TWENTY-YEAR-OLD DAVID BOWIE squared up to the new year with high hopes of 1967: A Hit Odyssey. But while London was swinging, David’s first post-teenage beat was more a demented lollop, closer to a German bierkeller than Carnaby Street. As if he’d been told his future was writing songs about a strange creature from a different world by a drunken gypsy who’d hiccupped and belched over all the fine details. As if everything he’d felt listening to The Velvet Underground had been erased from his mind and replaced by a big fat bowl of jelly and ice cream laced with whatever Vince Taylor took to make him believe he was the son of God. How else to explain the pristine oom-pah daftness of ‘The Laughing Gnome’?
In its favour, it was catchy. And funny, if you liked puns. But it showed all the wounds of a worrying severance between the cosmic crotchets ringing inside David’s head and the queer semi-quavers he was putting on record. And so he sang his song of ‘The Laughing Gnome’ while his mind’s jukebox drowned out its ‘ha-ha-ha’s with The Velvets and The Fugs, and its ‘hee-hee-hee’s with Syd’s Pink Floyd, the left-handed wizardry of The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, a trio formed by ex-Yardbird Eric Clapton who started the year crashing close to the shores of the top ten ringing the Ziggy-ready liberty bell ‘I Feel Free’.
Cream’s first big hit was still ebbing out of the charts in late February when they played David’s local Bromley Court Hotel. David invited Terry along, hoping he could turn his 29-year-old brother on to something other than his old bebop jazz favourites. But as Cream began their set, he noticed Terry starting to swivel and moan, as if the sound was physically assaulting him. He grew worse as the gig continued, eventually so bad that David had to lead him outside for some fresh air. Terry clung to David until they were in the car park, where he fell to the ground, ranting and screaming. He described the pavement cracking open beneath his feet and a ring of fire slowly encircling him, like flames were licking up all the way from hell. David knew this wasn’t booze or a bad trip. He’d seen the same schizophrenic glaze in the eyes of Vince Taylor. Now it shone in those of his poor half-brother, frightened and shaking on the cold ground of Coniston Road for all the world to see. There, in public, David’s great undiscussable family secret. The streak of insanity marbling through the Burns gene on his mother Peggy’s side, a bloodline dammed by lobotomy, shock therapy and early death, now destroying Terry. How much, he wondered, would it destroy him?
Terry Burns wasn’t alone in choking on the smog of madness to fall over London that month. The pop world was stunned by the rock ’n’ roll suicide of ‘Telstar’ producer Joe Meek. An insufferable combination of chart failure, paranoia, blackmail threats over his then-illegal homosexuality, drug abuse, pending bankruptcy and perhaps one séance too many drove him to murder his landlady moments before blowing his brains out; the date, 3 February, was also the eighth anniversary of the death of his idol, Buddy Holly. The last record of Meek’s to be released was a single by London mods The Riot Squad whose singer, Keith Gladman, was so affected by the tragedy he decided to quit. His determined bandmates began looking for a replacement. A few weeks later they found one. His name was David Bowie.
As an artist under contract currently recording their debut solo album, David had no need to seek another group. But The Riot Squad offered him an escape from his own storybook ‘Gnome-man’s land’, a chance to test the new ideas and influences playing havoc with his self-image. David completely restyled the band, ripping the threads from Syd Barrett’s wardrobe with bright flowery shirts and face paint. He made them rehearse covers of his newfound New York thrills, ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and The Fugs’ ‘Dirty Old Man’. He also supplied some unique and uniquely risky originals, the marijuana fantasy ‘Silver Tree Top School For Boys’ and the downright kinky ‘Little Toy Soldier’ stealing its chorus from the Velvets’ ‘Venus In Furs’. A premature, wastepaper basket rehearsal for The Spiders From Mars, his Riot Squad experiment ran its course after one demo and a handful of low-key gigs.
David returned to the day job of being simply David Bowie just in time to promote the release of his first album – titled simply David Bowie. As a bolthole from Bromley he was now lodging at Kenneth Pitt’s Marylebone flat, and it was Pitt whose flattering fanfare graced the back sleeve. ‘David’s keen sense of perception and unusual powers of observation enable him to view the world around him with the eye of an articulate eagle,’ wrote Pitt. ‘He moved so fast that everything he did was two years too soon. Why, he was even photographed in 1964 wearing a military jacket.’
