The Man Who Sold the World (6 page)

Alongside his new identity as Bowie, he restyled himself in summer 1965 as a Mod. His close contemporary and friend Marc Bolan, another client of Leslie Conn who traced an equally erratic course through the 1960s, had identified himself with the self-styled Modernist movement since his early teens. The term originally identified a working-class elite of fashion-conscious self-stylists, committed to constant innovation and renewal under the sway of designers from Milan and Paris; by 1965 it had become an attitude and style with a dress code as strict as any English boarding school; in this Mod code a misplaced jacket button or trouser hem could signal ignominy.

If the Who's Pete Townshend was the unchallenged poet of this exclusive, near-paranoid mentality, Bowie presented himself as its prince charming, as if his entire adolescence had been the prelude to the moment when the peacock could unfurl its feathers. He sported dogtooth or tweed, Carnaby Street or King's Road as the month demanded, his jeans or corduroy cut tight to his pipelike legs.

Bowie's allegiance to the Mod community was confirmed by his hair, described quaintly in the
Kentish Times
as a “long back and sides.” With its pudding-basin fringe and loosely enforced side parting, it looked haphazard at first, as if Peggy Jones had taken a pair of blunt scissors to her wriggling son. But it was simply another badge, an instant symbol of affiliation that placed Bowie squarely into the same camp as London contemporaries such as the Small Faces and the Action.

His stage repertoire with the Lower Third encompassed such unlikely fare as a blues-tinged interpretation of “Chim-Chim-Cheree,” from the children's film
Mary Poppins
, and the “Mars” theme from Gustav Holst's orchestral suite
The Planets
—which Bowie first heard as the theme to the 1950s TV science fiction series
Quatermass
. Though Bowie was still prepared to offer his Mod audience some familiar slices of American soul, much of his act comprised original material.

Craft, rather than inspiration, was the basis of Bowie's initial attempts at songwriting. “If anything, David was a poet not a composer,” the Kon-Rads' drummer, David Hadfield, recalled. “He was always seeing a news item in the paper and wanting to write a song about it.” “It took me a long time to get it right,” said Bowie of his early efforts. “I didn't know how to write a song, I wasn't particularly good at it. I forced myself to become a good songwriter, and I
became
a good songwriter. But I had no natural talents whatsoever. And the only way I could learn was to see how other people did it.”

Much of the material he wrote during his apprenticeship betrayed its inspirations all too clearly. Even at the height of his seventies fame, he admitted that “I envisage a scenario first, then the music,” with the attendant risk that he might be applying more originality to his concepts than to his melodies. But in late 1965 he introduced two songs that, in their autobiographical scope and musical invention, had no obvious precedents in the music that he had previously written or performed: “The London Boys” [A21], a harrowing slice of Soho life as experienced via teenage naïveté, and the gloriously narcissistic “Can't Help Thinking About Me” [A14]. Within weeks, Bowie was performing with yet another group, the Buzz.

He was a recognizable figure on the London music scene by now, personable, amenable, and unconventionally handsome. He had a handful of supporters in the pop press, who guaranteed him a modicum of regular coverage; he could fill prestigious clubs such as the Marquee, which staged a series of Sunday afternoon shows under the title
Bowie Showboat
. He was, in Mod parlance, a “face”; but still not yet twenty, he was gaining a reputation as a quality performer who didn't, quite, have star quality. He had recorded for three of Britain's four major record corporations (Philips had yet to bite) without conspicuous success. His songwriting was becoming increasingly inventive, and there were signs that he felt confined by his Mod status, as evidenced by his choices of finale for his stage act with the Buzz: either “You'll Never Walk Alone” or Anthony Newley's “What Kind of Fool Am I.” This was decidedly passé material for an avowed Modernist. And indeed by August 1966, he claimed to be composing a stage musical with “Downtown” composer Tony Hatch, and announced one solid ambition: “I'd like to get into cabaret, obviously.”

Kenneth Pitt had been introduced to Bowie after one of the
Showboat
performances at the Marquee, and a mutual rapport had been established. Bowie was impressed by Pitt's experience as an agent for stars such as Manfred Mann and Bob Dylan; Pitt was won over by Bowie's idiosyncratic performances and unabashed charm. “Nobody at that time knew he was gay except for me and Ralph Horton,” Pitt declared later. “David would have gone to any extreme at that time to avoid it being known.” What's obvious in retrospect was that Bowie was prepared to be whatever anyone who wielded power and influence wanted him to be. When it suited him, any of these identities could be discarded with ease, as a more lucrative prospect entered his horizon. This was the mercurial client whom Pitt agreed to manage in 1966. For the next three and a half years, he would be Bowie's single-minded mentor; he introduced the nineteen-year-old to cultural and social influences that he could never have discovered in Bromley or Beckenham—and reawakening those he had already forgotten.

