20. The Gouster

   A. Carlos Alamar   
        Bowie had already made before several attempts to crack the States,but he was far from being a household name.
       Bowie loved the contemporary black music of the day, and was also intrigued by the Latin emanating from the clubs of New York, obviously being tired of the rock scene.
       In spring 1974 Bowie met a man who would act as his guide to black music, and would also be his band leader for the next 14 years: Carlos Alomar, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican extraction.

       Alomar was good-humoured, calm, jokey and light. He was the bridge between Bowie's pop/rock glam phase and the 'plastic soul' of the mid- 1970s. To Alomar, back in 73-74, Bowie was an alarming creature to behold: " When you see a man so nasty white with red hair, don't you think that's strange? The glam rock that he was known for was a completely different circle than that he was putting himself into. I told him: " What you need to do is to come to my house and my wife can make you some nice chicken and rice and beans and put some meat on those bones! " And surprisingly, he said: " Sure".
       Alomar was less than impressed with Tony Defries : " He was extremely intimidating. Defries was not fun. Defries was a guy who would try to pull the wool over your eyes. He was also non-moving. He was not giving in any negotiation. I didn't like Tony Defries at all. "

B. Corinne Schwab

       Bowie would also then meet his future personal assistant - Corinne Schwab ( known as Coco) . The two are still together in a professional capacity over 30 years later.



       With Angie back in London, enjoying the glitterati of the Chelsea scene with the aid of PMA ( a drug also known as Pamela), Bowie turned to Coco for both friendship and help. At this time, 1974, Bowie's coke addiction was worsening. Bowie's drug use became very excessive very quickly. Drugs were somehow fashionable rather than a real need. Coco was Bowie's nurse, Bowie even dedicated her a song in 1987, Never Let Me Down . She proved an extremely competent charge d'affaires, who did in fact help keep him alive during those days of coke - driven paranoia.  Tony Visconti remembers: " Coco has been a very loyal, competent assistant to David. She was well educated and multilingual, and she simply did her job very well. ".
       Slowly, but surely Coco began taking on more and more responsibilities. One of David Bowie's insiders put it like this: " Her whole life revolves around David Bowie's affairs and it's a full-time job. She never seems to have anything outside going on much". 


C. Making David Bowie a star


       Tony Defries was committed to his artist. He was determined to make Bowie a superstar in America, and within 6 months, he had succeeded. The first stage was promoting the Diamond Dogs Tour in the spring of 1974, by TV and radio commercials,Billboards,and so on. The second stage of MainMain's "Operation Bowie" was,of course, the tour itself. The Diamond Dogs tour turned out to be the most theatrical rock tour ever mounted. In fact,in its daring and visual audacity, it has probably never been rivalled since.
       This was basically a one-man show ( the main character is Halloween Jack) , with just two dancers, Guy Andrisano and Warren Peace, to provide on-stage action. During the shows the two dancers, who doubled as backing vocals, lassoed Bowie. For Time ,Bowie sang enclosed in a gigantic hand, which opened as the song started. For Sweet Thing  he sang atop a bridge , whilst,for Space oddity he seemed to have discovered the gift of flight. Hunger City, a crumbling post-nuclear holocaust city with atomic bomb-blasted skyscrapers of molten steel, would be recreated at huge expense for an astonished public.

       Bowie planned a film version of the album, but the plan was never realised. " Diamond Dogs is the last rock'n'roll group " Tony Visconti told Radio 1 in 1976: " In one version of the song, the dogs actually eat people, or they kill people on stage, or they shoot machine guns back into the audience. He has these horrible visions of the apocalypse, the end of civilisation as we know it" . 
       It was Bowie's most difficult performance to date. The ability to project both a technically proficient and engaging vocal was more important than ever, and around this time Bowie developed a new, richer, full-throated vibrato.
       Another change in the band was the replacement of Mick Ronson with Earl Slick. He was brought to Bowie's attention through Michael Kamen, the Bowie's tour musical director, who had worked with Slick previously. Although Slick was delighted with the gig, he was less than delighted with the money offer : "I took the shitty money - $300 a week. The money was disappointing. I was making more money playing bars at the time". 
       
