How Bowie seduced his Beckenham landlady over tea and cannabis
That’s him in bed at her flat. But he cheated on her with a string of women — and men
THE genteel commuter suburb of Beckenham in Kent may have been home to an eclectic group of people over the years — Bob Monkhouse, Julie Andrews, actor Simon Ward and boxer David Haye, to name a few. But it still seems an unlikely hotbed for searing creative talent and lashings of hot sex and drugs. This week, however, it emerged as the sleepy launch pad for David Bowie’s first hit single Space Oddity — and the setting for a rather unconventional sex and drugs landlady/ lodger relationship between 23-year-old Bowie and Mary Finnigan, a single mother-of-two who was seven years his senior. In her new memoirs, Mary spills the beans on an extraordinary period when, for six psychedelic months, Bowie perked up not just the ‘commuter dormitory’ of Beckenham, but also her home, suburban family life and bed with his ‘very horny’ and ‘sexually sophisticated’ attentions until everything was ‘fizzing with excitement and activity’.
It all started one April afternoon in 1969. Bowie — having changed his name from David Robert Jones four years earlier — was a struggling folk musician who had released one album, which had sunk without trace.
Mary, who worked in journalism, lived in the ground-floor apartment of a block of flats in Beckenham. The sun was shining, she was lying out in the garden and heard some very unusual music — ‘This is Major Tom to ground control’ — coming from her neighbour Barry’s flat above.
‘I called up. “Hello? Who’s playing?”’ Mary told Radio 4’s Today programme this week. ‘And David popped his head out of the window and said: “Hello I’m David.” ’
He was an old friend of Barry’s from Bromley Technical High School who had popped over from his parents’ home in Bromley to hang out.
‘I said: “Would you like to come downstairs for a cup of tea and some tincture [alcoholic extract] of cannabis?”’ David was down in a flash.
He was thin and pale with a mop of blond curls and, Mary says, full of extraordinary charm and 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 small oblong box containing a stylophone (a small electronic keyboard played with a stylus) and his Gibson guitar. As Mary made lunch for her new £5-a-week lodger, he played her his new song, Space Oddity, on the stylophone.
When Mary’s children, Caroline and Richard, charged in from school a few hours later, he played it again.
They loved it. ‘It should go to No1,’ said Caroline. ‘I hope it does because I’ll be able to impress my school friends.’
Richard immediately rushed off to his room to draw an astronaut bobbing about in space to show David.
According to Mary, David had a wonderful manner with the children and they adored him. As did she.
‘He was a very talented singer and songwriter,’ Mary said in a recent interview for the Bristol Post. ‘I would not say I was infatuated with him, but I was interested, very interested, in him straight away.’
Bowie, meanwhile, had no work, no income and no savings. Thankfully, rent was never mentioned. The typical landlady/lodger arrangement was confused after a couple of days when, after preparing a special candlelit dinner, ‘a nice spliff’ and some carefully selected music, David seduced her.
BOWIE moved in to Mary’s room and they settled into a happy routine — living, cooking and eating together. They shared cannabis and ‘highquality hashish’, enjoying endless conversations about Tibetan Buddhism and the fact David had never tried LSD because he didn’t really fancy losing control. (He later admitted in interviews that he always preferred ‘fast drugs which speeded him up’, such as cocaine and amphetamines.)
Bowie was gentle, beautifully mannered and, according to Mary, very used to getting his own way. He would get up at noon, spend the afternoons in the garden working on music and lyrics while the two children played around him.
Whenever he came up with something he was pleased with — such as Wild eyed Boy From Freecloud — he would ask them their opinion. For a while, it was an idyllic — if slightly unconventional — family home.
Slowly but surely, Bowie and all his stuff took over Mary’s small flat.
YET incredibly, when an old van disgorged two giant amplifiers, a tape deck, electric guitar, microphone stands and endless cardboard boxes overflowing with cables, plugs and the rest of his musical gear into the home, Mary somehow made room for them.
Though she had an impeccably middle-class background, Mary was bohemian in outlook. She had spent a brief spell in Holloway Prison in 1967 after a conviction for drugs — which was subsequently overturned — and had taken up the hippie cause.
‘I was spellbound by his charm and his talent,’ she explained. ‘I had been a man-free zone for many months and now there was this handsome, sexy, interesting male creature occupying centre stage in my life, out of the blue and at high velocity.’
