Starman

by Paul Trynka

  David’s relationship with Hermione would mark what his friends saw as a transformation in his outlook; he was relaxed, almost playful. Hermione was upper class – her father was a solicitor in Edenbridge – relatively conservative, quiet and ‘sensitive’, says her flatmate Vernon Dewhurst. ‘She was a lovely girl, quite intense, and quite serious, compared to David.’ They made a sweet couple; Hermione the more self-consciously intellectual, David the joker. He didn’t strike anyone as particularly bookish or highbrow – generally, he was simply a laugh, with a good sense of humour, always joking.

  By August 1968, the pair set up flat together at 22 Clareville Grove, just off the Old Brompton Road, an elegant street in South Kensington filled with upmarket shops and clubs. The refined but cosy three-storey Georgian house belonged to boutique-owner Breege Collins. Her boyfriend Tom was a literary, ‘Henry Miller type’; photographer Vernon Dewhurst rented a back room along with his girlfriend, model and future Bond Girl Zara Hussein; another couple had conventional office jobs and David and Hermione rented the first floor. The place ‘always smelt nice’, according to Ray Stevenson. ‘You could tell it was mostly girls lived there.’ Hermione’s sense of style was evident in the Lloyd Loom chair, a vase of dried grasses in the cast-iron fireplace, lace on the bed head, and hessian cushions on the floor.

  For nearly six months, in this cosy little setting, David seemed uncharacteristically at ease, content. His songs from that time – ‘In the Heat of the Morning’, ‘Karma Man’ – were generally elegant, like his surroundings. By sheer hard work and ambition, he had begun to turn himself into a craftsman. David continued to experiment with new songs, although it was obvious his career was lagging behind Marc Bolan, who had finally lodged himself in the public consciousness with the Visconti-produced ‘Deborah’, which reached number thirty-four that May. Bolan kept it basic: rock ‘n’ roll with some clever word-play and a Donovan yodel. He had achieved something vital; his music was memorable and distinctive. Four years into his recording career, it seemed doubtful that David would ever manage this feat. Although living with Hermione had rubbed off much of his competitive aggression, Marc’s success still rankled. ‘Oh yeah! Boley struck it big, and we were all green with envy. It was terrible; we fell out for about six months. It was [sulky mutter], “He’s doing much better than I am.” And he got all sniffy about us who were down in the basement. But we got over that.’

  For all his pangs of jealousy, though, David could be proprietorial, happy for his ex-Mod mate, ‘they were like brothers’, says Ray Stevenson. ‘It was a good rivalry,’ says Jeff Dexter, ‘young blokes’ rivalry.’ The two were remarkably similar: fey and boyish, confident and flirtatious – and exceptionally talkative. David could expound on a wide variety of subjects compared to Marc, says Stevenson, who points out that Marc’s favourite topic was probably himself. David often talked Marc up to his friends, and when Bolan was preparing his debut album, Bowie suggested George Underwood, who’d now turned to art rather than music to make a living, for the artwork. When the album was a hit, Bowie seemed pleased: it marked a calmer, less competitive side of his character, inspired primarily by Hermione.

  Bolan, too, enthused about David to his friends, telling them he’d given him an instrument he’d been toying with, the Stylophone, a toy keyboard played with a stylus that features two buzzy synthesiser waveforms and a groovy wood-grained plastic case (Visconti remembers the quirky plastic gadget was actually a gift from Ken Pitt). But there was jealousy there, too; according to Tony Visconti, when David supported Tyrannosaurus Rex at a Middle Earth show on 19 May, Bolan insisted Bowie should not sing; instead, David improvised ‘Yet-San and the Eagle’, a mime based on China’s invasion of Tibet, set to a tape of ‘Silly Boy Blue’ – a performance that, as MC Jeff Dexter observes, ‘takes a lot of front’ and was lapped up by the audience, bar a couple of noisy Maoists.

  By the autumn of 1968, Ken Pitt was gradually being excluded from Clareville Grove’s cosy little scene; his task, it seemed, was fielding letters from Haywood Jones, who was wondering if his son would ever make a living wage from his music. Pitt and Jones had discussed whether the cabaret scene might provide the solution for David’s lack of money. The suggestion, says Pitt, came from Haywood and was agreed to by David. Pitt helped Bowie rehearse a routine that included performing some of his own songs to a taped backing, inter-song patter and – in a poignantly ludicrous detail – props in the form of four cut-out Beatles. However, the idea was still-born – one agent who witnessed a run-through told Pitt, ‘It’s a great act, but where can I book it? It’s too good.’

