by Wendy Leigh
“Much later on,” David recalled, “when I was producing Lou Reed, we decided we needed a sax solo on the end of ‘Walk on the Wild Side’; I got the agent to book Ronnie Ross.”
After Ronnie flawlessly completed his solo in one take, David, who rarely forgets anyone who has treated him well in the past, smiled and said, “Thanks, Ron. Should I come over to your house on Saturday morning?”
“I don’t fucking believe it!” Ronnie Ross exclaimed when he discovered that David Bowie had once been David Jones, his talented pupil, the twelve-year-old with so much love for the sax, and so much ambition.
From the first, John Jones, the former nightclub owner, who had once been married to Hilda, the Viennese Nightingale, was fascinated by show business, and passed his passion for greasepaint on to his son, David, as if by osmosis.
“Uncle John enjoyed all the celebrities and . . . that touch of glamour,” David’s cousin Kristina observed.
As soon as David was old enough, John Jones gave him an autograph book and did all he could to help him fill it with the signatures of stars. And as Dr. Barnardo’s press officer in charge of recruiting celebrities to help raise funds for the charity and also to interact with the children in it, he also was able to afford David an early glimpse of stars and stardom. When David was still a child, his father took him to see entertainer Tommy Steele onstage and took him backstage to see Tommy afterward. Born Tommy Hicks, like David, south of the Thames, Tommy Steele would become somewhat of an inspiration for David, and the blueprint for a facet of his initial show business image: the cheeky, chappy Cockney singer, part Tony Newley, part Lionel Bart, essentially a slightly disreputable character of the ilk of the Artful Dodger, of Oliver Twist fame.
The outing to see Tommy Steele was one of many that John Jones arranged for David. “Uncle John wanted David to be a star,” David’s cousin Kristina noted.
“He thought his son was absolutely marvelous. He always said he was going to do something great and talked about him all the time,” said John’s secretary, Winifred Bunting.
In short, instead of having a classic show business mother, a Mama Rose, exhorting him to “sing out,” David was blessed with having a show business father, one who would, through his teens, guide him, help him, and teach him the ways of self-promotion and image making.
As David dreamed of Little Richard and America, he dreamed from the perspective of postwar Britain, where he grew up. America became his Mecca, seemingly as far away from Bromley as Earth was from the moon. For although it may seem hard to believe today, Britain in the late fifties and on the cusp of the sixties still resembled a war zone. Food wasn’t particularly plentiful, and steak was a rare treat in a country where food rationing only ended in 1954, so as a ration-book baby, David would have been fed dried eggs and other ersatz produce.
When it came to music, artists like Ernest Lough, Danny Kaye, and Petula Clark dominated the radio waves. Rock music wasn’t played at all on the BBC Light Programme, and apart from the American Forces Network, only Radio Luxembourg aired rock music on Sunday nights at 11 P.M., when Pete Murray spun the top twenty records. It wasn’t until the pirate station Radio Caroline was launched in March 1964 that rock really exploded in Britain.
By then, David, characteristically, was ahead of the game, having seen Little Richard perform onstage in person. Moreover, he was also well aware of the band opening for Little Richard, the Rolling Stones, and its lead singer, one Mick Jagger, who had an instant impact on him.
“I’ll never forget this,” David recalled. “Some bloke in the audience looked at Jagger and said, ‘Get your hair cut!’ And Mick said, ‘What—and look like you?’ It was so funny.”
As David fell about in his seat, laughing at Mick’s bon mot, he couldn’t know that he had come face-to-face with the man who was destined to become his friend and his rival, and, now and again in certain arenas, including his choice of lovers, his doppelgänger. Only four years apart in age, and coming from the middle class, not the working class, as they so often projected themselves, David and Mick actually grew up less than ten miles apart—Mick in Dartford, Kent, and David in Bromley, Kent, and both of them had fathers of Yorkshire descent.
Away from his show business ambitions, David grew up in much the same way as many an English schoolboy of his time. At ten, he enrolled in the Wolf Cubs (the American equivalent of Cub Scouts) signing in with the 18th Bromley Cubs at St. Mary’s Church, where he was to meet his lifelong friend George Underwood, a good-looking local boy, the son of a greengrocer, who also nurtured ambitions of becoming a singer. Tall, cool, and stylish, with his hair arranged in a hot and happening Elvis style, George had charm and self-confidence, and, his classmates agreed, was tipped to the top of any career he chose to follow.
With George and their fellow Wolf Cubs, David spent one vacation at a summer camp by the seaside in Bognor Regis, Sussex, and another with his parents and George staying in a caravan in Great Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast. He also went on vacation to a family holiday resort called Pontins, in Camber Sands, where his next-door neighbor was the then well-known British comedian Arthur Haynes.
“I used to go over and try and get his autograph. I went over three mornings running and he told me to fuck off every day,” David recalled in a conversation with Alexander McQueen, published in Dazed and Confused. “That was the first time I met a celebrity and I was so let down. I felt if that’s what it’s all about . . . they’re just real people.”
It was an early lesson he would never forget, and when he became famous, he would always endeavor to stay true to it and remain real.
