Why Bowie Matters. Will Brooker
Restaurant, a gorgeous space of curved archways and elegant pillars. There are photos of Bowie with a mod haircut on display in the hotel reception, with a mounted single of his early songs with the Lower Third and The Manish Boys.
Sitting in the restaurant, I studied a different kind of matrix: a list of names and numbers, from an old reference book called Kelly’s Directory. It told me exactly who had lived on Bowie’s street and in the surrounding area in specific years. Even the abbreviations carried an air of quaint, pre-war convention. Every George was shortened to Geo., every William was a Wm. There were Herberts, Cuthberts, Cyrils and Arthurs; the Misses Austin, Miss Osborn and Miss Gibbs. I spoke to residents who’d lived on Plaistow Grove at the same time as Bowie. Some of them remembered him, or had stories about him passed down from previous generations. One told me that her nan saw David with his mother regularly at Mr Bull’s greengrocer shop. ‘She always tied coloured ribbons in his hair as a toddler because she wanted a girl. No wonder he turned out weird!’ Bromley’s older locals confirmed the shops around the corner from the Jones family, all the owners known politely by their surname. Mr and Mrs Bull had a dog called Curry. The Kiosk, selling sweets at Sundridge Park Station, was run by Miss Violet Hood; then there was Coates electrical engineers, Arthur Ash boot repair, Bailey’s the newsagent, a butcher’s shop run by two brothers, and a hair salon variously known at different times as Beryl’s or Paul’s.
Plaistow Lane, the main road, slopes slightly uphill before the turn on to Bowie’s home street. A painted sign brands the area as Sundridge Village. On a sunny evening in spring, it looks like a great place to grow up. David Jones’s neighbours did not change at all between 1955, when he was eight, and 1967, when he turned twenty. There was Miss Florence West, to the left at number 2, and to the right, Mr Harry Hall; Mr George Rowe lived at number 8, and Mr and Mrs Pollard at number 10. None of them moved in or out during those twelve years. On that specific, local level, Bowie’s life on Plaistow Grove seems consistent to the point of being comatose.
Walking down the short, quiet street from the main road to his house – morning, Miss West, good morning, Mr Hall – you can easily imagine an ambitious, imaginative and creative teenager becoming bored. From his back bedroom he could hear the trains from Sundridge Park on their way to London, and the music and boozy crowds from the pub, the Crown Hotel, at the end of his garden. I talked to a resident who’d occupied the same room, after the Jones family left. She explained that you couldn’t hear the trains anymore, now that the windows were double-glazed. Times change. The Crown is now Cinnamon Culture, an upmarket Indian. I sat in the beer garden. You can see what would have been his bedroom window, from the back, and imagine him again, looking out at the lights, the trains, the adults in couples and groups; listening to the music from the pub as it mixed with his American radio broadcasts, and longing for escape.
Of course, it’s only imagination. We can establish certain facts, but then we choose how to fill in the gaps. Without Bowie’s long-promised but never-written autobiography, we can only rely on available documentary evidence like maps and directories, and the recollections of his friends, family members and acquaintances, decades later. But judging by the jokes, provocations and outright lies that constitute many of Bowie’s interviews, can we really assume that even his own memoirs would be any more reliable?
Every biography of Bowie, even the most authoritative, is a constellation created by joining together a scatter of stars into a convincing picture. It is a particular route, plotted across the points of a map, which leaves some paths untravelled. It is a selection of ideas and evidence from the Bowie matrix – the vast network of what we know about this public figure and private man – which emphasises some details, and discards others. That’s the nature of research and writing: not just the discovery of information but the way we join it up; what we omit, as well as what we include. A history of Bowie – like any other history – is a story, based around selection, interpretation, speculation and deletion. It has to be, because if biographers simply absorbed and channelled all the available information about Bowie’s life, it would overwhelm any sense of conventional narrative and character: put simply, it wouldn’t even make sense.
