David Bowie Made Me Gay

by Darryl W. Bullock

  Open 24 hours a day, Holloway Express, at 304 Holloway Road, North London, is the ideal place to pick up a pint of milk and a loaf of bread on your way home or a quick bite to eat on your way to a football match at the nearby Emirates Stadium. It’s an unimposing shop on the ground floor of an unimposing building. Before Holloway Express opened its doors, the premises had housed a bike shop, a branch of Lloyds Bank and, back at the beginning of the 1960s, it was where Albert and Violet Shenton plied their trade, selling handbags, suitcases and other travel goods. All very pedestrian and unexciting.

  Yet for almost seven years, on the three floors immediately above A. H. Shenton Leather Goods, 304 Holloway Road is where magic was made.

  In Britain, during the dark days of the 1950s and 1960s, those bleak years after the Second World War but before the Wolfenden Report, being homosexual was akin to having the plague. Gay people were spat upon in the street, beaten up and even imprisoned for their sexuality. Outside a foreign film in an arthouse cinema, you would never see LGBT people portrayed in a positive way in the media – although certain gay stereotypes (especially that of the effeminate man or violent butch dyke) routinely provided source material for comedians, and these grotesques often appeared in movies or on television.

  It hadn’t been that long since medical researchers working in some European clinics had been implanting the testicles from corpses into the bodies of gay men – almost always without their knowledge – in an effort to boost testosterone levels. In the prison hospitals of post-war Britain, men convicted of homosexual acts were routinely forced to undergo aversion therapy: electric shocks were administered, hallucinogenic drugs given and men – whose crime had usually been no more than simply seeking sex with their own kind – were subjected to the kind of brainwashing techniques usually reserved for Hammer horror movies.

  Without the freedom that had been afforded LGBT performers before the war, it became necessary to invent a new way of living, and an underground social network sprang up where men and women conducted their lives away from the prying eyes of the public and the police. LGBT people soon had their own places to go (which were often seedy and always prey to the criminal classes), their own language to use and their own entertainment to enjoy – from the politically subversive to the outrageously arch.

  Gay men dominated the pop music scene in the UK during the 1960s: although no British artist would dare to come out to the media, the music industry was, in effect, run by a cabal of high-profile gay men. These included the impresario Larry Parnes, whose stable of singers featured many of the most successful British rock singers of the period (Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Joe Brown and Marty Wilde among them), composer Lionel Bart (who, before penning the musical Oliver! wrote chart hits for Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Adam Faith) and Sir Joseph Lockwood, the all-powerful chairman of EMI. Then there were the managers such as Brian Epstein (the Beatles, Cilla Black), Andrew Loog Oldham (the Rolling Stones), Kit Lambert (the Who), Kenneth Pitt (who managed David Bowie early in his career) and Robert Stigwood (Cream, the Bee Gees). By a not-so-strange coincidence, all of these men were at one time or another involved (in a business sense at the very least) with the magician of Holloway Road, the legendary producer Joe Meek.

  Meek was the brilliant but troubled enfant terrible of British record production, the maverick would-be mogul who was responsible for some of the most intriguing and innovative sounds of the 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Newent, Gloucestershire, Robert George “Joe” Meek was the creative genius behind such hits as ‘Telstar’ and ‘Johnny Remember Me’. He was also psychotic, possibly an undiagnosed schizophrenic or suffering from what we now recognise as bipolar disorder (or manic depression). It’s been documented that young Joe’s mother – who already had two sons – wanted a daughter and dressed him as a girl for the first four years of his life.

  Meek wrote, arranged, engineered and produced an amazing body of work: although it did not receive a full release during his lifetime (just 99 copies of one EP and 20 test pressings of the full album were ever produced) I Hear a New World, his visionary 1960 outer space opera, is now recognised both as the first true concept album of the rock era, and as a ground-breaking piece of electronica which has been ‘a profound influence’ on artists including Steven Stapleton and St. Etienne.2 His patronage helped make stars of people like Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, and he pioneered independent distribution, setting up his own label when he could not find support for his ‘way out’ sounds from the major companies of the day – although that attitude quickly changed once he started to have chart success. Between 1960 and 1963 Meek scored an impressive 32 Top 50 hits in the UK. His influence was enormous, but his single-mindedness and need for control over every aspect of his recordings often led him astray. He may have had an ear for a hit, but he managed to turn down Rod Stewart and David Bowie (he worked with Bowie’s band, the Konrads, after David left the group), and legend has it that he tried to persuade Brian Epstein not to sign the Beatles. What was the point of signing a group that consisted of four strong-willed young men when you could create your own and control every aspect of their career?

