His overnight success demanded a hasty follow-up hit. Steele rushed off ‘Doomsday Rock’, a sliver of jitterbugging daftness about the end of the world; Ziggy’s ‘Five Years’ in crude miniature. The single flopped, but Steele was already unstoppable, closing 1956 as the headliner on a countrywide variety package above ‘television’s crazy comedians’ Mike and Bernie Winters and a ‘Welsh wizard of the keyboards’ calling himself ‘Thunderclap’ Jones. In early December, the latter’s thunder confronted his lightning namesake when the tour spent a week at London’s Finsbury Park Empire. Among the audience on its closing weekend was nine-year-old David Jones from Bromley, there with his dad and his 14-year-old cousin, Kristina. It was the boy’s first rock ’n’ roll concert. A foreshadow of a future legend. A shake, rattle and roll of things to come. A mirror image of what might be: Tommy Hicks, a London boy from south of the river much like himself but renamed, reinvented, reborn as a teenage god.
A handful of originals aside, the bulk of Steele’s twenty-five-minute act put a Bermondsey beat on current hits by America’s rock ’n’ roll pioneers; he’d score his only number one early in the new year knocking ‘Singing The Blues’ by Detroit’s Guy Mitchell off the top of the UK charts with his own rival version. ‘Perhaps one day Tommy will sing songs as English as his speaking accent, or his grin,’ pondered journalist Colin MacInnes, soon-to-be author of Absolute Beginners. ‘If this should happen we will hear once again, for the first time since the decline of the Music Halls, songs that tell of our own world.’
Songs of our own world, and possibly others, electrified the mind of David Jones as he left Finsbury Park that night. His dad, the easily starstruck Boop-A-Doop dreamer of times past, had managed to squeeze him backstage, where David collected Steele’s signature in his autograph book. On the return journey to Bromley he chatted with his cousin about their favourite Steele songs. David loved the one about a hound dog. Kristina told him it was by Elvis Presley. She had the original record.
Back in the Jones’ family home, David watched spellbound as Kristina played him her copy of ‘Hound Dog’, jiggling her body and flapping her limbs lost in its rhythm. Never before had he seen her so physically possessed. Nor could he blame her. The firing-squad snare rolls. The razor-blade guitar solo. And that voice, a roar of savagery in a storm of sex. ‘It really impressed me,’ he’d remember. ‘The power of the music.’
Like the alchemical ‘Shazam!’ transforming Billy Batson into Captain Marvel. Or Elvis Presley into The Memphis Flash. Or Tommy Hicks into Tommy Steele. ‘The power of the music.’ So on a Bromley winter’s night in 1956, nine-year-old David Jones heard the first cry of destiny telling him to become Ziggy Stardust.
NINE
THE FEAR
AS ELVIS PRESLEY writhed his way to immortality on US television screens in the early months of 1956, back in Memphis Sam Phillips, now $40,000 richer, faced the future in urgent need of a replacement to expand his Sun Records empire. Hope prospered in two recent signings, hillbilly bopper Carl Perkins and jail-bothering country roughneck Johnny Cash, not to mention the increased traffic of starry-eyed hopefuls beating a path to Sun’s door believing themselves to be ‘the next Elvis’.
Among them was a 20-year-old piano-savaging Bible-school dropout named Jerry Lee Lewis. His father, a poor farmer from Ferriday, Louisiana, had raised petrol funds for their three-hundred-mile trip to Memphis by selling close to four hundred eggs from the family chicken coop. Turning up unannounced at Sun, his hopes were scrambled to be told the legendary Phillips himself was out of town. Not to waste the journey, Lewis still cut an audition tape for producer Jack Clement in any case, singing ‘everything’ he could remember. Some blues, some gospel, and an ever-popular song about purple dusk and twilight time called ‘Stardust’.
Clement liked Lewis but told him to go away and come back with an original rock ’n’ roll song. A month later, he did, joining Phillips’ roster as both a recording star in his own right – ‘Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano’ – and Sun’s in-house session pianist, lending his distinctive Ferriday fire to Perkins, Cash and a new novelty disc from the pen of reclusive Indiana songwriter Ray Scott. A few years earlier Scott had been at a drive-in movie when he noticed a strange object ‘all lit up and shaped like a cigar’ speeding high over the horizon – eventual fuel for a song about ‘little green men’ landing on Earth in a UFO to teach humans how to bop: ‘They were three-foot high, hit a few bars/ Started rock and roll all the way from Mars.’ Sun passed Scott’s demo to Arkansas-born singing truck driver Billy Lee Riley who eagerly kicked it into familiar rockabilly shape, embellishing the concept by naming his backing band the Little Green Men and tailoring matching green baize suits to wear on stage.
