All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  But what Davies had devised was never very visual. Even he expressed concerns about its viability as a filmable narrative at the time: ‘Arthur has a story – but the points are made by songs rather than direct actions or dialogue. I suppose it’s really more an opera than a musical play. I’m not sure when it’ll be screened.’ Sure enough, by the time another elegiac Kinks 45 appeared, in September 1969, the TV musical had been ‘delayed’ permanently. Ray was mortified. All his grand plans had hinged on getting Granada to finance the TV version.

  Arthur’s abandonment by Granada hit Davies hard. Ever willing to invoke his fine-tuned persecution complex, he subsequently claimed he ‘got shafted. [And] our careers hinged on that. I spent a year on that – a year-and-a-half nearly – and [then] it fell through.’ Meanwhile, the critical reception for the album, released in October, was coloured by the remarkable success of Townshend’s prior conceit. With Tommy widely lauded as a significant breakthrough in rock, The Who had beaten The Kinks to the punch. Even Davies begrudgingly admitted: ‘We came in for a lot of criticism from people who said we were imitating Tommy.’ His brother Dave once again feared for his younger sibling’s sanity: ‘Ray was driving himself into breakdown after breakdown trying to come up with ideas for songs. And . . . I felt that we were doing something original, developing our art. [But] it did absolutely nothing!’

  The hasty release of another 45 from the album Victoria, merely meant three consecutive single stiffs went with another chartless album. It was time to start rebuilding the brand name; and, perhaps surprisingly The Kinks decided the place to do that was America, where a three-year live ban by the American Federation of Musicians had finally been lifted. At the same time, VGPS and Arthur were being championed by the hip young rock critics who were writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Fusion and Creem. Following the lead of his brother-in-law, Arthur, Ray had decided ‘he loved the old country so much he didn’t want to stay around to watch it disintegrate’. And it seemed like only a really big hit would bring them back home, which in autumn 1969 looked a long way off.

  *

  Davies’ disillusionment with the pop process was directly related to the English public’s rejection of the two rather fine albums with which he had tried to resume that compact with the charts The Kinks effortlessly enjoyed through 1967.

  Meanwhile, another overtly English songwriter, David Bowie, had spent the past five years trying to emulate Davies’ initial chart success, and was just finding out that fame was not all it was cracked up to be. As 1969 dawned, he was hard at work on a series of demos with which he hoped to secure a record deal with Mercury. The year ended with the release of his second album, again unhelpfully called David Bowie; it singularly failed to capitalize on the Top Five success of the single that both preceded and introduced it, the unearthly ‘Space Oddity’.

  After five years of trying every which way to connect with some kind of audience on an emotional level, Bowie had written a song about alienation – in the immediate aftermath of his break-up with long-term girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale – and discovered emotional resonance had been there all along. Of course, as soon as the song charted he began a career-long attempt to suggest otherwise, though not before telling part-time rebound-girlfriend Mary Finnegan, then freelancing for the International Times, ‘Major Tom, the hero, anti-hero if you like, is a loser . . . At the end of the song Major Tom is completely emotionless and expresses no view at all about where’s he at . . . He gives up thinking completely . . . He’s fragmenting . . . At the end of the song his mind is completely blown.’

  By making the lyrics to ‘Space Oddity’ an increasingly fraught dialogue between the astronaut and ‘ground control’ Bowie personalized Major Tom’s sense of separation from the world. And while on the original January 1969 demo it is fellow Feather, John ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, who intones the parts of the lyrics that are ‘ground control’ talking, on the single Bowie sings both parts, suggesting a more interior type of conversation, heightening the sense of someone whose ‘mind is completely blown’.

  Although Bowie had spent the past two-and-a-half years celebrating eccentrics in song, this was the first time he had dared to make the narrator’s mental breakdown the crux of one. Yet he already knew all about the subject, having been born into a family where on one side schizophrenia was, not to put too fine a point on it, endemic. Aunt Una had died in her late thirties after electric shock treatment and periods in a mental institution. Aunt Vivienne had also been diagnosed with schizophrenia, while Aunt Nora had been lobotomized to ‘treat’ her ‘nervous disposition’. And now Bowie’s half-brother Terry was showing enough worrying signs to suggest insanity did not so much run in his mother’s family as positively gallop. By the end of 1969, Terry would be committed to the Cane Hill asylum, where he would see out most of his days.

