“TOTALLY INVOLVED, TOTALLY NOT SERIOUS”
OVER 1971, SOMETHING WAS BREWING IN DAVID BOWIE ’S BRAIN – A HYBRID ROCK’N’ROLL WHERE SEX AND SCI-FI MET.
EARLY AUGUST 1971: BOWIE WAS FEELING “A LOT lighter”, he told NME’s James Johnson. Hunky dory, in fact, the title of the album he’d just finished recording. “It’s been gloriously easy to record,” Bowie added, his best album yet. It needed to be. His first three had all been failures. Hunky Dory was everything Tony Defries, Bowie’s ambitious manager since spring 1970, had been waiting for. At Defries’s prompting, Bowie had signed a publishing deal that October, bought himself a piano and set about fixing what he called his “melody problem”. Changes, Oh! You Pretty Things and Life On Mars?, each sounding like a contemporary standard, dominated the early part of the record. Deeper into the album, cuts like Eight Line Poem, Song For Bob Dylan and Biff Rose’s Fill Your Heart were geared towards the US market. Perhaps not coincidentally, Bowie’s fellow Tin Pan Alley grafter Elton John had recently broken big in the States.
Mid-month, while NME readers were learning of Bowie’s new “totally involved, totally not serious” philosophy, Defries was in New York persuading RCA Records that David Bowie was a future Elvis – still the label’s crown jewel – rather than a second Elton. Shaking hands on a three-album deal, Defries returned to London and told Bowie he’d secured his future.
In early September, in New York to meet his new backers, Bowie was introduced to Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. He’d been covering Reed’s Velvet Underground songs since 1967. Errant Stooges frontman Iggy was a more recent discovery. Finding common ground with urban USA’s premier outré anti-stars had a profound effect on him. At Bowie’s suggestion, plans were hatched to bring both over to Britain in the new year.
Fired up by his brush with kindred spirits, Bowie returned to London convinced that
Hunky Dory – still three months away from release – was already old hat. Seeing his old mate Marc Bolan fronting a four-piece rock band and transforming British pop with effortless-sounding pop hits, while creating headlines with his enchanted persona, further encouraged him to accelerate.
The intention behind Hunky Dory had been to spotlight Bowie’s songwriting gifts and transatlantic appeal. That would still serve a purpose. But Bowie’s MO had rarely been to take the systematic approach. Between intermittent gigs, mostly playing as a duo with guitarist Mick Ronson, Bowie booked 10 days in a cheap rehearsal studio in October with drummer Woody Woodmansey and new recruit bassist Trevor Bolder, who’d been on board since early June. This time Bowie envisaged a much rawer band sound.
The template was already there on Hunky Dory. Queen Bitch, the climactic performance before The Bewlay Brothers’ comedown, was the sound of Bowie and his fledgling Spiders From Mars unzipping themselves for action. “Oh yeah!”, Bowie starts provocatively over the song’s sashaying three-chord-trick, a handsome conflation of Eddie Cochran and Lou Reed. It’s tempting to hear in the rising hysteria of Bowie’s “It could have been me” refrain his frustration in seeing his arguably lessertalented peers pip him to the big time. Bowie had never sung with such elasticated venom, nor to such a screeching, electric backing before. But behind the scenes, under cover of anonymity, he’d been flirting with a more flamboyant style for months.
THE CATALYST HAD BEEN AN EARLIER VISIT TO the States, for three weeks during January/February 1971. There to promote The Man Who Sold The World, Bowie, a keen student of all things American, soaked everything up – the crass commercialism, the whiff of danger, the neon-lit urgency of everything. He saw the Lou Reed-less Velvet Underground in New York and heard his first Stooges record in San Francisco. He also witnessed the transformation of Alice Cooper from underground duds into all-American shock-rockers thanks to some Bmovie theatrics and a chart-bound teen anthem called I’m Eighteen.
Bowie returned home with a few Legendary Stardust Cowboy 45s and at least two new songs of his own. Hang On To Yourself was inspired by the Velvets’ pacy set opener, We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together. Moonage Daydream was a slightly wooden piano-style rocker saved by an oddly strangulated vocal.
