Starman Read online

  Also by Paul Trynka

  IGGY POP: OPEN UP AND BLEED

  PORTRAIT OF THE BLUES

  DENIM

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-74812-991-1

  Copyright © Paul Trynka 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  To Kazimierz and Maureen: Heroes

  CONTENTS

  Also by Paul Trynka

  Copyright

  Introduction: Genius Steals

  Part One: I Hope I Make It On My Own

  1 When I’m Five

  2 ‘Numero Uno, Mate!’

  3 Thinking About Me

  4 Laughing Gnome

  5 I Wish Something Would Happen

  6 Check Ignition

  7 All the Madmen

  8 Kooks

  9 Over the Rainbow

  10 Battle Cries and Champagne

  Part Two: Where Things Are Hollow

  11 Star

  12 The Changing isn’t Free

  13 Make Me Break Down and Cry

  14 White Stains

  15 Ghosts in the Echo Chambers

  16 Helden

  17 I Am Not a Freak

  18 Snapshot of a Brain

  19 On the Other Side

  20 It’s My Life – So Fuck Off

  21 The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

  22 The Houdini Mechanism

  Discography

  Notes and Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  Genius Steals

  Thursday evening, seven o’clock: decadence is about to arrive in five million front rooms. Neatly suited dads are leaning back in the comfiest chair, mums in their pinnies are clearing away the dishes, while the kids – still in school shirts and trousers – are clustered around the small television for their most sacred weekly ritual.

  The tiny studio audience, milling around in tank tops and dresses, clap politely as the artist at number forty-one in the charts strums out two minor chords on his blue twelve-string guitar. The camera cuts from his hands to his face, catching the barest hint of a smirk – like a child hoping to get away with something naughty. But then as his friends – Trevor, Woody and Mick Ronson – clatter into action with a rollicking drum roll and throaty guitar, the camera pulls back and David Bowie meets its gaze, unflinchingly. His look is lascivious, amused. As an audience of excited teens and outraged parents struggle to take in the multicoloured quilted jumpsuit, the luxuriant carrot-top hairdo, spiky teeth and those sparkling, mascaraed come-to-bed eyes, he sings us through an arresting succession of images: radios, aliens, ‘get-it-on rock ‘n’ roll’. The audience is still grappling with this confusing, over-the-top spectacle when a staccato guitar rings out a Morse code warning, and then, all too suddenly, we’re into the chorus.

  From the disturbingly new, we shift to the reassuringly familiar: as he croons out ‘There’s a star —man …’ Bowie’s voice leaps up an octave. It’s an ancient Tin Pan Alley songwriter’s trick, signalling a release, a climax. And as we hear of the friendly alien waiting in the sky, the audience suddenly recognises a tune, and a message, lifted openly, outrageously, from ‘Over the Rainbow’, Judy Garland’s escapist, Technicolor wartime anthem. It’s simple, singalong, comforting territory, and it lasts just four bars, before David Bowie makes his bid for immortality. Less than one minute after his face first appeared on Top of the Pops – the BBC’s family-friendly music programme – Bowie lifts his slim, graceful hand to the side of his face and his platinum-haired bandmate Mick Ronson joins him at the microphone. Then, casually, coolly, Bowie places his arm around the guitarist’s neck, and pulls Ronson lovingly towards him. There’s the same octave leap as he sings ‘star—man’ again, but this time it doesn’t suggest escaping the bounds of earth; it symbolises escaping the bounds of sexuality.

  The fifteen-million-strong audience struggles to absorb this exotic, pan-sexual creature: in countless households, the kids are entranced – in their hundreds, in thousands – as parents sneer, shout or walk out of the room. But even as they wonder how to react, there’s another stylistic swerve; with the words ‘let the children boogie’, David Bowie and The Spiders break into an unashamed T. Rex boogie rhythm. For a generation of teenagers, there was no hesitation; those ninety seconds, on a sunny evening in July 1972, would change the course of their lives. Up to this point, pop music had been mainly about belonging, about identification with your peers. This music, carefully choreographed in a dank basement under a south London escort agency, was a spectacle of not-belonging. For scattered, isolated kids around the UK, and soon the East Coast of America, and then the West Coast, this was their day. The day of the outsider.