Soon the dining room became Bowie’s music studio, while the speakers were forever on the move, from the kitchen to the garden — trailing a tangle of cables everywhere as he scribbled and strummed. The Finnigans had to clamber over electronic equipment to get to the loo.
Then his good friend Angie Barnett, who later became his wife, all but moved in to join the fun.
But it wasn’t all just spliffs and sex and strumming. Together Mary and David set up a weekly folk night at the local pub, the Three Tuns in Beckenham High Street. Space Oddity was a highlight of Bowie’s Three Tuns set.
The highly successful Beckenham Arts Lab followed, promoting Sixties counter culture despite the fact the local population was hardly progessive and had voted in a Conservative MP since 1950. Suddenly, Beckenham was pulsating with excitement.
It culminated in the UK’s first Free Festival at The Croydon Road Recreation Ground — immortalised by Bowie’s song Memory Of A Free Festival. ‘It was the pinnacle of that summer,’ Mary said. ‘It was ecstati-
cally happy. It was just the most uplifting experience for all of us except David, because his father had died a week previously. And he was absolutely devoted to his father and he was in extreme grief.
‘I would say it was the bedrock of his stardom. He acquired a following and he had a basis from which to develop his talent.’
On the back of it all, Bowie’s first hit single Space Oddity started to climb the charts, reaching No 5. And then — for Mary, at least — it all unravelled. Perhaps naively, given it was the Sixties and her lover was an arrestingly androgenous aspiring rock star, she assumed their relationship was monogamous and that his weekly trips to ‘patrol the folk clubs’ in London were simply work.
It was a cruel blow to discover he was not only unfaithful, but also bisexual and polyamorous — in simultaneous relationships with Calvin Mark Lee, a Chinese American man from Mercury Records, a mime artist called Lindsay Kemp and, of course, Angie, who became Mrs Bowie the following year. ‘He had been bisexually multi-timing me for the entire period of our relationship,’ she said earlier this week. ‘I was just one among many of whom Angie was probably the principal.’
The relationship with Angie was particularly painful — discovered when Mary was flicking through a notebook by his bed and found a song about ‘beautiful Angie’.
Angie said in her autobiography, that Bowie called her from Mary’s flat and asked her down one night when Mary was out. ‘He was dreadfully sick, so could I come down and take care of him?’
When she got there from ‘trashy Paddington’, he did not appear sick at all. Before long they were sitting together in his bedroom, done up in colourful Indian and Tibetan fabrics which created a ‘hippiesensuous’ atmosphere.
They listened to his music and discussed the age’s new vogue for sexual freedoms (Angie had discovered she was bisexual in her teens). ‘I began seeing a new character and opening up to him,’ she said. ‘It felt warm and wonderful.
‘We became intimate that night — Nineteen sixty nine was a very fine year. David and I became close in the spring after our weekend at Mary Finnigan’s, and our love flourished in the sunshine of that summer. I can’t remember being apart at all.’
Mary and Angie had nevertheless become good friends, and remained so, spending a lot of time together in the flat. In an interview earlier this week, Mary declined to comment on rumours that she and Angie had also become sexually involved, simply insisting: ‘Angie was there. She was in the flat. We ended up sharing our lives, but it was not a maison a trois.’
Interestingly, she kept in touch with Angie, but not David.
MARY is today a 77year-old grandmother who lives in Bristol and doesn’t rate her former lover’s music as much as she used to. ‘After Ziggy Stardust, I really didn’t like his music very much. I loved the scruffy rock ’n’ roll stuff, but when he started doing his glam stuff...I found it all a bit pretentious,’ she said.
She insists her book is no kiss-and-tell, but instead an important reminder that Beckenham’s very significant contribution to rock history has been shamefully ignored.
After all, it was in Beckenham that Bowie wrote material for some of his best known albums, such as The Man Who Sold The World, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust.
Night after night, with his guitarist Mick Ronson and the rest of his band, he worked on songs such as Moonage Daydream and Changes. He has said that the character of Ziggy Stardust was actually born in Beckenham.
Bowie is now a twice-married global superstar worth £157million and who has sold over 100million records. He will celebrate his 69th birthday on Friday.
By coincidence Mary’s book and Bowie’s latest studio album, Blackstar, are also both released on Friday. It seems unlikely that she’ll be buying his album, but will Bowie be reading her book?
Psychedelic suburbia: david Bowie And The Beckenham Arts lab by Mary Finnigan (£14.95, Jorvik Press)