       The tour opened on 14 June at the Montreal Forum, Canada. There then followed a gruelling 37 shows in 27 days with one day off and one matinee performance in Toronto. Following a road accident after the gig performance in Atlanta, the tour continued with only half of 'Hunger City' , as the set had been damaged.

       He was sued by some members of his band because of the low money they received. Bowie himself was having massive financial problems of his own. He found out in July, much to his utter horror, that he did not,in fact, own half of MainMan, as he had thought all along, and that his stake in the whole Defriesian empire amounted to a pittance . It's important to mention that Bowie was financing the tour out of his own income.
       Tony Visconti says:  "I don't know how Mainman worked. I wasn't part of it,except that they had more employees than they needed and lots of the running costs were charged to David,not Defries. this is what ended their working relationship. "

19.Diamond Dogs

         Diamond Dogs , recorded in late 1973 and early 1974, shows him at both most indulgent and his most creative.

         Although never really a critics' rave, the album remains one of those most admired by his hard-core following. It is the closest Bowie has ever come to the ideal of a totally theatrical pop music. Martin Kirkup commented: " Where Aladdin Sane seemed like a series of Instamatic snapshots taken from weird angles, Diamond Dogs has all the deeper colours. "

         With this album, Bowie proved that without Ken Scott,without Ronno and The Spiders, he was still able to produce work of real quality.

         Diamond Dogs was also important in that it saw him working again with then ex-chum Tony Visconti.

         During the time Visconti was concentrating on Bolan, he was watching Bowie's career unfolding : "Hunky Dory made me jealous. I had nothing to do with it, but I asked myself, Where were the songs like that when I was producing him?"

         The themes of urban decay, decadence and the apocalypse, which are the main ideas on the album, are given a psychosexual twist. He envisaged a world in which snaggle-toothed ragamuffins dressed in looted furs and diamonds took over the city. The principal character, Halloween Jack, and his gang live on top of deserted skyscrapers and travel around the city on roller-skates. Bowie says he drew inspiration for the characters of 'Hunger City' from a story told to him by his father, who worked for many years for Dr Barnado's. 

Tracks:

Side one

1. "Future Legend" – 1:05
2. "Diamond Dogs" – 5:56
3. "Sweet Thing" – 3:39
4. "Candidate" – 2:40
5. "Sweet Thing (reprise)" – 2:31
6. "Rebel Rebel" – 4:30

Side two

1. "Rock 'n' Roll with Me" (lyrics: Bowie, music: Bowie, Warren Peace) – 4:00
2. "We Are the Dead" – 4:58
3. "1984" – 3:27
4. "Big Brother" – 3:21
5. "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" – 2:00

         The album begins with the track ' Future Legend', a spoken narrative describing a future urban apocalypse. It is a portrait of a city environment on the point of collapse, and its view of a dehumanised humanity, are indicators of Burroughs' influence.

         Diamond Dogs  is a trip into grotesquerry and seedy lowlife. The title track references Tod Browning, the maker of the then banned 1932 film Freaks, one of the most controversial movies ever made,starring, as it did, men and women with real-life deformities and rare medical conditions.

         The underrated 'We Are The Dead", with its creepy electric - piano opening, funeral pace and house-of-horrors imagery, is likewise graphically Gothic.  But it's the brazen drug-referencing that is most evident: "Is it nice in your snow-storm, freezing your brain? "

         In fact "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)" is the real masterpiece of the album, and it's also my favourite track from the album (in fact,I'm not sure,I love the whole album). It's in moments like this, rather than in the big hit singles or the radio-friendly songs, that Bowie's reputation as a true pop genius resides.

        For '1984' , Alan Parker plays a brilliant Shaft-inspired riff, as Bowie warns "Beware the savage jaw/Of 1984"

        The ending of the album is also quite brilliant. "Big Brother",replete with fake horns, strummed guitar and a massive wall of sound builds an  astonishingly overwrought climax which echoes some of Bowie's earlier work on The Man Who Sold The World .

        Then the song dissolves into the astonishing "Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family", a truly mesmeric and frightening chant in five/four time . It's on of the greatest moments Bowie has ever committed to tape.