  In the weeks that followed, it became obvious that these three minutes had put a rocket under the career of a man all-too recently dismissed as a one-hit wonder. Most people who knew him were delighted, but there were hints of suspicion. ‘Hip Vera Lynn,’ one cynical friend called it, in a pointed reference to ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ – the huge wartime hit that had also ripped off Judy Garland’s best-known song; this homage was too knowing. A few weeks later, to emphasise the point, David started singing ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ over the chorus of ‘Starman’ – as if to prove Pablo Picasso’s maxim that ‘talent borrows, genius steals’.

  And steal he had, with a clear-eyed effrontery as shocking as the lifted melodies themselves. The way he collaged several old tunes into a new song was a musical tradition as old as the hills, one still maintained by David’s old-school showbiz friends like Lionel Bart, the writer of Oliver!. Yet to boast of this homage, to show the joins, brazenly, like the lift shafts of the Pompidou centre, was a new trick – a post-modernism that was just as unsettling as the post-sexuality he’d shown off with that arm lovingly curled over Mick Ronson’s shoulder. This ‘appropriation’ might have been a hot notion in the art scene, thanks to Andy Warhol, but for a rock ‘n’ roller to declare ‘I’m a tasteful thief’ defied a sacred convention – that rock ‘n’ roll was an authentic, visceral medium. Rock ‘n’ roll was real; born out of joy and anguish in the turmoil of post-war America, and sculpted into the first electric blues. But David flaunted his lack of authenticity with brazen abandon. ‘The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from. I do think that my plagiarism is effective,’ he told an interviewer. The open lifting of iconic sounds was a disturbing new form of genius. But was rock ‘n’ roll now just an art game? Was the flame-haired Ziggy Stardust – potent symbol of otherness – just an intellectual pose?

  When David Bowie made his mark so elegantly, so extravagantly, that night on Top of the Pops, in a thrilling performance that marked out the seventies as a decade distinct from the sixties, every one of those contradictions was obvious; in fact, they added a delicious tension. In the following months and years – as he dumped the band who had shaped his music; when his much-touted influences like Iggy Pop, the man who’d inspired Ziggy, dismissed him as a ‘fuckin’ carrot-top’ who had exploited and then sabotaged him; when David himself publicly moaned that his gay persona had damaged his career in the US – those contradictions became more obvious still.

  So was David Bowie truly an outsider? Or was he a showbiz pro, exploiting outsiders like a psychic vampire? Was he really a starman, or was it all cheap music-hall tinsel and glitter? Was he gay or was it all a mask? There was evidence aplenty for both. And that evidence multiplie
d in the following months and years as fans witnessed – wide-mouthed – astonishing moments like his wired, fractured appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, or his twitchy but charming approachability on Soul Train. Was this bizarre behaviour also a mask? A carefully choreographed routine?

  In the following years David Bowie, and those around him, would struggle to answer this question. He’d emerged from a showbiz tradition propelled chiefly by youthful ambition, his main talent that of ‘repositioning the brand’, as one friend puts it. That calculation, that ‘executive ability’, as Iggy Pop describes it, marked him out as the very antithesis of instinctive rock ‘n’ roll heroes like Elvis Presley. Yet the actions that apparently signalled the death of rock ‘n’ roll announced a rebirth, too. Maybe this wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll like Elvis had made it, but it led the way for where rock ‘n’ roll would go. Successors like Prince or Madonna, Bono or Lady Gaga, each seized on Bowie’s ‘repositioning the brand’ as a set-piece example of how to avoid artistic culs-de-sac like the one that imprisoned Elvis. For Bowie himself, though, each brand renewal, each metamorphosis, would come at a cost.

