Why Bowie Matters. Will Brooker
family moved when he was barely six, and he lived in Bromley from January 1953 onwards, including a full ten years in the same house on Plaistow Grove. Brixton in south London sounds better as an origin than Bromley in Kent, as Bowie surely realised when he dropped tall tales about getting into local ‘street brawls’ that made him ‘very butch’ and growing up in an ‘’ouseful of blacks’. Brixton, in the early 1950s, was a borderline between the past and the future, where bombsites and ration books were reminders of the recent war, but where the sights and tastes of a more multicultural, modern London had begun to creep in. One neighbour recalls technicolour clothing, Caribbean vegetables, even jugglers and sword-swallowers at the local market, while Bowie describes the streets around Stansfield Road as ‘like Harlem’. Bromley, on the other hand, apart from its associations with H. G. Wells, is known primarily for bland suburbia: biographer Christopher Sandford mentions it as a ‘drab, featureless dormitory town’, and Bowie referred scathingly, in a 1993 interview, to its regularity, its conformity and its ‘meanness’. For much of his life, he preferred to write it out of his official history.
But think about your own childhood: where you were born, and where you actually grew up. I was born in Coventry and spent my earliest years there in a council flat, but by the time I turned three my parents had moved to the first of many short-term lets in south-east London. I only half remember those from photographs, unsure if my memory is of the image or the real place; and I don’t recall Coventry at all. Certainly, I was born there, but the streets I’m from – the streets that really formed me – are the ones around Kinveachy Gardens in Charlton from ages three to eleven, and then Woodhill, down the hill in neighbouring Woolwich, as a teenager.
Did his first six years in Brixton shape David Jones? To some extent, no doubt. ‘I left Brixton when I was still quite young, but that was enough to be very affected by it,’ he later claimed. ‘It left strong images in my mind.’ He apparently returned to Stansfield Road in 1991, asking the tour bus to stop outside his old house, and came back for a final pilgrimage with his daughter in 2014. But Brixton’s influence must surely pale compared to the formative decade, from ages seven to seventeen, that David Jones spent at 4 Plaistow Grove, next to Sundridge Park Station, in Bromley. There is, as yet, no statue, plaque, or mural there – just occasional flowers outside someone else’s residential house – though he recalled it in 1993’s ‘Buddha of Suburbia’, with one of those lyrics that seems a gift to biographers: ‘Living in lies by the railway line, pushing the hair from my eyes. Elvis is English and climbs the hills … can’t tell the bullshit from the lies.’ ‘I knew him as Bromley Dave,’ Bowie’s childhood friend Paul Reeves confirmed, years later. ‘As that is where we were both from.’
When I attempted to immerse myself in Bowie’s life and career, between 2015 and 2016, I followed the path he’d traced around the world, from New York to Berlin to Switzerland to New York again. I also spent time at his old haunts in London, reading his recollections of the La Gioconda coffee shop at 9 Denmark Street while sitting in the same spot, currently a Flat Iron steak restaurant. But while I’d visited his home streets in Bromley – Canon Road, Clarence Road and Plaistow Grove – I’d only paid passing attention to the area. With hindsight, there was an unconscious reason behind the omission.
My old manor, around Kinveachy Gardens and Woodhill, is about six miles from Bowie’s house in Bromley; close enough that we both knew each other’s territory, growing up. He travelled to Woolwich at least once, to see Little Richard at the Granada. My experience and his also overlapped in Blackheath and Lewisham, equidistant between our childhood homes: we both visited friends in the posh big houses of Blackheath and travelled to Lewisham for its superior shops. There are key differences, of course, and I’m flattering myself by imagining a connection between us. When Bowie caught the bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts, he jumped off it two stops later with ‘Life on Mars?’ already in his head. In significant ways, then, my experience in Woolwich was not like David Bowie’s in Bromley: but there are interesting cultural continuities, despite our difference in age. Our town centres had a lot in common, for instance: a Littlewoods with its school uniforms and jam doughnuts; the knives, forks and tomato-shaped ketchup dispensers in Wimpy’s very English hamburger restaurants; ornate, art deco Odeon cinemas on the edge of town. Because Bromley already seemed familiar to me from my own childhood, I didn’t delve as deeply in, or investigate it, in such detail. So in May 2018, I reopened the investigation. I went to live in Bromley, to revisit Bowie’s time there. I ate there, drank there, slept there and shopped there, walking his old routes.
