Why Bowie Matters

That’s an over-simplification, of course. But Bowie’s debut album for Deram is a compilation of oddities, made up largely of short stories about quirky characters: a ‘Little Bombardier’ who is driven out of town for inappropriate friendships with children; ‘Uncle Arthur’ who leaves his wife and returns to Mother’s cooking; the cross-dressing soldier in ‘She’s Got Medals’. These are vignettes with a mild twist, centring veterans from wars before Bowie’s time – the narrator of ‘Rubber Band’ fought in the 1914–18 conflict – and delivered with a chirpy-chappy vocal. The sound effects and melodramatic acting of ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’, the spoken punchlines at the end of ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, and the comedy voices (Nazis, news announcers) on ‘We Are Hungry Men’ add to the sense of vaudeville. Like ‘Rubber Band’, ‘Maid of Bond Street’ is based around a play on words (‘this girl is made of lipstick … this girl is maid of Bond Street’), and ‘She’s Got Medals’ also does double-service as a dirty joke, as Chris O’Leary points out (basically, ‘she’s got balls’).

O’Leary suggests that Bowie’s shift towards music-hall pastiche and a celebration of an imaginary English past was a clever move, ‘acutely timed’ to fit with a nostalgic 1967 trend for brigadier moustaches and military uniforms. The brass-buttoned jacket Bowie wears on the LP’s cover is a smart, sober version of The Beatles’ multicoloured Sgt. Pepper get-up; their album, celebrating a mythical military band that launched ‘twenty years ago today’, was released the same week as Bowie’s. On the other hand, we know that Bowie had genuinely been inspired by Newley back in 1961, before he joined The Konrads, and may have seen this shift into theatrical storytelling as a way to express himself as an original artist; a sharp about-turn from the stale Mod scene.

On one level, we shouldn’t expect Bowie’s 1960s solo work to tell us anything about his upbringing and environment. His decisions so far had all been based around gaining greater independence and celebrity, using each band in turn to move further away from the Bromley music scene. His gigs took him on increasingly wider circuits, from school fêtes and local village halls with The Konrads in 1963, to the Jack of Clubs and the Marquee in Soho with The King Bees in 1964, to gigs in Maidstone, Newcastle and Edinburgh with The Manish Boys by the end of that year. In December 1965 and January 1966, he performed with the Lower Third at Le Golf-Drouot and Le Bus Palladium in Paris.

But on the other hand, he kept returning: not just to Soho – he held a regular slot at the Marquee Club – but to the Bromel Club, barely fifteen minutes’ walk from his parents’ home. He was still living at Plaistow Grove in 1965, though he shuttled between Bromley and Maidstone during his stint with The Manish Boys, and spent nights in between gigs at friends’ houses or in the band’s van. As a minor, Bowie still needed his parents to sign his contracts, and drew a sketch map for Pitt in summer 1966, showing him how to get from Sundridge Park Station to 4 Plaistow Grove: Pitt wrote to John Jones and ‘your wife’ to confirm that he would be David’s sole manager, and visited Bromley in February 1967 to go through the paperwork. The first time Bowie formally moved out from his parents’ house was June of that year, when he began sharing Pitt’s apartment in London; even then, he only spent Monday to Friday with Pitt, and went back to Bromley at weekends. He unashamedly told a magazine in July of that year that he still lived at home with his parents. ‘I’d never leave them; we’ve got a good thing going.’ As O’Leary points out ‘The London Boys’, despite its edgy urban setting, was written by a teenager ‘living in Bromley, fed and clothed and funded by his parents’, and feels like ‘a suburban correspondent filing a story from the field’.

Though part of him was trying to escape his background, he was clearly reluctant to fully give it up, and this tension crept into his work, sometimes between the lines and sometimes more explicitly. Bromley was the territory he knew best, and it formed part of his mental landscape. But what emerges more strongly is a sense of in-betweenness: the dynamic between safety and escape, comfort and frustration, home and adventure, city and suburb, family and freedom. Bowie’s first-person narrators and characters of the period are often caught between these choices, poised in limbo.

