Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Mick Ronson’s career had interlaced with Bowie’s over the past five or six years, through fellow Yorkshiremen like John Hutchinson, who had shared the bill with The Rats at venues across the north-east. Born and raised in Hull – once a prosperous and confident Victorian city but, by the late sixties, already gripped by a long-term industrial decline – Mick Ronson was a unique musician, cut-throat in terms of his musical ambition, but remarkably laid-back when it came to advancing his own career.

  Local musician Keith Herd witnessed one of Ronson’s first tentative shows with his band The Crestas, and bumped into the guitarist regularly in the local music shop, Cornell’s. In 1967, after Herd set up a tiny recording studio in his front room, Mick turned up with his new band, The Rats, ‘and I couldn’t believe how he’d come on’. Playing a Fender Telecaster, Ronson had mastered ‘heavy guitar – using the amplifier and volume to get incredible sustain. It was the first time I’d ever heard it done.’

  The four-minute long mini-opera that The Rats constructed, ‘The Rise and Fall of Bernie Gripplestone’, was Who-influenced, distinguished exclusively by Ronson’s howling guitar. Although there are shades of Hendrix, Townshend and Mick’s principal guitar idol, Jeff Beck, Ronson’s playing was already unique; concise, tough rhythm guitar one moment, wildly fluid lead the next, made all the more thrilling by Ronson’s talent for bending a note to scary extremes – a unique trick that, according to bandmate Trevor Bolder, he’d mastered thanks to a fingernail on his left hand that was so tough and hard it was ‘almost deformed’. Nocking the string into a groove on the nail, he could bend it almost clear across the neck of the guitar. By the end of 1968, when he picked up a Les Paul Custom from Cornell’s and plugged it into his Marshall stack, he had become Hull’s unchallenged guitar hero.

  Good-looking, with his flint-sharp face and boney nose, Mick was friendly, a typical muso: his conversation revolved around music and women; if he ever saw someone ogling his guitar he’d nod and encourage them, telling them, ‘Go on, have a go.’ Then he’d shake the new acquaintance’s hand, enthusiastically. He was open-minded musically, as keen on harmony pop like The Move as heavy rock. And like the rest of The Rats, says bassist Keith ‘Ched’ Cheeseman, ‘he was a piss-taker’. Often, the ‘piss-taking’ was directed at suggestions that The Rats change their ‘winning’ formula. And by the end of 1969, Cheeseman noticed that although Mick had been indisputably the best musician in Hull when the bassist had first joined the band, one year later younger rivals were gaining on him.

  Mick Ronson, with The Rats, had enjoyed staying in his comfort zone. With Bowie and Tony Visconti, though, he was wrenched right out of it. The process started that Saturday, which he spent huddled with the pair, hurriedly learning songs for Jeff Griffin’s ‘In Concert’ on Sunday 5 February. It was a huge coup for Bowie to headline the new series – Marc Bolan, in contrast, was a last-minute substitution for half of a show – and David’s use of a guitarist he’d met two days before was a massive risk; an early example of the inspired gambles that would come to characterise his career.

  The ‘In Concert’ show represented another Bowie first: his use of the BBC to prototype the next phase of his work. From its opening moments in front of a small audience at Regent Street’s Paris Cinema, with a gritty, solo version of Brel’s ‘Port of Amsterdam’, there is a new toughness and sense of adrenalin. Familiar songs like ‘Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed’ sound Dylan-esque and faintly worthy – until Ronson hooks his mutant fingernail under the guitar string and, for the first time in Bowie’s career, the listener is in real doubt as to where the song is heading (a feeling shared by Ronson, who gets a couple of chords wrong). Nonetheless, it’s his drawn-out, exhausting guitar work that inspires announcer John Peel to pronounce the song ‘a bit of a treat’.

  ‘The Width of a Circle’, heard here for the first time, shares the sense of danger; Ronson’s guitar lines seamlessly interlacing with Bowie’s bashed-out acoustic chords, while Visconti’s bass guitar is relentlessly fluid and inventive. There are few recordings where we get to hear a band gel, in public, for the very first time; this is one of them. Ronson’s influences are apparent – the modal melodies evoking Hendrix, the twin-note Memphis scale taken from country licks – but are instinctively incorporated into a coherent style. In the process, David Bowie’s style becomes coherent, too.

