and the long-absent prodigal son moved in to the tiny, overcrowded house. The eventual solution to the overcrowding was for David to move in with Ken. Bizarrely, this move to his manager’s flat in Manchester Street was the first time the twenty-year-old had left home. Now the aspiring nomad would rely on handouts from Ken, rather than Haywood.

  Although David had long outstayed his welcome at his parents’ cramped two-up two-down, it wasn’t just Peggy’s suspicions that he was trying to evade. After Terry had arrived back in Bromley, David had started sharing some of his own musical obsessions with Terry, who had turned him on to so many musicians, from Eric Dolphy to John Coltrane. Hoping to reciprocate, David had taken his half-brother to see Cream at the Bromel Club, in February 1967. It was Terry’s first encounter with high-volume rock ‘n’ roll, and the experience was disastrous. According to David, ‘about halfway through he started feeling very, very bad. I had to take him out of the club because it was really starting to affect him – he was swaying … He’d never heard anything so loud.’

  As they emerged from the hotel doorway onto Bromley Hill, Terry collapsed onto the pavement. ‘He said the ground was opening up – and there was fire and stuff pouring out the pavement, and I could almost see it for him, because he was explaining it so articulately.’ Terry had suffered a schizophrenic fit. During his stay at the house, Terry also told David he regularly had such visions. This revelation was overwhelming, disturbing, but David did not share his reaction with those with whom he spent most time. His characteristic reserve, that urge, noticed by Dek Fearnley, never to discuss the claustrophobia of Plaistow Grove, seemed to apply to Terry, too. David kept his concerns about his half-brother to himself, and those around him continued to believe that he was an only child.

  Once Haywood had crammed his books and records into his tiny Fiat 500 and helped install him in Manchester Street, David cocooned himself in the neat, comfortable bachelor pad. Many of his afternoons were spent wandering around Fitzrovia and the other quiet, elegant Georgian streets around Manchester Square. Often he’d return from these magpie trips with a childish enthusiasm, presenting Pitt with his new discoveries: a Victorian children’s book he’d bought from Pollack’s Toy Museum, brass bells from some swinging clothes shop, o
r simply chestnuts, flowers, or leaves that he’d found in the street. At other times, David could be found shuffling through the bookshelves either side of the living-room fireplace, pulling out works like Saint Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, various first editions devoted to Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley – who was a distant relation of Pitt’s – typographer Eric Gill and German expressionist Egon Schiele. Pitt enjoyed his role as mentor, and in a Pygmalian-esque manner, he would take David to cultural hotspots or the local Italian place, Restaurant Anticapri. It’s possible that Pitt exaggerates his education of the nineteen-year-old, whom he describes as ‘not a cultured person’ in those early days, but there’s no doubt David was soaking up influences.

  David enjoyed those months closeted with Ken. On several occasions he frolicked around the flat naked; Pitt noticed his ‘long, weighty penis’ and concedes that ‘David was a tease.’ On another occasion Pitt emerged from the bathroom naked and David, laughing, mimed measuring Pitt’s penis, acting out an awed expression. The incident was recounted by one writer to illustrate the sexual frisson between them, but Pitt rejects that interpretation: ‘it was simply funny. Any sexual undertone was in their minds, not ours.’ To this day Pitt, who knows more than anyone of how David would use his sexuality to win people over, professes himself ignorant of his charge’s true sexual orientation. ‘Is David gay? I honestly don’t know.’

  Bowie’s arrival at the flat confirmed his status as Pitt’s main client, and the manager constantly fired off letters, looking for press, song-writing or acting opportunities. Deram had gone quiet after the release of David Bowie; Tony Hall, one of David’s supporters, had left, while Mendl and his friend Dick Rowe, both responsible for the label, were beset with political problems. Instead, the main focus of David’s commercial activities started to centre around his publishers, Essex Music.