To me, research – and critical thinking in general – is not so much about finding information as it is about making connections: drawing lines, linking points and sometimes making unexpected leaps across time and space. If you plotted them visually, the paths of my research process would form a network, a matrix: a conceptual map, expanding and developing and becoming increasingly more complex.
I started with a map: with two maps. The Goad Plan, a gigantic, hand-drawn map of Bromley in the 1960s, spread across a table in the library’s Historic Collections room, and a far smaller, digital version alongside it on my phone – 2018’s Google Maps app – which I scrolled across for comparison. The same place, separated in time.
There is little sign now of the smaller boutiques and quirky, independent shops that would have been part of David Jones’s cultural landscape – the Tip Top Bakery, Sherry’s Fabrics, Terry’s Stores, Dolly’s Trolley – though there is a Tips and Toes nail salon, and Buddy’s Café. Some of Bromley’s newer shops and venues offer an ersatz simulation of the past. Mr Simm’s Olde Sweet Shop is a franchise dating back to 2004, and Greater than Gatsby, a bar promising 1920s style, warns its punters: ‘Guys, no hats or hoodies, come on, you’re not 12.’
Medhurst’s Department Store, where Bowie bought his American vinyl and listened to records in the basement sound booths, is now a Primark. Wimpy’s, where he ate burgers with his school-friend Geoff MacCormack, indulging his tastes for America, is the Diner’s Inn Café. The nearby Lyons’ Corner House, where teenagers could gather over coffee, has also vanished – it’s now a Mothercare – though there’s still a music store, Reid’s, with saxophones in the window.
I sat at the Stonehenge Café, opposite Primark, and watched the Market Square and High Street with a double vision. It wasn’t hard to imagine a teenage David walking through the doors – past where the Aladdin Sane T-shirts are now hanging – to meet his girlfriend Jane Green, who worked on the record counter, for a covert smooch to Eddie Cochran and Ray Charles. ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’, says one of Bowie’s 1960s singles. I couldn’t help thinking about him. One of his last songs – released posthumously, on 8 January 2017 – was called ‘No Plan’. His final tracks in particular feel like a puzzle he left behind, a message for his followers. What was his plan, during the 1960s? Did he have any sense of his end goal? Was he working his way towards fame, or just enjoying the scene, the lifestyle, the groups and the girls, like so many other teenage boys who loved records and made their own music?
Pulling the digital map back from the High Street to a wider view, we can begin to plot Bowie’s Bromley on a broader scale. Most of the key landmarks in his early life are all within walking distance of each other; I proved it to myself by walking between them, putting the legwork into my research. Only Bowie’s secondary school, Bromley Tech, was out of easy reach; he used to take the number 410 bus. It’s now Ravens Wood School, and I visited it for the final chapter of this book.
Plaistow Grove is less than a mile north of the town centre. I took a right at the Hop and Rye pub, then walked down College Lane, passing St Mary’s Church, where a seven-year-old Bowie sang in the choir with his friends George Underwood and Geoff MacCormack. Nearby is a chip shop that dates back to 1920: I wondered if the lads got a takeaway there, as I did. Their Cub Scout pack, the 18th Bromley, is still based at the church, and meets every Friday. Past Plaistow Green, a well-tended grassy square, it’s another fifteen minutes down quiet, safe streets to David’s former primary school, Burnt Ash.
The Bromel Club, in the Bromley Court Hotel, is another mile from Plaistow Grove, along London Lane. Bowie played there with the Lower