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Why Bowie Matters
Will Brooker
A unique, moving and dazzlingly researched exploration of the places, people, musicians, writers and filmmakers that inspired David Jones to become David Bowie, what we can learn from his life’s work and journey, and why he will always matter. When David Bowie died on 10th January 2016, it seemed the whole world was united in mourning. His greatest hits were sung tearfully in pubs up and down Britain, garlands of flowers were left at the Aladdin Sane mural in his old stomping ground of Brixton and tributes poured in from a galaxy of stars. To many of us, Bowie was so much more than a pop idol. But why? In Why Bowie Matters, Professor Will Brooker answers that question persuasively, as both a fan and an academic. A Bowie obsessive since childhood, he hit the headlines over the course of a year-long immersive research project that took him from London to Berlin and New York, following in Bowie’s footsteps, only listening to music and reading books he loved, and even at times adopting his fashion. In this original and illuminating book, Professor Brooker approaches Bowie from various angles, re-tracing his childhood on the streets of Bromley, taking us through his record collection and bookshelves, and deciphering the symbols and codes of his final work, Blackstar to piece together how an ordinary suburban teenager turned himself into a legend, and how perhaps we too could be a little more Bowie. He shows us that while David Robert Jones died on that terrible day in January, David Bowie will live on forever.
WHY BOWIE MATTERS
Will Brooker
Copyright (#ulink_e28b2451-65e8-5635-a12e-bc25e7e1c23b)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Will Brooker 2019
Cover photograph © Sukita
Will Brooker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008313722
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008313739
Version: 2019-07-22
Epigraph (#ud66ebf7d-cbf1-5b22-9945-33ac2b430dff)
Things really matter to me.
David Bowie, Afraid
CONTENTS
Cover (#u70ed053d-38fa-560b-becb-8a8e106061fe)
Title Page (#uc855a30c-dad6-5e64-9420-7d900648c01d)
Copyright (#u3e495400-8a47-536d-80b2-8a6eed75aab3)
Epigraph
Introduction: David Bowie – A Life Story
1 Becoming (#ud27e4bf7-1f2e-5876-8bb2-7b6debcfb6d7)
2 Connecting (#litres_trial_promo)
3 Changing (#litres_trial_promo)
4 Passing (#litres_trial_promo)
Conclusion: David Bowie – A Legacy (#litres_trial_promo)
Discography (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION: DAVID BOWIE – A LIFE STORY (#ud66ebf7d-cbf1-5b22-9945-33ac2b430dff)
‘Dad lived ten lives in the years he had!’ Duncan Jones’s cheerful tweet on the second anniversary of his father’s death, in January 2018, sums up the popular idea of David Bowie: a man who lived at an accelerated rate and transformed himself with the release of each new LP. In the 1970s alone, he raced from his folk-rock beginnings through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and the blue-eyed soul man of Young Americans, before moving into the introspective Berlin period and finally concluding the decade on the cusp of the mainstream, MTV success that would dominate his 1980s.
It’s a familiar story, retold in every biography. This introduction is not that story. This is the story of how my life intersected with David Bowie; how he informed and inspired me from my first encounter with my mum’s Let’s Dance cassette when I was thirteen. It is not about Bowie’s changes, but about how he changed me – from that chance discovery in 1983 to 2015, when I undertook an academic project to live like him for a year, and attempted to compress his entire extraordinary career into twelve months.
Every Bowie fan has a story of the role he played in their life. Mine is unique, just like everyone else’s. The purpose of this introduction is not to qualify me as an extraordinary super-fan – although my experience was certainly unusual – but as a fan like millions of others; as a fan, no doubt, like you. We all have our own sense of Bowie, and that is the point.
David Robert Jones was born on 8 January 1947 and died on 10 January 2016. David Bowie was born, as a stage name, on 16 September 1965. He never really died. ‘David Bowie’ was a persona created by Jones, but he thrived and survived for four decades not just because David Jones stuck with this name – he’d previously adopted ‘Luther Jay’, ‘Alexis Jay’ and ‘Tom Jones’ – but because his audiences embraced him: because of his fans.
Bowie became a star, a concept, a cultural icon, because of people like you and me, who took him wholeheartedly into their lives. We invested aspects of ourselves in him, and so a part of him continues in us. This book is a celebration of Bowie’s importance, and an exploration of his legacy as a cultural icon. But on another level, it’s also about celebrating our inner Bowie, and letting it change and inspire us. We are ‘all the millions here’ Bowie gazed at in ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ in 1970: we are the galaxy of blackstars that he left behind in 2016. We all have our own stories of how he entered our lives and what he meant to us. This is mine.
I was born the year before Duncan Jones, and so while I knew of David Bowie in the 1970s, he stood for something shocking, scandalous and grown-up. He was like the taste of wine or beer: something I assumed I’d understand and appreciate later. When the video for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ played on Top of the Pops in 1980, I found it unpleasant and a bit scary, with its distorted colours, surreal images and flat, repetitive vocals. The droning chorus reminded me of the graffiti I saw on my walk home from school on the wall of a south London housing estate: ‘Sex is good, sex is funky. Sex is best without a dunky.’ Every week, I wanted the video to end so I could see more of ABBA, Blondie or Adam and the Ants.