 

VII

 

THERE MUST BE A HOLE IN A MAN WHO GETS UP ON A STAGE AND CRIES, “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!” I AM STILL A PARAMOUNT EGOTIST FOREVER WATCHING MYSELF. WHY? A KID NEEDS ALL THE ATTENTION HE CAN GET, ALL THE AFFECTION. HE WORKS FOR IT. HE WAS BORN WITH AN ENGAGING LITTLE FACE AND NOTHING MORE. SO HE USES HIS CUTENESS TO GET LOVE. THE PROCESS CONTINUES THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, INTO MATURITY. HE SHARPENS AND HONES THAT ABILITY UNTIL IT IS AN ART. ACTING, WHEN YOU BOIL IT DOWN, IS JUST A PLEA FOR APPROVAL, FOR LOVE.

 

—Anthony Newley,
Daily Express
, 1963

The man with “a hole” in his personality, the “paramount egotist,” was a star of rare versatility. If Anthony Newley had been American, he would have occupied a place in the Rat Pack pantheon alongside Sammy Davis Jr. The British public, however, tends to distrust performers who exhibit more than one talent; they're seen as pompous, pretentious, arrogant, all adjectives that were thrown at Newley during his lifetime.

Little more than a decade after his death, he is a mostly forgotten figure, often reduced to nothing more than a footnote in the career of a man he never met: David Bowie. This is scant reward for a decade of wild creativity, in which Newley moved like quicksilver from cabaret to film stardom; scored hit records as a teen idol, comedian, and crooner; penned two hit musicals; composed some of the most enduring British show tunes of the 1960s; conquered television as an entertainer, comic actor, and tragedian; wrote the original theme tune for the James Bond movie
Goldfinger
; starred in
Dr. Dolittle
; concocted a bestselling album of political satire with Peter Sellers; married Joan Collins to become part of the nation's highest-profile celebrity couple; and then followed Frank Sinatra to Las Vegas—all this between 1959 and 1969. He invented a new strand of surreal television comedy that paved the way for the Monty Python troupe; mastered song-and-dance and mime; and, in a groundbreaking 1961 drama that mixed comedy with existential protest, tackled a theme that would haunt David Bowie a decade later: the helplessness of the entertainer when faced with the imminent extinction of mankind. He was a true giant of British popular culture, but the solitary mark he has left on the rock generations is that he inspired Bowie to record “The Laughing Gnome” [A37].

Newley could not muster much enthusiasm for Bowie or his music. “Never cared for his performances,” he admitted in 1975. “Sort of uni-sexless, wouldn't you say?” In later years, Bowie would laugh affectionately when Newley's name was mentioned, like a gangster being reminded of a vintage heist with a tragic flaw. Before “The Laughing Gnome” reemerged to embarrass him in 1973, however, he was more prepared to admit to this influence. “I was Anthony Newley for a year,” he said earlier that year. “He was once one of the most talented men that England ever produced.” He would consistently ask interviewers if they remembered
The Strange World of Gurney Slade
, a 1959 television series from Britain's ATV company that ran to just six half-hour episodes. Its gimmick, startling for the times, was that Newley would find himself stumbling from one inexplicable mishap to the next, while providing all the dialogue as a stream-of-consciousness voice-over—like the bizarre love child of Virginia Woolf and Mr. Bean.

Kenneth Pitt remembered the series well, and cemented his bond with Bowie by showing him outtakes from the filming of the 1962 drama
The Small World of Sammy Lee
. Set in a suitably enclosed milieu that barely extended beyond the square mile of Soho,
Sammy Lee
was a virtual one-man showcase for Newley as a strip club compere with a seamless line in suggestive patter, plenty of self-hatred, and a doomed proclivity for owing bookmakers money. Like
Gurney Slade
, it established the distinctive Newley persona: a tragic hero who is incapable of meeting any crisis without a gag. With his deadpan Cockney humor and almost annoyingly consistent charm, Newley was the prototype for one of Bowie's standard ways of greeting the media: he would fall naturally into the role of the South London cheeky chappy who insists that you really shouldn't take anything too seriously, darling, otherwise where would we all be?