Pitt’s latter comment assumed a cruel poignancy when the album was released on 1 June 1967. The same day as the decade’s decisive pop zeitgeist Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In its instantly iconic pop art cover by Peter Blake, The Beatles assembled a dream cast of their personal heroes, among them portraits of H. G. Wells, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs and Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove co-writer Terry Southern. At the centre of the celebrity scrum in day-glo military jackets stood The Beatles themselves. Or rather, not The Beatles. The strain of their delirious ‘bigger than Jesus’ totalitarian conquest of every human nervous system in the western hemisphere had forced them to cease playing in concert the previous summer. It was Paul McCartney who suggested it ‘would be nice’ to lose their identities by assuming the military alter egos of Sgt Pepper’s band. ‘To submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group,’ McCartney added, ‘we could make up all the culture around it.’ Pop had always been full of alter egos in as far as Reg and Brian sweeping their birth certificates under the rug of a glamorous Marty or Vince. But the ruse of Sgt Pepper blasted open a totally new dimension of illusion and suspended disbelief. A ruse that wasn’t lost on the young David Bowie.
Bitterly, Sgt Pepper also highlighted the shortcomings of the David Bowie album as a defining pop artefact of 1967. While both records looked back through sepia spectacles to a fuzzy, arcane Lord Kitchener’s Empire, The Beatles had done so plugged into the mains of modern psychedelic rock ’n’ roll. The songs of David Bowie sounded strictly vaudeville by comparison. His debut album had been an end rather than a beginning. Such an end that he wouldn’t release another record for the next two years. Two long years in which to reassess who or what ‘David Bowie’ really was.
Unable to make any headway in pop, he first rebounded into delusions of thespian grandeur. A director friend of Pitt’s offered to cast him in a comedy film based on the classical legend of Orpheus in the underworld. The role was that of a pop singer who is eventually ripped to pieces by his own fans. The film was never made.
Potentially more disastrous was his escalating interest in Buddhism. David attended regular meetings at the Tibet Society, studying their literature and philosophy and meditating with lama monks. His next move towards enlightenment would have involved retreating to a monastery in Scotland, a vow of abstinence and a shaved head. The Scottish bit didn’t bother him so much as the lack of sex and hair. He wisely stayed in London, his locks and libido unsnipped.
Still resisting the straighter path of pop, his next tangent was thankfully more fruitful. David decided he wanted to study mime after being introduced to Lindsay Kemp, a 29-year-old Scottish actor and dancer currently performing a one-man show off Covent Garden. Kemp was to become David’s mentor, friend and one of his many lovers. But more importantly he pruned away the dead wood of David Jones to reveal a little more of the Starman lying in ambush within. It was Kemp who first opened David’s eyes to the exotic costumes, make-up and mannerisms of Japanese kabuki. It was Kemp who properly taught his body to ‘exteriorise’ the soul through movement. And it was Kemp who embedded his love for the work of a Belgian songwriter and former labelmate of Vince Taylor, Jacques Brel.
David’s first dose of Brel came in the autumn of ’67 with the solo debut of ex-Walker Brother Scott Walker, himself an aloof pop enigma whose mass appeal was neatly summed up by his publicist as ‘isolation inviting adulation’. The Scott album featured three of Brel’s English translations by Bri
ll Building veteran Mort Shuman, including both ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘My Death’. Walker covered more Brel on his second and third albums of ’68 and ’69, by which stage David had since been ‘absolutely floored’ by the off-Broadway hit Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris, a theatrical showcase of the Belgian’s songbook which he and Kemp saw many times during its five-week London run.
Between kabuki and Jacques Brel, Kemp’s influence boded well for the coming of Ziggy Stardust. So too David’s discovery of a poem by Liverpool’s Roger McGough, ‘At Lunchtime’, about bus passengers freaking out thinking it was the end of the world – a lyrical spore for ‘Five Years’. Only the fact he was currently reciting the poem as part of a one-man cabaret act where he also sang ‘The Laughing Gnome’ to a glove puppet seemed the action of someone who’d willingly allowed their once promising pop career to slip into the doldrums. His record label obviously agreed. They’d since scheduled his next single, a song presumably born of his thankfully aborted Scottish exodus, ‘London Bye Ta-Ta’, only to cancel its release at the last minute. The same month, they dropped him.