But I changed, and Bowie changed. In 1983 I was on holiday with my family, somewhere in the English countryside: seven days of steam train museums, hill walks and horses. I picked up a cassette my mum had brought along: Bowie’s Let’s Dance, his mainstream breakthrough. My mum was thirty-eight at the time, only two years older than Bowie. I was thirteen. I slotted the tape into the red plastic Walkman I’d got for Christmas, and didn’t take it out all week. My mum never got that cassette back. I still have it now. I asked her recently why she’d bought Let’s Dance, as I didn’t remember her being a Bowie fan in the seventies. She was ‘entranced’, she told me: he looked stunningly handsome and desirable, rather than just weird. She even tuned in to Top of the Pops every week, she confessed, to watch the videos. I felt exactly the same way, though we never told each other at the time.
For me in 1983, Bowie’s music was a soundtrack to imaginary films, the music playing during the love scenes and end credits of movies that were never made. It was a glimpse into a sophisticated, adult world – not deliberately shocking, like his singles of the 1970s, but gleaming and stylish, with lyrical cross-references and casually dropped ideas that hinted at the intelligence behind them. March of flowers! he declared on the discordant ‘Ricochet’. March of dimes! These are the prisons! These are the crimes! I listened repeatedly, carefully writing down the words; I felt like I was engaging with something challenging and avant-garde. I analysed them as if they were a poem from English class.
It wasn’t easy to fit in at my school – you needed just the right Farah trousers and Pringle sweaters, the right sports bag, the right haircut and the right couldn’t-care-less attitude. I studied too hard and couldn’t afford all the proper gear, so I was a boffin, a tramp and probably a poof too. Lads at school said David Bowie was gay. I loved looking at his videos. I recorded them from the Max Headroom TV show, rewinding and freeze-framing them. I liked his sharp suits, his sharp teeth and his pained expression, as if he were struggling with something. In the ‘Let’s Dance’ video, backed against the wall of an Australian bar and surrounded by the glares of hard-drinking men, he didn’t look like he fitted in either. Maybe I was gay for feeling that way about David Bowie, but he made me feel it didn’t matter.
It turned out I wasn’t gay, and it turned out Bowie wasn’t either. It didn’t matter. We both got married, to women. Nobody told me the groom wasn’t meant to have his own theme song playing when he walks down the aisle, so I entered to an instrumental version of ‘Modern Love’, wearing a suit I thought Bowie would appreciate. I landed a job as a university lecturer. One winter, towards the end of the last century, I flew to Australia for a conference, via Japan. I took a new Walkman, with only one cassette: a personal Bowie collection I’d compiled for the trip. It was my first time alone on the other side of the world. I listened to nothing but Bowie for a week, discovering new songs as I walked by the Brisbane River under the surprising December sun. On the way back I was stuck at Narita Airport, and was taken by coach to a remote hotel overnight. I knew nobody, and didn’t speak a word of the language. I’d never felt further from home. I listened to one song, on repeat. Now ‘Ashes to Ashes’ made sense to me, in all its alien strangeness and isolation.
I changed, and Bowie changed with me. I feel he was travelling alongside me, on that journey and on many others – or rather, that my own version of Bowie was my companion, because this ‘Bowie’ was a person I had helped to create, through our experiences together since 1983. You had your own version of him, no doubt – similar but different – who played a part in your life, and was shaped by the moments you shared.
Bowie and I both grew older. I was promoted to professor. Bowie seemed to enter semi-retirement, then returned ten years later with a comeback album in 2013. And that October, Lou Reed died. He was Bowie’s old friend, of course, since the sixties – Bowie was one of the first British fans of the Velvet Underground – and I’d loved Lou’s music since the eighties. But more importantly, I knew Lou Reed was only five years older than Bowie, and the refrain from the old song now sounded like a warning. Five years, that’s all we’ve got. My rock idols were dying, already. I’d always assumed Bowie would go on for ever, and suddenly I came to terms with his mortality. He was in his mid-sixties now. I wanted to do something to thank him, to celebrate him, to pay tribute to him, while he was still alive.
Like every kid, I used to draw, and sing and dance. At nursery and infant school, we’re encouraged to dress up, to perform and paint. We all do it, without shame and without a sense of being good or bad. And like most of us, I started to give those things up from adolescence onwards. It was hard enough as a teenager, trying to fit in, without having artistic hobbies too; and school also encouraged my generation to progressively narrow down, to focus only on what we were best at. Eight O-levels – my year was the first to introduce GCSEs – and three A-levels, then one subject at university, with a possible minor. (I rebelled in a small way by choosing a degree that was half English, half film: I even included an analysis of a Bowie video in a third-year essay.) By the time I was eighteen, I’d accepted that my drawing and singing were average at best, and that I was good at research and writing. So that’s what I did as a career. I became an academic. And in 2013 I decided to study Bowie as an academic project. I began my research in May 2015.