Take, for instance, ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ (January 1966), which Kevin Cann sees as a ‘confessional and reflective’ evocation of ‘his mother, Sundridge Park Station, the recreation ground at the end of his street, St Mary’s Church’. While it lends itself to an autobiographical reading, with a girl calling out, ‘Hi, Dave,’ its lyrics are, in fact, not nearly so specific as Cann suggests – there’s a church, a mother, a recreation ground, a station and indeed a school, but they are left generic. The song focuses on the moment when its young narrator is forced to leave (‘I’ve gotta pack my bags, leave this home’), revisits memories of the home town as he walks to the station, and ends at a point of transition, while ‘the ticket’s in my hand’. His family and friends are left behind in ‘never-never land’, but his future is unknown: ‘I’ve got a long way to go, hope I make it on my own.’

‘The London Boys’ (December 1966) finds its central character a few steps down the line, but equally uncertain. ‘You moved away, told your folks you were gonna stay away.’ This protagonist is ‘seventeen, but you think you’ve grown, in the month you’ve been away from your parents’ home’; like the narrator of ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’, he’s traded comfort for uncertainty, and now can’t turn back. ‘It’s too late now, cause you’re out there boy … now you wish you’d never left your home, you’ve got what you wanted but you’re on your own.’

‘I Dig Everything’ (August 1966) checks in on the same milieu on a different day, in a more upbeat mood. The newcomer in ‘The London Boys’ has bought coffee, butter and bread but ‘can’t make a thing cause the meter’s dead’; in ‘I Dig Everything’, the narrator ‘ain’t had a job for a year or more’, rents ‘a backstreet room in the back part of town’, and is ‘low on money … everything’s spent’, but he doesn’t care – he feeds the lions in Trafalgar Square, makes friends with the time-check girl on the end of the phone, and waves to policemen. He finds stuff to do for free. He digs everything. He’s made himself a home in London. Even so, the joy in this song stems from uncertainty (‘I don’t know a thing’), and from embracing the precarious balance between success and failure (‘some of them were losers but the rest of them are winners’).

Bowie’s debut album moves away from this semi-autobiographical approach – two of the examples above are from a first-person perspective, and have ‘I’ and ‘Me’ in their titles – but uses the same dynamic structures with some of the character vignettes. The ‘Little Bombardier’, like the narrator in ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’, is thrown out of his home town and catches a train towards an uncertain future; though the tone tends towards throwaway comedy rather than teenage angst, the ending is almost identical.

‘Uncle Arthur’, finally, is still living with Mother, facing ‘another empty day’ of routine tedium as the bell strikes five and he closes the family shop; he finds romance late in life, at age thirty-two, but runs back to Mummy when he realises his new bride can’t cook. By contrast, ‘The London Boys’ opens with Bow Bells striking another night, and its protagonist returning wearily to seedy digs without electricity. Both options – living with your mum in cossetted security into your thirties (‘he gets his pocket money, he’s well fed’), and scrounging for food and friends as a seventeen-year-old in Soho – are presented as imperfect. Arthur experiments with freedom and quickly abandons it; the ‘London Boy’ pretends he’s having fun, but secretly regrets that he can’t go home. Even in their vaudeville disguise, then, Bowie’s songs from 1967 work through his own experiences as a young man who’d toured widely with bands and secured a regular gig at a club in Soho, but kept returning to his home base in Bromley; a solo artist who still needed his dad’s signature, who depended on his parents for support, and who couldn’t seem fully to get away from the street where he’d grown up.

But all this was behind him now. It was June 1967, and he had a solo record out, with his name and face on the cover. He’d made it, surely.

He hadn’t made it. The singles, ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, flopped, and the album tanked at 125 in the UK charts. Another possible future for Bowie closed down: as Chris O’Leary suggests, ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ was a strong enough contender in the lacklustre music market of summer 1967 to have reached the top ten. With a successful follow-up, O’Leary speculates, it could have led to an alternate path of cabaret, Vegas shows, duets with Petula Clark and Nancy Sinatra, Bacharach covers and a disco crossover hit in the 1970s. That Bowie remains in a parallel universe, with all the other what-ifs and might-have-beens.

He was dropped by Deram the following year. The experience would surely have destroyed the confidence and drive of many twenty-year-old artists: he’d had his shot, and the world didn’t want to listen. Instead, he branched out into other fields. Some of his attempts were rewarded with small success; most were met with failure, but still he kept going.