  The alienation expressed in ‘Space Oddity’ was further compounded by its apocalyptic B-side, the equally dissociative ‘Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud’. In the notes to the songs on David Bowie – printed by Disc at the time of its release – Bowie summarizes this, his first ‘prophet figure’ as someone who ‘lives on a mountain and has developed a beautiful way of life . . . [but] the villagers disapprove of the things he has to say and they decide to hang him. He gives [himself] up to his fate, but the mountain tries to help him by killing the village.’ In other words, it not only addressed messianism but also a very personal sense of separation from the wider world, which in a 1993 BBC radio interview Bowie finally admitted was something that could be traced all the way back to his childhood: ‘This feeling of isolation I’ve had ever since I was a kid, [but] was really starting to manifest itself through songs like [‘Wild-Eyed Boy . . .’].’

  Slowly but surely the young man was learning to put a truer, deeper self into his songs, something not lost on his latest love, Angie Barnett, whom he had chanced to meet through a mutual bisexual liaison. As she says in her most recent memoir: ‘When I met David, the paranoid vision and the language of life’s darkness were second nature to him. “Space Oddity”, “Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud” – that’s how he really thought about the world.’

  ‘Conversation Piece’, his next exposition on isolation (‘And the world is full of life / Full of people who don’t know me . . .’), was another song he demoed along with ‘Space Oddity’. He also made it the first song recorded for the album that he hoped would reinforce the reputation he’d recently gained. For now, though, he preferred to lament the loss of ex-girlfriend Hermione, and in passing the ideals of the Summer of Love, thus producing an album that sat uneasily between two stools of (singer-)songwriting – the confessional and the character-driven.

  As a result, this superb song was sidelined to B-side status on the throwaway ‘Prettiest Star’ (an oversight Bowie almost corrected in 2000, when he re-recorded the song for the aborted Toy album8). Meanwhile, he artfully constructed a partly fictional potted biography for the press release to accompany the November 1969 release of David Bowie (a.k.a. Man of Words, Man of Music), hoping to explain away a two-and-a-half-year hiatus between albums and the attendant change in him. It would be the first of many fabricated pasts bestowed by Bowie on credulous critics:

  [Age] 20

  – Dropped out of music completely and devoted most of my time to the Tibet Society

  – Helped get the Scottish monastery underway

  21

  – Acted, wrote and produced with mime company

  21 1/2

  – Formed own mime, music, mixed media trio

  21 3/4

  – Fell in love

  22

  – Solo again and making an L.P., for Phillips

  – Started Arts Lab in Beckenham, Kent, to try and promote the ideals and creative processes of the underground.

  At least he was being upfront about the Arts Lab, which was a genuine attempt to ‘promote the ideals and creative processes of the underground’, though by the time of the album’s appearance it
had pretty much run its course, as the only other real talents to emerge from its weekly sessions at the Three Tuns pub – the enigmatic Keith Christmas and acid-folk combo Comus – had gone in search of their own record deals. As record producer Tony Visconti told one Bowie biographer: ‘His Arts Lab . . . was his way of buying time and sharpening a few skills when important people weren’t looking.’ But when the new David Bowie appeared in the shops he was forced to decide (with a little help from Angie) what mattered most – his own career or aiding perennial underachievers.

  By November 1969, young David knew he had an album he needed to promote – even if his new record label, Phillips, seemed to think David Bowie would promote itself, as evidenced by their unpersuasive press ad: ‘Now Try His Album . . . You’ll Want It!’ However, the space cadet simply wasn’t ready. An important gig at the Purcell Room went badly, leading Bowie to recall: ‘As soon as I appeared, looking a bit like Bob Dylan with his curly hair and denims, I was whistled at and booed . . . It turned me off the business. I was totally paranoid and I cut out.’ In fact, according to the manager of Comus, Bowie’s chosen support-act that night, the singer-songwriter was blown off the stage by his fellow lab-rats from Beckenham:

  Chris Youle: Bowie was . . . the folkie, doing Jacques Brel ballads. We were the underground oddballs writing songs about necrophilia, crucifixion, madness – there wasn’t anything like that in Bowie’s repertoire at the time. So we went down really well at the Purcell Room. He didn’t.