I started by drawing up lists, from biographies and online sources, of all the books Bowie had read; then all the songs he’d listened to, and all the films he’d enjoyed. By immersing myself in his creative input – the art and culture that had influenced him – I hoped to gain a new understanding of his work. In Australia and Japan I’d listened to nothing but Bowie for a week. Now I was committing myself to his music for a year. I structured twelve months of my life around the various phases of his career, from the late 1960s to the present day, and devoted myself to one album at a time. As a sign of that commitment, I had my hair cut and coloured in the Man Who Fell to Earth style from the mid-1970s. I wanted to be reminded of my project every time I saw my own reflection. I wanted to connect with him, to merge with him in some way; to become an in-between Brooker-Bowie hybrid. As Bowie knew, ‘Die Brücke’ is both the name of an art movement, and the German for ‘bridge’. It’s also, of course, a near-rhyme for my own name. It seemed to fit. I was trying to build a bridge between us.
Immersing myself in his influences wasn’t enough. I grew up about six miles from David Jones, and I spent the summer of 2015 exploring his childhood and teenage territories, walking his old streets and discreetly checking out the houses where he’d lived with his family. I trained in filmmaking and photography in my twenties – again, something I gave up as a career – so I’d mixed with hair and make-up artists, but never had the experience of being on the other side of the camera, under the lights. I decided I needed to try it. I had photos taken of me, styled as Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. I posted them online. Times Higher Education magazine got in touch to find out what I was doing – a professor spending the summer break dressed as Bowie was enough for a news feature – and published a short article. Then other magazines got in touch, and newspapers, and radio, and then TV shows. I had progressed to the Thin White Duke phase – I’d commissioned a tailor for an authentically 1970s white shirt with a tall, wide collar – by the time This Morning asked me on for an interview with Eamonn Holmes. The next day, I got up early for a slot on Sky’s news show, then took a taxi to a studio at midnight for a live broadcast in Australia. ‘What are you doing next?’ the reporters asked me. ‘I’m going to Berlin,’ I told them. And so I had to go to Berlin.
I was contacted by media and literary agents. I was invited to the Bowie exhibition as it toured to Melbourne, in Australia, and then to Groningen, in the Netherlands. I was interviewed in languages I didn’t understand, and heard my words translated and voiced by an actor for news broadcasts around the world: I appeared in Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese newspapers. I’d become, in a small way, an international figure, borrowing something from Bowie’s celebrity. I was performing different versions of myself, my personality splitting into public and private. I understood something of what Bowie must have experienced when he first became famous.
And then, in January 2016, Bowie died. I was in New York City that winter, wearing a replica I’d had made of his Alexander McQueen ‘Earthling’ coat; I’d had my hair clipped and spiked, and had grown a goatee beard, as he did for his fiftieth birthday. I was reliving Bowie’s 1997 as I walked down another of his home streets – Lafayette, in Lower Manhattan – on a tour of his favourite bookstores and coffee shops. He was six storeys above me at the time, in his luxury apartment. He had a fortnight to live.
On 9 January I was back in Berlin, shooting footage for a video diary of my experiences. I’d been drawn into photography and film again; I’d also dug out my old cine camera and was using Super-8 for the first time since my teens. I flew home late that night. In the morning, the news felt like a bad dream. I did one interview, then refused the rest. I felt too shocked and sad, and had nothing much to say. That evening, I accepted an invitation from Radio 4, with director Julien Temple. We had a drink after the discussion, in a pub near the BBC with a dripping ceiling. He told me how Bowie had reacted to his half-brother’s death in 1985. (I never met the real Bowie – only my own internal Bowie – but that year, I met a lot of people who’d known him personally.)
I experienced what felt like genuine grief, as if a family member had died. Many fans felt the same: maybe you did, too. I stayed indoors, and retreated inside myself. I’d been working with a tribute band, the Thin White Duke, taking the place of their lead singer, but it was months before I performed with them again – not until May, towards the end of my research year, and by that point it felt like time for a celebration rather than mourning. The gig was packed with long-term fans in their fifties, mixed with younger people of undergraduate age. When we sang ‘Starman’ as an encore, everyone joined in. I still have the footage, panning over the crowd of faces as they chant the final chorus. It’s a picture of pure, shared joy. We were all thanking our own version of Bowie, and it felt like he was there with us.
As I approached May 2016, and the end of my project, I saw a counsellor for six sessions. I felt I needed a bridge of my own: a way to transition out of this intense research and back into everyday life. We started by talking about Bowie, and progressed to my own family, my personal history and what I’d inherited from previous generations, like my granddad in the Navy, who never talked about what he’d seen in conflict. Bowie, born just after the war, and growing up around Brixton bombsites, was about expression, creativity and release, an antidote to English repression. He was about the bravery not to care if you fitted in with the norm, about the boldness to push past your own limits. He wasn’t the best singer – Freddie Mercury soars above him on ‘Under Pressure’ – and he certainly wasn’t the best dancer. He tended to play himself, as an actor, and he was only ever an amateur painter. But he did it anyway. And, because I had to, because I’d committed to my research project, I did things I wasn’t the best at, too.
