Starman

by Paul Trynka

  When it came to selling the song, it got camper still, when David recruited Freddie Buretti as a ‘lead singer’, posing with him and Bob Grace for photos as the band Arnold Corns, for a single released on the tiny B&C soul label. In an interview for Sounds, David touted Freddie, or Rudi, as ‘the new Mick Jagger’, despite the fact his voice was barely audible on the record. But that wasn’t the point; the music, rushed as the recording was, signalled a new simplicity which was being sold with a new flamboyance. The serious, rather worthy David Bowie who’d extolled the virtues of the Arts Lab was being consigned to history.

  ‘Moonage Daydream’, together with ‘Hang onto Yourself’, written over the same period, were all the more impressive for being kept in reserve. Instead, it was a third song, written just a few weeks before, which signalled the beginning of the most crucial winning streak of David’s life.

  The new song’s origins echoed, almost spookily, two other songs that transformed their composers’ careers. Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ arrived in a dream, marking the point at which he would assume joint leadership of The Beatles. So did Keith Richards’ ‘Satisfaction’, which he woke up humming one night in a Florida motel, and which would become the Stones’ first US number one. The song which was lodged in David Bowie’s mind when he woke one morning early in January 1971 would stay just two places outside the Top 10. But it was just as pivotal.

  Bob Grace was the first person to hear the news, when the phone rang at the start of a busy day. ‘I woke up at 4 o’clock,’ David told him. ‘Had this song going in my head and I had to get out of bed, work it out on the piano and get it out of my head so I could go back to sleep.’

  ‘What’s it called?’ asked Grace.

  ‘“Oh! You Pretty Things”.’

  David insisted he needed to demo the song straight away, and Grace worked out that they could piggyback on a session booked for a radio interview at the Radio Luxembourg studios. There was no time to call in Tim Broadbent or Henry Spinetti, so David recorded the song solo, the only accompaniment the jangling of the bracelets he was wearing. Grace had become close friends with Bowie by now, drawn into his web. After pronouncing the song ‘stunning’, he felt compelled to recruit more supporters to the Bowie cause. The best contender he could think of was Mickie Most, still the UK’s best-known independent producer, who he knew would be at that year’s MIDEM festival in Cannes, just a few days away.

  With the rendezvous organised, Grace played the acetate for Mickie on a tiny Dansette player in a booth at the festival. He was nervous – and would been even more nervous had he known that Most had turned down David Bowie twice during the preceding years. David had not breathed a word about these earlier failures.

  Publishers’ folklore was that if Most listened to more than ten seconds of a song you had a chance. Grace paced around nervously as the famously opinionated producer listened to the entire song, waited until the fade-out, then announced: ‘Smash!’ He told Grace the song would be perfect to launch the solo career of Peter Noone, from Herman’s Hermits – uncool as they were, the Hermits were one of Most’s biggest acts, and this was a huge coup. The fact that the song had arrived, almost fully formed, from David’s unconscious demonstrated how, after five years of writing songs, he had bypassed the critical part of his consciousness. Before his writing had been considered; now it was inspired.

  Plenty of other songs demoed at Radio Luxembourg showed how the short US trip had provided David with a store of images to draw on. A theme was emerging. David was a pro, a man who knew how to work the system, but had an instinctive sympathy for those who couldn’t, those practitioners of what writer Irwin Chusid terms Outsider Music; erratic people like Syd Barrett, Iggy Pop, Moondog or Stardust Cowboy Norman Carl Odam. David would follow their star-crossed careers, and their fate infuses songs like the gorgeous ‘Lady Stardust’, demoed on 10 March, along with an early version of ‘Moonage Daydream’, and the wonderfully hokey ‘Right On Mother’, also destined for Peter Noone.

