‘He kick-started the decade.It went from black and white to colour overnight’
Bowie biographer DYLAN JONES recalls THAT Thursday night in 1972 when pop changed forever – and the moment his hero mistook him for his mother...
It was 7.30pm on July 6, 1972, and I was sitting by myself watching Top Of The Tops in our semi in Deal, Kent, and couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Back then, the show was regularly watched by 12 to 13 million people every week, almost a quarter of the UK population. A large percentage of viewers were teenagers, like myself, who – having David Bowie strut about in his space-age onesie singing his new single Starman – thought he was talking directly to them from the BBC studios.
Bowie was ridiculously flamboyant, and had a campness about him that was immediately appealing.
He was wearing a multi-coloured jumpsuit and playing a blue acoustic guitar, and he looked scary. Essentially, he looked carefree in a way that no pop star had ever looked before. It was colourful, risqué, transgressive, and very, very appealing to an impressionable 12-year-old.
Previously, my pop consumption had been based around one-hit wonders and odd T.Rex records. Bowie, to me, was a complete revelation.
For me, Bowie had kick-started the Seventies, as the decade turned from black and white to colour overnight.
I saw him in concert, bought his records religiously, and when I moved to London in 1977 even visited Heddon Street in the West End where he had been photographed for the cover of his breakthrough LP The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.
I collected every album review from the NME, Bowie posters and devoured every book written about the man. Then, in 1981, I met him on the set of an appalling vampire movie called The Hunger, in which Bowie was starring with Catherine Deneuve.
That day he asked me for a light, and I simply couldn’t have been happier.
I was a film extra, hoping the day would run into overtime so I could take home £70, and he was, well, David Bowie. Soon I started working as journalist, and suddenly he was everywhere.
NOT TONIGHT, FREDDIE In 1972 Bowie was approached by an unknown singer to produce his band’s debut. Bowie turned down the offer as he was busy. The singer was Freddie Mercury. The band was Queen.
I spent a day with him backstage at his famous Milton Keynes concerts when he was promoting Let’s Dance in 1984 (he made me blush by calling me his ‘friend’, even though I was nothing of the sort), and then in 1985 we went to the Notting Hill Carnival together.
The only details I can remember was that I had my head shaved after losing a bet with my friend Robin, and that Bowie chain-smoked.
I can’t remember if he was still drinking at the time (I think not), but he smoked like a monkey in a glass box. Like many other journalists, I was flattered by his attention, and at one point even considered that we might be ‘friends’.
We weren’t, and never would be, but I certainly got to know how his mind worked, and saw how he would size up people, situations and culture – books, records, films – and analytically disassemble them for his own benefit.
Bowie was the quintessential cultural magpie, and nothing was safe in his company. If it wasn’t nailed down, he would have it. Metaphorically speaking, of course. He would make contact at the most inconvenient times, luring you into his web and making you feel as though you were the most important person in the world.
You knew you were being conned, but you didn’t mind as he was so unbelievably charming.
Once, he called me by mistake when I was at work.
We’d spoken the week before about some barmy wallpaper scheme he was dreaming up with Laura Ashley and he had dialled my number instead of calling his mother.
I seem to remember we had a long conversation about Modern Painters magazine, and whether or not Damien Hirst’s new restaurant, Pharmacy, was any good.
Another time, as we were chatting in The Halkin hotel behind Buckingham Palace, we spent a good hour discussing exactly why Robbie Williams was famous.
This would have been in about 2002, when Bowie was thinking of releasing an album called Toy, which was going to be made up of new versions of some of the songs he’d released in the Sixties. He seemed to be somewhat bewildered by Robbie’s success, as to him he appeared to be little more than an old-school musical song-anddance man.
Bowie had spent most of his career following his instinct and hoping it would collide with public taste, so when he was presented with a phenomenon that he didn’t understand (like Robbie Williams), he wanted to get to the bottom of it.
Bowie was incensed that Robbie had co-opted so much of the John Barry Bond theme You Only Live Twice for Millennium that he wondered how on earth he had got away with it. My last meeting with Bowie happened last summer, although it wasn’t a meeting at all, merely a chance encounter with the landlords of the hotel Bowie had stayed in when he was building his house in upstate New York.
It would be betraying a confidence to reveal what they told me, but it seems Bowie had not lost his ability to charm. And now he is gone. Forever. There will be no more records. No more chance encounters. No more interviews. No more performances.
Nothing. Bowie as he was is no longer with us, although I think each and every one of us should be grateful that he produced so many inspirational reasons for us to keep returning to his music.
I, for one, am going to spend the next month listening to Bowie and to Bowie alone. I’m going to start with Space Oddity and then work my way through his entire back catalogue, right up to his new record, Blackstar.
And of course the record that I will be playing more than any other will be Starman. More importantly, I’ll be watching the Top Of The Pops performance – this time on YouTube – a performance that always manages to immediately transport me back to the family semi on the south coast, on that warm summer afternoon in 1972.
And if I shed a tear, then so what? Even in death he means more to me than any other singer, any other performer, any other star on the planet.
LOVE YOU TILL THE
PIPS GO... The Prettiest Star was composed for his future wife Angie, who later claimed Bowie phoned her in Cyprus to propose marriage and sang it down the line. Marc Bolan played guitar on the
single version.