"Elvis is English and climbs the hills " ('The Buddha of Suburbia',David Bowie,1993)
Bowie was born David Robert Jones at 9.00 a.m. on Wednesday
The unmarried status of his parents was still sufficient to have the neighbours tut-tutting into their cuppas.His father,Haywood Stenton Jones was the son of a shoemaker and his mother was Margaret Mary Burns (known as Peggy) .They had both been married in the past and had each a son,but David was to be their only child together.John Jones worked for Dr Barnardo's as a promotions officer (he also took part in the WWI) and his mother was a ushurette at a local cinema.esday,8 January 1947,by a quirk of fate twelve years to the day after one of his early heroes,Elvis Preasley.
Little David Jones soon developed a taste for exotica - at the age of three,Peggy found her son plastered in powder and eyeliner.
The austere,non-physical nature of his relationship of Terry ( his half-brother) with his parents may have left Bowie somewhat scarred.Terry was forever rowing with his mum;his dad was often in a state of quizzical,melancholic withdrawal.
Until well into the middle age,Bowie would admit that he was,underneath all the war paint and glitter,painfulli shy,and that he found it very difficult to relate to people and enter into meaningful relationsh
ips with individuals.The cheeky,urbane chatterbox of today is ,in fact,the direct antithesis of the young Bowie,who spent his first forty years on the planet acting like a man from the Andromeda galaxy.Both the public David Bowie and the private David Jones were strugglig yo make some sort of useful connection - for the most of the 70s,it was virtually impossible for us,and for him,to disentangle the two facets of his personality in the first place.
Like most cultural incons,Bowie is supremely 'mythogenic'.Like all great names,whether from film ( orson Welles or Greta Garbo,for instance),sport ( Muhammad Ali) or indeed politics (JFK),Bowie's appeal has lain in the generation of myths.
Bowie was also something of a past master at simply lying and getting away with it.In one interview he mythologised his early years,a la Andy Warhol,at time claiming to have been brought up in an ''ouse full of blacks',and at other times to have been lived up for a while with relatives in far-off Yorkshire (untrue).
The geography of the situation is crucial: living in the suburbs so close to London provided the perfect paradigm for escape.London represented exotica,freedom and change for youngsters driven near-disperation by the blandness of the capital's environs.Thoustands of teenagers could acces the naughtin
ess and release represented by the clubs ,pubs,shops and scandals of London and yet remain inside the dominant parent cultures.This was a life of respectability and rebelion.
Much of the impetus behind British popular music since the mid-1950s has come from these artistic,dreamy,bed-sit musicians.British pop has been dominated by the white,middle-class autodidacts,from Pete Townshend,Jagger and Richards and the Ray Davies in 60s through to Suede's Brett Anderson,Blur's Damon Albarn and Pullp's Jarvis Cocker in the 90s.
Rather than being being a source of embarrassment or restraint,this elite has produced some of the most wonderful moments in popular culture.David Bowie is,and remains,the finest product of this sensibility.All the shock,all the outrage,all the outreach which has dominated his music,comes from the preicament of his liminality;from not fitting it,from wanting to be different,from being brought up in a climate of suburban conformity,and wanting to belong to a community of urban hipness.Bowie's whole career is a macrocosmos of this search to be other,married to the desire to be part of a scene.
Another fact
or was crucial in shaping teenage suburban rebelion:America,an alien culture which,for a time,was the epitome of cool.The tension between British and American popular culture was absolutely crucial.
Bowie had always loved listening to music.Peggy was a drama queen,John naturally nonconfrontational.In part it might be said that Bowie would inherit this complicated and unfortunate mix of character traits from his parents,often being frightened of confrontation yet supremely theatrical and show-stealing.
John Jones was nothing if not on the cutting edge of new technology.A television had been purchased in 1953,then a gramophone,and in 1956,Dad came in with a stack of new fangled 45s - The Moonglows,Frankie Lymon And The Teenagers,The Platters,Fats Domino.