As well as taking up film and photography again, using various formats from digital to 1960s vintage kit, I experimented with painting, because Bowie did it during his Berlin period. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I wasn’t very good at first, but I got better. I started going to portrait classes every week, and continued to improve. I began singing lessons, too, and while I’ll never be the best, after four years of vocal training I’m not so bad. I have folders on my computer now titled ‘painting’ and ‘singing’, where I save my own work and track its progress. I have Bowie to thank for that. I didn’t become Bowie – nobody can – but by aspiring to be more like him, I became a better, brighter, bolder version of myself.
I am a Bowie fan, but I am also a professor, and those two sides of me are bridged rather than separate. I’ve published scholarly articles and an academic book about Bowie, which were informed by both critical theory and my decades of fandom; and I became more deeply invested in Bowie through my writing and research, as I learned more about him and studied his work more closely. I even taught a class on Bowie and stardom, enjoying the way twenty-one-year-old students, who were born around Bowie’s fiftieth birthday and the Earthling album, both appreciated and criticised his star persona.
Those twin approaches – fan and academic – come together in this book. For me, critical theory and philosophy are only useful if they serve us as tools; if they offer us a new understanding and a valuable perspective. So the use of theorists like Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in this book is not to try to elevate Bowie’s popular work to some loftier academic plane – to show that he is worthy of serious analysis and that his name can be mentioned with theirs. That, to me, goes without saying. Their theories are here as tools to give us a different angle and context for Bowie’s creative expressions, identity transitions and cultural references. They can offer us a new way of seeing, which is surely what Bowie was all about.
If you love David Bowie, you already know why he matters. You have your own reasons, bound up with moments from your own life when his songs intersected with your experiences and provided the perfect soundtrack. But this book will suggest different reasons, approaching from new directions and new angles: new ways of connecting the dots and mapping a path through the mosaic of his life.
1 (#ulink_b25a6cee-1bd1-5814-9773-9205bbb15380)
BECOMING (#ulink_b25a6cee-1bd1-5814-9773-9205bbb15380)
On 25 March 2018, a statue of Bowie – or rather, of several Bowies, because it morphed multiple incarnations into a bronze chimera – was unveiled in the market square of Aylesbury. Its title is Earthly Messenger. The aesthetic was criticised, but the name passed without comment, because it perfectly fits the new persona that has evolved posthumously around David Bowie: the idea of an otherworldly being who descended to our planet in January 1947 and departed it in January 2016.
‘Ziggy is Stardust now’, was the caption on one memorial cartoon, showing Aladdin Sane’s face as a new constellation: and indeed, the ‘Stardust for Bowie’ campaign named a lightning-bolt pattern of stars in the vicinity of Mars after him. Others evoked Major Tom: an astronaut stepping through the Pearly Gates, or a weeping Ground Control sending unanswered messages to the lost spaceman. One artist drew Bowie in delicate watercolours, in the style of the Little Prince: Ziggy standing on his own tiny planet in space, titled The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Time, in turn, published a commemorative edition called ‘His Time on Earth’. Blogs, articles and tweets repeated the phrase ‘Goodbye, Starman’, elaborating on the theme with each anniversary: ‘A year ago, the Starman David Bowie said goodbye to our planet to start his “Space Oddity”,’ an online fan noted in January 2017, while Vice marked ‘a year since David Bowie ascended’. ‘It’s been two years since David Bowie left us for his home planet, and we haven’t been the same since,’ suggested the Consequences of Sound site in January 2018, under the headline ‘Remembering the Man Who Fell to Earth, Two Years After Bowie Returned to the Stars’.
Of course, Bowie provided the raw material for this final media incarnation, which joins the dots of various songs and characters – Starman, Lady Stardust, Blackstar, Major Tom, the Man Who Fell to Earth and, more fundamentally, the idea of Ziggy as messiah – into the picture of an uncanny visitor from outer space, an ‘Earthly Messenger’, whether alien or angel. Fans can hardly be blamed for extending Bowie’s career-long fascination with outer space into a comforting image – somewhere between religion and science fiction – of him not dead, but departed to another world; he even advised them on his final album to ‘look up here, I’m in heaven’. But even at the time, this idea felt to me like a misreading, understandable as a coping mechanism but disrespectful to his mourning family – Duncan Jones, I guessed, did not think of his father as an extraterrestrial who’d returned to his home planet – and misrepresentative of the Bowie I felt I knew.
My own sense of Bowie was not of an uncanny creature who had descended, fully-formed, to treat us to his art before leaving us again. I saw ‘Bowie’ as a persona originally conceived by the young David Jones, who struggled for success and worked hard to maintain and develop it. Part of the point of Bowie, to me, is that Jones was, contrary to the popular myth, an ambitious, frustrated and creative young man from an ordinary environment, who created something extraordinary through sustained effort, dedication and drive in the face of repeated failure. To see him as a creature who effortlessly came and went from the stars diminishes that other side of the story: to my mind, this more complex version is the truer story, though, as we’ll see, the truth of Bowie is elusive.
The Aylesbury statue points to another, contradictory way of seeing Bowie that emerged after his death. He was supposedly from elsewhere, but he was also from, or associated with, specific places on earth, and those places wanted to claim him for tourism. Aylesbury’s boast was that the Ziggy Stardust album had debuted there – though Ziggy himself first performed at the Toby Jug in Tolworth, down the road from me – and argued that its Market Square, the site of the statue, inspired the first line of ‘Five Years’. South-east London maintained that Bowie was ‘Our Brixton Boy’ – the slogan appeared on the Ritzy Cinema just after his death – and has its own mural, now repainted and protected with a plastic cover, around the corner from his childhood home on Stansfield Road.