  At the same time that David was laying the bed-rock of his future music, he was focusing just as diligently on reinventing his image, and, more specifically, consigning the past to oblivion. Bill Harry, childhood friend of John Lennon and founder of Mersey Beat magazine, was one of London’s busiest PRs; Bob Grace called him in, explaining that David’s career had stalled, and they were trying to generate some momentum. Harry and Bowie spent days closeted together, talking about science fiction – a mutual obsession – music and photography. Harry knew many rock ‘n’ rollers, but none of them had as sophisticated a sense of visuals: Bowie brought in mood-boards of photos and glossy magazine cuttings, photos of movie stars and Egyptian pharaohs to illustrate photographic ideas, and together they plotted to airbrush David’s past.

  Harry helped push The Man Who Sold the World, which finally made it to the shelves in Britain that April, but Bowie’s eyes were fixed firmly beyond that release. Armed with a stack of glossy photos taken by the Chrysalis photographer Brian Ward, Bowie and Harry did the rounds of Fleet Street and the music press. While Bill sat in the office, chatting, David would go to the filing cabinet, pull out the old shots of the curly-headed ‘Space Oddity’ Bowie and replace them with the new session, banishing the one-shot wonder to oblivion. ‘He was planning ahead. He didn’t seem part of the normal culture at all, sitting around in a pub or club and getting boozed up; he was collecting together images for the future,’ says Harry.

  Their campaign reaped immediate results: a spread in the Daily Mirror, plus stories in the Daily Express and the music press. The stories paved the way for Peter Noone’s single of ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ – with David contributing a strident, bouncing piano – which hit the Top 40 on 22 May, peaking at number twelve. The lumpy, pedestrian arrangement failed to hamper the song’s gorgeously inventive melody, which was as fleet of foot as White Album-era McCartney; Peter Noone went into print praising David Bowie as the finest songwriter since Lennon and McCartney. Suddenly, the one-hit wonder was the new kid on the block.

  Bob Grace, the man who had helped engineer this career turnaround, was overjoyed: this was what he’d joined Chrysalis for, to take an artist ‘from demo to limo’, as the slang had it. When Terry Ellis, his boss, called him in to his office, with the song still at its chart peak, he walked in to the room expecting a promotion and a pay rise. Instead, Ellis was red-faced with rage. ‘This is a disaster!’ Ellis yelled. ‘You’ve ruined the image of my company. The Chrysalis Music label on a pop record! How dare you? Furthermore I have a manager outside, Tony Defries, who’s absolutely furious.’

  Defries walked in, and the conversation turned into a heated argument, with Defries accusing Grace of trying to poach his artist, while Grace countered, ‘If you did more for him, he’d stop hassling me so much!’ Bill Harry had a similar encounter, accused of interfering, and when Defries announced, ‘From now on, all interviews must be conducted from my office,’ Harry quit as David’s PR.

  Today, Bill Harry insists that Defries could never measure up to other managers he worked with, like Led Zeppelin’s famously aggressive Peter Grant. ‘I couldn’t work with Defries. I found him quite unpleasant, and inflexible.’ But Harry and Bob Grace’s accusations that Defries had left Bowie to fend for himself would not be repeated, for in the forthcoming weeks, Tony Defries would reinvent himself as completely as his client.

  David Bowie had fought his way back into contention, more or less unaided. But Defries was the man who’d build an army behind him.

  Tony Defries was already an expert in reinvention and repackaging. Born in 1943, reputedly near a secret airfield in north London, and just five years older than David, he claimed to have had a similar, ‘fractured’ childhood and viewed his life in a similar, almost mythical sense. His grandparents had fled from Russia, and the young Defries had, he would tell listeners, been put into care for a year when he was just a few months old; a devastating experience, during which he clinically died at one point from an asthma att
ack. Like David, he was conscious of growing up amid wartime ruins, in his own case as part of a Jewish family living on its wits in Shepherd’s Bush, dodging gangs of Irish, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, whilst building a business selling factory-reject china and other oddments. He and his brother Nicholas soon discovered that an average brace of duelling pistols could be transformed into a desirable rarity once packaged in a convincingly antiqued wooden box; they were selling a fantasy, and in much the same way, Defries, who left school at fourteen, would act as a lawyer, and then a manager.

