Starman

by Paul Trynka

  The recording session for ‘Space Oddity’, on 20 June, 1969, was one of those rare occasions where everyone involved sensed its historical importance. According to Gus, ‘When we hit that studio we knew exactly what we wanted – no other sound would do,’ although there were happy accidents that changed the final result. Guitarist Mick Wayne thought he’d finished an early take and was about to retune a bass string on his Gibson ES-335, but Dudgeon liked the effect of the warped note swamped with reverb and told him to repeat the sound on the next take. Rick Wakeman, who played the Mellotron, found that ‘it was one of half a dozen occasions [in my career] where it’s made the hair stand up on your neck and you know you’re involved in something special. “Space Oddity” was the first time it ever happened to me.’ Terry Cox remembers the consensus that a breakthrough was finally imminent, ‘That excitement definitely did transmit itself to me, too.’

  The sense of event was heightened by the presence of Calvin Lee, waiting to hurry the tape off for mastering. ‘I remember him coming in and whipping it off to the factory straight away,’ says Dudgeon, ‘that’s how things were on that day.’

  Less than three weeks after the session, the single had been pressed and was released to an enthusiastic critical reception; one of the most welcome reviews came from Penny Valentine in Disc, who was not only respected, but who also had a nose for a hit and pronounced that the record ‘is going to knock everyone senseless’.

  Outside the perfection of that single session, though, confusion reigned. In America, Mercury were sufficiently confident of the single’s prospects to greenlight work on an album, which started on 20 July. Yet Philips in the UK were disorganised: with UK MD Leslie Gould under notice that he was to be replaced, it was Essex – David’s publishers – who took control of the sessions. Planning was nonetheless sketchy; according to Visconti, the album was mapped out at a meeting between him, Bowie and David Platz. ‘As David’s previous album was all over the place musically, the master-plan was to keep him on course with one style.’ Visconti envisaged a folk-rock sound, based around David’s twelve-string guitar, and suggested using Mick Wayne’s band, Junior’s Eyes, whom he’d recently produced; they were likeable, younger and less expensive than the usual session musicians, just ‘a bunch of blokes he could hang out with’, says guitarist Tim Renwick. The band – which Renwick and drummer John Cambridge had joined only recently – knew little about David, ‘only the “Laughing Gnome”, so we didn’t know what to expect’.

  For his Deram album, David had been confident in overseeing the music; this time around, it seemed much of that confidence had been knocked out of him. During their introductory chat the band found him ‘kind of nervous and unsure of himself’, says Renwick. ‘He was a bit of an unlikely solo artist – a lot of solo artists are very pushy and egocentric [but] he wasn’t like that at all.’ David was strikingly vague about what he wanted. ‘There was very little direction,’ says Renwick. ‘It was odd that there wasn’t a figure saying, “That worked – that didn’t work.”’

  John Cambridge would be David Bowie’s drummer for the next nine months; crucial months in the singer’s musical development. This was a time when David, according to legend, was an ‘ice man’: battling inner demons, using and discarding musicians like worn-out guitar picks. In contrast, Cambridge found David energetic and jokey, ‘but not pushy’. Instead, he was content to be led, most notably by his new girlfriend, who became a permanent fixture that summer.

  Visconti, too, while enthusiastic, was reluctant to take control. ‘I was not a very good producer yet and I hadn’t started to engineer. I had only made the first Tyrannosaurus Rex album and the Junior’s Eyes album,’ and his inexperience was noticed by the band. They all liked him, but thought he was ‘sort of over polite’, says Renwick. The album which emerged from these seemingly directionless sessions was not orchestrated; it was busked, cooked up on the spot, which gave it a delicious tension. For even as Bowie was turning his back on hippie values, he was reliant on people like Mick Wayne – who was talented, shambolic and ‘very druggy’ – to give shape to his vision.

  The sessions – at Trident Studios, in a little Soho alleyway – were drawn out over the summer and early autumn. A session would be booked with no pre-warning of the songs they would be working on, and the day would start with David sitting on a high stool with his twelve-string, saying, ‘I’ve got this one.’ After playing through the song acoustically a couple of times, he’d smile at the band and ask them, ‘Shall we have a go?’ For his acoustic numbers, assisted by Keith Christmas, the process was even more basic. And thus David Bowie’s second album was pieced together.