  His studio, above the Shenton’s shop, was stuffed with primitive electronic equipment. Utilising every bit of available space, it was not unusual to find vocalists recording their part in the lavatory whilst the future heavyweights of heavy metal plucked their guitars in the stairwell. Working in this archaic, anarchic milieu, he was rewarded when, in 1962, he managed to give his in-house band The Tornados (fronted by bass player Heinz Burt, with whom Meek was infatuated) a Number One single on both sides of the Atlantic with the instrumental ‘Telstar’. Often cited as the first US Number One by a UK act (it wasn’t: that honour went to clarinettist Acker Bilk, whose ‘Stranger on the Shore’ made the top of the Billboard charts six months earlier), ‘Telstar’ – a rousing anthem created for the eponymous communications satellite – was an enormous international hit, selling in excess of five million copies. His acts may have disparagingly referred to the studio as ‘the Bathroom’ but Joe refused to move: ‘this old dump has been lucky for me,’ he once said.

  From that point on, things should have been easy for the man dubbed ‘Britain’s Phil Spector’, but in November 1963, at the height of his fame, he was arrested outside a gents toilet in Madras Place (just a few minutes’ walk from his studio) for ‘persistently importuning for an immoral purpose’3 and fined £15 (equivalent to around £300 today), an incident that collaborator Geoff Goddard isolated in the 1991 BBC documentary The Strange Story of Joe Meek as the turning point in his often tempestuous life: ‘This appeared in the newspaper and he was terribly upset about that. From then on everything went wrong.’ From that day forward, he would never be seen outside of his studio without his trademark sunglasses. Wracked with guilt and shame over his sexuality, it’s hardly surprising that he – like so many other gay men of the same period – would suffer mental health issues.

  Goddard was, for a time, Meek’s favourite collaborator: although he issued four singles under his own name, he was best known as a songwriter, penning ‘Johnny Remember Me’ and Heinz’ hit single ‘Just Like Eddie’, playing keyboards on ‘Telstar’ and, after permanently falling out with Meek, writing for Cliff Richard. His deep interest in spiritualism, an interest that Meek shared, influenced much of his work. The pair claimed to have warned Buddy Holly of the date on which he would die and, after the plane crash, they would have regular conversations with him from beyond the grave. Certainly a large percentage of Meek/Goddard material shows a heavy Holly influence, including the Mike Berry hit ‘Tribute to Buddy Holly’ and the hiccoughing vocal on Goddard’s own single ‘Girl Bride’. Goddard and Meek’s successful partnership was brought to an end when Geoff attempted to sue Joe over the Honeycombs’ hit ‘Have I The Right’, which Meek produced and which provided him with his last Number One single. Goddard believed ‘Have I The Right’ was cribbed wholesale from his own son
g ‘Give Me The Chance’. They would never speak again. From 1964 to 1967, Joe only hit the charts eight more times, and only three of those singles went Top 30. The highly ambiguous lyrics of ‘Have I The Right’ were written by the gay songwriting team of Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley: according to Blaikley the song was inspired by the last paragraph of Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness.4

  Goddard’s lawsuit was only one of many: Meek was already being pursued through the courts by French composer Jean Ledrut, who accused him of plagiarism by claiming that the tune of ‘Telstar’ had been copied from his own ‘La Marche d’Austerlitz’, a piece Ledrut had written for the 1960 film Austerlitz. There is a striking similarity, but as the film was not issued in Britain until after ‘Telstar’ had been a hit it seems unlikely Meek – although never one to shy away from a spot of sonic theft – did actually crib Ledrut’s composition.

  In a life dotted with the bizarre (one of Meek’s hobbies was to take his recording equipment into graveyards in the hope of capturing the voices of the dead. On one occasion he was convinced that he recorded a talking cat), Joe’s next step along the road towards career suicide was probably the strangest of them all.

  For a while The Tornados played as the backing band for British rocker Billy Fury, but Meek was obsessed with establishing his protégé Heinz as a solo star; he scored big with his second release ‘Just Like Eddie’ (he didn’t actually sing on the first disc credited to him, ‘Country Boy’), but soon went down the drain. Although Heinz (who died in 2000) and his wife Della always denied that there was anything sexual to their relationship, Heinz lived at Holloway Road with Meek for the best part of three years. Joe created a ‘monster’, Tornados’ drummer Clem Cattini told the Daily Express in June 2009: ‘Heinz was talentless and that’s being kind. It dawned on us rapidly that we were a vehicle for his career.’5 In 1965, Cattini left, going on to became the most successful session drummer in British chart history, with 40 Number One singles to his credit. When Meek made an abortive attempt to resuscitate his own flagging career by relaunching The Tornados, none of the original members of the band were involved.