  Inevitably, as David Bowie’s career moved ever onwards, generations of fans wondered what lay behind those masks. In subsequent years there have been many accounts, either of a flint-hearted rip-off merchant, or a natural-born genius with some minor character flaws. Yet as the hundreds of friends, lovers and fellow musicians who speak within the following pages attest, the truth is far more intriguing.

  For the truth is, David Bowie – behind the glitter and showmanship – didn’t just change himself on the outside; he changed himself on the inside. Since Doctor Faustus sold his soul, or Robert Johnson found himself at the crossroads, artists and musicians have struggled to transcend the talents they were born with. David Bowie, a youth with ambition and more charm than talent, seemed to have achieved that magical alchemy, the achievement we all dream of: he transformed himself, and his destiny.

  PART ONE

  I Hope I Make It On My Own

  1

  When I’m Five

  Everything seemed grey. We wore short grey flannel trousers of a thick and rough material, grey socks and grey shirts. The roads were grey, the prefabs were grey and the bomb sites also seemed to be made of grey rubble.

  Peter Prickett

  It was a cold, wet November in 1991, like the cold, wet Novembers of his childhood, when David Bowie asked his driver to take the scenic route to the Brixton Academy. The smoke-filled coach pulled slowly down Stansfield Road, just a few hundred yards from the venue, and paused outside a large, anonymous three-storey Victorian house, before moving on.

  Bowie had been chatty, open, almost surprisingly vulnerable in the last twelve weeks, but remained silent for a few minutes as he gazed out of the window. Then he turned around, and guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, sitting next to him, could see tears trickling down his employer’s cheeks. ‘It’s a miracle,’ Bowie murmured. He was unashamed of his vulnerability. ‘I probably should have been an accountant. I don’t know how this all happened.’

  For Schermerhorn, who’d seen Bowie’s showmanship and poise from close-up, the mental image of David Robert Jones inspecting a company spreadsheet seemed ludicrous. As had the doubts he’d expressed to Schermerhorn a few days before: he didn’t even know if he could sing. For Schermerhorn, who had seen the man’s almost mystical ability to hold a show together and dominate a crowd, this apparent self-doubt was bizarre. Over the coming months, Schermerhorn would learn from Bowie’s friends, and his own observations, about the man’s organisation, his ‘executive abilities’, his talent for working the system. Yet here was the man himself, surveying the scene of his childhood, convinced this was some kind of accident. The idea seemed ludicrous. Hadn’t someone so eminently glamorous always been fated to be a star?

  David Bowie has described himself as a ‘Brixton boy’ more than once. Although his stay was brief, it’s an apt term. Brixton in January 1947 was a unique location: the cultural focus of south London, blessed with its own racy glamour, battered but unbowed by the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s terror weapons, whose destruction was visible wherever you walked.

  It was natural that David’s father, Haywood Stenton Jones, should gravitate towards Brixton, for its music-hall traditions matched his own fantasies. Born in Doncaster on 21 November, 1912, and brought up in the picturesque Yorkshire brewery town of Tadcaster, he had a tough childhood: his father died in the First World War, and his mother soon afterwards. Raised by the local council and an aunt, Haywood Jones came into an inheritance from the family footwear business when he was eighteen. ‘So he bought a theatre troupe. What a wise idea!’ David recounted years later. The enterprise lost Haywood much of his fortune, and he invested what was left in a nightclub in London’s West End that catered to boxers and other exotic characters. It was during this short-lived venture that he also acquired a wife, pianist Hilda Sullivan. When the nightclub burned up most of his remaining cash, Haywood came down with a stomach ulcer. The idea of working for a children’s charity came to him in a dream; both an exit route from his own troubles and a way of helping kids who’d suffered fractured childhoods like his own. In September 1935 he started work at Dr Barnardo’s at Stepney Causeway, an imposing, sooty complex of buildings in the heart of the East End, which had provided a refuge for homeless children since the 1870s.