  The rather shambolic recording – which Visconti describes as ‘personal and warm in many ways but often ragged’ – would make this album unique in David Bowie’s catalogue. His intricately worked words were set against a loose, hobo backdrop where, on songs like ‘Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed’, the results are obviously influenced by Dylan’s first electric sessions. Other obvious touchstones include Tim Hardin – whose crystalline, descending chord sequences are echoed in both ‘Cygnet Committee’ and ‘Wide Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ – or Simon and Garfunkel, snatches of whose ‘Mrs Robinson’ pop up in ‘Letter to Hermione’. The overall effect mirrors the David Bowie that everyone from that time remembers: intense but passive, intriguing but introverted.

  The lack of direction afflicting David was entirely explained by his personal life: for as Visconti explains, ‘Calvin Lee was besotted with David – and his hidden agenda was to have him as a boyfriend. But Angie, who arrived on the scene during the recording of the album, squashed all possibility of that.’ The business backdrop was even more chaotic; Calvin Lee was operating in a semi-official capacity, posting out promo copies of the single after hours and offering encouragement at many of the sessions, which were then interrupted by ‘a nerdy American character, Robin McBride, from Mercury’, says Visconti. ‘[He] turned up on our doorstep and we were told that we were all answerable to him. I despised him.’

  As weeks elapsed after the single release, the machinations around its creator became more complex. Before the sessions, David had told Visconti that Ken Pitt was too old school. ‘After the record,’ he stated, ‘I’ll be dropping him.’ Pitt, meanwhile, pushed the single by sending polite letters to BBC Radio, Top of the Pops, and other outlets, augmenting his efforts with an attempt at chart-rigging in a deal with a shady character, who offered to massage the single into the Record Retailer chart for £100. Pitt acceded, ultimately handing over £140 in total; but the single languished outside the Top 40. To this day, Pitt remains slightly shamefaced about the episode; according to other figures in the industry, Pitt’s distaste for getting down and dirty was a crucial failing. ‘Ken was too gentlemanly,’ says Olav Wyper, later general manager of Philips. ‘He thought the way to make this a hit was to put money in somebody’s pocket. Which wasn’t enough.’

  The American release was even more confused. Simon Hayes had received an early pressing of ‘Space Oddity’ and played it at Mercury’s Wednesday sales conference in Chicago. ‘Everyone had been excited about the record. But when they heard it they all said: “This is a sad story about a guy lost in space. And we’re gonna release it when there’s a space shot happening – and there’s a real possibility we could lose a man in space?”’

  With Mercury presidents Irving Green and Irwin Steinberg fast losing their nerve, there was a rush edit, says Hayes, which censored most of the references to Major Tom’s fate. It must have made for a very short record. The single was eventually released in a modified US edit ‘with absolutely no promotion behind it’, according to Hayes, ‘and it died a slow death, as these things do’.

  Blissfully oblivious of all the corporate machinations, David was genuinely excited as the moonshot approached on 20 July. He, Angie and Ray Stevenson stayed up for the TV coverage. Stevenson found it disappointing, ‘It was dull, black and white fuzzy footage of people walking slow
ly,’ but observed, ‘David was very excited.’ David later described his state as ‘over the moon! And they used [the single] as part of the background track – I couldn’t believe they were doing that. Did they know what the song was about?’

  According to Stevenson, the most memorable part of the evening was when Angie announced, ‘I’m going out for a walk,’ and then, on her return, ‘suddenly she’s seen them – little green men, and all this nonsense’. Ray was impressed by Angie, but it was at this point that he started to have ‘doubts’. If David was sceptical, he concealed it. ‘He humoured her – and asked all the questions that a charming person would.’

  Amid the mess of people competing for David’s attention – ‘vampires and predators’ as Ken Pitt terms them – Pitt was especially suspicious of Angie’s influence, seeing her presence behind disturbing aspects of David’s behaviour, including an attempt in June to negotiate an advance with publisher David Platz, behind Pitt’s back. Partly to re-establish his pre-eminence, Pitt organised a trip to a pair of music festivals in Malta and Pistoia, Italy, at the end of July. Bowie would sing ‘When I Live My Dream’, judged sufficiently MOR for such events, against a backing tape but the main purpose of the trip, says Pitt, was merely the prospect of ‘a little fun and sun’. Angie dropped in for the Italian leg of the trip – savouring Pitt’s suspicious reaction – following which David and Ken returned to London, in David’s case directly on to a show at the Three Tuns. It was only when David arrived in Beckenham that he received a message that his father was ill. He seemed to sense the situation was serious. ‘Someone else can host tonight,’ he yelled at his fellow volunteers, ‘just get me home.’