Neither were considered fit for Hunky Dory. That’s because Bowie had a better idea. While in the States, he’d told Rolling Stone writer John Mendelsohn of his ambition to lampoon the pop business with what he called ‘Pantomime Rock’. He was arguing for a new aesthetic along the lines of that outlined in Susan Sontag’s essay Notes On ‘Camp’, where sincerity is not enough; worse still, it is unmasked as “simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness”.
A week after his return, Bowie demoed both songs
“BOWIE HAD NEVER SUNG WITH SUCH ELASTICATED VENOM, NOR TO SUCH A SCREECHING, ELECTRIC BACKING.”
with local pick-up band Rungk, giving the project a suitably corny name: Arnold Corns. Considering Bowie’s recent piano compositions, and given his admiration for Andy Warhol’s mentoring ways, Arnold Corns was a convenient vehicle to test-drive a new musical initiative while at the same time flex his latent impresario muscles. Bowie even found a star face to front the project, clothes designer Freddie Burretti, alias ‘Rudi Valentino’. Bowie predicted he’d become a Mick Jagger for the 1970s.
Famously, Freddie couldn’t sing a note. Besides, Bowie was far more excited by his new backing band. After a second Corns session in June, with Bowie’s band now providing the backing, he dropped the project. But he’d not forget the songs. During an intense week of Ziggy sessions between November 8-15, Bowie resurrected both. He no longer felt any need to maintain a distance from this more avowedly rock material, nor remain anonymous behind an alter-ego. For this new project, David Bowie would present Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.
The night before the first session, Bowie took the band to see Alice Cooper at the Rainbow. He was appalled by the vaudevillian spectacle and walked out before the end. Bowie had big ideas for the Ziggy project and threw everything at it, from his love of Edith
Piaf and Judy Garland (he wanted to be “an entertainer in the old-fashioned sense of the word,” he’d told Johnson back in August) to his desire to create something as impactful on rock as Sgt. Pepper or Tommy. He knew the timing was right, that his ever-growing entourage believed in his talent and above all that his material would stick.
While it’s been said that Bowie was kicking the germ of the Ziggy idea around the States in February 1971, the project unfolded piecemeal. The truth is that Bowie recorded much of the album with his long, blond Veronica Lake locks intact; that the album was still being called Round And Round weeks after the main sessions had finished; that such a quintessentially Ziggy-style song Sweet Head never made the final cut; and that three of the album’s key titles – Starman, Suffragette City and grand finale Rock’n’Roll Suicide – were recorded almost as an afterthought.
With Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie realised his ambition to create a rock’n’roll musical of sorts. The man who’d described himself as ‘The Actor’ on the Hunky Dory sleeve also saw the venture as a way of unifying his shadow career as a mime, an aspiring writer of musicals, even to reconcile his pet subject – the divided self. He also likely intended to leave the mask on-stage at the end of each performance. It didn’t quite work out like that.
ILEFT EMI STUDIOS IN 1969 TO JOIN TRIDENT Studios [in Soho] as an in-house engineer. There was me, Robin Cable and Roy Thomas Baker. We each had our niche. Robin did orchestral stuff, like the early Elton John albums, Roy got the more obscure, heavier type of things and I was right in the middle. We didn’t have any say in which projects we were on. Some people might ask for you, like George Harrison asking for me to engineer All Things Must Pass. But with Bowie’s Space Oddity album I was assigned some of the sessions and that was it. When it came to The Man Who Sold The
World I think I was requested. At the time I thought Bowie was a really nice guy, a good singer, with a certain amount of talent. But to me, in hindsight, those two albums, Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold The World, weren’t him. He wrote the songs and sang them, but the rest was a controlling producer. The only thing that happened from those records was the Space Oddity single, which he did with Gus Dudgeon, who was the kind of producer who allowed the artist to have their freedom. Apart from that single, Tony Visconti had control and those records were flops. Then Tony went off [with T. Rex] and David, for himself as much as anything, needed to know what he was hearing in his head worked.
