by Paul Trynka
Marking his ascent from being a curiosity from Beckenham to a fully fledged rock star, David and Angie had left Haddon Hall in the summer, moving briefly to Maida Vale before installing themselves in the customary rock hangout of Chelsea, at 89, Oakley Street, not far from Jagger’s Cheyne Walk home. Freddie Buretti and Daniella Parmar occupied the basement of the four-storey, flat-fronted 1850s house; Ava Cherry, after a month at Oakley Street – which was long enough to outstay Angie’s welcome – moved into Daska House, an apartment building one hundred yards up the King’s Road. Various Beckenham artists reworked the house as a model of rock-star chic: stairs painted alternately matt and gloss black, a hallway lit by car headlamps, a sunken double bed, air-brushed murals in most of the rooms – a sun rise, based on the Sun Pat peanut butter logo for David, a tropical beach scene for Zowie’s room on the top floor, alongside the office. The living room was in white shagpile, dominated by one of George Underwood’s paintings and a larger Dali-style work. The sunken central area was surrounded by scatter cushions, with a spherical TV, a state-of-the-art video machine and Polaroids of ‘exotic activities’, remembers airbrush artist Mick Gillah.
Towards the end of 1973, this sleek, busy household seemed an epitome of domestic bliss, a glossier version of the Haddon Hall ethos. David was once more enthused by his work, occasionally treating visitors to sights of lyrics he’d cut and pasted together from his more bizarre fan letters. Generally busy with her own projects or shopping trips, Angie still operated as a domestic goddess, treating guests to an impeccably turned-out soufflé or quiche. Zowie was now an out-going two-year-old: dressed in brightly coloured dungarees, with long blond hair, he’d scamper around the house singing songs he’d made up. Only granny was missing from this idyllic scene – although visitors to her flat on Albermarle Street remember Peggy being devoted to Zowie, she was seldom, if ever, seen at Oakley Street, and never featured in David’s conversation. Instead, Tony Defries was David’s only father figure.
Defries’ absence in America was the only disquieting element in David’s domestic life. Musicians, producers, girlfriends could be discarded; Defries’ inspirational visions, his insights, were irreplaceable. ‘It could be anything: business, what people to see, girlfriends, Tony would orchestrate it all,’ says Ava Cherry.
At the summit of his career – released from the live treadmill, finally ranked alongside his teenage idols – the close of 1973 should have been a time for David to savour his own success and freedom. Finally, he was given time to relax; fatefully, he was also given time to doubt. And once he’d opened himself up to them, those doubts intensified remarkably quickly. The impact on the psyche of a man who saw himself almost as Defries’ son was predictable. ‘Devastation is the word,’ says Cherry, his closest companion over this period. ‘They were great days, till Tony messed David’s head up – really messed him up.’
12
The Changing isn’t Free
Cocaine is a cruel drug. It makes people behave like absolute bastards.
Keith Christmas
As 1973 drew to a close, with David Bowie in London and Tony Defries in New York, both men basked in their achievements. They had finally beaten the system. But neither of them could wait to join it.
Defries, the man who had derided old-school, bloated record company management, was building an over-staffed empire that mirrored the system he despised. And David, who had constructed a manifesto that positioned him as a new species of human, couldn’t wait to become chums with the previous generation of rock stars. Each of them spotted the contradictions in the other’s position, but not their own. ‘They were a really solid team up to that point,’ says Tony Zanetta, who respected – worshipped, even – both men. ‘But once everything stopped and they could enjoy the fruits of success, the cracks started to appear.’
Those cracks would fail to damage Defries’ serene sense of self-worth; David Bowie, however, could hardly bear to contemplate them, burying his worries so deep that the inevitable crisis would be utterly devastating.
