Why Bowie Matters. Will Brooker

      Bowie kept trying, despite all the setbacks, and kept working, and kept moving. After another brief stay at Plaistow Grove in January 1969, he’d relocated to 24 Foxgrove Road in Beckenham, which he shared with Barrie Jackson, a childhood friend from his old street. The following month he moved in with Mary Finnigan, in the ground-floor flat of the same house. His relationship with Finnigan quickly changed from neighbours to lovers, and then adapted again when he met Angie Barnett on Wednesday 9 April. In August, David and Angie moved to Haddon Hall, at 42 Southend Road, Beckenham, where they rented the entire ground floor of a Victorian villa.

      Both Haddon Hall and 24 Foxgrove Road have been demolished and replaced with flats. You can still visit both sites, though, and realise how close they are to each other; Foxgrove Road is five minutes up the hill from Beckenham Junction Station, and 42 Southend Road less than ten minutes’ further walk in the same direction. Beckenham Junction, in turn, is just two stops down the line from Bromley. Again, Bowie’s sense of adventure, experiment and escape was tempered with caution. He’d moved out of his parents’ home, and in with a neighbour from his childhood street; he then relocated downstairs with Mary Finnigan, making friends with her young children and becoming part of a new family household. When he finally rented his own place with a long-term girlfriend, he was still only a couple of miles from his childhood home; easily close enough for his mother to come round and prepare Sunday lunches for Bowie and his friends. Peggy later moved to a flat in Beckenham, even nearer to her adult son, and when Bowie and Angie married, they held the ceremony at Bromley Register Office, with the reception in the Swan and Mitre pub. However, while Haddon Hall was only a few miles from Plaistow Grove, it was a world away from the tiny terraced house where David had grown up: a gothic playground with a grand piano, stained-glass windows, heavy oak and crushed velvet upholstery. Bowie and Angie would go out to clubs together and bring dates back; band members slept on mattresses across the landing, and the basement was converted into a rehearsal studio.

      Finally, he’d found what he’d been working towards. His former lover Mary had made friends with his new girlfriend Angie; he invited his friend, producer Tony Visconti, to move in with them. Together, David and Mary Finnigan developed an Arts Lab at the Three Tuns, down the hill on Beckenham High Street. Bowie was the star act, backed by psychedelic liquid light shows, and the audience reached over two hundred during the summer. They organised an open-air festival for the same day as Woodstock, at Croydon Road Recreation Ground (the bandstand is still there). Bowie started to record a new album in July, and released ‘Space Oddity’ as a single on 11 July, in time to catch the buzz around the moon landing. John Jones wrote to Ken Pitt that ‘David is keeping very cheerful and seems to be keeping himself fully occupied.’ It was summer 1969. After seven years of trying, Bowie had made it.

      But there was another heavy blow in his step-by-step progress towards greater independence. His move into Haddon Hall immediately followed the death of John Jones, at age fifty-six, on 5 August. Bowie had just returned from a festival in Malta, and had come back in time to perform at the Arts Lab. Mary Finnigan informed him after the set that his father was seriously ill, and Bowie arrived at Plaistow Grove to find him semi-conscious. He struggled through the Free Festival, in what he understandably called ‘one of my terrible moods’. Later, he explained that he’d lost his father ‘at a point where I was just beginning to grow up a little bit and appreciate that I would have to stretch out my hand a little for us ever to get to know each other. He just died at the wrong damn time …’

      ‘Space Oddity’ started slowly in the chart, then rose to number 25, earning Bowie his first appearance on Top of the Pops in early October. The single reached number 5 at the start of November, the perfect lead-in to his second album on Friday 14 of that month. With a youthful mixture of humility and arrogance, Bowie told the NME, ‘I’ve been the male equivalent of a dumb blonde for a few years, and I was beginning to despair of people accepting me for my music. It may be fine for a male model to be told he’s a great looking guy but that doesn’t help a singer much.’ In early 1970 he formed a new band, the Hype, teaming up for the first time with guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey. The team we know as the Spiders from Mars was almost entirely in place, adopting larger-than-life stage personae (‘Spaceman’, ‘Hypeman’, ‘Gangsterman’): with hindsight, it looks like the start of glam rock. And then in March 1970 Bowie released his follow-up to ‘Space Oddity’, ‘The Prettiest Star’. It sold 798 copies and died. He wouldn’t have another hit single for two years. He hadn’t made it after all.

      I sat in the Zizzi on Beckenham High Street, which is now decorated with a mural of Bowie and key quotations from his songs in the windows. At the next table, three teenage lads ordered bashfully from a blonde waitress, in front of the lyrics ‘When you’re a boy, you can wear a uniform; when you’re a boy, other boys check you out.’ Fifty years ago, Bowie sat here with his acoustic guitar, playing for a crowd of regulars. This Zizzi was the Three Tuns until 1995, then the Rat and Parrot. In 2001, Mary Finnigan and supporters installed a plaque celebrating the Arts Lab and anticipating that the pub’s former name would be restored: it was, but only for a year. The plaque is still out front, with its perhaps overambitious boast that Bowie launched his career here; a Three Tuns sign hangs alongside the Zizzi logo.

      It’s hard to know the truth about any period in Bowie’s life. Some stories are built on more solid foundations, and some are shakier. The popular idea that Bowie shocked the world in the early 1970s as a fully-formed genius makes him easier to idolise, perhaps, but harder to aspire to, and harder to identify with. It is easier to treat him as a creature of uncanny talent, an unearthly one-off, because it erases the years of struggle behind his success and allows us to think of him as different to the rest of us. But in many ways, he wasn’t different to the rest of us. He wasn’t trained as a singer. He didn’t show early signs of musical ability. He was an uncertain frontman as a teenager, insecure about his own vocal abilities. You can hear him improving from single to single during the 1960s. He taught himself saxophone at the age of fifteen, learning to play along with his favourite records, and focused on it while he was convalescing from his eye injury: he took lessons, but only from spring until summer 1962. He could pick out chords on a guitar and piano, but couldn’t read or write music; he used descriptions in a book to choose the instruments for his debut album, and relied on colour-coded charts, instead of conventional notation, for ‘Space Oddity’. As a dancer, an artist and an actor he was an enthusiastic amateur. He had the privileges of being a white, lower-middle-class teenager in a little house in a safe neighbourhood; but he also had to deal with a troubled half-brother who clashed with his parents, a family history of mental illness and the early loss of his father.

      In September 1972, David Jones sailed with his wife Angie to New York on the QE2. He was now not just David Bowie, but Ziggy Stardust, complete with the crimson hair, jumpsuits and platform boots. They checked into the Plaza Hotel on Central Park and went up to their suite. ‘Babe,’ said Angie – or so the story goes – as she looked around at the decor, the view and the gifts