by Pat Gilbert
Bowie’s first album—the one he’d later try to forget—David Bowie, released on June 1, 1966.
In the summer of 1967, David Bowie had stiff competition, not least from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the very same day. But while Sgt. Pepper became the biggest-selling rock album of the 1960s, Bowie’s first long-player stalled outside the UK Top 100 and remained a footnote in history until he became a star in the early 1970s. But, typically, by the time it appeared, Bowie had already moved on. The single “Love You Till Tuesday,” another chart miss, was to be his last release for almost two years. Next came an extraordinary period that, though it bore little musical fruit, would nourish Bowie’s artist impulses for many years to come.
A short press bio issued around the time of Bowie’s Deram debut.
CHAPTER 2
1968–1970
All the Madmen
In the spring of 1967, Bowie’s career took an intriguing new turn when Ralph Horton quit the music industry for a job in the motor industry, leaving Ken Pitt as Bowie’s sole manager. For the next three years, it would be the urbane, gentlemanly Pitt who would steer the singer’s career and help unlock the boundless creativity whirling around inside him. During this period, Bowie would experiment with mime, acting, scriptwriting, and even Buddhism, interests that would divert him from his music career but prove crucial to germinating the singular collision of rock, theater, costume, and mysticism that propelled him to superstardom in the early 1970s.
When Pitt took over, not long before the Deram release of David Bowie, he thought it appropriate to travel to South London to meet Bowie’s father and reassure him that, despite his son’s poor record sales, his future lay in the arts. “We met at the local station,” Pitt told Chris Welch. “He was a nice man, although I don’t think he really understood what David was trying to do. He was nervous about the idea of David being in show business.” A few weeks later, both to spare his parents from the noise of his nocturnal music sessions and to make space for his half-brother, Terry, who’d recently returned to Plaistow Grove after a serious mental episode, Bowie took up Pitt’s offer of a spare room in his flat on Manchester Street in Central London. Ever supportive, and perhaps also glad of some peace and quiet, his father helped Bowie move his belongings in his tiny Fiat 500.
Somebody up there likes me: Bowie in Paddington, London, in 1968.
Bowie outside the imposing entrance to Haddon Hall in Beckenham, South London, where he lived from October 1970 until spring 1973.
Ken Pitt, who took over as Bowie’s manager in 1967 and produced his first two albums.
Pitt had long recognized that his twenty-year-old charge had an uncommon and far-reaching talent that needed nurturing and that, after nine flop singles, the time was right to explore new artistic avenues. His attempts to further the singer’s career sometimes went unappreciated, however. “We were invited to a party attended by people who could give David broadcasts and TV work,” Pitt recalled in MOJO. “I was chatting them up, which was obviously a big bore for him. Then a producer said, ‘Is that your wonderful David Bowie?’ I turned round and saw him with some bird sprawled all over him. I thought they were going to copulate in front of the British music industry. I left without him.”
Bowie spent his free days—of which there were plenty in 1967, after David Bowie had slipped out largely unnoticed—devouring his host’s impressive library of books and classical records. Holst’s The Planets suite became a particular favorite, as did Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and a book on Egon Schiele, the controversial German painter who committed incest with his sister and died at twenty-eight. Pitt’s interest in art rubbed off on Bowie, who began to read about the subject ravenously. A curious synergy between the two men was already becoming apparent, as evidenced around Easter of 1967 when Bowie became the first musician ever to cover a Velvet Underground track, at a time when Lou Reed’s legendary group was virtually unknown in its native Manhattan, let alone in London.
At the end of 1966, around the time the Buzz split up, Pitt had flown to New York on business and took the opportunity to drop in at Andy Warhol’s Factory. He was given a signed test pressing of the then-unreleased The Velvet Underground & Nico album, which he brought back to London. “Not being [Ken’s] particular cup of tea, he gave it to me to see what I made of them,” Bowie informed the author in 2002. “Everything I both felt and didn’t know about rock music was opened to me on one unreleased disc.… This music was savagely indifferent to my feelings. It didn’t care if I liked it or not.” His mind blown, a few weeks later the singer recruited a band called the Riot Squad to record a cover version of “Waiting for the Man” and a new song of his own, “Little Toy Soldier,” which liberally borrowed from “Venus in Furs.” Nothing came of the project, but it was an interesting indication of how Pitt’s and Bowie’s enthusiasms interacted to make the singer even hipper than he’d been before.
