by Paul Trynka
David had been introduced to Essex by Tony Hall, an old friend of the company’s celebrated proprietor, David Platz. Ralph Horton had signed David to Essex during Pitt’s trip to the USA, much to Pitt’s chagrin, for he had been chasing a much bigger advance. But this alliance would prove vital over the next couple of years, placing Bowie within a sprawling musical nexus which included production companies, overseen by Denny Cordell and later Gus Dudgeon, plus publishing clients that included Anthony Newley, Lionel Bart, Lonnie Donegan, The Moody Blues and, from the spring of 1967, Marc Bolan. This ensured Marc and David continued to tread similar career paths, although they diverged when it came to songwriting, for while Marc kept his songs to himself, David was evangelistic about pushing his own material and getting it heard.
The motivation was social as well as professional. For David, sharing his songs was how he related to people. In the later days of The Riot Squad he would happily spend hours teaching his songs to Croak Prebble, who replaced him as singer. The same applied to his involvement with The Beatstalkers, then Scotland’s leading live band, a tight-knit posse of Glaswegians who would have intimidated many outsiders. But not David. ‘He had incredible confidence,’ says bassist Alan Mair. ‘No matter where you were, he would pick up a guitar and sing full blast. Most people would be cagey, even Freddie Mercury was quite humble or quiet [in a similar situation], but David would flabbergast me.’
David gave The Beatstalkers’ ‘Silver Treetop School for Boys’, a neat, ‘Waterloo Sunset’-style short story of a dope-addled boys school. More significantly, ‘Over the Wall We Go’ was recorded by a Robert Stigwood protégé named Oscar, later famous as sitcom actor Paul Nicholas. A playground ditty, settting the line ‘Over the wall we go, all coppers are nanas’ to the tune of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, it failed to trouble the charts but found an entirely different audience: ‘I played it all the time at Middle Earth in the Roundhouse,’ says DJ Jeff Dexter. ‘It was a perfect record to play against the Pigs, man, a psychedelic comedy record – and it had this fer-lum fer-lum fer-lum beat that idiot dancers love.’ The single also became a late-night Radio London favourite, a camp psychedelic classic, loved by those who’d grown up on Billy Cotton and The Goons and could cackle along in dope-enhanced hilarity.
None of these modest successes helped to sell David’s own recordings, though, and Ken Pitt remembers his frustration at a logjam of material, recorded at Plaistow Grove or on an open-reel recorder at Manchester Street, which seemed destined never to be released. One evening Bowie vented his frustration, says Pitt, by telling him, ‘I’m going to write some Top 10 rubbish,’ then proceeded to write a song which was neither. ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’ would be his first collaboration with Tony Visconti, the producer with whom he’s most associated: the finest song Bowie had written to date, it would also become the cause of his biggest artistic setback.
Tony Visconti had arrived in London in April 1967 at the invitation of Denny Cordell, who’d worked with him briefly in New York. Cordell was overworked, Visconti had production experience and – crucially – turned out to be a brilliant arranger. Within weeks he was teamed with Denny Laine and Procol Harum, while his addition of a woodwind quartet to The Move’s ‘Flowers in the Rain’ helped propel it to number two in the charts. Visconti had already brought Marc Bolan’s new project, Tyrannosaurus Rex, to Essex Music when David Platz played him an album by another Essex writer, David Bowie.
Visconti was intrigued, mostly by the album’s diversity, ‘it was like a demo, trying everything: “Look, I can do this, and I can do that, too!”’ He was introduced to David in a tiny room at Dumbarton House, Essex Music’s Oxford Street headquarters; the two built up a rapport straight away, both of them fast-talking and obsessive, with almost encyclopaedic musical tastes. The producer listened to a number of David’s demos and picked out ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’ as much for its coherent, folk-rock style as its content. Taking control of the project, Visconti located the musicians and wrote out every note of the music – ‘I had to, as we only had three hours for the session’ – and produced the recording at Advision. The result was David’s most coherent, concise song since ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’. Its lyrics – ‘I will show you dreams where the winner never wins’ – were vaguely Dylanish, its ‘dededudum dededum’ vocalising Bolan-ish. His voice sounded mature and free of affectation, while in the middle eight, his double-track vocals are a foretaste of Ziggy Stardust’s rock ‘n’ roll yell.
‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’ was a gorgeous track, but it was nonetheless rejected by Decca’s regular Monday singles selection panel. The decision marked the beginning of a minor crisis for David (and a major crisis for Deram, as Denny Cordell and Platz switched allegiance to EMI). David had so far endured his career setbacks with a characteristic calm, but over these months he started to voice his pain. Steve Chapman was in charge of Essex Music’s demo studio, where he’d help David record songs or cut acetates of the ‘amazingly creative’ demos David crafted at Manchester Street. The studio was tiny, and they spent long hours in conversation; seventeen-year-old Chapman looked up to the worldly, intelligent singer, ‘he had this amazing palette of ideas, Tibetan philosophy, mystical concepts’. But late in 1967, shortly before Chapman left to join a band named Junior’s Eyes, he noticed, ‘David sounded quite depressed. He told me, “I’m thinking of chucking it in. Really, I’d like to become a Buddhist monk.”’
Those frustrating afternoons, often spent hanging around with no recordings in prospect, eventually put paid to the youthful arrogance that Leslie Conn remembered. Ken Pitt persevered, sending a copy of the album to Mickie Most to drum up interest – Most didn’t reply – and fruitlessly chasing acting and commercials jobs. By spring 1968, the crisis of confidence had extended to Bowie’s manager, according to Alan Mair, who after quitting the Beatstalkers had been given the use of a spare office by Ken Pitt. ‘I think Ken Pitt had reached the stage where he didn’t know what to do with him. One day he said to me, “Do you want to be David’s personal manager?” I wasn’t interested – but I think Ken had reached the point where he was pulling his hair out.’ The situation deteriorated further in March, when Deram rejected ‘In the Heat of the Morning’ and ‘London Bye Ta Ta’. It was particularly painful for Hugh Mendl. ‘It was so hard,’ he reflects, sadly, ‘he was a wonderful person – but at that time it was me against fate.’
In the Bowie story, Deram have generally been cast as villains, but ‘In the Heat of the Morning’ – despite its elegant Visconti string arrangement – was undistinguished, its style essentially that of the Deram album minus the cockney vocal. And in the end, it was Bowie and Pitt’s decision to walk. ‘David came in and said, “I don’t think anything’s happening for me as a singer,”’ says Mendl. ‘He told me, “I’m going to go and do dancing – so could I please be released?”’
Mendl had long, tortuous conversations with his friend Dick Rowe, who was in similar straits with Cat Stevens, who left Deram that spring after a bout of tuberculosis. Distressed that the label was about to fall apart, Mendl agreed to let David go, ‘but I had the feeling I was being a bit conned’. At the time he thought that the move was perhaps a piece of grandstanding by Bowie, who had some other masterwork up his sleeve. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
David’s claim that he was planning a new career as a dancer was, for the moment, true. The move seemed bizarre at the time; in retrospect, it marked the transition from an ambitious boy’s conventional career progression, to a series of inspired leaps into the unknown. In 1968, with only a couple of decent songs to his name, the twenty-one-year-old David Bowie did not have many of the hallmarks of a great artist. The one that he undoubtedly did have was courage.
This fascinating digression started when a secretary in Ken Pitt’s office sent a copy of the Deram album to actor and dancer Lindsay Kemp. Kemp was ‘absolutely enchanted by the songs – and by the voice. It was reminiscent of my favourite other singers like Anthony Newley an
d Jacques Brel; a husky, smokey voice that was plaintive, damaged. And I was able to identify with that.’
The performer started using ‘When I Live My Dream’ to open his show at The Little Theatre Club off St Martins Lane; David took up Kemp’s invitation to come and see a performance, and was ‘very flattered’ says Kemp. ‘And the show fascinated him, with me as Pierrot. And we met afterwards and it was love at first sight.’ After the show, David followed Lindsay to his flat in Bateman Street, Soho; there, he beheld a British version of the New York underworld depicted by The Velvet Underground. ‘My flat was filled with strippers, hookers, pimps and druggies,’ remembers Kemp, fondly. Given the wide-eyed quality of the Deram album, Kemp had assumed Bowie would be ‘as innocent as a child’ but was proven wrong. ‘He looked around, then he sat down – and was completely at home.’
