Why Bowie Matters. Will Brooker
with a helmet, set of shoulder pads and a football, all of which had been donated by a local Air Force base.’ The news story features a photo of him in full football gear, and the headline ‘David Leads Sport Revolution’.
We get a sense of the initiative, the ambition, the almost naïve confidence – if you don’t ask, you don’t get – that we associate with the later David Bowie, who drawled like a gangster in ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate’, from 1974: ‘if you want it, boys, get it here.’ But behind this remarkably enterprising teenager, a man stands in the wings: a secondary supporting character, reminding us that David’s supposedly dull suburban life had other dimensions.
‘It all started,’ the local paper explains, ‘when David’s father, Mr Haywood Jones, purchased a short-wave radio with evenings of musical relaxation in mind for the family.’ John Jones is also there in the background of his son’s news stunt: ‘His father, who comes from a family of avid rugby enthusiasts, stood by scratching his head, perplexed.’ He takes the role of the boring suburbanite – ‘it is a safe bet that the people of Bromley may soon be scratching their heads, too’ – but it was John who escorted David (with George Underwood, who appears in some of the photos) up to Grosvenor Square for the day, and who bought the radio set in the first place. Jones Senior had already provided the house with a TV, in time for the coronation in 1953, and a stack of new American 45s, including David’s beloved ‘Tutti Frutti’, in 1956. Bowie later enthused that when he first played Little Richard, ‘My heart nearly burst with excitement. I’d never heard anything even resembling this. It filled the room with energy and colour and outrageous defiance. I had heard God. Now I wanted to see him.’ If this is another convincing origin story for Bowie’s stardom, his dad was behind it, quietly enabling his son’s transformative experience.
David may have dreamed of escape from Bromley, but there are far worse things to escape than boredom. He had the leisure to experiment and play – to join bands, to try different fashions – because, despite the modest size of his house, he was cushioned by a comfortable level of middle-class privilege. In the year they moved to Plaistow Grove, David met new friends at the choir and the Cub Scouts, and was taken by his dad, with his cousin Kristina, to see Tommy Steele, getting his autograph backstage. His headmaster at Burnt Ash encouraged the class to express themselves through ‘movement training’, describing David as a ‘sensitive and imaginative boy’. There were regular trips to his dad’s work, more meetings with TV stars, and a Scout summer camp on the Isle of Wight, where George and David performed their favourite pop songs as a skiffle group.
John Jones took David to visit potential secondary schools; David got his first choice, Bromley Tech, ‘with no real battle’. His form master, Owen Frampton, was progressive and inspirational, starting an ‘art stream for students interested in visual creativity’. David decided he wanted to become a jazz musician, after reading On the Road in 1961: his dad bought him an acrylic sax for Christmas that year. Within a couple of weeks, David had persuaded his dad to help him buy a better one, and they went to Tottenham Court Road together to get a professional instrument on hire purchase. David set himself to the task of learning music from his American singles; self-disciplined for a fifteen-year-old, but no doubt helped by the fact that his house already had an upright piano. With his characteristic, wide-eyed chutzpah (if you want it, boys, get it here), David wrote to a local jazz musician, Ronnie Ross, asking for lessons. His proficiency on the sax got him into his first band, The Konrads, and his first public gig at a school fête. There was a network of local venues ready to accommodate them: church halls for rehearsals, country clubs, colleges and ballrooms. John Jones arranged the band’s professional photoshoot. Although David left school with a single pass, his form master Owen Frampton made the effort to find him a job in advertising, which David was fired from a year later. ‘I just couldn’t stand the pace … it was just so boring trying to compete with sketching out raincoats and things.’ His dad supported him financially as David decided to dedicate himself solely to making it in the music business. Both his parents signed his first management deal, because David was only seventeen. This was summer 1964, and he was in his third band already, having made his television debut in June.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves: but as we piece together the story of how David Jones became Bowie, and how Bowie became Ziggy, it’s important to remember that his background helped him – not just by giving him something to transcend and escape, but in a more literal sense. He faced obstacles and hardships, there’s little doubt of that. The eye injury that left him with a permanently-dilated left pupil sent him to hospital – his dad rushed him in when it ‘just exploded’ – and needed months of convalescence. He argued with his mother in particular, who, concerned about his obsession with music and fashion over schoolwork, ‘wanted me turned down’. He often had to retreat to his bedroom, thinking, in his own words, ‘they are not going to beat me.’ (But didn’t we all, as teenagers?) And then there was Terry, and the family history that Terry carried with him, which we’ll come to later. But he also had a father, at least, who ferried him around, funded him and gave him many of the tools that forged his later, larger-than-life persona. It was his dad, ironically – or with self-sacrificing generosity – who helped his son to become bigger and bolder than David Jones, to rewrite his childhood and to ditch the family name.
But there were a lot of boys in bands in 1960s Bromley, sharing similar levels of middle-class privilege, home comforts and family support. David Jones’s success was not, of course, solely due to his dad. In the story so far, we can already sense an incredible self-belief; for a supposedly sensitive, insular teenager, he went straight for what he wanted. His music career in the 1960s suggests a slow, steady attempt to construct something original and distinctive from available materials: a piecing-together of genres and styles, a testing of what worked and a willingness to quickly reject what didn’t, and a struggle within the system to create something new. He didn’t want to be a great bluesman, a pop singer or a folk artist. He combined his talent for music with his flair for fashion and visual art, using them all as a means to an end. What he wanted was a certain type of stardom.
Shortly before joining The Konrads, he’d been inspired – on another theatre visit, to see Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, in July 1961 – by Anthony Newley’s theatrical flair and his power over a crowd.
He kept saying ‘Stop the world’, and the cast would freeze, and he’d come forward and rap to the audience. Then he’d say ‘OK’ and they’d start moving again. The girls were like machines, lifting their arms and legs up and down like clockwork. It just blew me over and I knew I wanted some of that, but I didn’t know what exactly. That’s when I started formulating my own style.
Even if we take Bowie’s tendency to retcon his past into account, we can trace this impulse through his early experiences with local bands. His dedication to the saxophone, thanks to Ronnie Ross, won him a place in The Konrads. He started to take on vocal duties and wrote some of his own songs, slipping them in between, as he said, the usual covers ‘of anything that was in the charts’. They worked hard; they were a journeyman band, aiming to please the crowds of the Royal Bell in Bromley (now a boarded-up nightclub) and the Beckenham Ballroom with versions of the Shadows and ‘Johnny B. Goode’. Audiences stopped dancing and drifted away from the stage when the band switched to one of David’s compositions, but he kept pushing, expanding them beyond a straightforward covers outfit. He challenged his own insecurities by singing two songs at each gig – ‘I was never very confident of my voice’ – and, perhaps to counter the shyness, started to invent a rock ‘n’ roll persona for himself. He told the others that Jones was a boring name, and toyed with Luther Jay and Alexis Jay before settling on Dave Jay, signing it with a saxophone on the capital letter.
The band’s uniform of green corduroy jackets and brown mohair trousers was his idea too – as were the publicity pics with his dad’s photographer friend – and he drew towering cartoon backdrops of jazz musicians for their later gigs, creating a distinctive sense of theatrical space.
A news report in the Bromley and Kentish Times of August 1963 explains that ‘a feature of their stage act is the special infra-blue lights which, when directed on their specially coated instruments, cause them to change colour – a big hit with the fans.’ The article doesn’t specify that it was