In the meantime, David cast around for role models. Iggy and Lou no longer sufficed; instead he increased his focus on their apparent antithesis, Mick Jagger. Mick was always a rival, rather than an idol. Determined to topple Jagger from his pedestal, David was also fascinated by him to the point of obsession. He and Ava enjoyed several dinners with Mick and Bianca, chatting volubly, with the pair even noodling on a tune together one night, which became the Astronettes song ‘Having a Good Time’. But neither one could quite discard their elegant, sophisticated personas. ‘It was polite, intellectual – but there was a line they didn’t cross,’ says Cherry. In later years, Angie Bowie described how she’d caught Bowie and Mick in bed together, which is ludicrous to anyone who saw the two together. Each man was guarded, and even twenty years later would be almost excessively conscious of his relative standing; the notion that one would be completely open with the other, let alone to be ‘a bottom’ was unthinkable. To Ava, the two personalities seemed similar; bright, competitive, with a similar dry or camp humour, but in reality they were very different. David was always in the grip of some obsession, or enthusiasm. Mick wasn’t. ‘He was never under the spell of anything,’ says Maggie Abbott, later the movie agent for both Mick and David. ‘He was always totally under control. He was a typical Leo, much more disciplined than David. He would never be taken in by anything.’
Although David acted otherwise, he was intimidated by his rival, who was an old hand at managing pretenders to his throne. Jagger had led the way for so many of David’s obsessions, from recruiting the coolest African-American girlfriends, like Marsha Hunt, to writing lyrics in a Burroughsian cut-up style, as Mick had done for Exile on Main Street, back in 1971. Yet at a Rolling Stones show in Newcastle that spring, it finally dawned on Bowie that he was in a position to top the Stones singer. Standing in the wings, he was telling confidant Scott Richardson about the time he’d offered to carry Brian Jones’ guitar and been told to piss off. Suddenly, the pair noticed that Jagger was glaring at them from centre stage. Glancing behind, they realised hundreds of fans were ignoring the band, craning their necks to see the carrot-haired presence at the side of the stage.
David and Scott accompanied Jagger and Bianca to a casino that evening, where Scott noticed that Jagger was fascinated by his rival. Thereafter Jagger would stay in regular touch, keeping tabs on David, who relished the accolade – but also found his competitive instincts reawoken. Until now, he had measured himself against Marc Bolan, who had never made an impact in the States, and whose appeal in Britain would wane that autumn, prompting Marc’s final split with Tony Visconti. Jagger would be an altogether more challenging friend and rival.
As was his habit, David approached the task of measuring up to Jagger by moving directly on to his turf, liberally appropriating from him. This helped inspire his choice of Olympic as his working studio, along with Keith Harwood, at that time the Stones’ favourite engineer. While the lyrical core of David’s next album would be a reworking of his 1984 concept, its chaotic, dystopian edge intensified by his use of Burroughs’ cut-up technique, the musical blueprint was unashamedly based on The Rolling Stones.
The core of the album was completed within a few frenzied days at Olympic, according to bassist Herbie Flowers and guitarist Alan Parker, seasoned session men who together made up the UK soul band, Blue Mink. The pair were well used to having their melodic ideas become the basis of someone else’s song – Serge Gainsbourg’s superb Melody Nelson album, for instance, on which they took almost total responsibility for the music, uncredited. ‘That was part of what we did,’ says Parker, ‘so on high-profile sessions we would simply double the fee.’
For the album that would became Diamond Dogs, the principal songs were well organised, with five or six backing tracks laid down in roughly three or four days. Parker and Flowers both remember the development of what would become the album’s best-known song, ‘Rebel Rebel’, for David introduced it quite specif
ically. ‘I want it to sound like the Stones,’ he told them, before showing them the song, borrowing Parker’s black Les Paul. Bowie’s riff was uptempo, Stonesy, but it needed honing; Parker picked the main notes out clearly, adding a particular chord shape, rather than the original single note, just before the chord change, and a distinctive ‘beeeoonng’ in the last line of the chorus, just as David sings the line ‘I love you so’.
‘David played the riff to Alan, Alan made sure it was good enough to record, and then [Alan] played it,’ says Herbie Flowers, who remembers the electric guitar, bass and drums laying down the backing track simultaneously – which accounted for the loose feel, with the song speeding up as Aynsley Dunbar launches into his stomping, on-beat drum pattern, which consciously evokes the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’.
