Why Bowie Matters. Will Brooker
‘It was a very conventional suburban home, a tiny terraced house, very comfortable and very homely … and there I’d sit in the front room, talking about David, and his mother would tell me, “You know, he was always the prettiest boy in the street, the sort of boy that all the neighbours loved.”’
Biographer Christopher Sandford adds to the complexity of this family portrait. David’s father was ‘irrepressibly proud of his son’ but also ‘dour, taciturn and tight-fisted – a cold man, an unresponsive man’ who had a stream of affairs and was ‘very prejudiced … very’. Peggy, by contrast, was ‘loud, fractious and given to bewildering mood swings’, yet also ‘inhibiting and aloof’. Sandford finds quotes from Bowie to support this perspective: his father ‘had a lot of love in him, but he couldn’t express it. I can’t remember him ever touching me’, while a compliment from his mother ‘was very hard to come by. I would get my paints out and all she could say was, “I hope you’re not going to make a mess.”’
Peggy herself told an origin myth of Bowie. When he was three, she explained to a journalist in 1985, he’d taken an ‘unnatural’ interest in the contents of her make-up bag. ‘When I found him, he looked for all the world like a clown. I told him that he shouldn’t use make-up, but he said, “You do, Mummy.”’ It’s a neat story, and it echoes her son’s memory of being scolded for playing with paints, as well as his later glam, drag and Pierrot personae. But with hindsight, knowing what David Jones became, it’s understandable if those who knew him, even his mother, tend to tell stories that fit the finished picture, and if biographers, in turn, choose those as the building-blocks of their books. Our sense of David Jones’s childhood is a mixture of non-fiction, invention and half-truth, shaped retroactively by everyone’s awareness of what happened next. The adult Bowie – sometimes literally – rewrites the past of young Jones, and those who knew him tend to follow suit.
Underwood, for instance, remembers that David boasted precociously to the school careers adviser, ‘I want to be a saxophonist in a modern jazz quartet.’ Owen Frampton recalls the Bowie of Bromley Tech as ‘quite unpredictable … already a cult figure’. Dana Gillespie claims Bowie told her, at age fourteen, ‘I want to get out of here. I have to get out of here. I want to go up in the world.’ A neighbour tells Sandford that Bowie used to stand in the glow of the Crown pub’s coaching-lantern, ‘anticipating his pose as Ziggy Stardust’. Another relative recalls that he stood up in front of the TV, aged nine, and announced, ‘I can play guitar just like the Shads … and he did’ – even though the Shadows didn’t appear in public until David was eleven. The local anecdote about Peggy taking her infant son to the shops with ribbons in his hair – ‘No wonder he turned out weird!’ – falls into the same pattern. Even the midwife who delivered baby David in 1947 supposedly pronounced, eerily prefiguring the image of Bowie as angel messiah, that ‘this child has been on earth before’. His music teacher, Mrs Baldry, is unusual in her careful refusal to fuel the Bowie myth. ‘He was no spectacular singer. You’d never have picked him out and said, “That boy sings wonderfully.”’ Bowie’s own revisions of his past, of course, don’t help. ‘I’ve always been camp since I was seven,’ he claimed. ‘I was outrageous then.’ His tendency to retcon his own origins – to suggest that the seeds of his later strangeness and stardom were already rooted in childhood – is particularly evident in his 1970s interviews, when he was keenly forging his media brand.
‘Can’t tell the bullshit from the lies.’ As ever, Bowie’s lyric was knowing. The truth, inevitably, lies in an amalgam of all these testimonies – the interviews, the reminiscences, the dry documents – with the likeliest possibilities emerging in the overlaps between stories, or in a combination of apparently contradictory reports. A house can be tiny, poky and cold to one visitor; tiny, cosy and warm to another. A man can find it difficult to express physical affection towards his son, but show his love by buying him instruments and introducing him to celebrities. A mother can praise her boy as the prettiest in the street, but still feel wary of him playing with her make-up. A woman can sing without shame to the radio over a family Sunday dinner, and still seem aloof or uncomfortable in front of a fourteen-year-old girlfriend. A teenager can have many friends and still feel lonely.