  After the concert there was muttering about missed endings, wrong chords, the fact that ‘it was a bit crap really’, says Cambridge. But the fact the performance was ‘raw as fuck’ was part of the excitement, ‘You could see even then that was a lot better. Mick lifted it.’ ‘It was incredibly exciting,’ remembers Tony Visconti, ‘because we knew Mick was going to work out – he had something we needed.’

  Rickety and sporadic as it was, Bowie’s short tour from the end of February, 1970, would be his first with a proper, consistent band since the Lower Third days. Ronson had no second thoughts about joining up, but there were fleeting suggestions of augmenting the line-up with Tim Renwick, who turned up at Haddon Hall to be checked out by David and Angie. ‘My girlfriend came with me and Angie was checking her out – I remember thinking, Blimey, this is odd.’ Angie perhaps didn’t approve, but in any case Renwick needed paying – and Ronson was happy to play for free. For days, he and David immersed themselves in practice at Haddon Hall, sitting opposite each other. John Cambridge would drop in to see how it was going. ‘It would be just the two of them in the bedroom with the guitar. I’d go in and they’d say, “Hang on John we’re just doing this.” In other words “piss off”.’

  Ronson’s arrival galvanised the Haddon Hall crew, and the languor that had overcome David since his father’s death seemed to evaporate in the run-up to the band’s debut at the Roundhouse on 22 February.

  While Bowie and Ronson practised, Angie went shopping for their clothes, assisted by Mark Pritchett. ‘Tony was working out of Oxford Street and we all met there in the morning but lunchtime and the whole afternoon was spent, Angie and I, scurrying around theatrical costumiers to dress them all up.’

  It was in this brief afternoon, spent scurrying around Charing Cross Road and Fitzrovia, that the foundation of David Bowie’s image throughout the 1970s would be laid. In the mid-sixties, he’d become a pretty convincing Mod; since that time, his attire had reverted to a vaguely post-hippie style, his hair curled in what Ken Pitt thought was tribute to Bob Dylan; with his flowery shirts and afghan coats, David could have passed for Eric Clapton in his Cream heyday of 1969 or so. In his previous incarnations, David was pretty, tasteful, or cool. It was Angie – and, later, Chelita Secunda – who would push him to be outrageous.

  With Pritchett in tow, Angie masterminded the band’s flamboyant attire during that afternoon’s shopping: a gangster outfit, with fedora, for Ronson, who was given the title Gangsterman; a leotard with an ‘H’ sewn on the chest for Visconti, the Hypeman; a cowboy outfit for John Cambridge; and a multicoloured, diaphanous concoction, with scarves attached to a lurex shirt, for David – Rainbowman.

  Ken Pitt claimed credit for naming the band, remembering that after Bowie had told him, ‘This is one big hype,’ he said, ‘Well, why not call it The Hype?’ But it seems David may have got the idea from photographer Ray Stevenson, who suggested the name only for David to respond, ‘We can’t use it – Led Zeppelin’s publishers are called SuperHype.’ According to Jeff Dexter, who introduced the show, the name only started being bandied around after the fact. ‘They’d just said the name casually – it was only after certain people caught on that it crept into the vocabulary.’

  There was no doubt that the Roundhouse show was a major event; the ‘In Concert’ performance alerted fans that Bowie was unveiling a new work in progress, and many friends from the Three Tuns turned up for the band’s support slot to Noel Redding’s short-lived band, Fat Mattress. Mark Pritchett was one of them, and actually remembers the performance being ‘a bit of a mess’. Ronson was using a 200 watt Marshall amplifier stack that
totally overpowered the other musicians. ‘People expected quite a lot,’ says Pritchett, ‘and what they got was much of Man Who Sold The World at thunderous volume. A lot of that material suited thunderous volume – and a lot of it didn’t. So it sounded a bit of a mess.’ Yet there was one thing Pritchett did notice: ‘At the centre of all this mayhem, chaos and noise David was extremely relaxed’.

  The show later would be seen as a crucial staging post on the way to glam, not least because Marc Bolan turned up and, says Visconti, watched the show in rapt attention, his chin on the stage. The band’s theatrical outfits drew ridicule, according to Visconti, but David, who had seen how Lindsay Kemp could carry off the most outrageous outfits, was buoyed up by the reaction. Just as crucially, as Mark Pritchett observed, ‘David was moving.’ His body language had entirely changed: the costumes, the artifice and the raw power of Ronson’s guitar had unlocked the carefree joy of David’s early R&B days.