Strictly speaking, yes, he was a Brixton boy; he was born on that street, at number 40. But his family moved when he was barely six, and he lived in Bromley from January 1953 onwards, including a full ten years in the same house on Plaistow Grove. Brixton in south London sounds better as an origin than Bromley in Kent, as Bowie surely realised when he dropped tall tales about getting into local ‘street brawls’ that made him ‘very butch’ and growing up in an ‘’ouseful of blacks’. Brixton, in the early 1950s, was a borderline between the past and the future, where bombsites and ration books were reminders of the recent war, but where the sights and tastes of a more multicultural, modern London had begun to creep in. One neighbour recalls technicolour clothing, Caribbean vegetables, even jugglers and sword-swallowers at the local market, while Bowie describes the streets around Stansfield Road as ‘like Harlem’. Bromley, on the other hand, apart from its associations with H. G. Wells, is known primarily for bland suburbia: biographer Christopher Sandford mentions it as a ‘drab, featureless dormitory town’, and Bowie referred scathingly, in a 1993 interview, to its regularity, its conformity and its ‘meanness’. For much of his life, he preferred to write it out of his official history.
But think about your own childhood: where you were born, and where you actually grew up. I was born in Coventry and spent my earliest years there in a council flat, but by the time I turned three my parents had moved to the first of many short-term lets in south-east London. I only half remember those from photographs, unsure if my memory is of the image or the real place; and I don’t recall Coventry at all. Certainly, I was born there, but the streets I’m from – the streets that really formed me – are the ones around Kinveachy Gardens in Charlton from ages three to eleven, and then Woodhill, down the hill in neighbouring Woolwich, as a teenager.
Did his first six years in Brixton shape David Jones? To some extent, no doubt. ‘I left Brixton when I was still quite young, but that was enough to be very affected by it,’ he later claimed. ‘It left strong images in my mind.’ He apparently returned to Stansfield Road in 1991, asking the tour bus to stop outside his old house, and came back for a final pilgrimage with his daughter in 2014. But Brixton’s influence must surely pale compared to the formative decade, from ages seven to seventeen, that David Jones spent at 4 Plaistow Grove, next to Sundridge Park Station, in Bromley. There is, as yet, no statue, plaque, or mural there – just occasional flowers outside someone else’s residential house – though he recalled it in 1993’s ‘Buddha of Suburbia’, with one of those lyrics that seems a gift to biographers: ‘Living in lies by the railway line, pushing the hair from my eyes. Elvis is English and climbs the hills … can’t tell the bullshit from the lies.’ ‘I knew him as Bromley Dave,’ Bowie’s childhood friend Paul Reeves confirmed, years later. ‘As that is where we were both from.’
When I attempted to immerse myself in Bowie’s life and career, between 2015 and 2016, I followed the path he’d traced around the world, from New York to Berlin to Switzerland to New York again. I also spent time at his old haunts in London, reading his recollections of the La Gioconda coffee shop at 9 Denmark Street while sitting in the same spot, currently a Flat Iron steak restaurant. But while I’d visited his home streets in Bromley – Canon Road, Clarence Road and Plaistow Grove – I’d only paid passing attention to the area. With hindsight, there was an unconscious reason behind the omission.
My old manor, around Kinveachy Gardens and Woodhill, is about six miles from Bowie’s house in Bromley; close enough that we both knew each other’s territory, growing up. He travelled to Woolwich at least once, to see Little Richard at the Granada. My experience and his also overlapped in Blackheath and Lewisham, equidistant between our childhood homes: we both visited friends in the posh big houses of Blackheath and travelled to Lewisham for its superior shops. There are key differences, of course, and I’m flattering myself by imagining a connection between us. When Bowie caught the bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts, he jumped off it two stops later with ‘Life on Mars?’ already in his head. In significant ways, then, my experience in Woolwich was not like David Bowie’s in Bromley: but there are interesting cultural continuities, despite our difference in age. Our town centres had a lot in common, for instance: a Littlewoods with its school uniforms and jam doughnuts; the knives, forks and tomato-shaped ketchup dispensers in Wimpy’s very English hamburger restaurants; ornate, art deco Odeon cinemas on the edge of town. Because Bromley already seemed familiar to me from my own childhood, I didn’t delve as deeply in, or investigate it, in such detail. So in May 2018, I reopened the investigation. I went to live in Bromley, to revisit Bowie’s time there. I ate there, drank there, slept there and shopped there, walking his old routes.
To me, research – and critical thinking in general – is not so much about finding information as it is about making connections: drawing lines, linking points and sometimes making unexpected leaps across time and space. If you plotted them visually, the paths of my research process would form a network, a matrix: a conceptual map, expanding and developing and becoming increasingly more complex.