  Actually, the audience at the Purcell Room proved remarkably forgiving of the solo Bowie, even after he apologized upfront that his repertoire was mostly his own songs, which he disarmingly admitted, ‘sound all very much the same’. The one national reviewer to cover the show – the influential Tony Palmer, writing in the Observer – offered some astute advice for the pretty young thing: ‘His love reveries are dreary, self-pitying and monotonous. But when he turns his eyes to the absurdities of technological society, he is razor-sharp in his observations.’

  It was advice Bowie eventually did take on board (along with Comus’s whole schtick). But at this stage, still consumed by fear of failure, and with his greatest supporter, his father, recently deceased, he was looking for an excuse to drop out again. And the Purcell show provided it. When he asked his ever-supportive manager, Kenneth Pitt, ‘Which papers were here tonight?’ and was erroneously informed that not one single journalist had turned up, he said in a loud voice, there on stage, ‘Fuck it.’

  And fuck it, he did. Over the next six months he did everything he could to sabotage the hard-won success he’d finally achieved with ‘Space Oddity’. Even before Phillips issued the follow-up to that major hit, he was telling teen-mag Jackie, ‘I hate the chart system. I think whether anyone has talent as a performer should be more important than whether or not they have a hit disc.’ As for the prospect of further singles, he informed Mirabelle that he hoped the two albums due for release – the second of which was a World of . . . compilation of earlier Decca tracks, including three songs rejected back in 1968 – ‘go well because I really don’t want to have to do another single. They’re really not worth the bother and time.’ At one point, he was even considering putting out a re-recording of one of the previously rejected 45s from 1968, ‘London Bye Ta-Ta’, as his next single, before he was persuaded to plump for ‘The Prettiest Star’.

  Not yet surrounded by figures for whom success was measured in units alone, Bowie elected to turn his back on the charts before they turned their back on him. He would talk about the choice he made back then – similar to the one Dylan took in May 1965 – during a 1974 interview with NME’s Charles Shaar Murray. Speaking from a position of real (and enduring) stardom, he suggested: ‘When “Space Oddity” became a hit, that was when I really started . . . [to] see how needs are achieved – all the human needs and wants, and trying to be this and that. [And I found] there’s no gratification in it.’

  *

  Perhaps in the interim Bowie had acquired an understanding of why his great inspiration, Syd Barrett, had opted out at the end of 1967. By 1974, each of them had certainly learnt that when one wanted back in – which Barrett did by spring 1969, and Bowie did by autumn 1971 – it usually proved easier said than done. By 7 June 1969, when a letter appeared in Melody Maker asking why the Barrett solo LP ‘promised over a year ago, [hasn’t] been released yet’, it had been eighteen months since Syd had been hoofed out of ‘his band’. Remarkably, this letter provoked a reply from the man himself, who claimed: ‘There have been complications regarding the LP, but it is now almost finished and should be issued by EMI in a few months. I now spend most of my time writing.’

  These new songs, though, were no longer the cosmic fairy tales of a pie-eyed piper. Rather, they tried to make sense of a world that lost its sense of purpose even before he had scrambled it some more with his own form of self-medication. As for those ‘complications’ he hinted at in Melody Maker, according to the EMI producer who had just spent two months working with him, it all dated back to the 1968 sessions and involved ‘broken microphones in the studios and [mutterings of] general disorder . . . This had resulted in a period when, if not actually banned, Syd’s presence at Abbey Road wasn’t particularly encouraged.’

  This unexpected response to a fan’s open letter seemed like the first public clue that Syd was emerging from his own ‘awful scene’. But the real return dated back to a night at the end of March, when he turned up at the 100 Club to see his old pals Soft Machine play. And afterwards, he even said hi. As bassist Hugh Hopper recalls it: ‘Syd was muttering away in his usual way and said, “Would you like to come along and do some recording?”’ They assumed, not unreasonably, that he had some specific idea in mind.

