Why Bowie Matters. Will Brooker
a TV appearance, a magazine feature. He was ruthless, self-centred, dedicated to his own success, but endearingly creative in how he achieved it. He was single-minded and canny, but also innocently imaginative: his natural shyness and sensitivity were balanced with sheer front and cheeky charm. Writing to a self-made millionaire in the laundry self-service business and asking him to sponsor the King Bees worked because it reached John Bloom out of the blue, taking the magnate by surprise. David was an artist, not a con-artist.
How much of his approach during those five years was clever media manipulation, and how much was an expression of something more personal? Were the dyed hair, piratical boots and leather blousons of 1964 the sign of David’s genuine interest in way-out styling, or the fashioning of a distinctive brand image? We can’t know. He may not have known himself.
We have to guess whether he was just playing with the press when he told the reporter he was into boys, ‘of course’, prefiguring his later claims to be gay and bisexual. We can’t be sure whether he changed his hair, his clothes and brand to fit the changing market, or his own changing tastes; whether he was genuinely trying to subvert gender roles with his long hair, or whether he simply guessed it would get headlines. His interviews at the time are as frivolously playful as his later interactions with journalists: ‘Insistently he claims the dubious honour of being Bromley’s first “Mod” but has since changed his philosophy to become a “Rocker”,’ proclaimed his press release in 1965. David ‘likes Scandinavian “birds” … dislikes education, 9–5 jobs, long straight roads and “coppers” (in either sense – “cash” or the “law”)’.
Were the idiosyncratic ideas like infra-blue lighting, a Wild West-themed band and the cartoon backdrops just an attempt to grab attention with a gimmick, or a deeper impulse from the boy who’d been told not to make a mess in his bedroom with paints, and now found himself with more freedom? The truth is that we don’t have to choose – the same decision can combine both a clever media strategy and a personal, artistic experiment. Again, when we meet a contradiction in Bowie’s history, it doesn’t always have to be resolved: we can see it in double vision.
It’s tempting to think, though, that when he dug out his green corduroy jacket from The Konrads and drew felt-pen stripes over it, customising it for his brief role with the Riot Squad in spring 1967, that this was an act of individual expression, a creative sabotage of the uniform he’d worn in his first band. In contrast to the teenage investment he’d put into The Konrads, the Riot Squad was a deliberately short-term fling for a twenty-year-old Bowie. The band knew he was going to move on, and they welcomed his ideas of hand-painted props, mime and make-up: they already used a flashing blue police light in performances, which may have drawn him in. He even hid behind a disguise rather than using his real (stage) name, adopting the temporary alias ‘Toy Soldier’ in promotional material: perhaps his first persona. The jacket is now on display in Bromley Library, one floor down from the maps and local directories. ‘It’s tiny, isn’t it?’ the archivist remarked to me. ‘And what a conservative type of rebellion’ – she laughed – ‘to draw pinstripes on your own jacket!’
He’d been writing his own lyrics since at least summer 1962; The Konrads backing singer Stella Gall remembers him noting them down in an exercise book. He didn’t have to persuade a band to let him perform them now, or compete for credit. He no longer had to cover this week’s hits, or ape the sound of Lennon and The Beatles, or Daltrey and The Who. This was his opportunity to let the world hear David Bowie. What did he do with his new solo platform? He let the world hear another Anthony Newley.
That’s an over-simplification, of course. But Bowie’s debut album for Deram is a compilation of oddities, made up largely of short stories about quirky characters: a ‘Little Bombardier’ who is driven out of town for inappropriate friendships with children; ‘Uncle Arthur’ who leaves his wife and returns to Mother’s cooking; the cross-dressing soldier in ‘She’s Got Medals’. These are vignettes with a mild twist, centring veterans from wars before Bowie’s time – the narrator of ‘Rubber Band’ fought in the 1914–18 conflict – and delivered with a chirpy-chappy vocal. The sound effects and melodramatic acting of ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’, the spoken punchlines at the end of ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, and the comedy voices (Nazis, news announcers) on ‘We Are Hungry Men’ add to the sense of vaudeville. Like ‘Rubber Band’, ‘Maid of Bond Street’ is based around a play on words (‘this girl is made of lipstick … this girl is maid of Bond Street’), and ‘She’s Got Medals’ also does double-service as a dirty joke, as Chris O’Leary points out (basically, ‘she’s got balls’).