So it came to pass in February 1957, fifteen years before Ziggy, that the fuses of pop music and visitors from outer space were finally soldered together as one on Sun Records 260. Billy Riley and his Little Green Men. ‘Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll’.
WHEN DAVID JONES was born on 8 January 1947 the term ‘flying saucer’ didn’t exist. Nor would it for another six months. Not until 32-year-old American pilot Kenneth Arnold reported the sighting of several ‘peculiar looking’ objects flying over Mount Rainier, south of Seattle, Washington. On the afternoon of 24 June, Arnold was alone in a two-seater plane when he spotted a wedge-shaped formation of nine unidentified aircraft all seemingly without tails streaking through the sky at unnaturally high speed. When later giving statements to the FBI and news reporters, Arnold described them as ‘saucer-like’. Simplified by the press for ease of headlines, the ‘flying saucer’ was born.
Only two weeks after Arnold’s sighting, on 8 July in New Mexico, the front page of the Roswell Daily Record declared ‘RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION’. An official statement issued by the Roswell Army Air Field intelligence office announced that they had ‘come into possession of a flying saucer’, which had crashed on a local ranch. According to the Record, ‘No details of the saucer’s construction or its appearance had been revealed.’ The following day, the same paper reported it had all been a false alarm – the ‘saucer’ was really part of a weather balloon. Yet the seeds of the century’s most famous UFO conspiracy theory had now been sown: that the US military had recovered a genuine interplanetary craft and its occupants; that six months to the day David Bowie popped into the world in Brixton, a Starman had already fallen to Earth on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico.
Flying saucer scares were symptomatic of an age shivering with the onset of Cold War and the shock and awe of atomic power. An age more than ready to rekindle the panic ignited by Welles via Wells not ten years earlier. Those first flinches of invasion paranoia in the press quickly led to shrieks of low-budget hysteria on the soundstages of early-fifties Hollywood. Among the first and best flying saucer films was 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still, a political plea for anti-nuclear global pacifism masquerading as sci-fi drama. Klaatu, a humanoid alien, and his eight-foot robot Gort, arrive in Washington DC in a giant silver saucer. On disembarking Klaatu announces, ‘We have come to visit you in peace,’ only to be promptly shot by the trigger-happy National Guard. He survives, escaping government custody and returning to his planet after delivering a stern warning to humanity – that it should cease its present course towards atomic war or risk obliteration by his peacekeeping space police.
As a benign extraterrestrial missionary come to save Earth from itself, Klaatu was something of a Ziggy-in-the-rough, one who in actor Michael Rennie boasted almost as fabulously feline a set of cheekbones. He was also one of few exceptions to the rule of fifties Hollywood sci-fi with its endless assault from slimy interplanetary aggressors intent on world domination – the perfect climate for producer George Pal’s 1953 film version of The War Of The Worlds, its Martians attacking a Commie-fearing gung-ho America, foregoing Wells’ original tripod fighting machines for stingray-shaped flying saucers.
In Britain, Wells’ old friend, Prime Minister Wi
nston Churchill, was becoming increasingly agitated by recurring UFO stories in the press. He’d been aware of the phenomenon since 1944 when, during the final months of the war, an RAF pilot logged the first official military report of a flying metallic disc. As with all future military sightings, Churchill ordered an official silence on the subject for fear of destabilising the still-victorious national morale. But by the summer of 1952, as the low-budget Hollywood hokum of Flight To Mars hit British cinemas and fresh press reports of UFOs over the White House bounced across the transatlantic newswire, Winston’s nagging unease was serious enough to contact his Air Ministry. ‘What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to?’ he demanded. ‘What can it mean? What is the truth?’
The ministry placated him with the assurance that a full intelligence study had already been undertaken and ‘all the incidents reported could be explained’. But not all of them could. In the high summer of 1956, months after Churchill had retired from office, an incident occurred within British air space which would forever alter the Ministry of Defence’s stance on flying saucers.