  For Bowie and Visconti, the still-born move into cabaret came to epitomise Pitt’s out-of-touch, old-school attitude; the growing back biting between the Pitt and Visconti camps would anticipate many such battles in David’s career. In the absence of any clear direction from David himself, Pitt also continued investigating openings for acting jobs, while also hoping to advance Bowie’s musical career with a promotional film based around some of his recent material, including ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’. In the meantime, David paid the bills by starting work at Legastat, a photo copy shop frequented by lawyers and barristers near London’s High Court.

  With the cabaret idea abandoned, David turned his attention once more to the underground movement; after placing an ad in its house journal, The International Times, he recruited Tony Hill – previously guitarist with The Misunderstood – to team up with him and Hermione. Named Turquoise, the ‘multimedia’ trio performed their first show at the Roundhouse on 14 September; for their second show, they renamed themselves Feathers. Hill was unenthused by the trio and left after three shows to form his own band, High Tide.

  Fortunately the indefatigable Hutch, David’s companion from The Buzz, had left his latest job, in Canada, and returned to London. With a new taste for folk music, a day job as draughtsman for a refrigeration company in Hornsey (which meant he didn’t need paying), and his down-to-earth Yorkshire demeanour, he was a better fit for the band than Hill, and found David more congenial than in the old days, too. ‘He was happy and relaxed, which I’d never really seen in The Buzz – probably down to Ralph, whose trousers and everything else were too tight. David had come out of that and was happy with Hermione.’

  The music, too, was more spontaneous, worked out on the top floor at Clareville Grove, with Hutch on his Harmony six-string acoustic, David on his Gibson twelve-string. David was still searching out new music, absorbing Hutch’s new influences, like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, picked up in Canada, while Bowie turned Hutch on to a new obsession, Jacques Brel.

  Bowie had first heard Brel’s songs during the period when he was besotted with Lesley Duncan, hanging around her Redington Road flat. They’d briefly enjoyed what David describes as an ‘on-again, off-again’ relationship; Lesley had recently had a fling with Scott Walker and had the distressing habit of playing Scott’s songs whenever David was round at her flat. Initially offended, Bowie became intrigued by the Jacques Brel songs that Walker was singing; once his jealousy subsided he became first a fan of Walker, but more crucially he became obsessed with Brel. When ‘Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris’ – Eric Blau and Mort Shuman’s Greenwich Village show based on Brel’s songs – came to London later in 1968, David was in the audience. Hutch spent many evenings at Clareville Grove working out the chords for the Brel songs ‘Port of Amsterdam’ and ‘Next’, which they incorporated into their repertoire.

  The new trio played their first ‘multimedia’ show together at Hampstead’s Country Club on 17 November; one wonders if, as he floated across the stage during the band’s naive, almost child-like performance, David recalled his music and movement classes from Burnt Ash primary school. David and Hermione’s mini-ballet was performed to a spoken-word piece, played on a cassette recorder. David performed a solo mime, The Mask, with a similar taped backing, while Hutch, persuaded he had to perform a spoken-word piece, settled for ‘Love on a Bus’, by Liverpool poet R
oger McGough: ‘at least he was a Northerner’.

  For all the so-called experimentation of London’s underground scene, most audiences were confused or unmoved by Feathers’ performances. Their recordings show why. In October, Visconti managed to wangle a session at Trident Studios, funded by Essex Music, to record ‘The Ching-a-Ling Song’. A piece of child-like whimsy with lyrics about azure clouds and crystal girls, it seemed an unsuccessful attempt to ape Marc Bolan. The best that could be said about this lightweight ditty is that it anticipated the summer jug-band feel of future hits like The Mixture’s ‘Pushbike Song’. Perhaps the song’s blandness can be explained with the theory that domestic harmony doesn’t usually inspire great works of art. In which case a solution was imminent.

  With its low ceilings and creaking floorboards, Clareville Grove was not conducive to privacy, and towards the end of 1968 flatmate Vernon Dewhurst heard two sounds emanating from David and Hermione’s room. One was the frequent arguments between the two. The other was a new song that David was working out. He showed it to Hutch within a couple of days, by which time he’d already thought of overlaying its claustrophobic chords with the sinister, comic buzz of his Stylophone and completed most of the lyrics, which opened with the words, ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’. ‘He was immensely proud of it,’ says Dewhurst, one of the first few people to hear the new song, ‘but I remember laughing about the Stylophone’.

