Why Bowie Matters

So how did he do it? This is my own interpretation: my way of connecting points in the Bowie matrix to create a story.

The suburbs played a part. Novelist Jonathan Coe has written of his upbringing on the outskirts of Birmingham that ‘it gave me the imaginative space to dream of different worlds; wider, more exciting, not necessarily better. It was the very uneventfulness of the suburbs that turned so many of us into creators.’ Rupa Huq, in Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture, identifies locations like Bromley as a nowhere-land, neither ‘city’ nor ‘country’. ‘There is a case to be made,’ she goes on, ‘for the very fact that suburbs are seen as unremarkable and conformist allowing artistic endeavour to flourish there.’ David Buckley agrees that ‘the geography of the situation is crucial: living in the suburbs so close to London provided the perfect paradigm for escape. London represented exotica, freedom and change for youngsters driven to near-desperation by the blandness of the capital’s environs. And it was close by – a mere half an hour away by train.’ No wonder Bowie’s back bedroom, where he listened to the radio within earshot of the railway line, looking out at the carriage lamp of a busy pub, is such a potent image in his origin myth. Academics like the word ‘liminal’ for these spaces that lie in between, neither one thing nor the other; ‘liminal’ comes from the Latin for ‘threshold’. David was outside, waiting and wanting to cross over.

‘You find yourself in the middle of two worlds,’ he reflected. ‘There’s the extreme values of people who grow up in the countryside, and the very urban feel of the city. In suburbia, you’re given the impression that nothing, culturally, belongs to you. That you are, sort of, in this wasteland.’ He dreamed not just of London but also beyond it, through the jazz records and Beat poetry Terry Burns brought back from Soho, to America. Young David, born exactly twelve years after Elvis, was already fired up on ‘Hound Dog’ and Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’, and listened to the American Armed Forces Radio; by age thirteen he’d written to the US Navy via the embassy in London, and been invited to spend the day with them learning about American football. ‘Then, much to his amazement,’ the Bromley and Kentish Times reported in November 1960, ‘David was presented with a helmet, set of shoulder pads and a football, all of which had been donated by a local Air Force base.’ The news story features a photo of him in full football gear, and the headline ‘David Leads Sport Revolution’.

We get a sense of the initiative, the ambition, the almost naïve confidence – if you don’t ask, you don’t get – that we associate with the later David Bowie, who drawled like a gangster in ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate’, from 1974: ‘if you want it, boys, get it here.’ But behind this remarkably enterprising teenager, a man stands in the wings: a secondary supporting character, reminding us that David’s supposedly dull suburban life had other dimensions.

‘It all started,’ the local paper explains, ‘when David’s father, Mr Haywood Jones, purchased a short-wave radio with evenings of musical relaxation in mind for the family.’ John Jones is also there in the background of his son’s news stunt: ‘His father, who comes from a family of avid rugby enthusiasts, stood by scratching his head, perplexed.’ He takes the role of the boring suburbanite – ‘it is a safe bet that the people of Bromley may soon be scratching their heads, too’ – but it was John who escorted David (with George Underwood, who appears in some of the photos) up to Grosvenor Square for the day, and who bought the radio set in the first place. Jones Senior had already provided the house with a TV, in time for the coronation in 1953, and a stack of new American 45s, including David’s beloved ‘Tutti Frutti’, in 1956. Bowie later enthused that when he first played Little Richard, ‘My heart nearly burst with excitement. I’d never heard anything even resembling this. It filled the room with energy and colour and outrageous defiance. I had heard God. Now I wanted to see him.’ If this is another convincing origin story for Bowie’s stardom, his dad was behind it, quietly enabling his son’s transformative experience.

David may have dreamed of escape from Bromley, but there are far worse things to escape than boredom. He had the leisure to experiment and play – to join bands, to try different fashions – because, despite the modest size of his house, he was cushioned by a comfortable level of middle-class privilege. In the year they moved to Plaistow Grove, David met new friends at the choir and the Cub Scouts, and was taken by his dad, with his cousin Kristina, to see Tommy Steele, getting his autograph backstage. His headmaster at Burnt Ash encouraged the class to express themselves through ‘movement training’, describing David as a ‘sensitive and imaginative boy’. There were regular trips to his dad’s work, more meetings with TV stars, and a Scout summer camp on the Isle of Wight, where George and David performed their favourite pop songs as a skiffle group.

