Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Today, David Bowie is unique in its creator’s catalogue thanks to its endearing lack of artifice. Yet even at the time it was obvious it lacked the acuity and intensity of folk rockers like Tim Hardin or Simon and Garfunkel. While the Observer’s Tony Palmer famously rhapsodised over David’s ‘quite devastatingly beautiful’ looks, the reviews mostly commented on the thoughtful lyrics and suggested that Bowie was a follower, rather than a pioneer. Even Bowie’s own pronouncements to writers like Music Now’s Kate Simpson betrayed his awareness that he lacked a convincing, coherent worldview, shown by his praise for celebrated right-wing politician Enoch Powell for at least standing up for a cause – ‘whether it’s good or bad is not the point’.

  More worryingly, Simpson’s feature mentions her friends’ perception that David was a ‘one-hit wonder’, a dread phrase that would crop up with monotonous regularity over the next few years. Obviously intelligent, he nonetheless lacked the talent of, say, John Lennon for encapsulating an agenda in a song, or a sentence. Six years after he’d formed The King Bees, David had scored his first hit single, yet the underwhelming impact of his album seemed to rob him of all momentum. To many, he simply seemed all over the place.

  Yet, for a few key people, David’s live shows – notably his showcase at the South Bank’s Purcell Room on 20 November – still demonstrated not lack of focus, but bravery. BBC producer Jeff Griffin was about to stake his reputation on an innovative series of ‘In Concert’ broadcasts the following spring, opening with Led Zeppelin. When he saw Bowie at the Purcell Room, Griffin was ‘blown away. I’d read about him working with Lindsay Kemp, but it wasn’t until I saw him there that I realised there was far more to him than the average rock star … he was doing brave things, singing Jacques Brel songs. He was one of those rare performers who just had that extra dimension to him, something that’s hard to describe.’

  Fascinated by the fact that Bowie had moved on so dextrously from his ‘twee, but fun’ Deram debut, Griffin pencilled in a Bowie show for the spring. By which time, David would have moved on again.

  7

  All the Madmen

  It was all a bit of a mess. But in the centre of all this chaos, mayhem and noise, David was extremely relaxed.

  Mark Pritchett

  It was their Graceland: the ostentatious, rambling and slightly decaying headquarters where David and Angela Bowie enjoyed marital bliss, interior decoration and sexual frolics. Innocent teenage American girls would one day walk in and fondly imagine themselves as imprisoned in some re-imagined Victorian melodrama; cynical journalists would enter its imposing hallway and be overawed by the Bowie mystique. It was a location where the realignment of the musical and fashion values of an entire decade would be hatched.

  Angie had spotted Haddon Hall, at 240 Southend Road in Beckenham, back in the summer of 1969. Beckenham, a relatively green and leafy suburb celebrated mainly as the home of Noddy author Enid Blyton, was just down the road from Bromley. Angie and David agreed to move into Flat 7 early in September and established themselves there at the end of the month. The building was the epitome of crumbling magnificence, an opulent High-Victorian family house, which even at the time struck resident John Cambridge as reminiscent of Elvis’s grandiose Memphis home.

  The building, which boasted a magnificent entrance hall, was divided into flats; David and Angie’s flat was on the ground floor, but they also had the use of the staircase, which led the visitors up to a small half-landing, dominated by a magnificent Gothic stained-glass window; from there the staircase divided, ascending to a gallery at first-floor level which gave on to a set of sealed-up doorways, later commandeered as sleeping space. Tony Visconti and girlfriend Liz moved into Haddon Hall in December, taking the back bedroom on the ground floor, and sharing a huge living room, complete with lavish open fireplace, with David and Angie; soon Tony had persuaded Mr Hoys, the owner of the house, to let him build a rehearsal space in the basement.

  Royalties from the ‘Space Oddity’ single – which by January had sold 138,656 copies in the UK – trickled in slowly, but the single’s success pushed up the fee for David’s live bookings up to a magnificent £100 or more. Flush for the first time in his life, David took to spending money like a duck to water. After passing his driving test and returning his father’s Fiat to Peggy, he bought a Rover 100, complete with luxurious leather seats and walnut dashboard, while he and Angie became familiar figures at the antique shops on Old Kent and Tower Bridge Roads, acquiring Art Deco lamps, William Morris screens and mahogany chests of drawers.