One of the great things about David was his ability to pick the right team to put across what he wanted. The team at that point – Trevor, Woody, Ronno, me behind the board and himself – was perfect for his ideas. We finished Hunky Dory, loved it, moved on. Two weeks later, I saw him in the corridor at Trident and he said, “We’re going to do another album.” I thought he was crazy. But he’d promised two in a row so [management company] GEM could get a better record deal. People did an album every six months then. The cream really rose to the top under those conditions. To keep that momentum going you had to be fucking great.
He talked about the next record and said, “You’re not gonna like it. It’s going to be more rock’n’roll.” But he was wrong, I did like it. I’d recorded The Beatles’ Helter Skelter – hard to get more rock’n’roll than that! And we’d already done Queen Bitch on Hunky Dory.
TO MAKE ZIGGY MORE rock’n’roll we started with a slight change in the drum sound. Woody thought the drums on Hunky Dory sounded like Corn Flakes packets. So on the opening day of Ziggy we set up a drum kit made up of different sized Corn Flakes packets. Just to amuse him. David didn’t discuss the concept because there wasn’t one. There are perhaps three songs that go together. The song that plays most into the concept idea is Starman, which came later.
When it was time to sing he wouldn’t discuss in advance what he was going to do. We’d test the track for level and then he’d go in and sing the whole thing. And whatever he did is what you hear today. Ninetyfive per cent of the vocals, on the albums I did, were first takes. The vocal on Five Years, which is a great prologue song, he was bawling his eyes out at the end. Rock’n’Roll Suicide was one of the only ones we had to record in sections because the first part is very close-up and present and then, in the second half, he’s belting. They came from his soul and that’s why they’re still amazing vocals today, because they’re genuine.
There was definitely a darker side to him which came through on songs like Five Years and Bombers and others later. But it didn’t come out in the room. On all four albums we did, he was always very up and we had a lot of fun, I never saw him down. But he bored easily. Woody and Trevor were always on the edge of their seat, because they knew if they didn’t get it quickly he’d say, “It isn’t working, let’s move on.” He didn’t even come to any of the mixes.
Once we thought we were done, word came back that RCA thought there wasn’t a single. So we went back in and did Starman in two days. The ‘I’m Gay’ interview [‘Oh You Pretty Things’, Melody Maker, January 22, 1972] had just come out. I remember mixing something, might have been Starman, and the assistant engineer asking me if I felt uncomfortable around him. Did I think David would try and get off with me? I laughed and said, “No! Not in the slightest.” It was just brilliant publicity.
When we finished I don’t know if any of us knew what we’d got. I didn’t realise until it came out. My sister-in-law was about to give birth in Bournemouth. I took my wife to see her, dropped her off at the hospital and went to park the car somewhere. I’m walking back to the hospital and coming out of someone’s open window was blasting Suffragette City. I thought,
“THE ASSISTANT ENGINEER ASKED ME, DID I THINK DAVID WOULD TRY AND GET OFF WITH ME?”
“Fuck me, that’s great.” Then I was sitting in reception at Trident reading a paper and Gus Dudgeon walked in and said, “Congratulations Ken!” and I said, “On what?” Starman had entered the charts.
SO WHEN IT WAS TIME TO record Aladdin Sane, David was a star. We started it in New York. He loved the atmosphere over there, but most of it ended up at Trident. Also, in between those albums he’d produced [Lou Reed’s] Transformer and [Mott The Hoople’s] All The Young
Dudes. So his confidence was building. He was certainly more sure of himself, which could at times come out as ego. He was a little more arrogant.
My recollection is that the drugs didn’t start ’til after Aladdin Sane. The cocaine habit pushed the ego even further, as it tends to do. That’s got to play with your head. It’s always difficult dealing with stardom. Pin-Ups and
Diamond Dogs were kind of weird, and there was a long period when we weren’t in touch and that was mostly legal, because of nonpayment of royalties. But one day I came home and my answer phone was flashing, and it was David and we started to make more contact again.
I’d always e-mail him on his birthday, to remind him that he was four months older than me. And he would always respond very quickly. Until the last time when I sent the email and didn’t hear back from him. Then, next day, the phone goes early in the morning and it was a friend of ours who worked for a radio station: “Would Ken be interested in doing an interview?” And my wife said, “It’s six in the morning, what do you mean would he be interested?” and she said, “Oh, so you haven’t heard?” And that was how we found out he had died.