The date was Monday 13 August. In Bromley, nine-year-old David Jones was enjoying the school holidays. In America, the unstoppable Elvis Presley was whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ towards his third number one with ‘Hound Dog’. In London, Tommy Hicks was still busking for the Soho slickers in the basement of the 2 I’s, while over in Hammersmith the Gaumont Palace projector shone the tale of Jedda the aboriginal girl, ‘as wild as the land she loved’. And just after 5 p.m. in the radar traffic control room of RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, Technical Sergeant Forrest Perkins began the late shift as watch supervisor.
As night closed in, Perkins took a call from another RAF base in Norfolk warning of a mysterious object heading their way at such an extraordinary speed those who saw it could only describe ‘a blur of light’. The object soon showed up on Lakenheath’s radar. Perkins monitored its odd behaviour for the next half hour: a blip remaining static for five-minute periods before gliding in straight lines at a constant six hundred miles per hour then stopping still for a few minutes’ rest only to glide on again. The same movements were tracked by neighbouring RAF bases in Bentwaters and the air surveillance unit at Neatishead. Assessing the risk posed by the UFO, the decision was taken to scramble a de Havilland Venom night fighter to intercept it.
Perkins guided the Venom towards the still stationary object. Half a mile from contact, the pilot radioed. ‘I’ve got my guns locked on him.’ Seconds later the Lakenheath radar showed the UFO had mysteriously slipped behind the Venom and was now shadowing its flight path, in Perkins’ words, ‘Like it was glued right behind him.’ The pilot spent the next ten minutes trying in vain to shake the UFO with a series of desperate ducks, dives and loop the loops. As Perkins noted, they could tell from the pilot’s radio tone, ‘He was getting worried, excited and also pretty scared.’
Low on fuel, the pilot announced he had to return to base. Perkins watched him on the Lakenheath radar, tailed by the UFO for a few miles until it stopped, resuming a stationary position. ‘I saw something,’ said the pilot, ‘but I’ll be damned if I know what it was.’
A second fighter was scrambled to intercept the UFO. Before it had a chance to approach its target, the engine inexplicably started to malfunction. The second pilot was forced to return to base also. Minutes later the UFO moved out of radar range and was lost.
The next day, anxious top brass from the Ministry of Defence swooped upon the RAF bases concerned, interviewing all pilots, crew and radar technicians involved and reminding them of their obligation to the strict thirty-year rule of silence under the Official Secrets Act. Log books were taken away for expert analysis, never to be seen again. Relevant papers were ‘accidentally destroyed’. Shaky footage from the first Venom’s gun camera, allegedly containing images of the UFO, was also removed to MoD headquarters in Whitehall. It too has since vanished without trace.
Ten years after the ‘Lakenheath–Bentwaters Incident’ – its official name in the annals of ufology – in 1966, American physicist and flying saucer sceptic Dr Edward Condon at the University of Colorado accepted his government’s offer to compile a detailed scientific report into the UFO phenomenon, examining a number of cases from around the world. For security reasons the names of locations were changed, with Lakenheath becoming ‘Greenwich’. Condon’s committee analysed all data, including Perkins’ testimony. Their conclusion made for the most stunning extract of his otherwise fiercely dismissive report published in 1969 as Scientific Study Of Unidentified Flying Objects. ‘Although conventional or natural explanations certainly cannot be ruled out,’ wrote Condon, ‘the probability of such seems low in this case and the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved appears to be fairly high.’
Those who lived to speak of the events of 13 August 1956 beyond any stipulated MoD embargo were left in no doubt that on Lakenheath, Condon was right. At least one genuine UFO. ‘No aircraft then or since has shown the flight envelope demonstrated by that object,’ protested Flight Lieutenant Freddie Wimbledon, chief controller on the night at RAF Neatishead. ‘Are we so arrogant,’ he concluded, ‘as to think we are the only intelligent life in the universe?’
THE MORNING OF 14 August 1956. Mere hours after an unexplained blip vanished from a radar screen in Lakenheath, David Jones awoke in Bromley; a nine-year-old boy who in only a few months’ time would have his juvenile senses irreversibly blinded by the fiendish light of rock ’n’ roll. Who for the time being knew nothing of Tommy Steele, nor Elvis Presley. Nor, like the rest of Britain denied all knowledge of the incident in the press, the unidentified blur of light which had freaked and foxed the major resources of the Royal Air Force one hundred miles away over East Anglia as he slept.