  The establishment of their own palace at Haddon Hall marked the crowning of Angie as queen to Bowie’s king. It was an impressively fast rise to power, but even for her most recent acquaintances, it was no surprise. Born in Cyprus in 1950 to an American mining engineer father and a mother of Polish extraction, educated at a British boarding school in Montreux, Switzerland, Mary Angela Barnett was self-sufficient, energetic and irresistibly loud. She revelled in telling listeners of her scandalous expulsion from Connecticut College for Women for a lesbian affair, and to most Brits – in the era before affordable transatlantic travel – she seemed ravishingly cosmopolitan. Brought up in sophisticated, international surroundings, she was as at home scrubbing Haddon Hall’s wooden floorboards to erase the smell of cat pee as she was at distinguishing a genuine Art Nouveau light fitting from a reproduction.

  From spring 1970 onwards, as John Cambridge puts it, ‘You met Angie before you met David.’ Their union would always be as public as it was personal, like the celebrity liaisons brokered by Hollywood PRs anxious to maximise their column inches. Cambridge was one of those people who found Angie irritating – ‘too domineering and shouting’ – and saw at first hand how Angie would force David into decisions he wanted to evade, notably firing Ken Pitt.

  The first public statement of their love affair was ‘The Prettiest Star’, the only new song David wrote over the winter of 1969. (Absence made his heart grow fonder, for Angie disappeared to see her parents in November, partly to flee from Peggy’s phone calls accusing her of ‘living in sin’.) Languid and uncharacteristically simple, it would be almost unique in Bowie’s canon: a conventional love song, its lyrics speculating on their future fame as a professional couple, ‘you and I will rise up all the way’.

  As an anthem to Angie, it was appropriate that ‘The Prettiest Star’ also marked the passing of Ken Pitt’s influence. Ken Pitt dropped in to Trident for the session – an event that was becoming comparatively rare. It was around 1 a.m. on the morning on 8 January – David’s twenty-third birthday – and as Pitt wandered around the control room he exchanged only a few words with Bowie and Tony Visconti, who were chatting to Godfrey McLean and Delisle Harper, drummer and bassist from Gass, a funky Santana-ish band that Visconti recruited for the recording. Photographer David Bebbington watched Pitt tell no one in particular that he’d just dropped in to see another of his clients, Billy Eckstine, at the Talk of The Town club. Bebbington started to feel embarrassed at how Ken was being cold-shouldered. Pitt proudly mentioned how he’d been working with Eckstine for twenty years, and Bebbington briefly admired Pitt’s loyalty before wondering what Eckstine – once a cutting-edge bandleader, now a mannered MOR crooner – had in common with Bowie. When Pitt left the studio a few minutes later, no one else seemed to register he’d gone.

  A second visitor was, initially at least, more welcome. It was at Tony Visconti’s suggestion that Marc Bolan dropped in to play lead guitar on ‘The Prettiest Star’; and while mutual friends at the time remember Marc being brotherly to David, on this, their only official joint recording, their rivalry soured the atmosphere. ‘He came in and it was daggers,’ remembers Visconti. ‘Everyone’s having a good time, then Marc comes in and the atmosphere chilled up.’

  Visconti had spent a good few days vibing up Marc, who was enthusiastic about showing off his newly acquired electric guitar skills and had carefully prepared his guitar melody. David, too, was upbeat, complimenting Ma
rc effusively, when June Bolan suddenly broke into a tantrum, bitching, ‘The only good thing about this record is Marc’s guitar.’ Marc hurriedly packed up his Fender Strat, and the pair left without another word.

  The squabble highlighted the tension that would always exist in the relationship between David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Marc had always enjoyed talking up David, but having predicted ‘Space Oddity’ would be a hit, Marc seemed irritated to be proven right. This was a clear illustration of how the teenage ‘arrogance’ that Les Conn remembers derived from different causes. David was generally happy when his friends did well; Marc wasn’t. What was confidence in Bowie equated to bravado in Bolan – a distinction for which June Bolan had an explanation, which she shared with Ray Stevenson. ‘She had this theory, it was because Marc had a small dick and David had a monster. A lot of their personalities come from this: David can charm the girl and know that through to the conclusion of this encounter he’s not going to disappoint. Marc couldn’t.’