        Aside from these moments of grand experimentation in sonics and theatricality, Diamond Dogs also contained two of Bowie's best ever pop songs:  " Rock'n'Roll With Me", the single that never was,pointed, ever so slightly, towards the more soulful future that would be The Young Americans period.

        And then, there's rebel rebel , which reached a surprisingly lowly Number 5 after crashing into the Top 40 once place below that in the first week of release. The last of his bona fide glam singles, it was a manifesto for all the Bowie Boys and Bowie Girls: " You got your mother in a whirl  / She;s not sure if you're a boy or a girl" sums up early -70s gender-bending perfectly. Arguably Bowie's greatest-ever riff, it was a brilliant taster for the album proper.

        Bowie performed the new single on the Dutch Show Top Pop in February,whilst in Holland for a few days to work on the new album at a studio in Hilversum. With an added eye patch ( he had gone down with a bout of conjunctivitis), the Aladdin Sane meets pirate man look was the last time we would see the full crimson spiky Bowie haircut  ( if I were to choose,I'd say this is one of Bowie's sexiest videos.I love his hair here)

        The cover presents Bowie half-man/half-dog,and it;s one of Bowie;s most dramatic, and definitely most seedy covers ( made by the Belgian artist Guy Peellaert)

        Diamond Dogs brought the first phase of Bowie's career to an end. Released in April 1974, Diamond Dogs not only closed down Bowie's glam-rock period, but became glam-rock's epitaph.

        When he left the UK for the US in April 1974, the version of him on show was, on first inspection, a sartorially toned-down representation. The era of glitter and stack-heeled boots was indeed over,but the man himself was entering the most paranoid and out-there period of his life,a three-year period of chill, supercharged creativity. He redesigned his Ziggy cut into an epic flame-coloured parting,packed away the kabuki garb and reinvented himself as a sharply dressed soul boy in a suit. The gouster was born.

18. 1973 - Bowie's year

             By 1973 there was a recognisable Bowie cult in the UK, as 'Bowie Boys' and ' Bowie Girls' roamed suburbia.
             Although Bowie's records were being bought by everyone from teens to mums and dads, his hard-core following, those that actually took to the streets in make-up and glitter,seemed to consist of two types:

• first, Bowie had a huge following among teenage girls
• second, there were those arty suburbanites, the sexual experimenters, the bedsit gloomsters, who were drawn to Bowie's cleverness and his love for arty cross-referencing.

             Scientologist and writer, Simon Frith, wrote: " Bowie-ism was a way of life - style as meaning - and no other idol has had such an intense influence on his fans as David Bowie. His example of self- creation was serious and playful - image as art as image, and his tastes, the selves he created, were impeccably suburban: he read romantic literature ; he was obsessively, narcissistically, self-effacing....Bowie was youth culture not as collective hedonism but as individual grace that showed up everyone else as clods." In fact, Firth points out : "As a star, Bowie never pretended to "represent" his fans, but he did make available to those fans a way of being a "star"...Glam rock dissolved the star/fan division not by stars becoming one of the lads, but by the lads becoming their own stars. " 

             In May 1973 there was made a documentary by Bernard Falk - the programme recorded scenes of mass hysteria, screaming teenies and boys and girls dyed hair, glitter and the modish Aladdin Sane thunderbolt felt-tipped across their faces. This was the beginning of Bowie's immortality through style, and ,for his fans , it was this sense of sartorial danger which magnetised them.

             Bowie was freakish and other, and he presented the blueprint for all those bored suburbanites. Bowie, with his brand of self-absorption, his anti- countercultural poses and his revelry  in the surface trappings of glitz and artificiality, was the supreme expression of this new era of post- hippy, pre-punk questioning.

             By the end of 1973, Bowie had extricated himself from The Spiders and was about to bring his professional relationship with both Mick Ronson and Ken Scott to an end.

             'The 1980 Floor Show" was the last time Ronson and Bowie would share a stage for 10 years.

             The end of Bowie's working relationship with Ken Scott meant a shift of focus to more experimental techniques and arguably greater musical daring, and an end to the 'classic' pop period of David Bowie.