  ‘Space Oddity’ was born fully-formed, and although it has been said that Hutch wrote the opening chord sequence, he points out that he merely changed some chord shapes, to add to the song’s ethereal, disjointed feel. The song’s distinctive harmonic structure was defined by David’s limited, unconventional guitar style, while its lyrics were tightly plotted. In fact, the piece was not organised like a song, with verses, choruses and a middle eight: it was more like a work of drama. David describes the song as arriving almost instantaneously, inspired by his trip to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘I went stoned out of my mind to see the movie and it really freaked me out, especially the trip passage.’ For the first time, this was a song that had arrived without conscious effort, or attempt to mimic others – the first song that derived from the unconscious, rather than ambition.

  As Hutch learned the song and worked out a harmony vocal, two points struck him, as they strike today’s listener; the simplicity of the melody, and the complexity of the song’s structure. The main melody, accentuated by the Stylophone, is two notes, a semitone apart; the most claustrophobic melody possible, the perfect metaphor for the narrator’s isolation. Meanwhile, the song’s structure is arranged exactly as a play script, with the simplest of chords anchoring the basic opening dialogue, while the melody and chords become more expansive as the story unfolds, and Major Tom steps into the void. As Hutch observes, ‘Most musicians make songs with a structure that has been used before – his songs have a structure he dreams up for himself.’

  While it’s the words that have drawn most attention on this song, it’s the harmonic structure that renders it extraordinary. Each chord change manipulates the mood – as Ground Control tells the Major he’s made the grade, the chord swerves from the opening line’s minor to a cheerily optimistic major, a psychological judder that tells us of the disconnect between ground control and their astronaut. It’s a consummate piece of songwriting, the first evidence that Bowie might indeed be the genius he’d said he was, two years before.

  An additional surreal frisson has been added by the interesting suggestion, made by writer Nicholas Pegg and others, that the hero’s name was inspired by Tom Major, a failed trapeze artist from Brixton, whose unlikely career became celebrated when his son, John Major, became the British Prime Minister in 1990. Sadly, the intriguing possibility that a poster for Tom Major’s circus act lodged itself in the young David Jones’s memory is impossibly remote – for Tom Major retired from showbiz two decades before David’s birth, in order to make garden gnomes (and must therefore have influenced a far less revered Bowie song).

  ‘Space Oddity’s sense of numbness and alienation has also inspired speculation that its genesis involved heroin – rumours encouraged by David in the mid-seventies, when he was playing up his image as a long-term druggie. Those close to him at the time – including Ray Stevenson, whose brother Nils would later succumb to heroin addiction – dismiss the idea. ‘I don’t think David and Hermione were even into smoking dope,’ says Hutch. ‘They were into white wine. There was a side of the scene with a lot of sitting in basements and getting wasted, but not those two.’ Even David’s own account of watching Kubrick’s 2001 stoned on grass doesn’t tally with the recollections of people like Tony Visconti, who remember him coughing and spluttering when inhaling a joint. Instead, the bleakness of the song seems primarily to have been inspired by his arguments with Hermione – rows immediately noticed by those around them, who had been genuinely affected by the feeling of bliss that, along with the smell of joss sticks, permeated the elegant Georgian hallways of Clareville Grove. That feeling of contentment, unique in David’s life so far, would not reoccur for many years. Its loss marked his rise to the star status he’d craved for so long.

  According to Ken Pitt, David’s new song surfaced after he had asked David to write a ‘special piece of new material’ for a promotional film he’d been planning in the hope of getting David exposure on German or British television. Filmed on Hampstead Heath and at Clarence Film Studio on Deptford Creek, the film featured nine segments, including the trio performing ‘Ching-a-Ling’, an overdubbed ‘Sell Me a Coat’, and a mimed ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’. The most historically significant section included a studio version of ‘Space Oddity’, with David contributing a kooky solo on the ocarina. The footage is marvellously camp, all the more so for the wig which David sports, after a hair cut he’d undergone for a tiny TV role in The Virgin Soldiers. Bowie puts his dance training to use simulating weightlessness, before succumbing to the embraces of a pair of space nymphettes.