In 1967, for instance, Bowie told a New Musical Express journalist that he’d moved with his family not to Bromley, but to Yorkshire when he was eight. He claimed to have lived with an uncle in an ancient farmhouse, ‘surrounded by open fields and sheep and cattle’, complete with a seventeenth-century monk’s hole where Catholic priests had hidden from Protestant persecution. The NME journalist commented helpfully that it was ‘a romantic place for a child to grow’. There’s a seed of truth in what sounds a purely fanciful story: Kevin Cann’s Any Day Now: The London Years, built around well-documented details, suggests that David did visit his Uncle Jimmy in Yorkshire for holidays in 1952 and fabricated these trips into an extended stay at a later age. Yet even this contradicts Bowie’s simultaneous assertion that he lived in Brixton until the age of ten or eleven and walked to school past the gates of its prison. Authors Peter and Leni Gillman dug into educational archives to confirm that David Jones transferred into Burnt Ash Juniors, Bromley, on 20 June 1955. The school is seven miles from Brixton Prison, which makes it very unlikely that a ten-year-old took that detour. Historical records and maps, with their prosaic evidence, are duller than Bowie’s stories about his past, but more reliable.
Can we trust the memories of the people who grew up with him? Dana Gillespie, one of Bowie’s first girlfriends, memorably describes a trip to his parents’ ‘tiny little working-class house … the smallest I’d ever been in’. She thinks they had ‘little tuna sandwiches … it was a really cold house, a very chilly atmosphere.’ There was a television ‘blasting away in the corner, and nobody spoke’. She repeated the anecdote for Francis Whately’s 2019 documentary, David Bowie: Finding Fame, adding a postscript: ‘It was hard going. It was soulless.’
David Jones’s mother Margaret, known as Peggy, is similarly described by his former school-friends as cold and unaffectionate: ‘I don’t think it was a family,’ remembered Dudley Chapman. ‘It was a lot of people who happened to be living under the same roof.’ George Underwood agrees: ‘Even David didn’t like his mum. She wasn’t an easy person to get on with.’ Geoff MacCormack remembers telling Bowie that Peggy ‘never quite took to me’, receiving the rueful confession in response that ‘she never quite took to me, either.’ Peter Frampton suggests that David had a better relationship with his teacher, Owen Frampton – Peter’s dad – than he did with his own father, Hayward Stenton (known as ‘John’) Jones. ‘I’m not privy to the relationship … but I don’t think it was that great.’
George Underwood, by contrast, recalls John Jones as ‘lovely, a really nice gentle man’, while Bowie’s cousin, Kristina Amadeus, points out that David’s dad, who ‘absolutely doted on him’, bought him a plastic saxophone, a tin guitar and a xylophone before he was an adolescent, and that ‘he also owned a record player when few children had one … David’s father took him to meet singers and other performers preparing for the Royal Variety Performance.’ The Jones’s house may have seemed tiny to Dana Gillespie, but to Kristina, it was ‘lower middle class … his father was from a very affluent family.’ Uncle John, she tells the Gillmans, ‘really wanted him to be a star’. Note that despite these many documented friendships and relationships with cousins close to his age, Bowie reports of his childhood that ‘I was lonely,’ and also recalled: ‘I was a kid that loved being in my room reading books and entertaining ideas. I lived a lot in my imagination. It was a real effort to become a social animal.’
Despite the supposed coldness of the Jones family home, Bowie reminisced in the late 1990s about roast dinners on wintry Sundays, with a small fire blazing, and his mother’s voice soaring to match the songs on the radio. ‘Oh, I love this one,’ she’d remark, joining in with ‘O For the Wings of a Dove’, before haranguing John Jones for thwarting her musical ambitions. David Buckley’s biography describes her as a ‘drama queen’ with a frustrated dream of ‘being a singer, being a star’, while John was ‘naturally nonconfrontational’. Frigid, unaffectionate, not really a family; or a warm, even heated environment, with a drama-queen mother and a softly-spoken dad who used his industry connections, his experience as head of Dr Barnardo’s publicity department, and his comfortably middle-class salary to support his