             Without question, 1973 will go down in history as Bowie's year. On New Year's Eve, RCA presented Bowie with a plaque to commemorate having 5 different albums in the chart simultaneously for a 19 - week period. RCA announced that his total UK sales were now 1.056.400 albums and 1.024.068 singles.

             Around this period, David would meet Ava Cherry - a striking black woman with short,platinum-blonde curls, perhaps several inches taller than Bowie himself. Bowie had met Ava in New York at the time of his Radio City Music Hall gigs in February 1973. Ava was a waitress at a party and Bowie soon had her earmarked as a future singing star. Cherry would now also be a regular backing singer for Bowie, and thee two would be romantically linked.

             Bowie's musical obsession were changing, and changing fast. What is certain is that, by the end of 1973, Bowie was already on the road to a more soul-inflected future.

17. Pin Ups

             The resulting album is uneven although beloved by many, and a massive-selling hit to boot. Personally,I'm not a huge fan of this album, it is one of my least favourites, and I'm going to be very short about this one.
             Released in October 1973, it was a UK Number 1 for 5 weeks, as Aladdin Sane had been, and rode the crest of the wave of Bowie's enormous UK popularity at the time.
             The album's highlight is, of course, his cover of The Merseys', 'Sorrow', the only time when he vastly improves the original.

             Bowie was again aping those around him, and this time it seemed to be Bryan Ferry. Although he never explicitly admitted to impersonating Ferry's richer, mannered croon, it was obvious to Scott and Ronson that this was the intention, and it was one thing they didn't altogether welcome with open arms. The album's only single release, "Sorrow",justifiably became one of his biggest hits,reaching Number 3 in Britain, and staying in the charts for 15 weeks, well into 1974.

             Perhaps more inspiring than the music was the startling cover - Bowie,naked again and next to him the personification of mid 60s cosmopolitan chic,Twiggy. Both look more like wind-up dolls than beings made of human flesh. The overall effect was that of a startling piece of artifice : the human condition reduced to simulacra .

16.Killing the Kabuki Monster

             As the Ziggy tour morphed into the Aladdin Sane tour in early 1973, the shows became even more ambitious.

             By the middle of 1973, Bowie had been on the road, almost non-stop, for 18 months, in a punishing schedule that included six British tours, two American tours and a tour of Japan - more than 170 gigs in all. The Japanese tour was also a huge success. At the start of the tour, Bowie was a virtual unknown with negligible record sales ; by the end, it was mass hysteria at the concerts.

             After the Japanese gigs, there was a large gap before the next gig, at London's Earl Court. His fear of flying meant that Bowie decided to return to Europe on the Trans-Siberian express.             

             As the summer drew closer Bowie was nearing exhaustion, despite the onset of what the tabloid media had dubbed 'Bowiemania',a level of hysteria not witnessed since the Fab Four in the mid-1960s. Bowie had gone mainstream with a vengeance with profiles on BBC's Nationwide, massive exposure on radio 1, and a avid interest from the tabloids and the rock press. However, on 12 May, The Spiders played a thoroughly dispirited gig at Earl's Court. The ambience was zero, the acoustics appalling because the PA was to small for the venue, and it was impossible to see the stage itself. It was one of the first times that Earls Court had been used for a rock concert, and the stage was also too low and fans couldn't even see it properly. It was one of the few real failures of the Ziggy/Aladdin Sane era. But no one could have expected Bowie's next move.

             " Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it's the last show that we'll ever do..... Bye bye. We love you. "

             Bowie's retirement announcement from the stage of Hammersmith Odeon, immortalised in that rather grainy DA Pennebaker film, left his fans in a state of complete disbelief. Bowie, just 18 months into his fame, was bowing out for good. Little did we know that this was not the end of the story but simply the conclusion of one chapter in Bowie's career: Ziggy and glam rock era were over.

             As a historical event, the Hammersmith gig has attained a mythic dimension. It wasn't the best gig The Spiders ever played, but it was their last, and it marked the end of an era. Although concealed from The Spiders until the night of the show, Bowie's announcement was in fact carefully leaked to the press beforehand.