  David made a good show of seeming unconcerned by Marc’s petulance – he was cheerful on the drive back to Beckenham in his Rover in the small hours of the morning, buying a huge Chinese takeaway on the way and spreading it over the dashboard. But though he might appear calm in the face of such troubles, his music often suffered from the confused mess of personalities surrounding him during this period; he relied, more than most, on others. That night’s show at the Speakeasy typified the confusion. Tim Renwick – now David’s preferred guitarist ahead of Mick Wayne – was booked at the last minute, but found David’s passivity and lack of direction irritating. ‘It wasn’t like, “Right, here we go.” It was more like “What’s next?” and then nothing.’ John Cambridge wasn’t even told there was a show; he’d turned up for a drink at the ‘Speak’, along with Junior’s Eyes’ ‘Roger the roadie’, only to be asked at the last moment, ‘Do you have your drums?’ Fortunately, he kept them in the boot of his Mini Minor. The last-minute request marked his debut as Bowie’s official drummer.

  Soon after the Speakeasy show, Cambridge also moved into Haddon Hall, and came to enjoy the eccentric domesticity. In later years, Haddon Hall would become celebrated for its sexual excesses. Yet the atmosphere was more Bloomsbury Set than Haight Ashbury: Angie made an excellent hostess, greeting visitors effusively, proffering tea or biscuits. At other times there were schoolboy japes – David and John Cambridge chasing each other round with water-pistols or exchanging deadpan Yorkshire banter. Cambridge’s humour was celebrated, sometimes witty and so dry it would take the listener several seconds to register. (‘Maybe I overdid it,’ he reflects today, ‘Angie didn’t always appreciate all me jokes.’)

  The deliciously fin de siècle ambience at Haddon Hall became even more obvious when Angie found a housekeeper, in the Edwardian shape of Donna Pritchett, who lived across the road and whose son, Mark, a pupil at Dulwich College, had been drawn into the Arts Lab set. Donna ruled the kitchen, cooking up a Sunday roast in an emergency, or dispensing endless cups of tea. She would generally brook no nonsense, chiding David if he burnt the furniture with a cigarette; David and Angie were adept at charming her, sending her greetings cards or little notes written on the back of a ten-shilling note – ‘David was cute like that,’ observes Mark.

  In fact, David proved remarkably chipper over the period, far more resilient to the poor sales of the Philips album than he had been to the fate of his Deram debut – the influx of money from the ‘Space Oddity’ single helped, of course. But there was a more traumatic source of disquiet in his personal life, one that he voiced publicly in the final days of the Arts Lab. There was a constant flow of new volunteers through the organisation, and during one of their ‘getting to know you’ meetings, David introduced himself to those sitting around him with the words, ‘My name is David. And I have a brother in Cane Hill.’

  Most of those present were unaware David had a brother, but nearly everyone was aware of Cane Hill. Built in 1882, the asylum was a huge, purpose-built Gothic complex intended to provide a more sympathetic, modern environment for the ‘incurably insane’, with extensive grounds and outdoor pavilions from which the inmates could enjoy views of London. Nevertheless, the building, on a commanding hill in Coulsdon, ten miles south-east of Beckenham, was regarded as a terrifying place, famous locally as the insane asylum which had housed Charlie Chaplin’s mother, who had been confined to a padded cell and hosed down with freezing water, as a primitive antecedent of electro-shock therapy. The establishment was more enlightened in the 1960s, but there was a justifiable fear for inmates and their relatives that once they’d walked through its imposing gates, they would never return. As Hannah Chaplin told her son when he visited her, ‘Don’t lose your way – they might keep you here.’