  Tony’s unique life was carved out in a British society in a state of flux, with the aristocracy trying to pawn its possessions, and European families trying to reclaim their own inheritance, looted by the Nazis. In this chaos, empires could be rebuilt, and Defries planned to be at the head of one. Even his many detractors concede he was shrewd; he was also fearless, and would go straight to the top of whatever company he was dealing with to cut a deal. Just a few years older than many of his clients, he was nonetheless ‘a big daddy figure’, as Dana Gillespie puts it, who’d look after them and shield them from all earthly worries. Modelling himself on Colonel Parker, he told David that he would make his protegé famous as a ‘one-name star’ like Elvis or Dylan: a monolithically famous performer, known simply as ‘Bowie’.

  The nature of Defries’ and Bowie’s professional relationship would often be misunderstood, not least by David, despite the fact it was legally documented. Defries did not work for David: David worked for him. In David’s ten-year contract as a singer and songwriter, signed on 31 March, 1972, with Defries’ newly established MainMan empire, the artist is defined as an ‘Employee’. The schedule to the contract also includes the details of David’s separate management deal with Tony Defries, signed the previous August. The term of the contract, it states in bold black and white, is ‘timeless’.

  Defries explains his remoteness in the spring of 1971 by the fact he was simply waiting for David’s Mercury contract to expire. A more pressing reason was doubtless his involvement with Stevie Wonder. By May, and the ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ breakthrough, Defries’ Detroit mission had stalled and Wonder had agreed to renew his deal with Motown. David Bowie was therefore back to being his best bet. But if Defries had waited until the last minute to bet on Bowie, when the moment came, he would bet big. And Defries was betting with much more than money (which came, in any case, from Laurence Myers). He bet his professional life. From the moment he fully engaged himself in Bowie’s career, there was never any doubt that the fates of these two men were intertwined.

  Anya Wilson was the radio plugger who’d helped drive Marc Bolan’s ‘Ride a White Swan’ to number two, and was hired by Defries to repeat her feat for Bowie. ‘I had more than one knot in my stomach working for Tony, believe me,’ says Wilson. ‘He was very focused on what he wanted. I got fired several times, but he would rehire me a couple of weeks later and pay me back pay. But when he was locked in it was absolute. There was never any doubt. It was very infectious.’

  Defries was ready to bide his time until the end of June, when Mercury could exercise their option on David, but from May onwards he worked closely, plotting with Bowie and Bob Grace. It was the publisher, with Anya Wilson, who secured another slot on the BBC’s ‘In Concert’ series, which would be a key signpost of what was to come.

  The growing sense of event was heightened with the news that Angie had given birth to Duncan Zowie Haywood Bowie at Bromley Hospital on 30 May, after a drawn-out labour. David was there for the birth, which further sealed Angie’s position as queen to Bowie’s king. But Angie, who freely admits, ‘I was not the maternal type,’ would later pinpoint the aftermath of the birth as a dark portent for their relationship. Zowie – named after the Greek word for ‘life’ – was a chunky eight and a half pounds, and Angie suffered a cracked pelvis, blood loss, exhaustion and what sounds like classic post-natal depression. A few weeks after the birth, Dana Gillespie persuaded Angie to join her for a trip to her parents’ summer villa in Italy. Angie recruited the redoubt able Suzi Frost, henceforth an integral part of the household, to look after Zowie during her absence, and remembers David hardly raising an eyebrow at her departure. Years later, though, she’d speculate that David, for all his sexual non-conformity, retained some distinctly old-school family values and regarded the trip as an unforgivable desertion.

  Yet for those around them, the birth and surrounding events seemed largely idyllic, with Angie continuing to provide a protective ‘cocoon’ around David in which he could create. The impression of a domestic idyll was cemented with David’s song ‘Kooks’, which asked their baby, ‘Will you stay in our Lovers’ story?’ Written after David had spent the day listening to Neil Young’s After the Goldrush, its jiggling piano feel was based on Young’s ‘Till the Morning Comes’, with its central lyric quoting the Young title ‘I Believe in You’. Then, as now, it’s a delightful song: deft, light-hearted, totally without artifice.