O’Leary suggests that Bowie’s shift towards music-hall pastiche and a celebration of an imaginary English past was a clever move, ‘acutely timed’ to fit with a nostalgic 1967 trend for brigadier moustaches and military uniforms. The brass-buttoned jacket Bowie wears on the LP’s cover is a smart, sober version of The Beatles’ multicoloured Sgt. Pepper get-up; their album, celebrating a mythical military band that launched ‘twenty years ago today’, was released the same week as Bowie’s. On the other hand, we know that Bowie had genuinely been inspired by Newley back in 1961, before he joined The Konrads, and may have seen this shift into theatrical storytelling as a way to express himself as an original artist; a sharp about-turn from the stale Mod scene.
On one level, we shouldn’t expect Bowie’s 1960s solo work to tell us anything about his upbringing and environment. His decisions so far had all been based around gaining greater independence and celebrity, using each band in turn to move further away from the Bromley music scene. His gigs took him on increasingly wider circuits, from school fêtes and local village halls with The Konrads in 1963, to the Jack of Clubs and the Marquee in Soho with The King Bees in 1964, to gigs in Maidstone, Newcastle and Edinburgh with The Manish Boys by the end of that year. In December 1965 and January 1966, he performed with the Lower Third at Le Golf-Drouot and Le Bus Palladium in Paris.
But on the other hand, he kept returning: not just to Soho – he held a regular slot at the Marquee Club – but to the Bromel Club, barely fifteen minutes’ walk from his parents’ home. He was still living at Plaistow Grove in 1965, though he shuttled between Bromley and Maidstone during his stint with The Manish Boys, and spent nights in between gigs at friends’ houses or in the band’s van. As a minor, Bowie still needed his parents to sign his contracts, and drew a sketch map for Pitt in summer 1966, showing him how to get from Sundridge Park Station to 4 Plaistow Grove: Pitt wrote to John Jones and ‘your wife’ to confirm that he would be David’s sole manager, and visited Bromley in February 1967 to go through the paperwork. The first time Bowie formally moved out from his parents’ house was June of that year, when he began sharing Pitt’s apartment in London; even then, he only spent Monday to Friday with Pitt, and went back to Bromley at weekends. He unashamedly told a magazine in July of that year that he still lived at home with his parents. ‘I’d never leave them; we’ve got a good thing going.’ As O’Leary points out ‘The London Boys’, despite its edgy urban setting, was written by a teenager ‘living in Bromley, fed and clothed and funded by his parents’, and feels like ‘a suburban correspondent filing a story from the field’.
Though part of him was trying to escape his background, he was clearly reluctant to fully give it up, and this tension crept into his work, sometimes between the lines and sometimes more explicitly. Bromley was the territory he knew best, and it formed part of his mental landscape. But what emerges more strongly is a sense of in-betweenness: the dynamic between safety and escape, comfort and frustration, home and adventure, city and suburb, family and freedom. Bowie’s first-person narrators and characters of the period are often caught between these choices, poised in limbo.
Take, for instance, ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ (January 1966), which Kevin Cann sees as a ‘confessional and reflective’ evocation of ‘his mother, Sundridge Park Station, the recreation ground at the end of his street, St Mary’s Church’. While it lends itself to an autobiographical reading, with a girl calling out, ‘Hi, Dave,’ its lyrics are, in fact, not nearly so specific as Cann suggests – there’s a church, a mother, a recreation ground, a station and indeed a school, but they are left generic. The song focuses on the moment when its young narrator is forced to leave (‘I’ve gotta pack my bags,