The Starman still wasn’t due for another sixteen years. The boy David had yet to assemble him. Yet Her Majesty’s government was now poised and ready. For they knew what he didn’t. That, as of 13 August 1956, Ziggy Stardust might land any time tomorrow.
TEN
THE PROFESSOR
DAVID JONES WASN’T like other boys. Other boys his age played cowboys and Indians and followed the adventures of ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’ in the Eagle. Other boys his age didn’t suddenly announce ‘I think I’m dying,’ and lie still for hours trying to convince their parents rigor mortis had taken effect. Other boys didn’t pull melodramatic ‘moodies’. They weren’t mysterious. They weren’t, as even he’d later admit ‘slightly camp’. They weren’t anything like an alien pop messiah in hibernation.
Even his earliest taste in music was askew of the norm. Before discovering rock ’n’ roll his mother encouraged him through the national ritual of Sunday lunchtimes listening to the BBC Light Programme’s Family Favourites, kitchen aromas wafted through the furnishings by the strains of ‘With A Song In My Heart’ and the comforting cut-glass tones of ‘forces’ favourite’ Jean Metcalfe. Except that David’s ears were piqued not by comfort but by upset. Musical awkwardness. Hidden within this seemingly safe, morally chaste ark of pleasantries were the Trojan horses of hazy cosmic jive. The Weird Notes. The kind that jack-knifed the melody of Danny Kaye’s ‘Inchworm’ and ‘Tubby The Tuba’ or his mother’s favourite, Mendelssohn’s ‘O, For The Wings Of A Dove’ aria as trilled by the famous boy soprano Master Ernest Lough. Notes that didn’t travel straight but zigged and zagged, as if veering off their intended path. These were the strange sounds of David Jones’ childhood. And then came stranger visions.
On Tuesday 2 June 1953, with the 18-year-old Elvis Presley yet to darken the door of Memphis Recording Services and bump the world off its axis, in Britain some twenty million people spent most of their day staring at a small oblong window in a hulking wooden coffin, peering into a new dimension of monochrome majesty. Largely thanks to the public anticipation of this, the spectacle of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in the weeks beforehand an estimated million extra households invited these bulky, fuzzy, murmuring aliens int
o their living rooms as sales of the hitherto middle-class luxury of the television set rocketed.
One such cathode monolith landed in the front room of the Joneses, then living in Bickley to the south of Bromley. Like the other million families who’d succumbed to Coronation fever, in the weeks that followed the Joneses adjusted to life with their costly new invader in the corner of the living room. Weekday afternoons at 4 p.m. sharp brought Watch With Mother featuring the antics of Andy Pandy and, David’s favourite, The Flowerpot Men. Evenings ushered in serious political chat with The Voice Of The People and the informative natural history of Animal Patterns presented by a young David Attenborough. Saturdays were devoted to sports coverage until the tea-time Children’s Hour starring Sooty and Sweep. And at 8.15 p.m. Saturday nights starting 18 July, the first part of a new thriller serial called The Quatermass Experiment.
Six-year-old David would have been packed off to his bed before the programme started. Only perhaps, as he’d later claim, on that first Saturday he silently crept on tiptoe down the stairs and watched, unseen by his parents, from behind the settee. And his ears, already attuning to the scales of weird, would have smouldered at the discordant awe of its theme tune. And his pliable mind would have swollen with wonder to watch the story unfold of the first manned rocket flight into outer space, of some unexplained malfunction sending the vessel crash-landing to a terraced street just like his own in south London with only one of its three crew emerging alive.
And if he did, then at 8.50 p.m. in Bromley as the boy David crept back to bed ‘rigid with fear’, disturbed by all he’d seen and heard – a rocket scientist named Quatermass, strange things falling to the London suburbs from space, news reporters talking about ‘flying saucer scares’, men with sandwich boards proclaiming the end of the world and the sense-numbing assault of its theme tune – then simultaneously in Memphis where it was just approaching 3 p.m., Elvis Presley would have first set foot in the studios of 706 Union Avenue, loitering in the queue until it was his turn to tell office manager Marion Keisker, ‘I don’t sound like nobody.’
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