  An entirely new line-up (referred to by Joe as Tornados 65 or The New Tornados) recorded what proved to be the final single released under the Tornados moniker. ‘Is That a Ship I Hear’ was a dismal instrumental that Joe hoped would prove a hit with the pirate radio stations – especially as its release (according to Meek’s assistant Patrick Pink) was influenced by Joe’s friendship with Radio London DJ Tony Windsor. ‘Tony and Joe had a bit of a thing,’6 he explains, ‘And I think it was done to please him’. Joe had previously drip-fed Tony exclusive material from his artists, including The Tornados, for use on his show. ‘Is That a Ship I Hear’ did not exactly make waves on the water or over the air, however the B-side of the 45 may have put a smile on the face of Windsor (real name Tony Withers), the man who presented a strand on Big L called Coffee Break, sponsored by the appositely named Camp Coffee.

  After a couple of minutes of cheesy cinema intermission organ, ‘Do You Come Here Often’ drops an outrageous bombshell. Suddenly we are in a gay bar in London, eavesdropping on a private conversation between two very outré and gossipy old queens. The entire conversation lasts for around 45 seconds, and it’s fair to say that if only a handful of people heard the track then fewer still would have understood that ‘see you down the “Dilly”’ was a knowing nod to the gay men who cruised the area around Piccadilly looking for sex. While it was the radio comedy Round the Horne that surreptitiously brought Polari into the homes of middle England via the camper-than-camp characters of Julian and Sandy, it was Joe Meek who first put two bitchy, effete types on a mainstream pop record. Although giving a writer credit to the group, and composed around a motif that keyboard player Dave Watts had come up with, that section was written by Dave Watts, guitarist Robb Huxley and Meek. The two members of The Tornados had no idea at the time, but the lines that Joe wrote – coupled with his insistence that they drop any references to the opposite sex – made ‘Do You Come Here Often’ the most ‘out’ gay record released by a gay man in the UK in the ’60s.

  ‘Do You Come Here Often’, 1966

  As critic Jon Savage wrote: ‘“Do You Come Here Often” was an extraordinary achievement: the first record on a UK major label – Columbia, part of the massive EMI empire – to deliver a slice of queer life so true that you can hear its cut-and-thrust in any gay bar today’.7 Many years later, Dave Watts admitted he

  had no idea what “see you down the ‘Dilly’” meant when I recorded the voice. I was more concerned about getting Joe to let me play a slightly jazzy piece on the organ. I don’t think he noticed what I was playing as he was giggling so much when we did the overdub with the talking. Robb Huxley [and I] didn’t have a clue that it was something to do with [being] gay. Robby and myself were blissfully unaware of the fact at the time. We were talked into doing it by Joe, but it was a laugh doing it all the same.

  Huxley, committing his memories to his website, recalled that ‘Dave and I never thought that we were portraying a couple of gay guys but at the same time if it came across that way it was OK, it was fun and we thought we were being cute.’ 8

  According to Huxley, ‘Joe was getting very hot on the idea of us becoming a comedy act. We toyed with the thoughts of making an LP all based on comical songs, and which Joe decided would be called They’re Not Just Pretty Faces. There would be spoken parts as well as music on the record. The closest that we ever got to that was “Do You Come Here Often”.’9 ‘I found it strange that even though Joe was gay he did not like the people around him being camp, and yet he came out with that great production,’ Patrick Pink (who later changed his name by Deed Poll to Robbie Duke, one of Meek’s many pseudonyms) adds. Oblique references had been made in pop records before but, issued in August 1966 before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the release of ‘Do You Come Here Often’ was a brave, even foolhardy move. Yet within a few months none of that mattered anyway.

  Burned by his association with the music industry, Geoff Goddard retired: his final job was working in the kitchen at Reading University. While there, he discovered that his old composition ‘Johnny Remember Me’ had been covered by Bronski Beat with Marc Almond, that the record had been a sizeable hit and that there was a large royalty cheque and a platinum disc waiting for him. Sadly, Meek did not fare so well. Although he was still on friendly terms with people who could help him (like Epstein, who took Meek to see Bob Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966 and Lockwood, who offered him a job as replacement producer for George Martin, who left EMI in 1965 to set up his own company), his world was coming apart.