John Jones took David to visit potential secondary schools; David got his first choice, Bromley Tech, ‘with no real battle’. His form master, Owen Frampton, was progressive and inspirational, starting an ‘art stream for students interested in visual creativity’. David decided he wanted to become a jazz musician, after reading On the Road in 1961: his dad bought him an acrylic sax for Christmas that year. Within a couple of weeks, David had persuaded his dad to help him buy a better one, and they went to Tottenham Court Road together to get a professional instrument on hire purchase. David set himself to the task of learning music from his American singles; self-disciplined for a fifteen-year-old, but no doubt helped by the fact that his house already had an upright piano. With his characteristic, wide-eyed chutzpah (if you want it, boys, get it here), David wrote to a local jazz musician, Ronnie Ross, asking for lessons. His proficiency on the sax got him into his first band, The Konrads, and his first public gig at a school fête. There was a network of local venues ready to accommodate them: church halls for rehearsals, country clubs, colleges and ballrooms. John Jones arranged the band’s professional photoshoot. Although David left school with a single pass, his form master Owen Frampton made the effort to find him a job in advertising, which David was fired from a year later. ‘I just couldn’t stand the pace … it was just so boring trying to compete with sketching out raincoats and things.’ His dad supported him financially as David decided to dedicate himself solely to making it in the music business. Both his parents signed his first management deal, because David was only seventeen. This was summer 1964, and he was in his third band already, having made his television debut in June.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves: but as we piece together the story of how David Jones became Bowie, and how Bowie became Ziggy, it’s important to remember that his background helped him – not just by giving him something to transcend and escape, but in a more literal sense. He faced obstacles and hardships, there’s little doubt of that. The eye injury that left him with a permanently-dilated left pupil sent him to hospital – his dad rushed him in when it ‘just exploded’ – and needed months of convalescence. He argued with his mother in particular, who, concerned about his obsession with music and fashion over schoolwork, ‘wanted me turned down’. He often had to retreat to his bedroom, thinking, in his own words, ‘they are not going to beat me.’ (But didn’t we all, as teenagers?) And then there was Terry, and the family history that Terry carried with him, which we’ll come to later. But he also had a father, at least, who ferried him around, funded him and gave him many of the tools that forged his later, larger-than-life persona. It was his dad, ironically – or with self-sacrificing generosity – who helped his son to become bigger and bolder than David Jones, to rewrite his childhood and to ditch the family name.

But there were a lot of boys in bands in 1960s Bromley, sharing similar levels of middle-class privilege, home comforts and family support. David Jones’s success was not, of course, solely due to his dad. In the story so far, we can already sense an incredible self-belief; for a supposedly sensitive, insular teenager, he went straight for what he wanted. His music career in the 1960s suggests a slow, steady attempt to construct something original and distinctive from available materials: a piecing-together of genres and styles, a testing of what worked and a willingness to quickly reject what didn’t, and a struggle within the system to create something new. He didn’t want to be a great bluesman, a pop singer or a folk artist. He combined his talent for music with his flair for fashion and visual art, using them all as a means to an end. What he wanted was a certain type of stardom.

Shortly before joining The Konrads, he’d been inspired – on another theatre visit, to see Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, in July 1961 – by Anthony Newley’s theatrical flair and his power over a crowd.

He kept saying ‘Stop the world’, and the cast would freeze, and he’d come forward and rap to the audience. Then he’d say ‘OK’ and they’d start moving again. The girls were like machines, lifting their arms and legs up and down like clockwork. It just blew me over and I knew I wanted some of that, but I didn’t know what exactly. That’s when I started formulating my own style.