  After his National Service in the Royal Air Force and move into Plaistow Grove, Terry had enjoyed a brief period of apparent domestic harmony, which was nonetheless often overshadowed by the effects of his illness. It was during this period that David had taken Terry to see Cream in Bromley, and witnessed the effects of what was later diagnosed as schizophrenia. For a time after this, while he stayed with mother and step-father, Terry’s condition was stable, but in the wake of Haywood’s death, he deteriorated. Peggy – who was in the process of moving to a flat on Albermarle Road in Beckenham – was unable to cope with her son, precipitating his move to Cane Hill. Peggy, according to friends, found the prospect of visiting Terry at the hospital too traumatic to endure – instead, her sister Pat would attend with her husband, Tony Antoniou.

  Around 1969 and 1970 – the first time David had a home of his own – David was also able to provide shelter for his half-brother, and at various times Terry would be seen around Haddon Hall, on release from Cane Hill. He met many of David’s closest friends during this period, and was friendly, sometimes chatty – especially about football – and sometimes confused. But in the long term, David proved as unable to cope with Terry’s illness as his mother.

  Those who saw David and Terry together were never in doubt that, as Mark Pritchett remembers, ‘Terry adored his brother … and he was a lovely chap.’ David obviously loved and respected Terry, citing him again and again as the source of many of his key musical and literary interests. But the principal emotion that Terry inspired in his half-brother was, says Pritchett, ‘guilt’.

  In the opinion of David’s aunt Pat, who publicly chastised David for his lack of attention to Terry in the 1980s, that guilt was justified: in her view, David simply turned his back on his half-brother. In fairness, there was probably little he could have done. Ray Stevenson, who spent a lot of time around Haddon Hall as Terry’s mental health deteriorated, points out, ‘I’ve known some schizophrenics and there is not much you can do to help – they are how they are and it’s horrible. You have to just not think about it. So I’d never slag him off for it.’

  Bowie’s fear of the madness in his family would become a common theme – it’s the stuff of classical drama, and has been a prism through which many have chosen to analyse his career, despite the lack of evidence to support it. Throughout this period, David was notably calm, controlled: he couldn’t have seemed more sane. Yet, as anyone who has been emotionally close to someone suffering from schizophrenia or paranoia will know, ‘madness’ is contagious; the descriptions of a schizophrenic’s visions can be more affecting, seem more convincing, than genuine, banal experiences. When he wrote songs, David’s empathised with his half-brother; in everyday life, David felt helpless. Terry’s plight was always an issue that David dealt with in song, rather than in reality, with the result that, says Mark Pritchett, ‘David built up a lot of guilt about him. And I think the darker songs are actually tributes to him.’

  With ‘The Prettiest Star’ as yet unreleased, few performances to occupy him, grief for his dad, troubles with Ken, and the traumas of Terry and Peggy, it was hardly surprising that Bowie spent much of January 1970 cocooned at Haddon Hall. To make matters worse, his band, Junior’s Eyes, was falling apart. Mick W
ayne’s increasing ingestion of drugs caused most of those around him to agree with singer Graham Kelly, who says, ‘I loved the guy – but working with him was a nightmare.’ By the end of January, every member of the band knew they would split; the only question, as singer Kelly remembers, was ‘Which way would people jump – and who would go with Bowie?’ With the BBC ‘In Concert’ session scheduled for 5 February, David needed to move quickly.

  Tim Renwick was the obvious front-runner for guitarist. But John Cambridge, the first official recruit to David’s outfit, had another prospect in mind, a ferociously talented guitarist who’d played in his previous band, The Rats: ‘I’d been pestering [David and Tony] to death, so finally I go down to Hull to find Mick Ronson. I knew where he worked, I arrive and he’s creosoting this training ground, I’m telling him I’ve got in with this band in London, David Bowie, it’s really good, and it needs a guitarist. And he’s going … “Oh I don’t know, I got in with a band in Sweden and was ripped off and I’m not about to do that again.” So I’m thinking, I just pestered them two to let me come down here – and now I’ve got to pester him to go up there!’

  Cambridge’s persuasion worked. Ronson turned up for the band’s show at the Marquee on 3 February; after the show the guitarist commented enthusiastically on the performance, as was his way. ‘Even if it was shite, Mick would still say it was good,’ Cambridge explains. The drummer introduced Bowie to Ronson at the venue, but David was distracted; only when they all returned to Haddon Hall and Ronson picked up an acoustic and started to play did Bowie register him. At that moment, as Tony Visconti describes it, ‘Everything was starting to click into place.’