Bowie kept busy over the next eighteen months. He had what Ken Pitt called, in a letter to John Jones, a ‘very brave try’ at writing the music for Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet: the director chose Donovan instead. He took up mime and movement with Lindsay Kemp, who has variously described his protégé as both ‘a joy to direct … an ideal student’ and, more recently, ‘a load of shit’. Bowie performed in Kemp’s stage play Pierrot in Turquoise, and explored Buddhism, professing that he hoped, at age twenty-five, ‘to be in Tibet studying Eastern philosophy … money doesn’t mean all that much to me.’ He auditioned unsuccessfully for musicals and feature films and won a role in a short called The Image, followed by a tiny cameo in The Virgin Soldiers. He sent a television play to the BBC and had it rejected; to placate his dad, who was worried about his son’s career, he tried a cabaret act, which came to nothing. One booking agent advised Ken Pitt: ‘Let him have a good day job … he’s never going to get anywhere.’ Instead, Bowie started his own dance and mime group, Feathers, with his new girlfriend Hermione Farthingale and his friend Tony ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson. ‘He’d try one thing, try another,’ Hermione later remembered. ‘He wasn’t lost. He just wasn’t found, either.’ He never stopped trying; but he didn’t release any records during 1968.

In early 1969 the relationship with Hermione ended, and Bowie moved back to Plaistow Grove, briefly, for the final time. He filmed a commercial for Luv ice lollies: the advert performed so badly that the product was taken off the market. With Pitt’s encouragement, Bowie shot his own promotional film, Love You Till Tuesday, going to the trouble of getting cosmetic work on his teeth, and wearing hairpieces to disguise his Virgin Soldiers short back and sides. Costs escalated, and experimental sections were scrapped. When the film was finished, Pitt arranged private screenings: TV stations and film distributors were unmoved. The project was shelved; but as part of its production, Bowie had written a new song, ‘Space Oddity’.

Once more, we reach a point of recognition. Surely, now, Bowie has done it. This is the hit single we all know. This is the brink of fame. ‘Space Oddity’ would open the album most of us recognise as his first – it was also named David Bowie – after the false start of the Deram LP. Bowie himself, typically, wrote his debut out of history, claiming in a 1972 interview that ‘I was still working as a commercial artist then and I made it in my spare time, taking days off work and all that. I never followed it up … sent my tape into Decca and they said they’d make an album.’ According to the popular myth of Bowie, this is the real beginning. It’s worth freeze-framing him again here, and asking how he reached this point, after the crashing failure of 1967. How did he get past the disappointment, and retain his drive? Why did he keep trying?

We can only speculate, while acknowledging that every decision can have several motivations: a need to live up to Ken Pitt’s expectations and investment; perhaps a desire to please his dad, who, as Bowie told an interviewer in 1968, ‘tries so hard’ and still supported him; certainly, Bowie seemed to retain an almost untouchable core of self-belief. In a conversation with George Tremlett in 1969, he explained, ‘smiling but firm’, that ‘I shall be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty.’ Tremlett comments that ‘by the way he said it, I saw the possibility that he might not make it had barely crossed his mind.’ There is another possible reason, concealed within the frantic comedy of ‘The Laughing Gnome’, his single from 1967. This novelty song failed to make it onto the Deram LP, was reviewed at the time as ‘the flop it deserved to be’, and haunted Bowie’s subsequent career. Understandably, it remained part of the 1960s he’d rather forget.

But while its high-pitched vocals and Christmas-cracker jokes make it an even broader music-hall number than ‘Uncle Arthur’, it shares intriguingly similar motifs with Bowie’s other work of the time: a local high street, a quirky older character, threats of authority (‘I ought to report you to the Gnome Office’), and forced exile via the railway station (‘I put him on a train to Eastbourne’). The narrator in ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ leaves his family in ‘never-never land’, and sets out towards an uncertain future, ‘on my own’; the gnome is asked, ‘haven’t you got a home to go to,’ and replies that he’s from ‘gnome-man’s land’, a ‘gnome-ad’. Like the ‘London Boy’ and ‘Uncle Arthur’, the gnome is drawn back from his wandering towards suburbia and home comforts: when the narrator puts him on a train to the coast, he appears again next morning, bringing his brother. Even the references to success, described in terms of eating well (‘living on caviar and honey, cause they’re earning me lots of money’) echo the rhyming contrasts between family security and precarious independence in ‘Uncle Arthur’ and ‘The London Boys’ (‘he gets his pocket money, he’s well fed’; ‘you’ve bought some coffee, butter and bread, you can’t make a thing cause the meter’s dead.’) Behind the frenetic gags, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ explores the same tension as Bowie’s more anguished singles from the same period: the push and pull of comforting, dull safety versus risky adventure. The same dynamic recurs, more metaphorically, throughout his later work, and can even be seen to structure Bowie’s career; we’ll return to it later. Already, though, we can see that this song has more to it than meets the eye.