  The song made its public debut a couple of days after it was written, at the BBC ‘In Concert’, on 3 June, 1971. Like most of the key events in David’s life, the show was pulled together almost randomly at the last moment. Late in May, David booked bassist Herbie Flowers and guitarist Tim Renwick for the appearance. Renwick had been an occasional visitor to Haddon Hall; David, says Junior’s Eyes singer Graham Kelly, was fascinated by the guitarist – indeed, Kelly maintains that David’s Lauren Bacall persona derived from the Marlene Dietrich impression that Renwick often performed as a party piece. Renwick appears on at least one long-lost song from that summer – ‘Hole in the Ground’, with Herbie on bass and George Underwood, who had not completely given up on music, on vocals – but his role as David’s sideman evaporated at the last moment, when David phoned Mick Ronson. The two had kept in touch over recent months – David took a small crew of Haddon Hall regulars down to Ronno’s London showcase at Lower Temple – and Mick seized the chance, for the band’s undistinguished single on Vertigo had sunk without trace. Ronson brought all his musicians down the A1; they arrived on the 5th and had one afternoon to rehearse. For Ronson, Woodmansey and bassist Trevor Bolder – who had joined Ronno only recently – the one afternoon was an impromptu, scary, electrifying start to a journey that would stay that way.

  Their nervousness was useful, forcing them to come up with ideas, and most of the off-the-cuff riffs they pulled together would survive on David’s upcoming album. David exuded happiness and positivity: overjoyed both with the arrival of Zowie and the thrill of creation. There was no overlooking his nervous energy, but he projected the conviction that this was meant to be; this was his man-child quality, that incredible sense of focus and belief that everything was simple.

  The show united Haddon Hall regulars like Mark Pritchett, George Underwood and David’s schoolmate Geoff MacCormack, with Ronson’s band, whose singer Benny Marshall guested on a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Almost Grown’. The Hull musicians were ‘nervous as hell’, yet much of the party atmosphere that is audible on the show’s recording is genuine. At times, the vibe was surprisingly intimate – as in the rendition of ‘Kooks’, dedicated to the new Bowie child, and jokey interactions with John Peel – yet from the moment David walked into the dressing room wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and out of it wearing his Mr Fish dress, exuding glamour, there was no doubt that this was an accomplished coup de théâtre. At the end, David tearfully apologised to producer Jeff Griffin that he’d completely messed up the vocal on ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’. ‘It hadn’t even registered,’ says Griffin. Then once the show was over, David forgot this blip, and was consumed by his next project.

  In future years, people would refer to Bowie’s mindset during that summer as ‘positive visualisation’. He announced the title of his next album, Hunky Dory, on the BBC at a time when the album was still a pipe-dream, and he was still tied to a record company he hated. The title came from a catchphrase of Peter Shoot, larger-than-life ex-RAF owner of one of Bob Grace’s favourite pubs,
The Bear in Esher: ‘It will either be a disaster, or everything will be hunky dory.’

  David loved the phrase. This time around, everything would be hunky dory. He talked about producing other acts as if he already had a star’s magic touch. And he laid out the future for the band who had been with him for only a few days, telling them about the two albums they would make in forthcoming months, with a new record company, the venues they would play at the start of the coming onslaught, and where they would end up. ‘He had it all in his head,’ says bassist Trevor Bolder. ‘And then he cited each part of where he was going to be.’

  Tony Defries was the other master of positive visualisation. He too would lay out the future in front of them as if it were a map. A key part of his strategy was to cut record companies out of the creative loop; Defries had the means to do that, for he would fund David’s next album independently before dispensing with Mercury and before approaching RCA – giving David, as opposed to the record company, control of his own music. This was an unprecedented commitment; as his future lieutenant, Tony Zanetta, points out, ‘Tony threw the book out the window. He loved to take huge gambles. Although of course it was Laurence’s money that he was gambling with.’