Why Bowie Matters. Will Brooker
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