A gloriously simple song which marked his farewell to the Ziggy era, ‘Rebel Rebel’ would become one of Bowie’s best-known singles. But Parker was shocked when, a few years later, he realised that, beyond writing the riff, Bowie was credited in the album notes with playing the guitar on the finished version. It would be nigh-on impossible for the most skilled guitarist to replace Parker’s work, because of the changing tempo and the sonic spill between the studio microphones. ‘I can tell my own playing, and my own sound,’ says Parker, ‘and I know it’s me.’
The emphasis on David’s role as guitarist seemed calculated to show Mick Ronson – whose solo career was flourishing, briefly – how well David could manage without him. ‘It’s silly … I don’t know why it would matter so much,’ says Parker, who’d chatted with both Ronson and Bowie at previous sessions. The confusion over the credits was all the more pointless, considering the superb job David did of playing guitar on the remaining songs, notably the title track – which with its cowbell and loose backing vocals echoed ‘Honky Tonk Women’ – and the jagged, New Wave-ish guitar on ‘Candidate’.
Look more closely, though, and the pettiness was more easily explained, for in the closing months of 1973, David’s world was falling in on him. At the beginning of the sessions, he was relatively optimistic, fired up by the challenge of learning the electric guitar, and enjoying the camaraderie of the studio, dropping in on Mott guitarist Mick Ralph’s new band, Bad Company, who were mixing at Olympic. But that camaraderie was splintered when Bowie was barred from the studio after an argument; by the end of the sessions there was precious little good will remaining.
David’s musical isolation, his dependence on session men – yes-men, really – had its upside, bringing a new intensity to his work. Yet outside the studio, his isolation was corrosive, worsened by the growing chaos and back-biting within MainMan. After Tony Defries’ departure for New York, MainMan’s cashflow problems took a dramatic turn for the worse. One of the company’s recent recruits, Corinne Schwab, did a heroic job of controlling the company’s UK finances, but even she failed to talk the Château D’Hérouville out of banning all MainMan’s acts in a dispute over unpaid bills. In January 1974, Olympic followed suit. Meanwhile, tales filtered back of the profligacy of MainMan New York, where staff had their own credit cards and had limos on call. ‘One by one, people were telling us what was happening,’ says Ava Cherry. ‘Eventually the truth of the matter was the company was spending money like water, while David couldn’t get any ready cash.’
As the suspicion that Tony Defries, the father figure who controlled so much of his life, was presiding over a financial meltdown grew, David found the perfect psychological crutch, one that had contributed to the air of glamour and decadence that surrounded the Rolling Stones: cocaine.
It’s fitting that cocaine would reach its height as the last vestiges of the ‘we’ decade were destroyed and the ‘me’ decade took over. Considered at the time as a safe, non-addictive substance – ‘We thought it helped us be smarter and more creative,’ says MainMan’s Tony Zanetta – cocaine would ravage the psyche of a generation of musicians. New Stones guitarist Ron Wood, and Iggy, would be just two of its victims; Iggy would later be sent to a mental institution as a result. Guitarist Keith Christmas, who’d been part of the optimistic, co-operative Beckenham scene, saw the drug’s effects on David and many others, and shudders as he recalls them. ‘It’s a cruel drug. It makes people behave like complete bastards. Because it takes away a lot of the fearful emotional need we have not to upset other people – it allows you to feel you can upset whoever the fuck you please. I found sometimes at a party, people would be having a good time, then someone would mention coke and the whole party would change completely. “Get some coke in, get some lines in,” would be all people could talk about. The compulsive quality of it is horrifying.’
Although a compulsive consumer of coffee and cigarettes, David had been almost virtuous in his avoidance of other drugs. ‘It was so peculiar,’ says Tony Zanetta, ‘he didn’t smoke pot, he’d simply drink a couple of glasses of white wine. It was so fast – cocaine was definitely something he incorporated into what a rock star should be.’
Ava Cherry remembers David’s ‘occasional toot’ as overlapping with the apparent financial crisis. ‘He was in a dark place … saying these people have taken all my money. And at the first stage [cocaine] would be a crutch: “It calms me down.”’ Angie, too, dates David’s obsession with cocaine as starting from these weeks. ‘It’s what they did to him, my boy,’ she laments in a rare outbreak of sympathy, also blaming the drug for the breakdown of their marriage.