The story of Kemp’s life is theatrical, picaresque and rather heroic. Born in Birkenhead, his sailor father was lost at sea when he was two; Kemp’s mother encouraged him to dress up and paint his face, then, worried he’d taken to it too well, sent him to Naval College, where he read ballet books and learned to survive by ‘enchanting the boys’, dancing clad only in red paint and toilet paper. After art college in Bradford, where he was friends with David Hockney, he trained with, and was thrown out by, the Ballet Rambert. Aided by his bald, muscular and blind collaborator Jack Birkett – often billed as The Incredible Orlando – he developed an unconventional hybrid of drag, mime and song and dance, and became one of London’s most respected dance teachers, working out of his studio in Floral Street.
Mick Farren, future underground scenester and member of The Deviants, painted backdrops for Kemp along with fellow former students of the Saint Martins school of art. He liked Kemp, but along with many friends, found Kemp’s scene intimidating, ‘it was a bit like going into 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.’
Kemp in person is engaging and sweet rather than intimidating, his natural extravagance revelling in extraordinary yarns that vary with the telling, as he readily admits. Kemp fell in love with David the first afternoon they spent together, when the dancer spent his time enthusing over his passions, which included, ‘The theatre, the music hall, silent movies, the Oriental and ritualistic theatre, Kabuki, Jean Genet, the Theatre of the Absurd.’ As yet their interests hardly overlapped; it was David’s ‘great sense of humour’ that sealed their relationship, and they would spend much of their time trading impersonations of music-hall stars, or movie icons like Laurel and Hardy.
Kemp says it was a love affair, as well as a working relationship. Within the first few days, David took Lindsay to the Tibetan Society and later David suggested a title for a new work, Pierrot in Turquoise, on which they would collaborate: ‘Turquoise is the Buddhist symbol for everlasting-ness. And of course I wore turquoise costumes, as a nineteenth-century-inspired clown.’
As plans developed for the Pierrot show, David attended dance lessons at Floral Street. In those days, said Kemp, ‘he wasn’t a very good mover, but he was equipped with the essential thing: a desire to move. And I taught him to exteriorise, to reveal his soul. And he had all this inside him, anyway.’
Sadly, no complete record exists of the show that Kemp and director Craig Van Roque crafted, based around the ancient tale of Pierrot and Harlequin, with a modern, anarchic slant. The press reviews of the time suggest that the performance was less than the sum of its parts, but that the parts were beguiling. Bowie played ‘Cloud’, who as well as singing, observed or commented on events in Brechtian fashion: he contributed ‘Columbine’, one of the finest songs of his folk-rock period, simple and elegant, ‘Threepenny Pierrot’, a variant of ‘London Bye Ta Ta’ and, in the early version, ‘Maids of Mayfair’ – ‘A real craftsman’s song,’ says Kemp’s musical collaborator Gordon Rose, who would later take over as MD at the Palladium. ‘I can still remember it – it had a theme, a chord sequence and a good hook.’
The plot revolved around Pierrot’s unrequited love for Columbine, who is seduced by Jack Birkett’s Harlequin. The most memorable scene was ‘Aimez-Vous Bach’, which depicted Pierrot’s despair: the lovelorn character cuts open his belly, throws out his heart and dances away using his entrails as a skipping rope; meanwhile, pianist Michael Garrett improvises around Bach’s French Suites. Often Kemp would extend the scene well beyond its normal duration, basking in the attention.
The tiny troupe hustled gigs around the country, sending out letters which Kemp and Garrett dictated while the partially sighted Birkett bashed away at a typewriter. Oxford Playhouse on 28 December, 1967, was the first, followed by three nights at Whitehaven’s Rosehill Theatre, a jewel-like confection built in a converted barn on the grounds of an eighteenth-century house owned by arts patron Miki Sekers.
Sekers was an Hungarian immigrant who’d founded a celebrated textile company, which made parachutes as well as the silk for Princess Margaret’s wedding dress. The textile magnate also donated the silk with which Russian designer Natasha Korniloff crafted the show’s brightly hued costumes. Korniloff was also the member of the troupe with a driver’s licence; only just tall enough to see over the wheel, she was charged with coaxing their overloaded van, packed with the gang and their costumes, from Oxford up to Cumbria for the run of shows.