  What Barrett actually had planned was to take up where he had left off nine months earlier. In fact, it was almost as if there had been no break at all. When he turned up at Abbey Road on 10 April for his first session of the year, with in-house producer Malcolm Jones at the helm, the two songs he recorded were the very ones he had been working on the previous July when the sessions had ground to an abrupt halt – now he duly overdubbed new vocals and guitar onto the Jenner-produced basic tracks for ‘Swan Lee’ and ‘Clowns and Jugglers’. If Jones was worried whether this suggested Syd had nothing new to bring to the party, the following day’s session shook any such thoughts from his mind. As he wrote in his privately published diary of the sessions: ‘Syd was in a great mood and in fine form, a stark contrast to the rumours and stories I’d been fed with. In little over five hours we laid down vocal and guitar tracks for four new songs and two old. At Syd’s request, the first thing we did was “Opel”. We both felt at the time it was one of his best new songs . . . It had a stark attraction to it.’

  Perhaps Jenner hadn’t been quite so crazy in hoping that if one ‘did the right things [Syd] would come back to join us’. On the evidence of the 11 April 1969 session – which resulted in pukka takes of ‘Opel’, ‘Love You’, ‘It’s No Good Trying’ and ‘Terrapin’ (in a single take); as well as usable vocal takes for ‘Late Night’ and ‘Golden Hair’ – it did seem as if Syd had indeed been spending time writing songs. And what he had was worth hearing. Both ‘Terrapin’ and ‘Opel’ were old-school Barrettian exemplars of elliptical wordplay, set to melodies one could not hope to hum. ‘Terrapin’, with its startling image, ‘We’re the fishes and . . . the move about is all we do’, suggested he continued to see things in a way few others did, even as he pleaded for understanding from this woman who set his hair on end. Meanwhile, ‘Opel’ begins by almost parodying a Piper-era Floyd lyric, ‘On a distant shore, miles from land / Stands the ebony totem in ebony sand’, but quickly dissolves into a painful interior quest where you is I, is another – defining itself with its own, increasingly desperate coda, ‘I’m living, I’m giving, to find you.’

  A further session, six days later, added two lesser songs to the mix – ‘No Man’s Land’ and ‘Here I Go’. Barrett now had enough for a
n album without resorting to Floyd leftovers (though ‘Here I Go’ was technically another pre-Piper song recast). He also seemed to have formulated a sound that allowed for a mixture of band performances (the two 17 April songs being cut with Jerry Shirley and John Wilson as rhythm section) and starker solo pieces, i.e. elements of ‘Jugband Blues’, now separate and distinct.

  On 25 April, he compiled an eight-track ‘master’ (from original four-track tapes) of the eight songs he was looking to overdub and/or mix. Excluded from this ‘master’ were the two songs he’d cut on 17 April, presumably because they were already in the requisite form. Three of these tracks Barrett dubbed to a reference reel for himself – ‘Terrapin’, ‘Clowns and Jugglers’ and ‘Love You’ – which he took with him at the end of the session. He had supervised the transfers himself as Jones was ill; and when he returned to the studio on 3 May, it was to supervise laying some backing over certain tracks, specifically the ones he had taken home with him. None of this conforms to the common portrait of a man at odds with the requirements of making an album. In fact, it rather suggests someone on a mission to finally complete a solo album ‘promised over a year ago’.

  Nor had Barrett forgotten about his old friends from Soft Machine. On 3 May they were finally summoned to Abbey Road for one of the stranger episodes from the Softs’ own rollercoaster career – their one session with Madcap Syd. Because of the erratic tempos of the solo recordings to which they were expected to play along, some of the Softs had a hard time of it. Mike Ratledge complained to Barrett’s most recent biographer: ‘Nothing was ever written down. Nothing was ever the same. I wouldn’t have minded if it was uniformly irregular, but it changed from take to take’ – quite an achievement when one considers he was overdubbing to an existing basic track.