Even if we take Bowie’s tendency to retcon his past into account, we can trace this impulse through his early experiences with local bands. His dedication to the saxophone, thanks to Ronnie Ross, won him a place in The Konrads. He started to take on vocal duties and wrote some of his own songs, slipping them in between, as he said, the usual covers ‘of anything that was in the charts’. They worked hard; they were a journeyman band, aiming to please the crowds of the Royal Bell in Bromley (now a boarded-up nightclub) and the Beckenham Ballroom with versions of the Shadows and ‘Johnny B. Goode’. Audiences stopped dancing and drifted away from the stage when the band switched to one of David’s compositions, but he kept pushing, expanding them beyond a straightforward covers outfit. He challenged his own insecurities by singing two songs at each gig – ‘I was never very confident of my voice’ – and, perhaps to counter the shyness, started to invent a rock ‘n’ roll persona for himself. He told the others that Jones was a boring name, and toyed with Luther Jay and Alexis Jay before settling on Dave Jay, signing it with a saxophone on the capital letter.

The band’s uniform of green corduroy jackets and brown mohair trousers was his idea too – as were the publicity pics with his dad’s photographer friend – and he drew towering cartoon backdrops of jazz musicians for their later gigs, creating a distinctive sense of theatrical space.

A news report in the Bromley and Kentish Times of August 1963 explains that ‘a feature of their stage act is the special infra-blue lights which, when directed on their specially coated instruments, cause them to change colour – a big hit with the fans.’ The article doesn’t specify that it was David’s idea, but we can take a guess. Earlier in 1963 he’d failed to persuade the other boys to rename the band Ghost Riders, with a Wild West image, and instead announced that he was thinking of changing his own name to Jim Bowie.

These eighteen months with The Konrads – he joined in June 1962 and left on 31 December 1963 – give us a template for Bowie’s early approach. Rather than trying to strike out on his own as a singer-songwriter, he worked within the existing frameworks; nudging a jobbing covers band to experiment, while pushing for his own ideas and styling the brand as much as he could. But failure is also a key aspect of Bowie’s career. The Konrads’ song ‘I Never Dreamed’ – co-written by Jones, Alan Dodds and Roger Ferris, and recorded during an audition for Decca – was rejected by the label, and the band also failed to get past the first round of Rediffusion’s TV contest, Ready, Steady, Win. David, frustrated at his lack of control within the group, teamed up briefly again with George Underwood – significantly, their side-project the Hooker Brothers was initially called Dave’s Reds and Blues, giving him top billing – and recorded music in his bedroom, using basic equipment to build guitar parts and harmonies and effectively creating a band on his own.

By January 1964, a month after leaving The Konrads, he’d recruited three older musicians, along with Underwood, into a new band, Davie Jones and The King Bees. Now he was headlining. The green corduroy, striped tie and brown mohair trousers were out, replaced by jeans, T-shirts, piratical leather waistcoats and high-cut boots from a fashionable London boutique. Acquaintances of the time describe him as ‘very fashion conscious’, with ‘way-out clothes and dyed hair’; outrageous enough to embarrass his more conventional girlfriends. With a distinct focus on blues, rather than just playing every chart crowd-pleaser, the King Bees had a stronger identity, and the Davie Jones of his 1964 publicity shots is more recognisable as proto-David Bowie.

Again, with characteristic inventiveness and cheek – perhaps inspired by his dad’s insider knowledge – he wrote to a local entrepreneur, laundry magnate John Bloom, asking him to sponsor the band. Bloom passed the details on to talent scout Leslie Conn, who signed up David, offered the King Bees a prestigious gig and management, and negotiated a record deal with Decca. On 5 June, just six months after The Konrads’ failed Decca audition, Davie Jones released his first disc, ‘Liza Jane’: on the 19th they performed it on Rediffusion’s TV show, Ready Steady Go!. In July, David was fired from his job in advertising after a blazing row with his boss – he’d been working as a ‘junior visualiser’, a paste-up artist – or, if you believe his version of events, decided to quit and dedicate all his time to making it in the music business.

From one angle, it seems a clear-cut, focused trajectory towards his later fame. But what if The Konrads had been signed by Decca, and triumphed on Ready, Steady, Win? Every point of apparent failure in Bowie’s 1960s is a pivot to an alternate future – now an alternate history – where his success would have come sooner, but surely would have been short-lived.