             After the gig, Bowie threw a huge 'retirement' do, with Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Ringo Starr, Barbara Streisand and Lulu all in attendance. the concert was a definite turning point for Bowie. He was shedding another skin that night at Hammersmith, throwing off glam rock and paving the way for a new, bolder era of experimentation. it was a rite passage.

             But why retire at the height of your fame? the answer lies in a combination of Bowie's low boredom threshold and, more importantly, his tour weariness. Bowie was genuinely exhausted after eighteen months' gigging. Just as Ziggy bit the dust at the end of the album, so Bowie used the Hammersmith Odeon show to fuel the myth and 'retire' in actuality. Since neither he nor his audience was sure whether it was David Bowie or Ziggy Stardust up there on stage, Bowie's fans assumed Bowie's retirement was the end of his,Bowie's,career,not simply that of his alter ego.

             There were also strictly commercial reasons behind the decision to bow out. Despite the sell- out tours, The Spiders were still receiving almost the same measly wage they had been on when Ziggy was an unknown.

             Ronson had become something of a huge live draw in his own right on the Bowie tours, and had his own fan base. With Bowie exhausted and off the road, in the second half of 1973 Defries turned his attention from Batman to Robin . He genuinely liked Ronson, and was also genuine in his appreciation of the Yorkshireman;s talents. So began the process of grooming Ronson for solo super-stardom.

             Finally, and most tellingly, Bowie was tired of the sort of music he was making with The Spiders. It seems that what actually drivers Bowie more than anything is not so much premeditated attempts to colonise markets, but a real hunger for musical experimentation. On Aladdin Sane ,Bowie had already begun, with Ronson's jazzy piano, to break free from the standard pop/rock format. Songs such as 'Panis in Detorit' hinted at a more obvious R&B/soul future. Bowie was,and still is, into all sorts of music, and by the middle of 1973 it was simply time for a change.

             Aladdin Sane had seen him move away from conventional pop, and his next planned project, an adaptation of George Orwell's tale of totalitarian terror,1984, would enable him to broaden the base of his music even further. Bowie wanted to move into mode serious intellectual territory outside the band format.

             First, though, there was a record company to appease. Bowie was now at a commercial peak. In the week beginning 23 July, 5 of his 6 albums were in Top40, 3 of them in the Top 15, an unprecedented feat for a solo artist. His next record, Pin Ups , a collection of covers from the 1964 - 1967 London club scene, was something of a stopgap. Certain that the next project did not need The Spiders, he was unsure of how to break the news that not only they were out of the picture as a live backing band, but that studio projects would not concern them either.

             Bowie was becoming a little more snappy with those around him. ' The success was changing him. Bowie began believing that all the trapping of success which Defries provided, the limos and that kind of thing, has to be there. In fact, they weren't trappings any more but necessities.'

15. Aladdin Sane

       


           Aladdin Sane has always been regarded as Ziggy's slightly inferior companion piece. Written in the main on tour in the States during the latter part of 1972, and released in the April of the following year, it was very much 'Ziggy goes to America' ,and English stylisation of American sounds, ideas and images.
            Aladdin Sane represented a definite step towards a harder, punchier sound. "It was almost like a treading-water album . But funnily enough, in retrospect, for me, it's the more successful album, because it's more informed about rock ' n' roll than Ziggy was", remembers Bowie.
            The Aladdin Sane character itself was a schizoid amalgamation, and the music reflected this fracturing down. Kent Scott remembers that,at the time, Bowie's own personality was undergoing series of quick- fire changes.
            Most of the Aladdin Sane album was written on the road during the autumn of 1972. Bowie himself was unsure of what direction to go in : " I kind of knew that I had said all that I could say about Ziggy, and what I'd end up doing would be "Ziggy Part 2"
            Speaking in 1993, Bowie told the BBC about the mythic quality America had at the time: " I don' know how much of a culture shock it is now....But I think for us back then, going to America was it. It used to blow us away. It was our own language, but it was this other world... Suddenly my songs didn't seem so out of place. "
            As with Ziggy Stardust , the cover shot for the album was as stylish as it contents. The album cover, a head-and-shoulder shot of Bowie with hair dyed reddish-orange and a painted thunderbolt splitting his face in two, is one of the most eye-catching and alarming ever made. The divine thunderbolt hinted at Bowie's continued fascination with the deification of pop idols. It split the face, and by implication the psyche , in two. Bowie didn't look like anything resembling a human being at all. The shot turned his physiognomy into a sort of tribal death mask, a shaman for the 1970s. When the album hit the shops in the spring of 1973, the cover was as startling  as rock  cover ever got.