  Ray Stevenson was enlisted to drive David to Plaistow Grove, where it was obvious that Haywood’s condition was grave; he’d been suffering from lung complaints for some years, probably linked to his heavy cigarette habit, and had now succumbed to pneumonia. Sitting down at the kitchen table with Peggy for endless cups of tea, Ray found David’s mum was relatively composed while David was ‘Panicky. It was obvious he really loved his dad.’

  David spent most of the next two days at Plaistow Grove. On 5 August, 1969, he called Pitt to tell him his father had died. Pitt joined him at the house, where he sorted through Haywood Jones’ papers. They had been left in perfect order. ‘He was always wonderful,’ says Pitt. ‘I wish he could have witnessed David’s success.’

  John Cambridge, the Junior’s Eyes drummer, was becoming closer to David as the sessions continued; he speculates that his broad Yorkshire accent and dry humour reminded David of Haywood. A few days after his father’s death, David told John that his phone had rung several times at 5.30 a.m. ‘I’d pick it up and there was no one there,’ he told John. ‘I just knew it was my dad seeing if I was all right.’

  Poignantly, the most significant live show of David Bowie’s life to date came on 16 August, just five days after Haywood’s funeral. The Beckenham Free Festival had been planned for several months, and included every member of Bowie’s social circle, with the notable exception of Ken Pitt. Mark Pritchett, who was reading his poetry on the day, met David early in the morning, when he was buoyant, fired up by the beautiful weather and the feverish activity. Short of microphones, they drove round to Mark’s house in Haywood Jones’ tiny Fiat 500 to borrow some. ‘Good grief!’ David laughed as they pulled up on Southend Road. ‘I’ve just taken the lease on the place opposite – we’ll be moving in in three weeks. Come and see us!’

  The afternoon was frenzied for all involved. Even those who – like photographer and blues musician Dave Bebbington – thought David’s new girlfriend was too pushy were impressed by the way Angie ‘made things happen’, selling burgers from a stall to raise cash. Every Arts Lab member was busy with some assignment at the Beckenham Recreation Grounds, whether it was PA, moving gear, puppet shows or impromptu street theatre events. The event was endearingly amateurish – DJ John Peel, who was scheduled to MC, was replaced by a medical student from Blackheath named Tim Goffe; local bands playing blues or Chuck Berry numbers dominated the bill, which included Keith Christmas, Bridget St John and The Strawbs.

  As David’s afternoon performance approached, however, the mood turned sour, ‘a combination of stage fright and thinking about his dad’, says Pritchett. Dave Bebbington, who photographed David’s solo set from on-stage, remembers, ‘There was little chat in between the songs; you could tell he was thinking, I have to be a trouper, I’m going to play my set and go home.’

  For Mary Finnigan, the day had started stressfully with a missing van and PA; it got worse that afternoon, when she remembers David calling her and Lee ‘materialistic assholes’ as they totted up the day’s takings. ‘I don’t remember him being unpleasant,’ says Bebbington, ‘just detached. He wanted to go home.’ David was absent from the celebratory curry at an Indian restaurant on Beckenham High Street that night; there were complaints from some, says Bebbington, that ‘David [was] being really shitty.’ Bizarrely, no one seemed to link his mood with the fact he’d buried his father five days earlier. The bickering, and the fact that Mary had been supplanted by Angie as David’s lover and muse, signalled the end of David’s close involvement with the Arts Lab, which, for David, had become a place where ‘everybody wanted a piece of him’, says Bebbington.