Following the David Bowie album, Pitt brokered a new publishing deal with Essex Music, leading to a final session that year that produced the wonderful “Let Me Sleep Beside You.” For Decca, the timeless, conventional rocker was too little too late, and it rejected it as a single (though Bowie would later tell a BBC interviewer it was never released because “my mother thought the lyrics were dirty”). Bowie’s music career was, for the time being, put on ice; instead, he enjoyed his first taste of another area of performance that he seemed born to try: acting.
Pitt had always encouraged Bowie’s wider interests in the arts, and one of Bowie’s earliest excursions outside music was a radio play called The Champion Flower Grower. Though this was rejected by the BBC, Pitt saw Bowie’s future in TV and theater. “David already wanted to be an actor and was capable of so many different things,” Pitt told Chris Welch. “He wanted to write musicals. It was all down to evolution, and David was evolving constantly, sometimes from day to day. It was difficult to keep up with his train of thought.” Rather than regard Bowie’s Deram album as a failure, Pitt saw it as a useful CV of his talents. He bought fifty copies and distributed them to contacts in film, TV, and theater. One of the recipients was the mime artist Lindsay Kemp, with whom Bowie enrolled for dance lessons at his studio in Covent Garden. Kemp was yet to find the celebrity his appearance at 1968’s Edinburgh Festival would bring, but the talented mime artist was already making waves on London’s fringe theater scene.
Lindsay Kemp, Bowie’s dance teacher and mentor in the late ’60s, photographed backstage during a run of his show Flowers at the Bush Theatre, London, in 1974.
Bowie and Kemp hit it off instantly, bonding over their love for musicals, the circus, Expressionist art, and Berlin cabarets. Bowie waxed lyrical about his newfound interest in Buddhism, then fashionable in hippie London, while the dancer turned his new friend onto Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, and performance art. “I taught him how to project, to enchant and how to hypnotise the public when you step on to a stage,” said Kemp, ten years Bowie’s senior, to writer Martin Aston in 2004. “David absorbed everything, like a sponge.” The pair began collaborating on a play titled Pierrot in Turquoise, for which Bowie provided music and took the role of Cloud. (Turquoise, the Buddhist symbol for eternity, reflected Bowie’s influence on the project.) The work premiered at Oxford on December 28, 1967, before enjoying a two-week run in London in March 1968. During this time, Bowie had an affair with the openly gay Kemp, which ended in tears when Kemp discovered Bowie was also sleeping with the beautiful Russian set designer Natasha Korniloff.
With his then-girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale, in their performance group at Turquoise, London, 1968.
Adding to the emotional tangle, Bowie had earlier in the year fallen for Hermione Farthingale, a striking red-headed dancer with whom, on Kemp’s recommendation, he created a minuet for a BBC television play based on Alexander Pushkin’s The Shot. After Pierrot in Turquoise ended its run, Bowie moved out of Pitt’s home and took the top fla
t of a house off Old Brompton Road to live with Farthingale. Bowie spent a quiet summer enjoying his girlfriend’s company, UFO-spotting on Hampstead with various acid-head friends, listening to Jacques Brel records (he’d discovered him via Scott Walker’s albums), and sporadically performing his own mime routines at venues including the Middle Earth club and Roundhouse. He also appeared—fleetingly—as an extra in the film The Virgin Soldiers, for which he was required to have a military-style short-back-and-sides haircut.
Photographed at home around the time of his first screen role in The Virgin Soldiers.