  David seemed well aware he’d turned a corner. ‘You could tell he knew a band was good for him,’ says Pritchett. During the sporadic run of dates that continued through February and March he was relaxed, enjoying his trip to Hull for a show at the university on 6 March, hanging out in the refectory with a tiny group of fans and bemused students. Angie’s presence seemed to register with them as much as the band’s. ‘David and Angie had identical curly hair, similar skinny build, you know how people who look a little similar to each other can fall in love?’ remembered one student, who shared a table with them.

  For David, the failure of the single celebrating his and Angie’s infatuation was the only disappointment of an otherwise idyllic spring. Released the day they sat chatting in the refectory, ‘The Prettiest Star’ slipped into oblivion with less than 1000 copies sold. For Ken Pitt, the release of the single confirmed his opinion of Angie as a ‘predator’, and his fears that influence was irretrievably slipping away from him were confirmed in March, as the two planned their marriage.

  In later years, as she came to terms with their celebrated and rancorous split, Angie would publicly doubt that David had ever loved her; indeed, some of her accounts of their decision to marry quote him as asking, ‘Can you handle the fact that I don’t love you?’ On another occasion Angie has described how the pair realised they were in love during their separation over Christmas 1969, which Angie spent with her parents in Cyprus, eagerly awaiting letters. After a ten-day postal strike, she received a card on which were written the words, ‘We will marry, I promise, this year.’

  Today, Angie retains much of the ebullience and enthusiasm that made her so magnetic back in 1970, but the emotional damage she’s sustained since that time causes her to ascribe darker, exploitative motives to most of her ex-husband’s behaviour. At one point, she tells me, ‘I don’t know anything that David’s done that wasn’t for his own benefit.’ Again and again we return to the topic, only to find her unable to contemplate any other interpretation.

  Most of David’s own pronouncements over the years support this bleak picture. When David talked about their marriage at the time, he did so as if it were a brand. After their catastrophically nasty split, he could hardly bear to mention Angie at all. Yet those who were emotionally close to Angie and David in their early days ascribe purer motives to their relationship. Ava Cherry, who would later become David’s official girlfriend even as he stayed married to Angie – an official position akin to that of the King’s mistress in the French Court – concedes, ‘I do think he had love for her,’ before pointing out, ‘I’m giving her props she would never me.’ Ava adds, ‘She was nurturing, and he needed that,’ but more importantly, ‘he liked the way she thought.’

  Scott Richardson would later occupy a corresponding position to Ava Cherry’s, as Angie’s official lover and David’s music buddy, and he too states, ‘It was genuine, a real thing. They tried to have a new kind of marriage, an open marriage, and it was absolutely brilliant what that represented.’

  Angie and David’s relationship had been an open one from the day they met. Angie, she says, signalled that the same would apply after their marriage, when she arranged for them to spend the night before their 20 March wedding in bed with a stunning dark-haired actress they’d met via Calvin Lee. Ken Pitt had heard about the wedding from Peggy, who disapproved of Angie, but nonetheless decided to turn up uninvited. It was a tiny gathering; John Cambridge was one of just three men, along with Roger the Roadie. Mick Ronson was absent and Visconti was working. David had asked Cambridge to act as witness; but when the registrar called out, Peggy, seated a couple of rows from the front, got up to sign the register. David looked around at John, and shrugged his shoulders. The wedding reception was a drink in a nearby pub.

  The unique nature of the Bowies’ marriage was brought home to John Cambridge a couple of days later, when he went to the Speakeasy with David and Angie. They were close friends by now, and John had often heard David frolicking with other women at Haddon Hall, but was shocked to see David dancing with ‘a bloke’. ‘But they only just got married!’ John remembers thinking. Seeing him watching, Angie grabbed John’s hand and tried to pull him onto the dance floor. ‘I turned around, that wa’ant the way I was brought up. I’m only nineteen, still really naive.’ Only years later did he wonder whether shocking his young drummer, and enjoying his reaction, was part of the appeal for David. And the intriguing possibility remains that David’s enjoyment of the nineteen-year-old’s embarrassment inspired 1972’s ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’.