'Then I hit gold."Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard.My heart nearly burst with excitement.I'd never heard anything even resembling this.It filled the room with energy and colour and outr
Like many other of his generation,Bowie loved American music and American culture ( he was a keen baseball follower as a youngster,and even played for the local team).When he first heard Little Richard,at the age of eight or nine,it was an almost epiphanic moment : it made him want to be a star.According to Bowie's testimony,in the late 1950s he knew there was nothing else he wanted to do in life other than make music.In his early teens Bowie was not just listening to R&B and rock n roll,but the hep jazz of Charlie Mingus too.
His half-brother,Terry,was a crucial influence here.Therry would talk to his kid brother about his love for the Beat poets,Kerouac and Ginsberg,and would frequent jazz cellars of an evening and tell tales of the thrill and excitement of modern jazz in the metropolis.
Good-looking and with an agile mind,Terry was also prone to bouts of gloomy depression and would later be diagnosed as a schizophrenic.The taint of 'madness' in the Jones family terrified the young Bowie: not only Terry was profoundly disturbed but many of his extended family on the B
urns side had psychological or mental problems,too.Auntie Una,a schizophrenic,died in her late thirties after enduring electric shock treatment and internment in a mental institution.Auntie Vivienne also had schizophrenic episodes.Auntie Nora had been lobotomised in order to treat her nervous disposition.Peggy's mum was a self-confessed 'mad-woman'.
However,throughout his teenage years David and Terry remained very close.One episode during this time would haunt Bowie for years to come.Like many schizophrenics - and some epileptics - Terry would often hear ' voices from God.This example of someone so close being possessed was horrifying for Bowie,and he became ever more fearful of and distant form his brother.
Bowie's first public appereance as a musician was back in the late 1950s when he went to the Isle of Wight with the Bromley Cubs.He and his lifelong mate George Underwood performed a few Lonnie Donegan skiffle songs using a makeshift double bass,made from a tea chest and a broom handle,and a ukulele.From that moment on,there was no turning back.
Whilist still at school he played in a band called The Konrads with his mate George Underwood.
To finance his musical interests,he took a couple of part-time jobs,one,so legend has it,as a butcher's boy cycling round Bromley delivering meat,the other at the local record shop owned by a guy called Vic Furlong.Bowie was fired from the latter for daydreaming,but not before he had bought himself a saxophone.Bowie took sax lessons with Ronnie Ross,a top British saxophonist.
At school,Bowie was far from conventionally gifted.Having failed his 11-plus,he attended Bromley Technical High School.He left school in 1963 after getting an 0 level in just one subject - Art.
Indeed,with hindsight,the most important thing that happened to him at school was the sudden,and excruciating,acquisition of the weirdest eyes in showbiz.During an argument with his then best mate ( and still bosom-buddy) George Underwood over a girl,Carol Goldsmith,george's knuckle caught David's left eye.At Farnborough Hospital,it was found that the sphincter muscles in the eye were damaged,requiring David to have two operations.After a lenghty time off school,he was left with a paralysed and permanently dilated pupil ( a condition known as aniscora) and retarded vision.Just to kill off one particularly prevalent media 'myth',Bowie does not,in fact,have miscoloured eyes - the effect of enlarged pupil on the iris only gives the appearence of different colours.He was born blueish eyes but because of the paralysed pupil his left eye is unable to dilate or contract,appearing brown or green depending on the ambient light.The origins of his Tehnicolor eyes have been top,or at least near the top,of virtually every 'revelatory' tabloid article on David Bowie for the past 30 years.
Anecdote after anecdote has been piled up to mythologize the whole event,including news stories playing up the origins of Bowie's impeccable alien physiognomy.The whole affair is an index of the media fascination with a near sixty-perfect bone structure,a full head of hair,a tiny waist ( at an age when most men's gusts have well and truly flabbed over their belts) and an amazingly reconstructed set og gnashers.Bowie said in 2005: " I have had nothing done really but to my teeth,and that helped prop up the visage".
Bowie may not have covered himself in glory in terms of academic wualifications,but he did prosses a vivid,unusual,imaginative flait for composition.Although his spelling and grammar were weak,he could write better stories than any of his classmates.Bowie is largely a self-taught.
He wanted to be an Elight Little Richard,an English Elvis.And that's exactly what he became - the first British solo superstar of the art-school era.