At eleven, David took the 11-plus exam, which British children then took in the last year of primary education, and the result of which governed their admission to various types of secondary school, and won entrance to Bromley Technical High School. An above-average student, he still counted music as his main interest.
Meanwhile, John Jones continued to encourage David to raise his head above the parapet, and, young as he was, to make his mark on the world. When the thirteen-year-old David developed a passion for American football games, which he monitored religiously on the short-wave radio purchased for him by his father, John encouraged him to write to the U.S. Navy’s London headquarters, detailing his passion for football and asking if they could send him some magazines about the sport.
David’s letter, as masterminded by his father, elicited not only American football magazines but the gift of a helmet, a set of shoulder pads, and a football. Whereupon John immediately wrote a press release and sent it to a local newspaper, which duly published the story about young David Jones and his fascinating preoccupation with American football.
Fortunately for David, one of his other primary interests, art, was fueled by the head of Bromley Technical High School’s art department, Owen Frampton, whose son, Peter Frampton, would find fame as a guitar player and go on the road with David on his Glass Spider tour, and also play on his Never Let Me Down record.
“David was quite unpredictable,” Owen Frampton remembered. “He was completely misunderstood by most of my teaching colleagues, but in those days, cults were unfashionable and David, by the age of fourteen, was already a cult figure.
“I was thoroughly used to very individualistic pupils and was rarely surprised by anything that occurred. Even when David varied the color of his hair or cropped it short, or plucked his eyebrows, I accepted his actions as a means of projecting his personality, and of that he had plenty!”
By the age of thirteen, David was engaging, handsome, and charming, and girls were already flocking to him like homing pigeons. On a school trip to Spain, such was his sex appeal that afterward, in a school magazine article, he was dubbed “Don Jones, the lover, last seen pursued by thirteen senoritas.”
Aware of his power over girls, even in his early teens, David manifested a streak of ruthlessness whenever a girl took his fancy, riding roughshod over any competition. When he double-dated, he thought nothing o
f jettisoning the particular girl he was with in favor of the girl who was with the other boy in the foursome, whereupon that girl immediately went off with him, lamblike, leaving the girl he was supposed to be dating feeling rejected, lost, and alone.
However, his propensity for assuming that any girl was fair game for him, no matter who else had already laid claim to her, led to one of the most seminal events in his life. In the spring of 1961, when David was just fourteen years old, a girl named Carol would inadvertently be the architect of the first tragedy of his life—one that would ultimately become the cornerstone of his image, and in many ways would lend him his unique trademark aura of dreamy otherworldliness.
His classmate and best friend George Underwood had fixed his amorous attentions on Carol, then still at school, and arranged a date with her. David, who had designs on Carol himself, told a massive lie to George, declaring that Carol wasn’t interested in George and therefore wouldn’t be going on the date he had set up with her.
When George learned the truth, outraged, he took a swing at David and caught him in the eye. David stumbled and fell down. At first, George assumed that he was kidding, as the punch hadn’t been hard. But by some malevolent quirk of fate, his punch had caught David’s left eye at an odd angle and scratched the eyeball, causing the muscle that contracts the iris to become paralyzed.
The end result was that, even to this day, David’s left pupil remains permanently dilated, giving that eye the appearance of being a different color from his right eye. It also left him with damaged depth perception, so that when he drove, cars didn’t come toward him but just appeared to get bigger.
His unmatched eyes also lent his gaze a hypnotic quality, and although it took him some time to adjust to the fact that his eyes were no longer identical, and he thought that he looked “weird,” he admitted, “I quite enjoyed that as a badge of honor.”
THREE
SELLING HIMSELF TO THE WORLD
Although George Underwood’s punch had damaged his vision irrevocably, David knew that his own nefarious plotting had provoked the attack, and that fact, coupled with his good nature, caused him to forgive George, and their friendship continued, undiminished. By the time he was fourteen, George, who was handsome and talented, had already sung with a local band, the Kon-rads, who played pop covers. A year later, in June 1962, David became the band’s saxophonist, calling himself Dave Jay, and also provided some backing vocals, while George was lead vocalist.
Soon David was playing gigs with the band, sometimes as Davie Jones, other times as David Jay. His first public performance with the Kon-rads took place at his school’s summer fete. He was nervous but the show went without a hitch, as the band performed covers of Little Richard’s “Lucille,” Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away,” and more. Although David was the youngest member of the Kon-rads, his creativity was already aflame, and he was constantly suggesting new songs and new outfits for the band, as he pushed to be allowed to write songs for them.
After leaving school in July 1963, on August 29, David made his first professional studio recording, singing backup on the Kon-rads’ “I Never Dreamed,” a landmark event in his young life. An assistant to Eric Easton, a manager of the Rolling Stones, had seen the band onstage and invited them to audition for the Decca Records label, who then invited them to make a studio recording of the song. Decca’s reaction to it, however, was negative.
So David, never one to cling to the wreckage of a sinking ship, moved forward on his own, and with George Underwood formed the rhythm and blues band the King Bees, and set about trying to get financing for them. In April 1964, in an enterprising move, which more than likely was orchestrated by his father, David decided to make an appeal to one of Britain’s richest men, washing machine tycoon John Bloom, and ask him to invest in him and the King Bees.