  When David came to commemorate that sunny but overclouded Bromley afternoon a few days later in the recording studio, he was in a sweeter mood. Charmingly homely, with a tiny Woolworth’s reed organ carefully miked up by Visconti, ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ would be, along with ‘Cygnet Committee’, a highlight of David Bowie’s second album. Where ‘Cygnet Committee’ was complex, having evolved out of an earlier song, ‘Lover to the Dawn’ – its lyrics a densely argued dissection of hippie values – this song was simple, poignant, and evoked the ambivalence that had enveloped David that year. When he sang, ‘Oh to capture just one drop of all the ecstasy that swept that afternoon’, the melody sweeps upwards with yearning for a hippie nirvana that others thought they had attained, but which he knew he hadn’t. A jewel of a song, it ended in the glitzy tinsel of a chorus borrowed from ‘Hey Jude’, a comedown perhaps, but as Tony Visconti points out, ‘in the shadow of The Beatles it was hard to have an original idea in those days’.

  ‘Memory of a Free Festival’, one of the last songs to be recorded, would close David’s Philips album, which bizarrely featured the same eponymous title as its Deram predecessor. It was an appropriate farewell, bidding goodbye to the hippie culture – and, in several instances, people – that had nurtured Bowie for the last nine months. Mary Finnigan and Calvin Lee, who left Mercury later that year, were two more people from whom David moved on, as he and Angie settled in to Haddon Hall, the Southend Road house he’d pointed out to Pritchett.

  With the confused welter of emotions that surrounded his father’s death – which included grief, sympathy for his mother, and irritation at the constant arguments with her – it’s hard to decipher Bowie’s feelings at the modest success of his purported breakthrough single, for in the wake of the moon landings, ‘Space Oddity’ slipped into the UK charts at number forty-eight, on 6 September, 1969, before dropping, seemingly, into oblivion.

  For most of the Philips staff, that, it seemed, was that. But they had not reckoned on Olav Wyper, the company’s newly appointed general manager – young, dynamic and handsome, with an Action Man jutting jaw that signalled his can-do attitude. Before joining Philips, Wyper had discussed the job with his secretary Sue Baxter, whom he planned to bring with him from CBS. Enthused about the move, she remarked, ‘That company has been a disaster for two years – but at least by the time we arrive they will have a hit on their hands.’ Intrigued, he’d gone out and bought ‘Space Oddity’. ‘Sue told me it was a sensational record, and she was right,’ he says.

  On his first day in Mercury’s Stannard Place office, Wyper was surprised to notice that the sales, promotion and marketing staff were sitting around with no new releases to work on, ‘
So I asked, “Well, what happened to that Bowie record?” “Oh, we tried, but it didn’t go anywhere.”’ With nothing else to promote, Wyper set the entire staff on to ‘Space Oddity’. ‘This never happened before or since,’ says Wyper, ‘it was purely because we had this three-week window with no major releases.’

  In the last week of September, ‘Space Oddity’ jumped up the charts to number twenty-five, rising steadily to peak at number five in a fourteen-week chart run.

  When David’s album was released on 4 November, he was up in Scotland for a short series of shows backed by Junior’s Eyes. By now the band were at their peak; a 20 October BBC session, with its superb version of ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’, easily surpasses their work on David’s album, and offers a tantalising glimpse of how that earlier material could have sounded, had it been worked up live first. But they were ‘odd gigs’, says guitarist Tim Renwick, ‘A couple were quite rough – on one there was a cage up front in case the audience got out of control.’

  David was nervous, slightly out of place amid the hard-bitten, hardworking band. Most of them were heavy dope smokers, especially Mick Wayne and his wife Charlotte, who were, ‘eyes on the wall, very stoned, always’. There were lighter moments – Junior’s Eyes singer Graham Kelly remembers Bowie throwing down a gauntlet to him after a few drinks in a vegetarian restaurant, after which they raced through the frozen Edinburgh Streets, Bowie on the bonnet of his car, Kelly on the bonnet of the band’s Transit.

  After the success of the single, David’s second album shuffled out in a rather half-hearted manner. By now, Calvin Lee’s relationship with Mercury was troubled, much to Ken Pitt’s glee, and Olav Wyper, who’d championed ‘Space Oddity’, was ‘completely underwhelmed’ by the album. ‘I think David had too much control of the album, and didn’t defer enough to Visconti,’ he suggests. Visconti, meanwhile, is ‘not particularly proud’ of the work, ‘I don’t think David had settled on who he was as yet.’ David, tellingly, says of this period, ‘I was looking for myself,’ which provides some explanation for his behaviour. One friend describes it as ‘weak, almost’, mentioning his reliance on people like Angie and, before her, Mary Finnigan, to deal with his disagreements with Ken Pitt or others.