How Bowie seduced landlady over candlelight and cannabis
THE genteel commuter suburb of Beckenham in Kent may have been home to an eclectic group of people – Julie Andrews, actor Simon Ward and boxer David Haye, to name a few. But it seems an unlikely hotbed for searing creative talent, hot sex and drugs.
This week, however, it emerged as having been the sleepy launch pad for David Bowie’s first hit single, Space Oddity – and the setting for a sex-and-drugs landlady-lodger relationship between 23-yearold Bowie and Mary Finnigan, a single mother of two seven years his senior.
In her memoirs, Finnigan tells about a psychedelic six months in which Bowie perked up the “commuter dormitory” of Beckenham, her home, family life and bed with his “sexually sophisticated” attentions until everything was “fizzing with excitement”.
It all started one April afternoon in 1969. Bowie – who had changed his name from David Robert Jones four years earlier – was a struggling folk musician whose only album had sunk without trace.
Finnigan, who worked in jour nalism, lived on the ground floor of a block of flats. The sun was shining, she was out in the garden and she heard some unusual music – “This is Major Tom to ground control” – coming from her neighbour Barry’s flat above.
“I called up. ‘Hello? Who’s playing?’ “Finnigan told Radio 4’s Today programme this week. “David popped his head out of the window and said: ‘Hello, I’m David.’ “
He was an old friend of Barry’s who had popped over from his parents’ home. “I said: ‘Would you like to come downstairs for a cup of tea and some tincture of cannabis?’ “Bowie was down in a flash.
He was thin and pale, with a mop of blond curls and, Finnigan says, full of charisma. He stayed well into the night, chatting, playing, devouring tea, tincture, biscuits and cake. By the time he left, she’d invited him to become her lodger.
A few days later, he returned with a suitcase, a stylophone and his Gibson guitar. As Finnigan made lunch for her new £5-a-week lodger, he played her Space Oddity, on the stylophone. When Finnigan’s children, Caroline and Richard, charged in from school later, he played it again. They loved it.
Bowie had no work, no in- come and no savings. Rent was not mentioned. The landladylodger arrangement was confused after a couple of days when, after preparing a special candlelit dinner, “a nice spliff ” and some carefully selected music, Bowie seduced her.
Bowie moved into Finnigan’s room and they settled into a happy routine. They shared cannabis and “highquality hashish”, enjoying endless conversations about Tibetan Buddhism and Bowie’s not trying LSD because he did not fancy losing control.
Bowie was gentle, beautifully mannered and, Finnigan says, used to getting his own way. He would get up at noon, and spend the afternoons in the garden working on music and lyrics while the two children played around him. Slowly but surely, Bowie and his stuff took over Finnigan’s small flat.
“I was spellbound by his charm and talent.”
Then Bowie’s good friend Angie Barnett, who later became his wife, all but moved in.
When Space Oddity began to climb the charts, reaching No 5, for Finnigan, at least, it all unravelled. Perhaps naively, given it was the Sixties and her lover an arrestingly androgynous aspiring rock star, she assumed their relationship was monogamous and his weekly trips to “patrol the folk clubs” in London were simply work.
“He had been bisexually multitiming me for the entire period of our relationship,” Finnigan says. “I was just one among many, of whom Angie was probably the principal.”
Finnigan had become good friends with Barnett and she kept in touch with her, but not with Bowie.
Finnigan, today a 77-yearold grandmother living in Bristol, insists her book is no kissand-tell, but a reminder that Beckenham’s significant contribution to rock history has been shamefully ignored.
Bowie is twice-married, has sold more than 100 million records and is worth £157 million (R3.6 billion). He celebrated his 69th birthday yesterday. – Daily Mail