According to Lindsay Kemp, Rosehill was also the scene of an hilarious imbroglio that played out in the farmhouse which they took over. Nestled in a draughty four-poster bed, Kemp heard ‘noises through the wall’. Venturing into the cold night, he discovered Bowie cuddling Natasha. ‘I was traumatised,’ says Kemp. ‘Totally destroyed.’
Kemp does admit that a well-publicised subsequent suicide attempt was ‘theatrical’ – an attempt to slash his wrists which produced only surface wounds. ‘Some of those stories are exaggerated. And I’ve given several versions.’ One of those stories has his blood drenching his costume in that night’s performance, ensuring rapturous applause from the crowd. Pianist Michael Garrett remembers that at one point during the evening, Kemp sat on the edge of the stage, holding the audience rapt with a long soliloquy, inspired by his star-crossed love affair. Kemp and Korniloff were both united in their anger and grief at their two-timing lover, and in their grief: ‘We cried on each other’s shoulders,’ says Kemp. The treacherous Cloud was then forced to sleep on a chaise longue in the hall for the next two nights (‘the poor sod’). Despite such backstage shenanigans, says Michael Garrett – who was also besotted with Natasha – the attitude, in sterling showbiz fashion, was always that the show must go on. ‘Lindsay was always having affairs with a member of the cast, and there were always arguments and fights. David was actually a gentleman. In any case, we would always go on-stage sozzled – which helped.’
With the short run of dates finished, the cast dispersed; David would continue to drop in on Lindsay at Floral Street. Time, the great healer, did its work and eventually the dancer’s bruised heart ‘began to recover’ sufficiently for him to continue working with David for more performances in March.
Although he’d largely kept his distance from psychedelia in 1967, David was content to drift along in its slipstream in 1968. He immersed himself in the underground scene, hanging out with characters like Lesley Duncan – the striking, dark-haired songwriter and backing vocalist who later sang on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon – and Jeff Dexter at Lesley’s top-floor flat on Redington Road, which offered a breathtaking panoramic view of Hampstead Heath. For a few weeks they had a regular Thursday night flying saucer meditation session where, says Dexter, ‘We hoped the flying saucers would come and take us away.’
During such late-night, consciousness-expanding sessions, David would take any spliffs handed around, although he wasn’t a committed dope smoker; photographer Ray Stevenson noticed his tendency to ‘hold the joint for a bit – and then pass it on’. According to The Lower Third, he’d boasted that he was first
turned on to grass by Donovan, and had encountered ‘amazing visions’, but his drug of choice remained conventional cigarettes, at least a pack a day. During the heyday of acid, David rarely, if ever, turned on – at least, not with the aid of LSD. As Jeff Dexter recalls, he assumed that everyone present at their evening saucer sweeps was into psychedelics, ‘but I discovered many years later lots of people who I thought were psychedelicised with me weren’t’.
The sessions at Redington Road included meditation based on Tibetan Buddhism, and the participants, including David, had the idea that ‘we could all communicate with other worlds’, says Dexter. Some observers, including Ken Pitt, suggest David’s fascination with Buddhism mainly involved burning a couple of joss sticks; yet David had studied Buddhism with dedication, visiting Tibet House to meet the Lama Chime Rinpoche. His fascination with Tibet also inspired the stately, translucent song ‘Silly Boy Blue’ which, while obviously influenced by ‘Walk on By’, boasted one of the most beautiful melodies of his Deram album. While he was never a full-blown devotee, David’s Buddhist credentials, says Jeff Dexter, were convincing. ‘When I first went to Samye Ling, the monastery up in Scotland, he’d already made an impression with the head monk, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. And he signed the visitors’ book before me – so he already had more than a couple of joss sticks.’ Other friends, like Ray Stevenson, remember real anger at China’s treatment of Tibetan monks. ‘He told me all about Chime, and the atrocities that were inflicted – I remember that anger, it stayed with me.’
Some of David’s interest in Buddhism, it turned out, was stimulated by a new figure in his life: Hermione Farthingale. Lindsay Kemp had recommended the classy, sweet, red-haired dancer, along with David and a couple of others, for walk-on parts in The Pistol Shot, part of the BBC drama series ‘Line 625’, which was recorded in January and broadcast on 20 May, 1968. Bowie and Hermione both had minor roles dancing a minuet together in period costume, which was enough to spark a relationship, much to Kemp’s chagrin, ‘because I still had hopes. Although Hermione was a wonderful girl, I must admit.’