David Bowie was 21-years-old. Now a singer–songwriter without a label, without a band. In bloody-minded defiance he drew up a radical new masterplan making full use of Kemp’s training. He would re-launch himself as a mime artist in a one-man show enacting the Chinese invasion of Tibet. He was also, as he’d later admit, smoking a lot of marijuana at the time.
Then again, sometimes it helped being out of one’s gourd. David could forget about all his recent frustrations and failures and vanish in the clouds of future fantasy. He could do what a lot of trippy hipsters were doing that summer of ’68. Get high. Go to the pictures. Maybe try losing his mind in that far-out new Stanley Kubrick film …
NEARLY FOUR YEARS after Kubrick’s first meeting with Clarke at Trader Vic’s, 2001: A Space Odyssey was finally complete. The original cut was close to three hours long and included a ten-minute prologue of edited interviews with physicists, astronomers and theologians discussing the possible existence of extraterrestrial life and its impact on our concepts of God and the universe. After the first press previews, Kubrick decided to lose the prologue, along with another nineteen minutes of film, before its official American release in the first week of April 1968. Even so, at two hours and twenty minutes with minimal dialogue the film was still ‘too long’ and ‘boring’ for test audiences. The critics were no kinder. The New York Times wrote it off as ‘somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring’. Many agreed it was ‘dull’ and ‘banal’, while in Harper’s Bazaar the notorious cinematic reaper Pauline Kael hacked into it as ‘a monumentally unimaginative movie’.
Kubrick was bulletproof. He confidently dismissed all negative comments as clear-cut evidence of a generation gap, attributing the ‘poor reaction’ to the wrong preview audience voicing a blinkered opinion of a film their senses weren’t equipped to understand. ‘There’s a basic problem with people who are not paying attention with their eyes,’ he argued. ‘They’re listening. And they don’t get much from listening to this film. Those who won’t believe their eyes won’t be able to appreciate this film.’
There was more to Kubrick’s conviction than bullish vanity. A generation of kids softened by the age of Sgt Pepper and flower power were, as he’d guessed, ready and willing to believe their eyes. Kubrick had given them the gift of a mind-bending widescreen psychedelic spectacle. The ultimate trip. With 2001: A Space Odyssey, the hippies could now join the space race.
The film premiered in London the same month, beginning a year-long run at the Casino Cinerama Theatre in Soho, just along Old Compton Street from the 2 I’s coffee bar. Which is where a soporifically stoned David Bowie wandered in and sank into his seat.
The lights dimmed and for the first three minutes he sat in inky darkness, the moaning unease of György Ligeti’s Atmosphères pricking his ears like a scream of insects. And then there was light. Blinding starlight curving white arcs around the edges of planets, stabbing his eyes from the great beyond, sucking him up out of his chair into the unimaginable softness of the cosmos. Light and music. The sound of all life awakening. The big bang hallelujah chorus of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra. Daa. Daaa. Daaaa. DA-DAAAAA!
Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom!
For the next two hours his senses were whiplashed through time and space. Back millions of years to the dawn of man’s docile primate ancestors who learn the art of war through the first apparition of Clarke’s giant monolith. Then forward to a future of space stations spinning above a pale watery planet to the graceful waltz of Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube and another monolith unearthed by astronauts under the surface of the moon. Forward again to NASA’s first mission to Jupiter, sabotaged by the artificial intelligence of the spaceship’s on-board computer, HAL, until he’s de-programmed by the sole survivor, Dr Dave Bowman. ‘Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?’ And finally climaxing with the psychedelic crescendo ‘Beyond The Infinite’; Bowman’s mind and body wrung through an alien kaleidoscope of light and colour until his journey’s end, evolving into a luminous humanoid foetus, the ‘Star-Child’. The now familiar kettle drums of Thus Spake Zarathustra beat deep into David’s ribcage. Alien contact had been made and, Sagan was right, Kubrick only had to ‘suggest’ it. The final frames of the Star-Child drifting towards Earth peeled back another layer of David’s brain. The superbeing born on Earth, reborn in space, seconds from returning to save mankind.
Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom!
The End.