Track list:


Side one

1. "Watch That Man" 4:30
2. "Aladdin Sane 5:06
3. "Drive-In Saturday" 4:33
4. "Panic in Detroit" 4:25
5. "Cracked Actor" 3:01


Side two

6. "Time" 5:15
7. "The Prettiest Star" 3:31
8. "Let's Spend the Night Together" 3:10
9. "The Jean Genie" 4:07
10. "Lady Grinning Soul"  3:54


            Aladdin Sane was recorded in New York and London,in January 1973. ' The Jean Genie' had been recorded for single release the previous November and was remixed by Ken Scott for the album. " It was done to be a big hit...Yeah,it's cute,but it's not one of my favourites. "
            The song was, of course, a homage of sorts, as Bowie reveals : "The Jean Genie was an ode to Iggy ".
            The single became Bowie's biggest seller to date, peaking at Number 2 just after Christmas. For the single release,MainMan funded Bowie's first ever promo,which was filmed over two days in San Francisco , starring actress Cyrinda Foxe,to add,as Rock says, "some local colour".  Foxe was a famous scenester and star of Warhol's film  Bad. David Bowie was now in love with Cyrinda and Angie had a new lover,Billy Doll.

            Drive-In Saturday , the second single off the album, was vastly superior, and it and Rebel rebel  are his finest glam-era singles.

            Time is one of his most successful songs from any period + five minutes of weird perfection. In the middle section Bowie heavy breathing, brought to the fore in the mix by Ken Scott, sets up a wonderfully overwrought tension to the melodrama. In the 90s, Suede would source this sort of Bowiesque moment on tracks such as The Power and The Beautiful Ones . This was always one of Ken Scott's favourite Bowie tracks.

            The beautiful ballad Lady Grinning Sould is,for Bowie, unusually sensual. Its direct, intimate appeal and lush mix, with twelve-string guitar and almost latino piano part, provide and unusually emotional and sexual ambience.

             The pivotal song on the album,though, is the title track, the clearest indicator of how Bowie was trying to free himself from the confines of rock. Mick Garson, his new pianist, was one of the main inspirations. Garson was on board and he would remain with Bowie for the next three years. Bowie was becoming jaded with pop / rock and,in Garson, he saw a talented, eccentric musician who he could learn from. It is no surprise that Bowie's experimental phase started with Aladdin Sane .

            Another track, the opener, Watch that Man ,has baffled fans for close on three decades. The question on most people's lips has been a simple one : "where the hell is David Bowie?" . Buried beneath a wall of glam-rock freak-out, the lyric is almost inaudible.

            Cracked Actor is one of my personal favourites, I love the live variants, and the way Bowie plays his role on stage.

            Panis in Detroit has an unique sound,and expresses David Bowie's fascination with the city.

            

            Aladdin Sane well and truly established Bowie as a major- league pop star, in the UK at least. On its release in April 1973, it debuted at the top of the UK charts. The album was Number One for 5 weeks.

14.The American Tour

I looked at the way Bowie presented himself in that whole 72-73 period and I just thought ,and  i still do to this day, that it was the greatest rock'n'roll star image that there has ever been

 Gary Numan 1998          

            In the autumn of 1972, Bowie set sail for the States. Already the biggest pop star to have emerged in the UK during 1972, it was vital that the holy grail of American success came Bowie's way. The Bowie contingent were on a high, full of hope, and sure that American success was just around the corner.