The pattern continued: a few steps forward, another setback, and another shift. The King Bees’ first major gig was a flop that left David in tears. Juke Box Jury, on BBC1, voted ‘Liza Jane’ a miss. Musically, though credited to Leslie Conn, it’s indebted to the standard ‘Li’l Liza Jane’, and, in the words of Rebel Rebel author Chris O’Leary, is ‘doubly derivative (aping the Stones aping American electric blues)’, not far from The Konrads’ straight covers. Davie Jones, despite his growing confidence, still tries to disguise his accent, though it slips through: as O’Leary notes, ‘Jane’ becomes a twangy ‘Jayne’ by the end. Anne Nightingale, in a contemporary review, called it ‘straight R&B with a strong Cockney inflection’. The B-side, ‘Louie, Louie Go Home’, was a cover of an American release and another mash-up of borrowed styles: if the original was white kids trying to sound black, the King Bees’ cover added Beatles-like backing vocals and a whiny Lennon inflection from the lead singer.

‘Liza Jane’ failed to sell, and David once more left the band. He was chasing success, rather than a particular sound; he even altered his accent from the A-side to the B-side of the single, as the genre shifted from blues to pop. Once again, his projects overlapped as he impatiently sought a new vehicle: he auditioned for The Manish Boys in July 1964, and quit the King Bees later that month. (But again, an alternate path branches out from this point. What if ‘Liza Jane’ had been a hit?)

The pattern continued into 1965. The Manish Boys recorded ‘I Pity the Fool’ in January and released it in March with one of David’s own compositions, ‘Take My Tip’, on the B-side. His talent for provocation and media manipulation emerged more boldly, as he told a promoter his sexual preference was for ‘boys, of course’, and invented a story for the Daily Mirror: he’d supposedly been banned from the TV pop show Gadzooks! It’s All Happening because of his long hair. While enjoying the press attention, David was furious that the band had persuaded Leslie Conn to drop his individual credit on the record, and release it as a single by The Manish Boys. He reasserted himself when they played at the Bromel Club, his home territory, and ensured his name was highlighted, but the other band members hit back with a reminder in their own local paper that ‘Davie is a member of the group, and not, as many people think, the leader.’ Again, the single tanked, and he left the band on 5 May 1965, less than a year since his audition. Once more, we get the sense that every band, every stunt, every style and soundbite was a means to an end: he wanted to cultivate his own brand, not just to join a gang.

And the cycle started again. By 17 May he was leading Davie Jones and the Lower Third. In August, the new group released ‘You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving’, credited solely to Davy Jones. It was an original composition, though this time David steered his new group towards a Who sound – built around the structure of ‘Tired of Waiting for You’, by The Kinks – and his vocals approximated Roger Daltrey. The B-side, ‘Baby Loves That Way’, pastiches Herman’s Hermits and owes a further debt to The Kinks. Drumming up attention for the new single, David met agent Ralph Horton, who agreed to manage the Lower Third and advised a style shift towards London’s mod fashions.

David was still a darling of the local press – the Kentish Times saw it as newsworthy that ‘Davie Changes His Hairstyle’ – and now, under Horton’s influence, adopted what the paper called a ‘college-boy’ look, with Carnaby Street white shirts, hipster trousers and flowery ties. In September, Horton introduced David to the more experienced manager Ken Pitt and, on Pitt’s advice, they changed his stage name to Bowie. David was interviewed in style magazines – ‘I consider myself just to be fashion conscious, not a mod or anything’ – released ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ in early 1966 for his new label, Pye, and covertly planned to go solo. The other band members suspected, but only realised when their 29 January gig at the Bromel Club was billed as ‘David Bowie’, and they were told they wouldn’t get paid. We can predict the next step. On 6 February, Bowie formed a new group, The Buzz, and toured with them for eight months. In August, he released ‘I Dig Everything’, without the band: it was his last work for Pye. Again, the writing was on the wall, and in late November, just before launching a new single on the Deram label, he told The Buzz he wouldn’t be needing them in future.

The single was ‘Rubber Band’, with ‘The London Boys’ on its B-side. ‘David not only wrote the song,’ boasted the press release, ‘he scored the arrangement and produced the master recording.’