David’s mental state would also have an obvious effect on his music. Although some of Diamond Dogs’ songs were languid and melodic – ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate’ – there was an obsessive quality about the recording, with jagged guitars and saxophones layered ominously on each other. The lyrical imagery, too, was dark, its stories of the Diamond Dogs drawn from Haywood Jones’ stories of Dickensian London, when orphan kids crowded the rooftops of the London rookeries. The resulting intensity marked a distinct sonic and spiritual departure from the optimism of his three albums with The Spiders. This new territory was fertile, and marked a progression in David’s work, but there was a sacrifice too; in the obsessive regard to sound, texture, an almost physical heaviness, the deftness of Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust – with their swooping melodies and restlessly mobile chord sequences – had gone.
The break with the past was crystallised when Trevor Bolder, who’d been working with Mick Ronson on the guitarist’s solo album and tour, answered the phone late one night.
‘Oi, Trev!’ his ex-singer greeted him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m doing nowt,’ Bolder responded.
‘Do you want to come and play on a song?’
Bolder agreed, and turned up at Barnes to find Bowie, Mike Garson and drummer Tony Newman working on a slow acoustic number. It was an uncomfortable experience, sitting in the studio with Bowie but no Spiders. The quartet ran through the song several times before running tape. ‘But it was a nothing song,’ says Bolder, ‘and it obviously got dumped later.’ The take complete, Bolder packed away his bass guitar, while Bowie sat with his back to him.
‘I’m off now Dave, I’ll see you later on,’ said Bolder. Bowie didn’t say a word. Bolder repeated himself. ‘I’m going, then. See you! Bye.’ Again, Bowie ignored him. The ex-Spider walked out of the studio, in silence, taking a last look at Bowie’s back, silhouetted against the control-room window. It was the last time they would share a studio.
During the same period, Bowie’s teenage friend Wayne Bardell bumped into him in Tramp’s nightclub. Overjoyed to see his friend, whom he’d last talked to during the first Ziggy tour, he walked up to him.
‘Hi, how are you?’
‘Hi. Who are you?’ was David’s response.
‘That hurt,’ says Bardell, who had sat in on the recording of ‘Pity the Fool’, and seen David regularly over the last nine years. ‘I was taking cocaine too … but it didn’t stop me knowing people. This was cold. Calculated.’
The freezing out of those who’d known him from his days as a struggli
ng musician was conventional behaviour for the 1970s – Marc Bolan exhibited a nastier version of the trait, again bolstered by cocaine use. David wasn’t nasty; he would simply cut people off, coldly. With those still in favour, he was considerate and thoughtful: after hearing from Tony Visconti that the home studio he was building was short of furniture, he sent around a Conran Shop van packed with office chairs, plus a dining suite and crockery – later they’d mix the bulk of the Diamond Dogs tracks there.
There had always been a child-like element to David’s persona – that clear-eyed earnestness was an intrinsic part of his charm. Yet that childishness was not so charming once it was distorted by the flattery of minor MainMan staff, the constant attentions of cooks or maids, and the other corrosive effects of celebrity. As Ava Cherry remembers, ‘Children think the whole world revolves round them. And that’s the way David was encouraged to think, by everyone.’ Certain friends would learn to manage David’s moods; notably Ron Wood, whom David knew from his Marquee days. David renewed his friendship with the guitarist once the Diamond Dogs sessions moved to Hilversum, in the Netherlands, where the Stones were also working. The two bonded over a mutual love of Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore, memorising and replicating their dialogues. ‘Ronny was very good at making you feel that you were having fun,’ says Ava Cherry, ‘and I always felt good when Ronny was coming over. Because David wasn’t angry then – he’d always be laughing.’
David built up a deeper, more enduring relationship over that same period. Corinne ‘Coco’ Schwab had been hired by Hugh Attwooll in the summer of 1973. MainMan’s UK office manager thought her well educated, intelligent and capable. He soon discovered she was ‘smarter than me, that’s for sure. I hired her and within a month I was gone – and she had my job.’ By the autumn of 1973, Corinne was the only person keeping the MainMan UK office afloat, for by then the financial situation was ‘intolerable’ says Tony Zanetta: ‘She was abandoned in the English office, Defries refused to pay almost any bills, David was spending wildly. She certainly earned her position.’