“His father probably helped him concoct the letter,” John Bloom says today. “In it, he wrote, ‘Brian Epstein’s got the Beatles, you should have us. If you can sell my group the way you sell washing machines, you’ll be on to a winner.’ ”
David’s chutzpah impressed Bloom, who, as it happened, had met the Beatles, liked music, and said to himself, “This is just another young kid, but then what was Ringo?”
“So I thought I’d give David a chance, and called my friend Leslie Conn, who ran Doris Day’s music publishing company and was also a talent scout for the Dick James Organization,” John Bloom said.
One of the few music industry figures instrumental in David’s early career who wasn’t gay, Leslie Conn, who also managed a young singer from Stamford Hill named Marc Feld (later Marc Bolan), invited David to audition at his Marble Arch, London, apartment. Upon hearing David perform, Conn decided that the teen had potential and signed David and the King Bees on the spot.
“He was as broke as any of the kids in those days, but he walked around like a star and was prepared to work for success,” Leslie Conn said, years later.
Unfortunately for David and the King Bees, the first gig that Leslie booked for them was singing at John Bloom’s wedding anniversary party.
As John remembers, “I’d invited Roger Moore, Vera Lynn, Adam Faith, Shirley Bassey, and all the top London show business impresarios to the party, and invited David and the King Bees to perform as I thought it would be good for him. David took the stage wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. His hair was relatively short and dyed a cornflower blond with a Tony Curtis quiff. He looked like a young waiter who had blown his first check on a bad haircut,” John Bloom said.
The party was held at the Jack of Clubs nightclub in London’s Berwick Street, and when David and the King Bees started their set, the guests were in the middle of eating and ignored them, chatting away to each other instead.
“I did not realize how tiny Bowie was until I saw him on the stage that night. The thing I noticed was that he had really small feet. He was very pleasant but subdued: He seemed tired, even a bit nervous,” John Bloom said. “But most of the people in the room were in their sixties, and they didn’t understand or like the kind of songs David and the King Bees were singing. I wanted the party to be special for my wife, and I was worried that it would turn out to be a disaster.
“So I went up to Billy Wright, who captained England at football, and before David and the King Bees launched into their next song, on my request, Billy went up to them and told them nicely to pack up. I was very sorry, and I gave Leslie £100 for David and the King Bees on the spot. Then Vera Lynn came on next and sang, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover,’ ” John Bloom said.
Fortunately, David’s failure to wow the establishment at John Bloom’s anniversary party didn’t sour his new manager, Leslie Conn, on him at all. Despite the fiasco of his anniversary party, John Bloom also somehow still retained his belief in David as well.
He remembered, “I sent Leslie another £400 for David and the King Bees, and the next thing I knew, Leslie called me and told me he had got a record deal for them.”
That record deal was with Decca Records, and, on June 5, 1964, David’s first record, “Liza Jane,” an arrangement of the old standard “Li’l Liza Jane,” produced by Leslie Conn, was released as a single. By then, David had left Bromley Technical High School and was working in an advertising agency called Nevin D. Hirst on London’s tony Bond Street, where he was employed as a junior visualizer (now known as a storyboard artist, a freelance artist who sketches out commercials and advertisements at the behest of the company’s art director.)
David worked in advertising for a year and along the way was able to glean the basics of advertising and marketing, drinking in the ethos of the industry as epitomized by the words of the adman in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest: “In the world of advertising there’s no such thing as a lie, there’s only the expedient exaggeration.”
All of this would color his future dealings with the media, so that Ken Scott, who produced several of his early albums, would go on to observe, “You never quite knew when he was being ho
nest. It’s not something I realized at the time, but seeing various explanations in interviews of something I’d known about, I’d think, ‘Ah, so that’s what you’re like.’ ”
David’s schooling in the mores of advertising, marketing, and self-salesmanship would color his future pronouncements (most likely his slick explanation of the choice of Bowie as a last name), which meant they were not always strictly accurate. At the time, though, he kicked against the conventionality of his working life.
“He only took the job for his father’s sake. His father thought that all this business with groups and music could well be a passing fad and that, at least if he spent a year or so at work, it would give him some stable grounding to fall back on,” his mother, Peggy, remembered, adding: “So David went to work there, though not without protest. I can remember him coming home and moaning about his ‘blooming job.’ ”
On Saturdays, he had a morning job at a local record store, Vic Furlong’s, but it didn’t last long—Furlong fired him because he considered him to be a dreamer who talked too much. Nonetheless, music remained his goal, his raison d’être. “I never, ever thought about the big house or the big car or anything like that. It never entered my mind,” he once said of his youthful ambitions.
In his spare time, he was single-minded about his music, so dedicated and determined that he ran the risk of alienating his peers. “What made him different was he would pass a party or anything up if there was something he needed to do for his music,” observed one of his contemporaries.
Through Leslie Conn’s persistence, “Liza Jane” was played on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury, in which a panel of four celebrities listened to a song—while the artist who recorded it was hidden behind a screen—then voted on whether it was a hit or a miss.