Despite claims in a press release for his 1966 single,"The London Boys",that he had studied at Bromley Art School,Bowie never actually atended art school.His introduction to art came from Owen Frampton,who ataught at Bromley Technical High School,which Bowie attented from 1958 to 1963.The list of pop musicians who went to art school in the late 50s and early 60s is like a roll call of the most important pop artists of their day: John Lennon,Eric Burdon,Keith Richards,Pete Townsend,Eric Clapton,Syd Barrett,Freddie Mercury,Charlie Watts,Bryan Ferry,Brian Eno,and many more.
In 1992 he told Life magazine: " From a very early age I was always fascinated by those who transgressed the norm,who defied convention,whether in painting or music or anything.Those were my heroes - the artists Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali,and,in rock,Little Richard...First it was John Lennon,some of the Stones and Kinks,and then it got hammered in with guys like [Roxy's Music]Bryan Ferry,King Crimson,Pink Floyd.....I would like to believe it that I and a number of others in the early 70s changed the fabric of pop,made it a wider receiver."
Certainly he never implied that he wanted to be a rock'n'roll star.
His first ever band was the R&B group,The Konrads
So confident was he in his own talent that he sent a letter to John Bloom,a wealthy entrepreneur,asking him to cough up some dough for the new Beatles,Rather than consmuminf the letter to the waterpaper bin,Bloom passed on the request to Leslie Conn,a music person who ran Doris Day's music publishing and who was a talent scout for the Dick James Organisation.
Throughout the mid 60s,Davie Jones was just one of many teenage wannabes on the London pop scene.Bowie then progressed though Who-sounding mod music with his next band,The Lower Third ( 'Can't Help Thinking About Me' is the best example) to the extraordinary exxentricity of his first Dream record in 1967,the acoustic folk\pop of Feathers in 1968,and that jumble of pop balladry and country rock found on David Bowie in 1969.
Bowie disliked heavy music,calling it a "fairly primitive form".For Bowie,rock was bloghted by false standards of musicianship and technique:' I look for sensation rather than quality,and heavy music seems to be full of musicians who have quality rather than musicians who for some reason can chill your spine'.So,stop referring to Bowie as a 'rock' musician.Bowie's musical palette is in fact far broader,and this is what makes him specially intersting.
A crucial influence on the young Bowie was that of his thirdt manager,Ken Pitt.Back in the 1960s,Pitt was a major-league player,having worked with Frankie Laine,Louis Armstrong,Duke Ellington,Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme.
"My own impression,having observed Bowie and Pitt together at Manchester Street [ where Pitt had his London flat] " says biographer George Tremlett, " is that they probably did have a sexual relationship - but one that was never as important to Bowie as it was to Pitt"
Pitt was also the first to recognise that Bowie was a musician/actor with a wide range of interests both low and high cultural.Bowie's interest in these two levels of artistic endeavour has constantly played itself out in his work.he took from high art and brought it down to street level.
Pitt's first recommendation on meeting his young charge was that he should change his name.In fact,this was not to be the first name change for the fledgling singer.Back in the 1963,in his first band,The Konrads,Davie Jones went under the stage name of dave Jay.
'Bowie',pronounced by the man himself and all his die-hard fans to rhyme with 'slowie',as opposed to 'wowie!' as used by most casual fans and chart show presenters,was chosen for its connection with the Bowie knife.Jim Bowie (pronnounced to rhyme with 'phooey') was a Texan adventurer who died at the Alamo in 1836,and carried a single-bladed hunting knife.Bowie's description of why he chose the name is typically highly ambiguous.In the 70s,Bowie proclaimed that the knife signalled a desire to cut through lies to reveal hidden truths ( a highly ironic comment,give Bowie's capacity for deceit),while in a recent Radio1 interview he said that he liked the connotations of a blade being sharpened on both sides,a signifier for all sorts of ambiguities.In fact,the Bowie knife has only one cutting edge,and is not double-handed. ( hahaha).Like all successful 'artificial' names,it now feels,in the light of Bowie's succes,completely natural. [ The Beatles for example is one of the silliest names in rock history,but,as Frith points out,succesful groups names always feel right;unsuccessful groups names remain silly.