I started with a map: with two maps. The Goad Plan, a gigantic, hand-drawn map of Bromley in the 1960s, spread across a table in the library’s Historic Collections room, and a far smaller, digital version alongside it on my phone – 2018’s Google Maps app – which I scrolled across for comparison. The same place, separated in time.
There is little sign now of the smaller boutiques and quirky, independent shops that would have been part of David Jones’s cultural landscape – the Tip Top Bakery, Sherry’s Fabrics, Terry’s Stores, Dolly’s Trolley – though there is a Tips and Toes nail salon, and Buddy’s Café. Some of Bromley’s newer shops and venues offer an ersatz simulation of the past. Mr Simm’s Olde Sweet Shop is a franchise dating back to 2004, and Greater than Gatsby, a bar promising 1920s style, warns its punters: ‘Guys, no hats or hoodies, come on, you’re not 12.’
Medhurst’s Department Store, where Bowie bought his American vinyl and listened to records in the basement sound booths, is now a Primark. Wimpy’s, where he ate burgers with his school-friend Geoff MacCormack, indulging his tastes for America, is the Diner’s Inn Café. The nearby Lyons’ Corner House, where teenagers could gather over coffee, has also vanished – it’s now a Mothercare – though there’s still a music store, Reid’s, with saxophones in the window.
I sat at the Stonehenge Café, opposite Primark, and watched the Market Square and High Street with a double vision. It wasn’t hard to imagine a teenage David walking through the doors – past where the Aladdin Sane T-shirts are now hanging – to meet his girlfriend Jane Green, who worked on the record counter, for a covert smooch to Eddie Cochran and Ray Charles. ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’, says one of Bowie’s 1960s singles. I couldn’t help thinking about him. One of his last songs – released posthumously, on 8 January 2017 – was called ‘No Plan’. His final tracks in particular feel like a puzzle he left behind, a message for his followers. What was his plan, during the 1960s? Did he have any sense of his end goal? Was he working his way towards fame, or just enjoying the scene, the lifestyle, the groups and the girls, like so many other teenage boys who loved records and made their own music?
Pulling the digital map back from the High Street to a wider view, we can begin to plot Bowie’s Bromley on a broader scale. Most of the key landmarks in his early life are all within walking distance of each other; I proved it to myself by walking between them, putting the legwork into my research. Only Bowie’s secondary school, Bromley Tech, was out of easy reach; he used to take the number 410 bus. It’s now Ravens Wood School, and I visited it for the final chapter of this book.
Plaistow Grove is less than a mile north of the town centre. I took a right at the Hop and Rye pub, then walked down College Lane, passing St Mary’s Church, where a seven-year-old Bowie sang in the choir with his friends George Underwood and Geoff MacCormack. Nearby is a chip shop that dates back to 1920: I wondered if the lads got a takeaway there, as I did. Their Cub Scout pack, the 18th Bromley, is still based at the church, and meets every Friday. Past Plaistow Green, a well-tended grassy square, it’s another fifteen minutes down quiet, safe streets to David’s former primary school, Burnt Ash.
The Bromel Club, in the Bromley Court Hotel, is another mile from Plaistow Grove, along London Lane. Bowie played there with the Lower Third in 1966, aged nineteen: it was a prestigious gig, in a venue that also hosted the Yardbirds, the Kinks and Jimi Hendrix. The exterior has barely changed, but the Jazz Club became a ballroom, which became the Garden Restaurant, a gorgeous space of curved archways and elegant pillars. There are photos of Bowie with a mod haircut on display in the hotel reception, with a mounted single of his early songs with the Lower Third and The Manish Boys.
Sitting in the restaurant, I studied a different kind of matrix: a list of names and numbers, from an old reference book called Kelly’s Directory. It told me exactly who had lived on Bowie’s street and in the surrounding area in specific years. Even the abbreviations carried an air of quaint, pre-war convention. Every George was shortened to Geo., every William was a Wm. There were Herberts, Cuthberts, Cyrils and Arthurs; the Misses Austin, Miss Osborn and Miss Gibbs. I spoke to residents who’d lived on Plaistow Grove at the same time as Bowie. Some of them remembered him, or had stories about him passed down from previous generations. One told me that her nan saw David with his mother regularly at Mr Bull’s greengrocer shop. ‘She always tied coloured ribbons in his hair as a toddler because she wanted a girl. No wonder he turned out weird!’ Bromley’s older locals confirmed the shops around the corner from the Jones family, all the owners known politely by their surname. Mr and Mrs Bull had a dog called Curry. The Kiosk, selling sweets at Sundridge Park Station, was run by Miss Violet Hood; then there was Coates electrical engineers, Arthur Ash boot repair, Bailey’s the newsagent, a butcher’s shop run by two brothers, and a hair salon variously known at different times as Beryl’s or Paul’s.
Plaistow Lane, the main road, slopes slightly uphill before the turn on to Bowie’s home street. A painted sign brands the area as Sundridge Village. On a sunny evening in spring, it looks like a great place to grow up. David Jones’s neighbours did not change at all between 1955, when he was eight, and 1967, when he turned twenty. There was Miss Florence West, to the left at number 2, and to the right, Mr Harry Hall; Mr George Rowe lived at number 8, and Mr and Mrs Pollard at number 10. None of them moved in or out during those twelve years. On that specific, local level, Bowie’s life on Plaistow Grove seems consistent to the point of being comatose.