            One aspect of British pop that had completely failed to grab the Americans' attention was its androgyny. Whereas Britain has had an arty wing of lipstick-glossed rockers since the 1970s, America has, despite the early intervention of Little Richard, been very late in developing the tradition (with the Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails or Suede)

            It's usually only a certain type of act that can clean up the dollars. In the 1970s, Elton John's high musical values in the studio and showmanship on stage made him the biggest-selling British artist there, with Rod Stewart not far behind. The largely anonymous Mick Jones sang his way to multi-dollar success,as did Fleetwood Mac,who were at least half-British. But the likes of art rockers Roxy Music went largely unloved. Bolan had had some limited success, but he was hardly a big star. Intensely competitive and driven, Bowie was determined to go one better.

            Back to the tour, Angie was an unwanted distraction on tour - after causing a disturbance in a hotel pool with one of her affairs late at night during a tour of the Southern States she was packed off home. From that moment on, Angie was never an integral part of Bowie's touring regimen. The cracks in the Bowie marriage were already beginning to show. Both were massively promiscuous, and when both started to parade their affairs in front of each other's noses (and then to make love to each other's friends), jealousy started to rot their 'open' relationship. Angie, convinced that Bowie and MainMan would make her a star, became increasingly disillusionated when the focus resolutely remained on her husband. 

            Despite generating a fortune for his record company and manager, the artist himself lived on advances, handouts and credit in rented accommodation in the UK, and hotels and apartments abroad. He lived in the myth of being David Bowie, driven, almost maniacally, from album to tour to album by a cold, indomitable will.

            Bowie's friends and workmates noticed him becoming more distant, and perhaps less friendly. Reminiscing in 2004, Bowie remembers feeling "displaced" : "There was a time when what I was doing...didn't seem to resemble anybody else was doing. I didn't understand what I was doing, but it just seemed out of touch with what everyone else was doing."

            Travis Bolder recalls: " We only saw him as we walked on stage. He separated himself from us towards the end, he was like a solo artist that didn't need us. The bigger he got, the bigger his head got, and the less important you were to him".

            Bowie signed an employment agreement with MainMan management and production company in September 1972 that assigned to Defries a 'timeless' term of office as Bowie's manager. Under the terms of agreement, Bowie was given a guaranteed allowance of 300 £ . In return, he'd signed his life away. Mainman had exclusive rights to Bowie's person and could also 'fictionalise' the singer's biography for press purposes. In effect, Mainman could tell a pack of lies about Bowie and he would have no comeback.
            By late 1973, as Ken Scott recollects, Defries' influence over Bowie was all-encompassing: " It was difficult to tell how much was David and how much was Defries"
            The MainMan days were possibly the most controversial of Bowie's career, involving as they did a hugely extravagant 'shagathon', with Bowie largely broke, and his wife Angie running up colossal debts in shoe shops and boutiques while desperately trying to cut as an actress ( she was later notably turned down for the lead in Wonder Woman)


            Friend and photographer Mick Rock puts it like this:
"It was part of the theatre to treat him like a star. Defries could then start talking about David having an exclusive photographer.  People were saying, 'David Bowie's got an exclusive photographer.Who the fuck is David Bowie?' The people reasoned: 'If he's got an exclusive photographer and bodyguards, there must be something going on. ' That was a piece of living theatre, if you like, part of the whole thing that Tony and David cooked up between them".


            Ken Scott remembers:
 " Defries made a fortune for himself! Bowie was completely stiffed by Defries and when something like that happens, you just pass it on, it's a fact of life.... Bowie got completely stiffed by Defries and he passed it on to others. Bowie had to become tight to survive and he just kept it going because he certainly wasn't tight to start with. Bowie was broke! He was putting on these incredibly extravant tours and he was paying for them completely out of his 50 per cent. it was completely unheard of! "


            The personality of Bowie's band was changing rapidly. The whole Bowie entourage was becoming considerably more weird than Bowie himself - he has just hired a new pianist, Mike Garson ,which was a scientologist.
            This general unrest among the ranks came at a time when Bowie was called upon to deliver new product, the first album to be written from a position of fame. In many cases such albums are either a frightened excursion in water-treading,with the artist cowed into giving the punters more of what they know ( the boring option and one preferred by artist too numerous to mention) , or a confused melody of paranoia and unhappiness in an interesting gee-it's-hell-at-the-top-having-all-this-money sort of way. For this new album, Bowie chose the second option, but fashioned the paranoia of the superstar into a fantastically innovative record.