  Without a doubt, the most bizarre curio of the promo film was David’s mime of The Mask, for which he wears Elizabethan-style white tights, which flatter his pert buttocks and well-packed codpiece. (‘The Mask was always Ken Pitt’s favourite,’ observes Hutch, tartly.) To his own voiceover, he mimes the tale of a boy who finds a mask in a junk shop, puts it on and finds it holds the secret of fame; and then at the climax, as the hero performs at the Palladium, the mask strangles him.

  The short, hilarious film was both gauche and prescient: even as David Bowie attempts to court fame in an almost Variety-style performance, he anticipates its corrosive effects. That ambivalence would be reflected in the months that followed, as he finally achieved the fame for which he’d hungered. As the film revealed, few other artists were as conscious of the duality of fame as David Bowie. Fewer still, once the fame from that first hit had ebbed away, would find themselves even more addicted.

  6

  Check Ignition

  David was adored on all sides. He has to be in that situation, to get ahead. You could call it manipulation, but what the hell.

  Calvin Lee

  As 1968 turned to 1969, hippie unity was splintering for ever. Idealism and whimsy were being shouldered aside by a wave of denim-clad, blues-riffin’ musos preaching a gospel of authenticity. As bands like Led Zeppelin and Free exploded onto the scene, the elfin, languid 1969 David Bowie was just as out-of-sync with this new dress-down era as he’d been in his previous Anthony Newley mode. During that disastrous era he’d been powered forward by a brash, luminous confidence, and some artful, unfocused songs. This time around, that youthful confidence had been battered. But he had one crucial factor in his favour: a copper-bottomed classic song, ‘Space Oddity’. It was his ace in the hole, and he played it with a new subtlety.

  Over these months more acquaintances noticed traits that would become characteristic of the twenty-something David Bowie: the way he’d earnestly quiz other people, finding out how they ticked, how he’d se
arch out allies and file them in his mental Rolodex for future use, without mentioning them to his current friends. Often, he seemed strangely passive, leaving decisions to others, content to bury his still-bruised ego. As one friend, musician and International Times writer Mick Farren puts it, ‘You got the feeling he didn’t want to show his cards – because he didn’t have many to begin with.’

  Those who fell out with David in later years often described his behaviour, from this period on, as cold and manipulative; in reality, although unusually secretive, he was easygoing, following the flow, simply taking advantage of random opportunities. One such chance came when he was visiting Barrie Jackson, an old Bromley friend, who’d moved down the road to Foxgrove Road in Beckenham. Hearing music drifting from the top flat, Mary Finnigan, another tenant of the same building who was sunbathing out in the garden, called out, ‘Who’s playing?’

  A few moments later, David came downstairs to share the sunshine and, says Finnigan, the tincture of cannabis she was enjoying. A week or so later, on 14 April, 1969, David moved in to stay with Mary and her two children at 24 Foxgrove Road. His friends had only just noticed the absence of Hermione, who David told them had left for New York. They missed David’s elegant, red-haired companion, but were impressed by how quickly he’d lined up a replacement. ‘We were very jealous,’ says David’s friend Ray Stevenson, ‘he never had to pay any rent.’

  Mary Finnigan had an impeccably middle-class background, but after a brush with the law and conviction for drugs possession – ultimately over-tuned – with a consequent brief stretch in Holloway Prison in 1967, she had taken up the hippie cause as a writer for International Times. She and David soon became lovers, and the singer became her new cause; within three weeks she had helped organise a regular Folk Club at the Three Tuns on Beckenham High Street; by its fourth week, on Sunday 25 May, the venture was titled the Beckenham Arts Lab, and eventually started drawing in street musicians, puppeteers, poets and other artists. Working with the eclectic group of volunteers, David immersed himself in mime and the visual arts, as well as music. The group became his main focus of activity, soon after his partnership with Hutch came to an end. The Yorkshireman had spent many intense evenings throughout the spring working on material with David after a long day in the office. In April, when a hoped-for deal with Atlantic for the duo failed to materialise, Hutch returned up north, in search of a decent salary to support his wife and young son. David seemed unconcerned, but later Hutch heard he’d been telling his friends, ‘Hutch thought we were never going to make it.’ It seemed, Hutch thought, that ‘David simply had no grasp of the concept of having a family to feed.’