Walking down the short, quiet street from the main road to his house – morning, Miss West, good morning, Mr Hall – you can easily imagine an ambitious, imaginative and creative teenager becoming bored. From his back bedroom he could hear the trains from Sundridge Park on their way to London, and the music and boozy crowds from the pub, the Crown Hotel, at the end of his garden. I talked to a resident who’d occupied the same room, after the Jones family left. She explained that you couldn’t hear the trains anymore, now that the windows were double-glazed. Times change. The Crown is now Cinnamon Culture, an upmarket Indian. I sat in the beer garden. You can see what would have been his bedroom window, from the back, and imagine him again, looking out at the lights, the trains, the adults in couples and groups; listening to the music from the pub as it mixed with his American radio broadcasts, and longing for escape.
Of course, it’s only imagination. We can establish certain facts, but then we choose how to fill in the gaps. Without Bowie’s long-promised but never-written autobiography, we can only rely on available documentary evidence like maps and directories, and the recollections of his friends, family members and acquaintances, decades later. But judging by the jokes, provocations and outright lies that constitute many of Bowie’s interviews, can we really assume that even his own memoirs would be any more reliable?
Every biography of Bowie, even the most authoritative, is a constellation created by joining together a scatter of stars into a convincing picture. It is a particular route, plotted across the points of a map, which leaves some paths untravelled. It is a selection of ideas and evidence from the Bowie matrix – the vast network of what we know about this public figure and private man – which emphasises some details, and discards others. That’s the nature of research and writing: not just the discovery of information but the way we join it up; what we omit, as well as what we include. A history of Bowie – like any other history – is a story, based around selection, interpretation, speculation and deletion. It has to be, because if biographers simply absorbed and channelled all the available information about Bowie’s life, it would overwhelm any sense of conventional narrative and character: put simply, it wouldn’t even make sense.
In 1967, for instance, Bowie told a New Musical Express journalist that he’d moved with his family not to Bromley, but to Yorkshire when he was eight. He claimed to have lived with an uncle in an ancient farmhouse, ‘surrounded by open fields and sheep and cattle’, complete with a seventeenth-century monk’s hole where Catholic priests had hidden from Protestant persecution. The NME journalist commented helpfully that it was ‘a romantic place for a child to grow’. There’s a seed of truth in what sounds a purely fanciful story: Kevin Cann’s Any Day Now: The London Years, built around well-documented details, suggests that David did visit his Uncle Jimmy in Yorkshire for holidays in 1952 and fabricated these trips into an extended stay at a later age. Yet even this contradicts Bowie’s simultaneous assertion that he lived in Brixton until the age of ten or eleven and walked to school past the gates of its prison. Authors Peter and Leni Gillman dug into educational archives to confirm that David Jones transferred into Burnt Ash Juniors, Bromley, on 20 June 1955. The school is seven miles from Brixton Prison, which makes it very unlikely that a ten-year-old took that detour. Historical records and maps, with their prosaic evidence, are duller than Bowie’s stories about his past, but more reliable.
Can we trust the memories of the people who grew up with him? Dana Gillespie, one of Bowie’s first girlfriends, memorably describes a trip to his parents’ ‘tiny little working-class house … the smallest I’d ever been in’. She thinks they had ‘little tuna sandwiches … it was a really cold house, a very chilly atmosphere.’ There was a television ‘blasting away in the corner, and nobody spoke’. She repeated the anecdote for Francis Whately’s 2019 documentary, David Bowie: Finding Fame, adding a postscript: ‘It was hard going. It was soulless.’
David Jones’s mother Margaret, known as Peggy, is similarly described by his former school-friends as cold and unaffectionate: ‘I don’t think it was a family,’ remembered Dudley Chapman. ‘It was a lot of people who happened to be living under the same roof.’ George Underwood agrees: ‘Even David didn’t like his mum. She wasn’t an easy person to get on with.’ Geoff MacCormack remembers telling Bowie that Peggy ‘never quite took to me’, receiving the rueful confession in response that ‘she never quite took to me, either.’ Peter Frampton suggests that David had a better relationship with his teacher, Owen Frampton – Peter’s dad – than he did with his own father, Hayward Stenton (known as ‘John’) Jones. ‘I’m not privy to the relationship … but I don’t think it was that great.’
George Underwood, by contrast, recalls John Jones as ‘lovely, a really nice gentle man’, while Bowie’s cousin, Kristina Amadeus, points out that David’s dad, who ‘absolutely doted on him’, bought him a plastic saxophone, a tin guitar and a xylophone before he was an adolescent, and that ‘he also owned a record player when few children had one … David’s father took him to meet singers and other performers preparing for the Royal Variety Performance.’ The Jones’s house may have seemed tiny to Dana Gillespie, but to Kristina, it was ‘lower middle class … his father was from a very affluent family.’ Uncle John, she tells the Gillmans, ‘really wanted him to be a star’. Note that despite these many documented friendships and relationships with cousins close to his age, Bowie reports of his childhood that ‘I was lonely,’ and also recalled: ‘I was a kid that loved being in my room reading books and entertaining ideas. I lived a lot in my imagination. It was a real effort to become a social animal.’