It’s easy to dismiss ‘The Laughing Gnome’ as a convenient vehicle for packing in as many gnome jokes as possible. But as we’ve already seen, Bowie was tempted by puns in his more serious tracks, too. ‘Rubber Band’ may be frivolous, but ‘Maid of Bond Street’, also built around a play on words, isn’t meant to be funny. ‘Space Oddity’ followed – ostensibly spoofing 2001: A Space Odyssey (the name ‘David Bowie’ even sounds like a parody riff on the movie’s protagonist, Dave Bowman) but far from a comedy song – and then ‘Aladdin Sane’, containing the hidden confession ‘A Lad Insane’. The cover of Low is a visual joke on ‘low profile’. ‘New Killer Star’, from 2003, puns on George W. Bush’s pronunciation of ‘nuclear’, but the song is no joke: it opens with a reflection on the ‘great white scar’ of the former World Trade Center.

In 1997, Bowie returned self-consciously to ‘grumpy gnomes’ with ‘Little Wonder’, which includes the names of the Seven Dwarves in its lyrics and has a twist in its title: depending on context, the phrase is used to imply both ‘no wonder, then’, and ‘you little marvel’. Linguistic gags in Bowie’s work are not, then, a cue for us to disregard the song as meaningless cabaret. In fact, the hysterical surplus of double meaning in ‘The Laughing Gnome’ could even be seen as an invitation to read more into the lyrics, like a dream bursting with symbolism that begs for analysis. ‘Gnomic’, after all, also signifies a mysterious expression of truth, and leads us, in turn, to Bowie’s description for the mousy-haired girl in ‘Life on Mars’. In a 2008 article he called her an ‘anomic (not a “gnomic”) heroine’. He knew the word could be read in other ways.

If we accept that the song can be taken more seriously, then the gnome’s brother, who appears at the end of the narrator’s bed one morning, is the key to further interpretation. David Jones had, more than once, woken up to find his half-brother, Terry, back from his nomadic travels and sharing his bedroom. Terry was ten when he first joined the Jones family at Stansfield Road in Brixton; but when they moved to Bromley in 1953, Terry, who hated John Jones, stayed behind. In June 1955 he came back, taking the bedroom next to David’s on Plaistow Grove; in November, he left again for the air force, and didn’t return for three years. He couldn’t stay, Peggy explained when Terry turned up again, unkempt and disturbed – the back bedrooms had been merged into one, and there was no room – so he moved out to Forest Hill, but still caught the bus regularly to Bromley, to visit David. Terry was already a major influence on his younger half-brother, helping him, as Peter and Leni Gillman put it, to ‘discover a new world beyond the drab confines of the suburbs’. He took David to jazz clubs in Soho, gave him a copy of Kerouac’s On the Road, and encouraged him towards saxophone lessons. ‘I thought the world of David,’ he later said, ‘and he thought the world of me.’ An intermittent resident at Plaistow Grove over the next decade, Terry was also in and out of local hospitals for the mentally ill. He was developing schizophrenia.

In February 1967, David and Terry – now both adults – walked down to the Bromel Club to see Cream in concert. ‘I was very disturbed,’ Bowie later recalled, ‘because the music was affecting him adversely. His particular illness was somewhere between schizophrenia and manic depressiveness … I remember having to take him home.’ According to Buckley’s biography, Terry ‘began pawing the road’ after the gig. ‘He could see cracks in the tarmac and flames rising up, as if from the underworld. Bowie was scared witless … this example of someone so close being possessed was horrifying.’ He was, Buckley goes on, ‘frightened that his own mind would split down the middle, too’. Bowie’s own recollection is, as we’ve seen, less melodramatic, but he confirmed in another interview, with a formality that suggests he was choosing his words carefully, that ‘one puts oneself through such psychological damage trying to avoid the threat of insanity, you start to approach the very thing that you’re scared of. Because of the tragedy inflicted, especially on my mother’s side … that was something I was terribly fearful of.’ His grandmother, Margaret, had also suffered from mental illness, as had his aunts Una, Nora and Vivienne; Terry’s episode at the Bromel Club brought it closer to home, though it’s worth noting that cousin Kristina dismissed Terry’s experience as a ‘bad acid trip’, and the idea of insanity in the family as one of David’s long-term lies, or ‘porkies’. ‘It just wasn’t true,’ she told Francis Whately in 2019.