  In January 1967, police in Tattingstone, Suffolk, discovered two suitcases containing the mutilated body parts of a young man by the name of Bernard Oliver. Unsubstantiated rumours quickly reached Meek that he, along with every other known homosexual in London, would be questioned in connection with the murder. This, coupled with the ongoing court cases and his impressive drug intake, was enough for him to lose what little self-control he had left. Unable to get the medical help he so clearly needed and (according to pathologist Professor Francis Camps) suffering from ‘delusions of persecution’ thanks to his prodigious use of amphetamines, on 3 February 1967 (the eighth anniversary of his idol Buddy Holly’s death) using the shotgun left in his flat by his muse Heinz, he took the life of his long-suffering landlady Violet Shenton before turning around and expending the second barrel on himself. Tony Windsor left Radio London the same month.

  ‘I wasn’t surprised about the way Joe died because I could never see him dying a natural death,’ Cattini revealed.10 In the days running up to his suicide, Joe had written to friends and colleagues to tell them he was ‘not at all well’: on the day of his death he barely acknowledged Patrick Pink (who was the last person to record for Meek), communicating with him via a series of scribbled notes, not speaking, as Meek was paranoid about his studio being bugged by people
trying to steal his ideas. Things had been very different during the recording of ‘Do You Come Here Often’ a few months earlier, as Patrick recalls: ‘I was in the office and listened to the recordings after they were completed. It was a happy day.’ A few weeks later, the lawsuit brought by Jean Ledrut was settled in Joe’s favour – unfortunately far too late to be of any help to him ‘It has been written that Joe took a tape recorder into a men’s toilet in a club somewhere and secretly recorded a conversation which he then used for “Do You Come here Often”,’ adds Robb Huxley. ‘This was absolutely untrue and was just another case of fictitious stories made up by people in order to present Joe as some kind of a perverted individual. He was just a homosexual and probably fought within himself to try to resolve his dilemma. Any time that he could creep out of his closet and create something like ‘Do You Come Here Often’, and have a fun time doing it, probably brought him a great deal of satisfaction and release. As far as we were concerned we were looking for girls in a club. Joe was looking for something else.’11

  Today a plaque recognising Joe Meek’s achievements as a ‘pioneer of sound recording technology’ sits between the windows on the first floor of 304 Holloway Road. Until recently, in a deliciously ironic twist, the plaque sat next to a satellite dish. Meek’s ghost is reputed to be heard banging about on the floor above the shop every 3 February.

  There were LGBT artists, of course, during the swinging Sixties, and Long John Baldry, Dave Davies, Pete Townshend and Dusty Springfield would all come out eventually. Questions about John Lennon’s sexuality have been bandied about ever since, at Paul McCartney’s 21st birthday bash, he quite literally bashed Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler about the head (hospitalising the poor man) for gossiping about it. However fashionable it may have become for biographers and filmmakers to suggest (in several cases, to insist) that Lennon had a brief dalliance with manager Brian Epstein, there is not one scintilla of evidence to back these stories up; however it has been suggested that the Lennon-McCartney composition ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ was written for Epstein (‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ definitely was: as the song fades out the acid-tongued Lennon can be heard to sing ‘Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew’).12 It’s interesting to note how every single song the Beatles recorded, from their Decca audition on New Year’s Day 1962 through to and including their fifth album Help! (outside a three or four cover versions) is about boy meets girl; bands like the Kinks and the Who were singing songs about inner conflict, of being outsiders – and both bands featured bisexual men. True, neither Dave Davies (in his 1996 autobiography Kink!) nor Pete Townshend (in a 1989 interview with radio host Timothy White) would come out for years, yet the clues are there in some of their earliest compositions. Townshend was one of the first pop hit writers to broach the subject of queerness in ‘I’m a Boy’ in 1966, and the Who were the first band to take a song about cross-dressing to Number Two in the UK charts. Coincidentally, ‘Lola’, the Kinks’ international pop hit that dealt with cross-dressing and transvestism two years before Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On the Wild Side’, also reached Number Two in the UK singles chart. By a twist of fate, both ‘Lola’ and ‘Walk On the Wild Side’ were at least partly inspired by Candy Darling, the American transgender actress (name assigned at birth James Lawrence Slattery in November 1944) who was a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory and starred in his films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971).13 Inspired by the success of ‘Lola’, Martin Murray, former leader of Joe Meek’s hit band the Honeycombs, issued a 45 in 1971 called ‘Sex-Change Sadie’; keen to trade on former glories, he christened his new outfit Honeycombak (the Honeycombs’ drummer, Honey Lantree, had been Murray’s girlfriend). Even the Hollies got in on the act with their tale of a cross-dressing Rock ’n’ Roll singer, ‘Hey Willy’.