Finally, we’ve reached tracks that appear on his debut album from June 1967. It feels like a landmark: after five years of adapting, borrowing, ditching, adopting and dropping – from David Jones through Davie Jay to David Bowie, from The Konrads to The Buzz, from Pye to Deram, from Horton to Pitt – he’s become the solo performer we start to recognise, grabbing his hard-hustled place on the outskirts of fame and edging closer to the centre. The LP features a close-up of his face and his stage name. He’s made it, surely.

How had he got here, when so many other boys and bands from Bromley had dropped out of the race? Partly, simply, through persistence. He’d decided to make it his career, and he wanted stardom enough to get over any misgivings and hesitation. He had a safety net, certainly – not every young man can give up his job in advertising, knowing his father will fund him – but he was still pushing himself on a personal level, taking risks and forcing himself to make them come true. This had been his sole focus since the age of fourteen: or earlier, depending which story we believe.

Like a petty gangster in a crime movie, he’d kept on moving up, replacing the boss in one band then moving to a larger outfit when he got bored or felt his ambitions stifled. With every step higher, he gained more status symbols: a headline credit, a newspaper article, a TV appearance, a magazine feature. He was ruthless, self-centred, dedicated to his own success, but endearingly creative in how he achieved it. He was single-minded and canny, but also innocently imaginative: his natural shyness and sensitivity were balanced with sheer front and cheeky charm. Writing to a self-made millionaire in the laundry self-service business and asking him to sponsor the King Bees worked because it reached John Bloom out of the blue, taking the magnate by surprise. David was an artist, not a con-artist.

How much of his approach during those five years was clever media manipulation, and how much was an expression of something more personal? Were the dyed hair, piratical boots and leather blousons of 1964 the sign of David’s genuine interest in way-out styling, or the fashioning of a distinctive brand image? We can’t know. He may not have known himself.

We have to guess whether he was just playing with the press when he told the reporter he was into boys, ‘of course’, prefiguring his later claims to be gay and bisexual. We can’t be sure whether he changed his hair, his clothes and brand to fit the changing market, or his own changing tastes; whether he was genuinely trying to subvert gender roles with his long hair, or whether he simply guessed it would get headlines. His interviews at the time are as frivolously playful as his later interactions with journalists: ‘Insistently he claims the dubious honour of being Bromley’s first “Mod” but has since changed his philosophy to become a “Rocker”,’ proclaimed his press release in 1965. David ‘likes Scandinavian “birds” … dislikes education, 9–5 jobs, long straight roads and “coppers” (in either sense – “cash” or the “law”)’.

Were the idiosyncratic ideas like infra-blue lighting, a Wild West-themed band and the cartoon backdrops just an attempt to grab attention with a gimmick, or a deeper impulse from the boy who’d been told not to make a mess in his bedroom with paints, and now found himself with more freedom? The truth is that we don’t have to choose – the same decision can combine both a clever media strategy and a personal, artistic experiment. Again, when we meet a contradiction in Bowie’s history, it doesn’t always have to be resolved: we can see it in double vision.

It’s tempting to think, though, that when he dug out his green corduroy jacket from The Konrads and drew felt-pen stripes over it, customising it for his brief role with the Riot Squad in spring 1967, that this was an act of individual expression, a creative sabotage of the uniform he’d worn in his first band. In contrast to the teenage investment he’d put into The Konrads, the Riot Squad was a deliberately short-term fling for a twenty-year-old Bowie. The band knew he was going to move on, and they welcomed his ideas of hand-painted props, mime and make-up: they already used a flashing blue police light in performances, which may have drawn him in. He even hid behind a disguise rather than using his real (stage) name, adopting the temporary alias ‘Toy Soldier’ in promotional material: perhaps his first persona. The jacket is now on display in Bromley Library, one floor down from the maps and local directories. ‘It’s tiny, isn’t it?’ the archivist remarked to me. ‘And what a conservative type of rebellion’ – she laughed – ‘to draw pinstripes on your own jacket!’

He’d been writing his own lyrics since at least summer 1962; The Konrads backing singer Stella Gall remembers him noting them down in an exercise book. He didn’t have to persuade a band to let him perform them now, or compete for credit. He no longer had to cover this week’s hits, or ape the sound of Lennon and The Beatles, or Daltrey and The Who. This was his opportunity to let the world hear David Bowie. What did he do with his new solo platform? He let the world hear another Anthony Newley.