  The chutzpah of David’s new wife would have a transformative effect on David’s career in several crucial aspects: one of her first acts was to persuade Philips’ Olav Wyper to advance £4000 to The Hype to fund living expenses, PA system and new tyres for the van, which had arrived at Haddon Hall along with Rats roadie Roger, also known as Roger the Lodger.

  With The Hype now on their way to a semi-official status, it was time to make their studio debut, in this case with a wonderful reworking of ‘Memory of a Free Festival’, recorded on 3 April and to be issued as the US follow-up to ‘Space Oddity’. To hear each instrument warming up, and then to hear Ronson’s guitar take the song by the scruff of its neck and thrust it forward is even now a thrilling experience, in which the listener can hear Bowie’s career snapping into shape.

  The session would also mark an ending, too. There had been a last-minute postponement of the session due to a double-booking with a live show in Scarborough, arranged by Ken Pitt. Ken had sent a note to Haddon Hall confirming the live date, but the confusion crystallised David’s dissatisfaction with the man who’d overseen his career for the last three and a half years.

  Some time in March, David called Olav Wyper’s office to ask if they could meet. ‘He was clearly very depressed – at times very tearful,’ says the Philips boss. ‘He said he’s reached this impasse with Ken, and their relationship was getting in the way of where his career should be going. And he asked, What do I think, and how can I help him?’ In later years, Wyper wondered whether David’s tearfulness was calculated; if so, it had the desired effect, making him side with the vulnerable singer. As general manager of David’s record company, he had a duty to avoid a conflict of interest, but after asking David if he had a copy of his contract with Ken – which he hadn’t – he gave him the names of three firms who could advise him. The first entry on the list was a pair of people whom Wyper knew well, who had decided to go into business together just a few weeks before. Their names were Laurence Myers and Tony Defries.

  In the spring of 1970, Laurence Myers was well known around the London music industry, principally as a management and accounting expert whose clients included Mickie Most. Myers was meticulous, well connected through his role as a show-business accountant, and was in the process of establishing his own management company, to be known as Gem or GTO.

  Tony Defries had come to Myers and Wypers’ attention as a lawyer with the legal firm of Martin Beston. Wyper had many friends who happened to be photographers, including Tere
nce Donovan, who had called in Martin Beston to help with copyright issues; Tony Defries was the lawyer assigned to their case. Wyper attended the meeting where Defries pitched for their business. ‘Tony was very bullish – he had a very firm attitude, and a belief that right was with him. I was very impressed.’

  Only later did Wyper happen to meet another solicitor from Martin Beston and discover that the go-getting lawyer he had seen in action was not exactly what he seemed. ‘Tony was very clever. He described himself as a lawyer [and I] assumed he was a solicitor. And then I found out later that Tony was a solicitor’s clerk. He was a lawyer, which is defined as someone working in the field of law, but not what I assumed.’ Winning over an audience on first impression, and leaving details until later, was part of Tony Defries’ style.

  Defries and Myers’ position on the list provided by Olav Wyper meant that, fatefully, they were the first to be called. There were several meetings throughout March, and Myers remembers being impressed by David Bowie. ‘I liked him – and I knew David was a special artist.’ But over their first discussions, it turned out to be Myers’ business affairs manager, Defries, who realised the potential of the young singer hoping to discard his manager. As Myers admits, it was Tony Defries who had ‘the vision. His great ability was, far more than I did, he knew what a star David was going to be.’

  The exact degree to which Defries was convinced by David’s potential on their first meeting, in which David poured out his troubles, is hard to gauge. But David’s dilemma appealed to Defries’ problem-solving abilities. He assured David that he could extricate him from his contract with Pitt. Pitt, in the meantime, had no concrete evidence of David’s dissatisfaction, until a meeting at his office on 31 March, when David finally told him, ‘Ken, I’d like to have a go at managing myself.’ The news came as no surprise, says Pitt – ‘I’d heard of at least one other management team who’d offered David something’ – but after promising to cut down on the live dates, and giving David a cheque for £200, it seemed the matter was settled, at least as far as Pitt was concerned. He continued to oversee arrangements, like the fast-approaching sessions for the next Mercury album.