Bowie’s first forays into theater and acting had been less than stellar, and it hadn’t escaped his notice either that while he was pursuing a life outside pop music, many of his direct contemporaries—including the Who and the Kinks, both of whom also released debut singles in 1964—had become internationally famous. That autumn, he was stung when another of his peers, Marc Bolan, broke into the Top 30, with his duo Tyrannosaurus Rex’s single “One Inch Rock.” Bolan’s success was the most painful for Bowie. The peculiar yin and yang of the two suburban Londoners’ relationship can be sensed from an incident from around that time, when Bowie invited Bolan and his girlfriend June to spend the day at Farthingale’s parents’ house in rural Edenbridge, Kent. Without Bowie’s knowledge, Bolan brought along his percussionist Steve Took and photographer Ray Stevenson and took over the Farthingales’ verdant country garden for a photo shoot. Bowie felt he’d been used and stayed inside the house, while Bolan and Took posed flamboyantly outside in the shrubbery. “They never even spoke to David or thanked Hermione for the use of her parents’ garden,” observed Tony Visconti, the Brooklyn-raised producer who oversaw Bolan’s records, in an interview with Bolan biographer Mark Paytress. Bowie, understandably, didn’t speak to Bolan for several months afterward.
Bowie wrote few, if any, songs of note in 1968, but that winter, a haunting new tune could be heard wafting down from his and Hermione’s top-floor flat. Written after Bowie had seen Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, released that year, “Space Oddity” told the story of Major Tom, an astronaut who after blasting into the sky ends up drifting alone in space, never to return to Earth. Both endearingly childlike and devilishly clever, musically and lyrically, it eclipsed everything Bowie had previously written. At its heart were profound questions about the space race: What did it all amount to? What did winning it mean?
Bowie gives a mime performance at the Middle Earth in London, May 19, 1968.
In January 1969, Ken Pitt began assembling material for a short demonstration film, Love You Till Tuesday, to promote Bowie’s talent as a multifaceted, all-singing, all-dancing, all-miming artist. Several segments featured David, Hermione, and the Buzz’s John “Hutch” Hutchinson performing new songs and a mime routine as “Feathers,” while another saw Bowie, dressed in white tights and a codpiece, acting out a piece he’d devised called The Mask—a prescient comment on the price that fame exacts, ending with the protagonist’s death on stage. Promo clips were also created for the two-year-old chart miss “Love You Till Tuesday” and unreleased “Let Me Sleep Beside You.” Pitt asked the film’s director, Malcolm Thomson, for another song to complete the show reel; he suggested “Space Oddity,” which he’d heard the singer strumming. “David sat on the edge of my chaise longue and sang me ‘Space Oddity,’” Pitt recalled to MOJO of the song’s audition. “It was incredible.” A sequence with Bowie dressed as a spaceman was duly shot to accompany an early demo version of the song.
A promotional photograph taken during the period between Bowie’s first and second self-titled albums.
Viewed today, the Love You Till Tuesday film is a fascinating period piece, oozing 1960s grooviness while rather gauchely marketing its twenty-two-year-old subject as an all-around entertainer. The month it was shot, Bowie appeared in a TV commercial for Lyons Maid’s Luv ice cream, seemingly just the kind of job the film aimed to bag him. Bowie remembered it as “a happy time,” but not long after Love You Till Tuesday was finished, Farthingale dropped the bombshell that she’d been offered a part in the movie version of the Song of Norway musical and was leaving for location shooting overseas. When she fell in love with an actor on set, it spelled the end of their relationship.
Bowie later admitted to being “devastated” by the breakup, so much so that he underwent a radical image change and had his hair permed. But he soon moved on. A few weeks later, while visiting an old friend in Beckenham, near his parents’ home in Bromley, one of the neighbors heard him playing the guitar. She introduced herself as Mary Finnigan, a writer for the counterculture newspaper the International Times, and offered Bowie some cannabis oil. They began an affair and Bowie moved into her flat, which she shared with her two small children. The previous December, Bowie and Farthingale had staged two Arts Lab events in Central London featuring mime, poetry, Buddhist chants, and music, and now Bowie proposed to Finnigan that they revive the idea in suburban Beckenham. In May 1969, Finnigan booked the back room of the mock-Tudor pub, the Three Tuns, in the town center for a series of weekly Sunday evening gatherings. “Come for the fun of it and for instant identification with the vibrations,” ran the publicity blurb, with Bowie declaring that the Arts Lab should “take over from the youth club concept as a social service.” The hippie happening, where Bowie would perform on his twelve-string acoustic guitar, proved a winner and became a regular weekly gig. It did little to raise Bowie’s profile outside South London, of course, but it did mean he was playing music again. Show reel in hand, meanwhile, Ken Pitt was busy trying to secure a new record deal on the strength of “Space Oddity.” He found a useful ally in Calvin Lee, a colorful music industry character who wore a glittering circle on his forehead—as Bowie would in 1973. Through Lee’s contacts at Mercury, Pitt was able to negotiate a contract with its UK partner Philips with a view to release “Space Oddity” to coincide with NASA’s proposed moon landing in July 1969.