  When the Second World War broke out, Haywood was among the first to enlist, serving with the Royal Fusiliers, who fought in France, North Africa and Europe. When he returned to a battered but victorious London in October 1945, Haywood immediately rejoined Barnardo’s as General Superintendent to the Chief of Staff. Like many wartime marriages, Haywood’s didn’t last – it was doubtless damaged by an affair with a nurse which produced a child, Annette, born in 1941.

  Hayward met Margaret Burns, known as Peggy – a waitress at the Ritz Cinema – on a visit to a Barnardo’s home at Tunbridge Wells soon after his return, and his divorce from Hilda only came through in time for him to marry Peggy eight months after the arrival of his second child, David Robert Jones, who was born at the family’s new home at 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, on 8 January, 1947.

  In that immediate post-war period, Brixton was cold, damp and soot-blackened and battered by vengeance weapons. Its pre-war raciness and music-hall glamour was only enhanced by its recent history, and in 1947 Brixton looked – to use one of David’s favourite words – especially dystopian. This part of south London had been judged ‘expendable’ in the Second World War: Churchill’s spymasters had manipulated the press reports of where Hitler’s futuristic V1 flying bombs were landing, to ensure they fell short and hit south London, rather than the wealthy West End. Over forty of the pioneering cruise missiles smashed into Brixton and Lambeth – entire streets both behind and in front of the Jones’ family home were flattened. Most of the rubble had been cleared away by 1947, but the area retained its foreboding gap-toothed look for decades.

  David’s first winter was grim. Britain in late 1947 was grim. The Second World War had invigorated American capitalism, but had left Britain tired, battered and near broke. There were no street lights, no coal, gas supplies were low and ration cards were still needed to buy linen, fuel, ‘economy’ suits, eggs and the scraggy bits of Argentinean beef that were only occasionally available. Christopher Isherwood, the writer who would one day advise David to move to Berlin, visited London that year and was shocked at its shabbiness. ‘London is a dying city,’ one local told him, advising him not to return.

  For parents, life was hard. Yet for the children who scampered around this urban wilderness, it was a wonderland; the abandoned, bomb-damaged houses were playgrounds and museums, full of intriguing treasures abandoned by long-vanished tenants.

  In later years, many of Peggy Burns’ friends would notice her contempt for the Labour Party, who had swept into power in the first post-war election on a platform of radical social reform. Yet given life that winter, her attitude was understanda
ble. The British had been exhausted by the war, but peace had brought no improvement in living standards. In Brixton it was impossible to find soap, the local Woolworth’s was lit by candles, Peggy had to constantly scour the local shops to find terry towelling for nappies, and at the end of February the Labour government introduced power rationing, with homes limited to five hours’ electricity a day. In the meantime, Haywood Jones and the Barnardo’s organisation wrestled with the problem of thousands of children displaced by the war.

  David loved his father – to this day he wears a gold cross given to him by Haywood when he was in his teens – but when asked about his relationship with his mother in 2002, he quoted Philip Larkin’s famously bleak ‘This Be The Verse’ – the poem that starts, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ The occasion was an informal live chat with interviewer Michael Parkinson; the lines drew laughter, as had many of David’s quips. As David went on to recite the remaining lines of misery, the titters gave way to uncomfortable silence.

  The ‘madness’ of Peggy Burns’ family would one day become part of the Bowie legend, but as far as the young David Jones was concerned, it was remoteness – a simple lack of emotion – that characterised his relationship with his mum. Peggy’s sister Pat said of their mother, Margaret Mary Burns, née Heaton, that, ‘she was a cold woman. There was not a lot of love around.’ Peggy seems to have inherited that coldness. Yet according to family lore, Peggy was good with children in her youth, working as a nanny before falling in love with the handsome Jack Isaac Rosenberg, son of a wealthy Jewish furrier. Rosenberg promised to marry Peggy, but disappeared before the birth of their son, and David’s half-brother, Terence Guy Adair Burns, on 5 November, 1937.