After Aladdin Sane, we were going out to dinner one night and David got down on one knee and gave me a gold bracelet inscribed “KT – the lightning strike – DB”. I’ve worn it almost every day since.
THERE IS NO MISTAKING ANGIE BOWIE – certainly not among the otherwise elderly vacationers milling about the lobby of the historic Arizona Inn. Even at the age of 72, she would seem an outsized character anywhere, but particularly in the semi-sleepy desert town of Tucson, where she’s chiefly resided since the mid-’90s, along with her partner of three decades, Michael Gassett.
As her booming raspy voice fills the Inn’s elegant librar y lounge – with tales of her 12-year relationship with David Bowie, and plenty of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll – occasionally a passing hotel guest will pop their head in and eavesdrop, their jaws soon agape.
“Am I being too loud?” she asks at one point. “When I start discussing this stuff, it’s like I’m talking about another world. Some of it just beggars belief.”
Born and raised in Cyprus, the child of an American Army colonel (“He was a natural strategist – that’s where I get it from”) and a stylish Canadian mother, Mary Angela Barnett would seem an unlikely midwife for a pop revolution. But one could argue the seeds of Ziggy Stardust were sown during her childhood.
“My thrill and fascination and love for sparkle and glitz came from Liberace,” says Angie, who encountered the flamboyant pianist on an ocean liner as a child. “My mother talked him into coming to our state room. Liberace was an angel – he came and gathered me up in his arms. He smelled of perfume and hairspray, just coiffed beautifully, tailored fantastically. I knew then how a man, how a star, should be.”
Although brought up a strict Catholic, at 18 Angie went to college in America and promptly began an affair with a woman. After the romance soured, she fled school and headed to the UK, where she was accepted at Kingston Polytechnic to study marketing and economics. Here, too, she began working for Mercury Records under its American boss Lou Reisner and his head of A&R, Dr Calvin Mark Lee (a fellow bisexual, whom she also dated). Working with artists including
Buddy Miles, Angie would go to bat for a young
David Bowie, whom Reisner was lukewarm on signing.
“They only wanted to give him a deal for a single. I said, ‘Why? For a couple thousand dollars more you could get an LP and all the publishing,’” says Angie, who first saw Bowie at the Roundhouse with his folk rock group Feathers in 1968. “I said a few encouraging things to him… then later on, he got the flu and asked me to come down to Beckenham to look after him. That’s when he played me all the songs he had. When he played me everything, I was impressed… I spent the night with him.”
Space Oddity’s freak success in 1969 promised more of the same, but it was hard for Angie not to notice flaws in the singer’s career strategy.
“Ken Pitt used to book him into these ridiculous working men’s clubs, where if you had long hair and looked swishy they’d boo you off stage,” she says. “After about three months of this, I said to David, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m getting fed up with this.’” Meanwhile, Angie says she was pushing Bowie into writing more challenging material. “I wanted him to be brave. I wanted him to talk about the things that most other people thought you should sweep under the rug, which is how English people are.”
THE COUPLE WED IN March 1970 and Bowie’s personal stability and growing confidence would be reflected in Hunky Dory. “That album was cute and fabulous,” says Angie. “That was us being together, having a kid.”
Their son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, was born in May 1971. But even the familial arrangement came with one eye on Bowie’s career. “He had to basically present as heterosexual with bisexual tendencies to get by the American censors,” says Angie. “I figured if he had a child they’re not going to argue that he’s hetero. And David had such a good relationship with his father, I could tell he was going to have a great relationship with Zowie.”
As a new Bowie album took shape, Angie worked on the visuals with Freddie Burretti, who’d worked as a tailor before figuring in Bowie’s plans for the Arnold Corns.
“Freddie was a rent boy,” says Angie. “And David fell in love with him. He was playing the classic French drama queen Camille who can’t get a hold of the person they love. I said, ‘Not a problem. Let’s bring him down and install him in Haddon Hall and we’ll get plenty of suits made.’”
Soon Bowie’s look was getting more outrageous by the day.