Terry features obliquely in at least two of Bowie’s songs. ‘Jump They Say’ (1993), Bowie explained, was ‘semi-based on my impression of my stepbrother’; he was cagier about ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ (1971), throwing out various decoy explanations before admitting, in 1977, that it was about himself and Terry, with ‘Bewlay’ as an echo of his own stage name. ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is never discussed in this context – it is, at best, accepted by critics as a bit of fun, or in the words of Peter and Leni Gillman, ‘a delightful children’s record’ – but it’s tempting to add it to the list of songs inspired by Bowie’s half-brother, especially if we bear in mind a story that Kristina tells about Terry and their grandmother. Little Terry had nervously smiled after being scolded. ‘Nanny said, “Go on, laugh again,” and he smirked again, and she smacked him across the ear and said, “That’ll teach you to laugh at me.”’ Ha ha ha. Hee hee hee.

It’s a persuasive reading. But to label ‘The Laughing Gnome’ with a single interpretation – a song about Terry Burns, the manic outsider who kept turning up at David’s house, and was sent away – would be reductive. Any Bowie song is, like the man who wrote it, a matrix of information, with multiple possible patterns of connection. Even single words can be loaded, and can pivot in various directions, suggesting different links. We can join the dots of those words and phrases in several ways and create a convincing structure, but with a twist, and from a new perspective, the picture changes. As I’ve suggested, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ also explores Bowie’s to-and-fro tension between independent adventure and the security of home. It’s also, let’s face it, a comedy song, a novelty number, a ‘delightful children’s record’. It can be all those things and more. An interview with novelist Hanif Kureishi gives a further quick twist and suggests a final angle.

Kureishi recalls that, when they worked on Buddha of Suburbia together, Bowie ‘would talk about how awkward it was in the house for his mother and father when Terry was around, how difficult and disturbing it was’. But he immediately goes on, without changing the subject, to describe his own experiences with Bowie on the phone. ‘I got the sense you have with some psychotic people when they’re just talking to themselves. It’s just a monologue, and he is just sharing with you what’s going round and round in his head.’ From Terry’s schizophrenia to David’s seeming psychosis, without a jump: the seamless segue is telling, and it’s a short step from there to Chris O’Leary’s suggestion that ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is ‘a man losing his mind, a schizophrenic’s conversation with himself’.

It would seem overly simplistic to suggest that Bowie channelled a fear of insanity directly into his work – ‘All the Madmen’ (1970), for instance, or the ‘crack in the sky and the hand reaching down to me’ from ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971) – unless he’d admitted it himself. ‘I felt I was the lucky one because I was an artist and it would never happen to me because I could put all my psychological excesses into my music and then I could be always throwing it off.’ This confession, included in Dylan Jones’s book, follows directly on from the quotation above (‘one puts oneself through such psychological damage …’). Note how Bowie’s formal poise switches into a rushed incantation; an attempt to make something true by saying it quickly.

In this sense, then, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is not just about Terry, but about what Terry meant to his younger half-brother: a troubled alter-ego who always comes back when he’s sent away, a reminder of what Bowie could have been, and what he feared he could still become. The laughing gnome is a figure embodying both madness and truth: manic laughter and gnomic warnings. You can’t catch him, and you can’t get away from him. He can’t be successfully repressed, but he can be accepted and embraced, not just peaceably but profitably (‘we’re living on caviar and honey, cause they’re earning me lots of money’). If we follow this interpretation to its conclusion, Bowie was not just pushing himself because he hungered for fame. He was driven to keep creating because he wanted to expel the ideas from his head into his art; he preferred to make the hallucination into a comedy character, rather than hear that high-pitched chuckling confined to his own head. He wanted to exorcise the energy before it could drive him crazy. He felt his art would save him, and perhaps it did; as the song predicts, it certainly earned him success.

Was his creative drive really fuelled, at least in part, by this fear of mental illness? We can’t be sure: we can only try to read back through Bowie’s public art into his private motivations, using the facts of his life as a framework. But it’s a valid way of seeing, and it makes a good story.