There were other Newleys who left their mark on Bowie, such as the exaggerated London barrow-boy vocalist of novelty singles such as “Strawberry Fair” and “Pop Goes the Weasel”; the writer of melodramatic, breast-beating West End ballads such as “Who Can I Turn To?” and “Once in a Lifetime”; the mime artiste and occasional clown he portrayed in his award-winning musical
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
; and the star facing humanity's final curtain in the 1961 BBC drama
The Johnny Darling Show
.

Most of all, Newley made it possible for David Bowie to embrace his London heritage, in the same way that the Beatles had opened up Liverpool to the world. He was not the only star of the rock'n'roll era who proudly displayed his roots in the Big Smoke: in fact, there was a brief but proud tradition of entertainers who shifted from rock to show business, including Tommy Steele, Joe Brown, and Mike Sarne. What Newley offered, and they didn't, was a sense of a deeper humanity; like Bowie, he inhabited his characters with such precision that it was impossible to distinguish the man from the masks.

Kenneth Pitt's professional involvement with Newley allowed Bowie to reconnect with an artist whose work he had adored when he was thirteen. Pitt's influence certainly didn't end there: he introduced the young singer to the sumptuous aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley; encouraged him to read Christopher Isherwood's stories of life in prewar Berlin; and invited him to attend West End shows. In Pitt's account, Bowie was constantly changing his image and his obsessions: “To begin with, he had a scruffy period when he wouldn't change his clothes and my secretary kept telling me how worried she was that he wasn't eating . . . and then we had a Bob Dylan period, when he dressed in black and went all introvert . . . and then he went hippie, like everyone else, wearing beads and bangles . . . and now we were back to Newley, whom he'd been listening to before in 1960 and 1961.”

In London, it was a time of cultural ferment, in which novelty was king. Pitt's expansive knowledge of popular music enabled him to imagine a career for Bowie beyond the apparently ephemeral life span of a rock singer. In August 1966, so Bowie archivist Kevin Cann discovered, Pitt introduced him to Carl Davis, an American composer and orchestrator who was a decade older than Bowie. Their brief was to compose songs for a short musical film, a task that allowed Bowie to distance himself from the material he was writing. Though he has never discussed his brief collaboration with Davis, it seems to have inspired him to attempt something entirely new: a series of character songs that were deliberately nostalgic (capitalizing on the London fad for reviving Edwardian fashion) and theatrical.

This session secured Bowie a rare opportunity to record an album for Decca Records' newly launched vehicle for contemporary pop and easy listening, Deram. It was a sign that his potential extended well beyond the Mod audience, for whom singles would have been more appropriate. He would now demonstrate his remarkable ability to separate his life into several discrete parcels, simultaneously inhabiting a variety of contradictory roles. For Deram, he was the miniaturist, creating tiny affectionate portraits of British life, often reaching back into the nation's imagined past. Meanwhile, he and Pitt continued to toy with ambitious plans for cabaret performances and stage musicals. The Buzz had become the latest casualties of his shift in perspective, but rather than gathering a small group of baroque musicians to accompany his latest compositions, he joined forces with an existing London band, the Riot Squad, with whom he began to explore the margins of contemporary rock culture. Having been reminded of Anthony Newley's early sixties novelty hits, he had also begun to write in a similar vein himself, concocting the notorious “The Laughing Gnome” [A37] and “Over the Wall We Go” [A36].

These songs, so Bowie reflected many years later, were “fumblings about how to bring theatricality to pop music or rock. It stems from the very English thing, the idea of music hall and vaudeville. . . . I would probably have gone on to all that, pantomimes, musicals and that sort of thing, if I hadn't been so stubborn and hard-headed about doing something that had to do with art.” At the age of twenty, he was prepared to accept success however it came. He clearly sensed that “art” and “entertainment” might be mutually contradictory for him, and his magpie enthusiasm for new forms of expression—one minute he claimed to be designing clothes for John Stephen, the next he was planning a film career—ensured that he would rarely concentrate on one method of stimulation for too long. Bowie was learning (and borrowing) from everyone, whether that was Frank Zappa (whose anarchic Mothers of Invention material he persuaded the Riot Squad to tackle onstage) or Cliff Richard (Britain's most polished pop star, whom Bowie saw in
Cinderella
at the London Palladium). No avenue was closed, no possibility rejected, no style discarded as too crass or embarrassing. Yet there was a willful streak in this young man that encouraged him to reject Swinging London at the peak of its iconic power, and to subvert opportunities for self-promotion, simply because he could. “When I wanted David to be extrovert, he wanted to be introvert,” Pitt complained in the mid-seventies. “When I wanted him to wear beautiful clothes, he wanted to wear dirty clothes. This glamorous creature that comes on with all this make-up was once totally introvert and colourless.”