“I’d be going, ‘No, Freddie – more! Make it more Liberace!’ Freddie and [Russian designer] Natasha Korniloff would be making these fabulous outfits for the stage, but it was the in-between that was important to me. I wanted him to look like a star all the time – to be dressed right, always maintaining the illusion, always promoting.”
“I WANTED DAVID TO LOOK LIKE A STAR ALL THE TIME – TO BE DRESSED RIGHT, ALWAYS MAINTAINING THE ILLUSION.”
By the time the LP emerged, Angie was serving as Bowie’s “interpreter, negotiator and head mistress”. “Sometimes I’d push him,” she says. “Sometimes I’d have to back away. But that’s managing – and I guess I was managing him.” At the top of their agenda was America: “If you don’t want to conquer the world, don’t waste my fucking time.”
While she insists that neither of them was ever in love with the other, Angie supported Bowie through Ziggy and beyond, though the success of the project was part of what prised them apart. “At a certain point the applause starts to make them think they’re something more than they really are,” she says. “And it’s like, no, you’re not God.”
Specifically, she felt Bowie had reneged on their personal agreement: “I had done a deal with David that first we would work on his career, and then we would work on mine.” Angie would go on to audition for the role of Wonder Woman on American television in the mid-’70s, but even while semi-detached, she would continue to field calls from her husband. “I was his trouble-shooter… I started to get really fed up with it. Disengaging was very difficult.”
After a decade of marriage, the couple officially divorced in 1980; Angie ended up with a $750,000 settlement and the Bowie name. A year later she would release a memoir, Free Spirit, but it would take another dozen years – and the death of her father (“I would never want to embarrass him while he was alive”) – before she published her eyeopening account, Backstage Passes: Life On The Wild Side With David Bowie. She has continued to write, penning a fascinating 2014 cultural history called POP.SEX.
Fifty years on from the Ziggy Stardust phenomenon, Angie believes her role in helping shape one of pop’s most fascinating chapters is finally being recognised.
“That’s the response I get now on social media – people are giving me my credit,” she says. “Never in anything I’ve ever written have I tried to take credit for something David did – I didn’t write his songs; I didn’t go on stage and perform. But I talked him into writing what I thought would be much more important and relevant. I had a big hand in how things looked. And I tried to boost him. When we got together, I promised David I’d make him known worldwide. And I succeeded.”
WHEN WE DID HUNKY DORY, WE WERE FINDING it very hard to imagine taking that on the road. Great songs and all that, but to turn it into a good rock show, it needed to be more exciting. And then it was like, OK, well, we have to rock it up a bit. This was the general consensus as we were chatting among ourselves: “This is a rock album we’re going for.” But not following the trends.
Mick, Trevor, and I, we’d been through very similar musical backgrounds. We’d gone through the blues. When I joined The Rats in Hull, they were still doing half a blues set, half a rock set, bit of progressive rock. We did a lot of Jeff Beck stuff. And we were all into, like, “If we’re going to do it, you do it properly.” Mick was fastidious about every note, it had to be perfect.
Bowie was continually writing. He was on a roll, you’d have to say. Everything that came out, it was like, “That’s a good song.” And it didn’t have any bearing on the last three that he’d written. He’d seemed to get his direction together.
Iggy and the new, rebellious side of rock was just starting to emerge in America. The English playing tended to be more musical. So, when we heard that, and the Velvet Underground stuff they’d done earlier, it was like, “Holy shit, it’s got a degenerate vibe about it. There’s no holding back on this stuff. But we’re not going to do it that way. It’s got to be English.” So, it was streamlining some of what they were doing into where it fitted in a Bowie song.
When we went back into Trident in November ’71 it was the same approach, but there was a bit more discussion about tracks. There was still this edgy thing I think David liked, where he’d go, “Let’s do Five Years. OK, Woody, you’re starting this one.” First thing I heard about it! Your first impulse is to do some tasty little bits, a few cymbal splashes. But we were very into, “What’s the song about?” So, you knew what you were trying to communicate. And when I realised this was about the end of the world, I kind of played from that viewpoint and Bowie went, “You’ve got it. Just keep that feel, it’s perfect.”