Despite the supposed coldness of the Jones family home, Bowie reminisced in the late 1990s about roast dinners on wintry Sundays, with a small fire blazing, and his mother’s voice soaring to match the songs on the radio. ‘Oh, I love this one,’ she’d remark, joining in with ‘O For the Wings of a Dove’, before haranguing John Jones for thwarting her musical ambitions. David Buckley’s biography describes her as a ‘drama queen’ with a frustrated dream of ‘being a singer, being a star’, while John was ‘naturally nonconfrontational’. Frigid, unaffectionate, not really a family; or a warm, even heated environment, with a drama-queen mother and a softly-spoken dad who used his industry connections, his experience as head of Dr Barnardo’s publicity department, and his comfortably middle-class salary to support his son’s ambitions?
Bowie’s former manager Kenneth Pitt, meanwhile, gives an impression of 4 Plaistow Grove that contrasts with Dana Gillespie’s chilly image; and his version of Peggy is also far more doting. ‘It was a very conventional suburban home, a tiny terraced house, very comfortable and very homely … and there I’d sit in the front room, talking about David, and his mother would tell me, “You know, he was always the prettiest boy in the street, the sort of boy that all the neighbours loved.”’
Biographer Christopher Sandford adds to the complexity of this family portrait. David’s father was ‘irrepressibly proud of his son’ but also ‘dour, taciturn and tight-fisted – a cold man, an unresponsive man’ who had a stream of affairs and was ‘very prejudiced … very’. Peggy, by contrast, was ‘loud, fractious and given to bewildering mood swings’, yet also ‘inhibiting and aloof’. Sandford finds quotes from Bowie to support this perspective: his father ‘had a lot of love in him, but he couldn’t express it. I can’t remember him ever touching me’, while a compliment from his mother ‘was very hard to come by. I would get my paints out and all she could say was, “I hope you’re not going to make a mess.”’
Peggy herself told an origin myth of Bowie. When he was three, she explained to a journalist in 1985, he’d taken an ‘unnatural’ interest in the contents of her make-up bag. ‘When I found him, he looked for all the world like a clown. I told him that he shouldn’t use make-up, but he said, “You do, Mummy.”’ It’s a neat story, and it echoes her son’s memory of being scolded for playing with paints, as well as his later glam, drag and Pierrot personae. But with hindsight, knowing what David Jones became, it’s understandable if those who knew him, even his mother, tend to tell stories that fit the finished picture, and if biographers, in turn, choose those as the building-blocks of their books. Our sense of David Jones’s childhood is a mixture of non-fiction, invention and half-truth, shaped retroactively by everyone’s awareness of what happened next. The adult Bowie – sometimes literally – rewrites the past of young Jones, and those who knew him tend to follow suit.
Underwood, for instance, remembers that David boasted precociously to the school careers adviser, ‘I want to be a saxophonist in a modern jazz quartet.’ Owen Frampton recalls the Bowie of Bromley Tech as ‘quite unpredictable … already a cult figure’. Dana Gillespie claims Bowie told her, at age fourteen, ‘I want to get out of here. I have to get out of here. I want to go up in the world.’ A neighbour tells Sandford that Bowie used to stand in the glow of the Crown pub’s coaching-lantern, ‘anticipating his pose as Ziggy Stardust’. Another relative recalls that he stood up in front of the TV, aged nine, and announced, ‘I can play guitar just like the Shads … and he did’ – even though the Shadows didn’t appear in public until David was eleven. The local anecdote about Peggy taking her infant son to the shops with ribbons in his hair – ‘No wonder he turned out weird!’ – falls into the same pattern. Even the midwife who delivered baby David in 1947 supposedly pronounced, eerily prefiguring the image of Bowie as angel messiah, that ‘this child has been on earth before’. His music teacher, Mrs Baldry, is unusual in her careful refusal to fuel the Bowie myth. ‘He was no spectacular singer. You’d never have picked him out and said, “That boy sings wonderfully.”’ Bowie’s own revisions of his past, of course, don’t help. ‘I’ve always been camp since I was seven,’ he claimed. ‘I was outrageous then.’ His tendency to retcon his own origins – to suggest that the seeds of his later strangeness and stardom were already rooted in childhood – is particularly evident in his 1970s interviews, when he was keenly forging his media brand.
‘Can’t tell the bullshit from the lies.’ As ever, Bowie’s lyric was knowing. The truth, inevitably, lies in an amalgam of all these testimonies – the interviews, the reminiscences, the dry documents – with the likeliest possibilities emerging in the overlaps between stories, or in a combination of apparently contradictory reports. A house can be tiny, poky and cold to one visitor; tiny, cosy and warm to another. A man can find it difficult to express physical affection towards his son, but show his love by buying him instruments and introducing him to celebrities. A mother can praise her boy as the prettiest in the street, but still feel wary of him playing with her make-up. A woman can sing without shame to the radio over a family Sunday dinner, and still seem aloof or uncomfortable in front of a fourteen-year-old girlfriend. A teenager can have many friends and still feel lonely.