The information we have about Bowie in Bromley (and in London, and Berlin, and New York) is a complex mosaic: Dylan Jones’s David Bowie: A Life, a collection of short interviews from which some of the quotations above are taken, is a perfect example of a book’s form echoing its subject. Bowie is, essentially, a kaleidoscope of multicoloured fragments, constantly shifting. We can identify patterns from the shapes, but someone else can look again from a different angle, and twist a little, and see something new. Our knowledge of him is a complex network, where two conflicting ideas can both have been true at once. ‘Some writers have struggled to put all this in a logical sequence,’ he told journalist George Tremlett in the late 1960s. ‘I wouldn’t bother if I were you.’
Why does this matter? It matters to remember that David Bowie did not descend to earth in 1947 but spent the longest stretch of his younger years in that tiny home on Plaistow Grove and in the streets surrounding it. He wasn’t hanging out with glam rockers and groupies, but with Peggy and John Jones, with George and Geoff and Peter, and sometimes Kristina, and sometimes his half-brother Terry Burns. Ten years before Ziggy, he was the fourteen-year-old in his school photo, with a winning, wonky grin, a neat haircut and two perfectly normal eyes.
He was, in many ways, like the hundreds of other boys at Burnt Ash and Bromley Tech. He was also far from the only local lad to form a band as a teenager: his first group, The Konrads, was already well-established, with George Underwood as the vocalist, by the time David was allowed to join in June 1962. David Jones had talent and ambition, but so did a lot of young men in his social circle. Somehow, he made himself exceptional. Somehow, he emerged from this environment and created an act – a work of art – that the world had never seen before. The story matters because anyone could have done it, but only Bowie did: and the fact that a boy who grew up in Bromley could forge the persona of a world-conquering glam rock messiah is surely more inspiring to the rest of us than the idea that Bowie simply arrived from space, fully-formed.
So how did he do it? This is my own interpretation: my way of connecting points in the Bowie matrix to create a story.
The suburbs played a part. Novelist Jonathan Coe has written of his upbringing on the outskirts of Birmingham that ‘it gave me the imaginative space to dream of different worlds; wider, more exciting, not necessarily better. It was the very uneventfulness of the suburbs that turned so many of us into creators.’ Rupa Huq, in Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture, identifies locations like Bromley as a nowhere-land, neither ‘city’ nor ‘country’. ‘There is a case to be made,’ she goes on, ‘for the very fact that suburbs are seen as unremarkable and conformist allowing artistic endeavour to flourish there.’ David Buckley agrees that ‘the geography of the situation is crucial: living in the suburbs so close to London provided the perfect paradigm for escape. London represented exotica, freedom and change for youngsters driven to near-desperation by the blandness of the capital’s environs. And it was close by – a mere half an hour away by train.’ No wonder Bowie’s back bedroom, where he listened to the radio within earshot of the railway line, looking out at the carriage lamp of a busy pub, is such a potent image in his origin myth. Academics like the word ‘liminal’ for these spaces that lie in between, neither one thing nor the other; ‘liminal’ comes from the Latin for ‘threshold’. David was outside, waiting and wanting to cross over.
‘You find yourself in the middle of two worlds,’ he reflected. ‘There’s the extreme values of people who grow up in the countryside, and the very urban feel of the city. In suburbia, you’re given the impression that nothing, culturally, belongs to you. That you are, sort of, in this wasteland.’ He dreamed not just of London but also beyond it, through the jazz records and Beat poetry Terry Burns brought back from Soho, to America. Young David, born exactly twelve years after Elvis, was already fired up on ‘Hound Dog’ and Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’, and listened to the American Armed Forces Radio; by age thirteen he’d written to the US Navy via the embassy in