FOR DAVID BOWIE, 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t just a film. It was a commandment. A burning bush in Super Panavision 70. He returned to see it several times, telling friends he felt completely ‘zapped’, yanked through his own cosmic wringer just like Dr Dave Bowman – Dave, Bow, he was only a syllable away himself. The future vision of 2001 was also that of David Bowie. One day he’d look back and agree. ‘It predicted my lifestyle for the seventies.’
Nor was it only about the psychedelic kick, the jaw-swinging special effects, the fact that when it was released humans had yet to set foot on the Moon but Kubrick realised it so eloquently that when they finally did astronauts remarked the real experience ‘was just like 2001’. It was something far deeper, a bleak human truth, a sense of isolation which touched the absolute core of his latent Starman. An understanding 2001 wasn’t really about space, or aliens, but loneliness. The pure, beautiful loneliness that exists at the centre of all great art, from Beethoven’s Late Quartets to Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Loneliness. Isolation. Or like Scott Walker, ‘isolation inviting adulation’.
If he could find a way to capture that same feeling, sat in the darkness of the cinema, staring at the sad little rock of human life so blue, so helpless, hanging in the unthinkable emptiness of deep space. No comedy gnome voices or wobbling Anthony Newley tics but a song from the soul with all the pathos of Jacques Brel. The ballad of the loneliest man in the universe. Floating in his tin can. Far above the world.
Yes. A musical space odyssey. He just might have the making of a great pop song …
FOURTEEN
THE RIVAL
THE IDEA FOR the musical space odyssey kicked and thrashed inside David’s head like an impatient foetus desperate to escape its womb. Until in the last weeks of 1968, the waters of inspiration finally broke. On Christmas Eve, David was among the millions watching a satellite broadcast from NASA’s Apollo 8 command module containing the first men to fly around the Moon. They beamed back pictures of the Earth as seen from the far side of the Moon accompanied by their reading of the opening ‘let there be light’ passages from The Book Of Genesis. Speaking to mission control, astronaut Jim Lovell confessed ‘the vast loneliness is awe-inspiring’. It made David imagine himself in the same situation, piloting the Apollo 8 from Earth to the Moon and back. Had it been him, he thought, something would have almost certainly gone wrong.
And so he took 2001’s Dav
e Bowman and Apollo 8 captain Frank Borman and created his own astronaut, called Major Tom, on a solo mission to the Moon. He leaves Earth a national hero but becomes overwhelmed by the intense alienation. Ground control lose radio contact with Major Tom who is left stranded alone in space, staring helplessly at the blue planet he once called home. A simple tune about a tragic spaceman. A hymn to human isolation and our planetary solitude in the wider universe. In wordplay homage to Kubrick, David called it ‘Space Oddity’.
One of the first to hear David’s new song was his old comrade in Carnaby clobber, the handsome young upstart he’d met over a tin of paint in Denmark Street a few years earlier. The one who called himself ‘King Mod’.
Life had been good to King Mod in the interim, more so than it had been for David. After a few false starts, flop singles and changes in haircut he’d finally clawed his way into the charts with a hippy folk stupor about a girl named ‘Debora’ (who looked like ‘a zebra’). King Mod wasn’t even a mod any more, more of a fairytale pixie fallen from the pages of Arthur Rackham made wild trembling hair and bleating flesh. The papers were already nicknaming him ‘The Boppin’ Elf’. While David’s muse was lost in space, King Mod’s was somewhere in the bowels of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a fantasy realm of wizards, unicorns and silver satyrs. He wrote songs with odd titles like ‘Frowning Atahuallpa’ exclusively for voice, acoustic guitar and bongos. But with two albums and two minor hit singles by the age of 21, he was winning in a race where David was forever struggling to get off the blocks.
In early 1969, King Mod was living in the epicentre of west London hippiedom in a pokey basement flat off Ladbroke Grove. It was there, in what he jokingly called his ‘chateau in the west’, that David sang him ‘Space Oddity’ on acoustic guitar. King Mod sat nodding his head in rhythm to its slow, melancholic chords. Afterwards he told David he thought it sounded a bit like The Bee Gees’ ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’, a resemblance some of his other friends had also picked up on. But King Mod liked it. ‘It’s going to be a hit,’ he predicted. David left overjoyed with encouragement. But as he closed the door behind him, King Mod’s eager smile collapsed in a brimstone scowl.
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