As a band we’d got into taking out anything that didn’t add to the song. And then it was like, “Well, they’re all spacey-oriented things, it’s about an alien, blah de blah. So, we need to be the future of rock’n’roll. Where would rock’n’roll go?” So, you’re thinking, “Well, it would go through electronic-y things, more technology involved. But then you’d still have this basic groove, that’s what rock’s all about.”
Musically, we’d worked together as a three-piece, so it didn’t take us much to get on the same page. A lot of times we didn’t talk about a song, we just played. Trev played quite melodically, and Mick would go, “What are you playing there? Oh, I like that.” Then he would work out his lead bit from the bass part. It just clicked. I guess there’s a chemistry that happens with most bands that have got something. You don’t know why it works. It just works.
David played us Ziggy Stardust on 12-string and then Mick played along with him on guitar, and it was like, “OK, this is kickarse. And this is about So, we have to make it good. It’s like an autobiography in a track.” Michael Giles from
King Crimson was the first drummer I noticed who started doing fills that fitted in strange places. So, doing Ziggy Stardust, it was probably 21st Century Schizoid Man I’d been listening to a lot. And I went, “Ooh, actually, this will fit the chord sequence. I don’t know if it’s a bit adventurous, but I’ll give it a go.” I guess it became kind of a hook.
WE FINISHED THE ALBUM, AND WE WERE high as a kite. It was like, “Wow, this is good, we’ve done a good job.” When RCA said there wasn’t a single it was like, “Fucking hell, really?” Then David said, “OK,” and over the weekend he wrote Starman. On the Sunday, he just said, “Oh, I’ve finished it. D’you want to come and hear it?” We went, “Fucking hell, that’s a hit.”
The funny thing was, because the other tracks on the album weren’t obvious singles, it stood out to us as like, “Oh shit, have we gone too poppy?” Mick and I were in a car going back to our place and I was going (adopts
exaggerated croon), “Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low-OH-OH.” We were like, “That’s right on the edge, innit, between shit and brilliance?” But it was fucking amazing that he wrote that over the weekend, and it was perfect from beginning to end.
Later, recording The Jean Genie at RCA Studios in New York, I think we’d soaked up
“WITH STARMAN WE THOUGHT, ‘OH SHIT, HAVE WE GONE TOO POPPY?’”
being in America. There were more rock stations there, so you got more on the American rock vibe. Live, tracks that we’d done quieter on Hunky Dory, we just played ’em fucking heavy. You’re playing bigger stadiums and I guess instinctively you get more into playing heavier. That was where our hearts were anyway – playing as loud as you can fucking get it, where they can still take it. We don’t want bleeding ears, but, y’know… close.
Santa Monica [Civic Auditorium, October 20, 1972] was an awesome gig. For whatever reason, it just really clicked. Bowie’s mike [stand] kept slipping and he took a pair of pliers off the roadie and fixed it. It was Ziggy with a pair of pliers! The audience all cheered. A lot of those American audiences, they were just gobsmacked. Their mouths were open, and we could see it from the stage.
Bowie’s changes in behaviour, and [our lack of] ability to communicate with him, was an oddity that we didn’t really put down to drugs. Sometimes he would come to soundcheck, just sing one bit of the one song, and then fuck off. Whereas before we’d have had a good run through things and a good laugh, as a gang. That changed the atmosphere.
The two Hammersmith Odeon gigs [July 2-3, 1973] were great shows. It was great to land back in London after we’d done America, then Japan, and then back to England. It was a tour that felt like each night was a peak. But we’d sort of got used to [the fact that] he would do things on the spur of the moment that sometimes were kind of shock tactics. So, when he announced that [it was “the last show that we’ll ever do”], I thought it was just one of those. It took a couple of days really to find out it’s really the Ziggy thing he’s ending.
If The Spiders had stayed together, the three of us? Good question. Pin-Ups would definitely have been better. We’d done demos of Rock’n’Roll With Me and 1984, off
Diamond Dogs. They were sounding really fucking good. I guess what he didn’t know, and we never brought it up, was that we all came through the soul thing as well. You learnt all that as part of your apprenticeship. But because we didn’t play like that any more, he probably didn’t think we could. We never went, “Well, we can do that too.” ’Cos it had passed by that point. But I reckon we could’ve handled a lot of it.