A still of Bowie performing “Space Oddity” in the half-hour promotional film Love You Till Tuesday, shot in 1969 but not released in full until 1984.
Bowie (left) with Hermione Farthingale (center) and John Hutchinson (right) in the dance/folk group Feathers, 1968.
Tony Visconti, now a good friend of Bowie’s, was tasked with recording the song. Dismissing it as a novelty record (“a cheap shot”), he passed the job on to Gus Dudgeon. Assembling a crack team of session men, including bassist Herbie Flowers and keyboard player Rick Wakeman, then still at music college, Dudgeon nailed the session, complete with Bowie’s futuristic parts played on a new toy electronic instrument, the Stylophone. The single was released on July 11 and used during the BBC’s coverage of the moon landing nine days later, which, like most of Britain, Bowie stayed up all night to watch. Just in case the launch ended in tragedy, BBC Radio wouldn’t play the record until the Apollo 11 astronauts had safely returned to Earth, which slowed the single’s ascent on the charts. In fact, it wouldn’t be a hit until October, when it reached No. 5 in the UK. In the United States, jittery executives at Mercury demanded an edit that fudged Major Tom’s unpleasant fate, then got cold feet and refused to promote the release.
Bowie gives a reading at Beckenham Arts Lab during the spring of 1969, a few months before the release of his era-defining “Space Oddity” single.
While “Space Oddity” floated up the UK charts, Bowie’s life changed immeasurably due to two dramatic events: first, the death of his father from pneumonia on August 5 and, second, his deepening relationship with Angie Barnett, the American girlfriend of Bowie’s music industry champion Calvin Lee, with whom Bowie had enjoyed a brief liaison. He would later quip that he and Angie met “because we were both fucking the same bloke.” Both Haywood Jones’s passing and Barnett’s arrival cast shadows over the free festival Bowie staged on Saturday, August 16, at Beckenham Recreation Ground, just a two-minute walk from the Three Tuns pub. Several thousand souls turned up to Bowie’s answer to Woodstock—taking place in Ups
tate New York that same weekend—to watch performances by Bowie and folk artists the Strawbs, Keith Christmas, and Bridget St. John, and soak up the hippie vibes.
The original Phillips release of “Space Oddity,” backed with “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud.”
“In the middle of the little green was a beautiful pagoda like bandstand, where we all sat and played,” recalled Bridget St. John to writer Lois Wilson in 2016. “Then surrounding it were stalls selling jewellery and ceramics.… there were Tarot readings, astrologers, the Tibetan shop. Angie was making hamburgers in a wheelbarrow, the Brian Moore Puppet Theatre performed, there were lots of kids running around. It was a really beautiful day.”
Bowie’s second LP was initially released in the UK as David Bowie and in the US as Man of Words/Man of Music, but has been known since 1972 by the title of its most famous song, “Space Oddity.”
But Bowie’s mood darkened as his own headlining appearance approached. His father’s funeral had taken place just a few days before, and an Arts Lab associate remembers the singer being “detached. He wanted to go home.” When Bowie spotted Mary Finnigan and Lee totaling up the day’s takings, he blasted them as “materialistic wankers.” The dark cloud quickly passed. Within days, he’d commemorated the event in a new song, “Memory of a Free Festival,” in which he reminisced, “It was ragged and naïve / it was heaven.” The song was among the last recorded for a new album he’d been working on at Trident Studios in Soho, with Visconti in charge. The producer recalled the music taking shape haphazardly; Bowie sat on a stool strumming his twelve-string while the musicians around him—essentially the same crew that cut “Space Oddity”—fleshed out the arrangements. One new recruit was Keith Christmas, one of Bowie’s favorites from the Arts Lab and its attendant festival.