Bowie was hunky dory about punch in the eye
Childhood friend recalls teenage fight over girl that left singer with his signature ‘unearthly’ look
IT WAS an eye-catching distinction for a pop star who loved to stand out from the crowd. Now a childhood friend of David Bowie has revealed how the singer thanked him for the punch in the face that gave the star his differentcoloured irises.
George Underwood, who had been friends with Bowie from the age of nine, hit the singer when they were teenagers after they both became romantically interested in the same girl.
Describing the 1962 incident as a “short-lived falling out”, Mr Underwood told The Daily Telegraph that tensions boiled over after Bowie meddled in his attempt to ask Carol Goldsmith out for a date when she came to his 15th birthday party.
“Just to get the story straight, it was about a girl we both fancied,” Mr Underwood, now an artist, said. “She came to my 15th birthday party – everyone was drunk at about eight, including David.
“I was sensible and managed a date with her. David phoned me on the day and said she had told him she didn’t want to meet me because she wanted to go out with him.”
However, when Mr Underwood went down to their local youth club later that evening he found Miss Goldsmith had been waiting for him all along.
“I was very p----d off with him, and in the morning I got on the bus to school and overheard him talking about this girl he was going out with,” said
Mr Underwood. “At break time I hit him. Later David said I did him a favour – everyone talks about his eyes, don’t they?” The altercation left Bowie with a blue right eye, while his left appeared dark or brown, after he reportedly suffered a deep corneal abrasion and paralysis of his iris sphincter muscle. His different-coloured eyes have been described as “one of the enduring legends” behind his “unearthly aura” that made him – and his alter ego Ziggy Stardust – so distinctive.
“The uncanny appearance of Bowie’s eyes was ideal for a performer who embraced ideas of the alien, the outsider, the otherworldly and the occult,” Kevin Hunt, senior lecturer in design and visual culture at Nottingham Trent University, wrote in The Independent. “In an increasingly visual world seemingly preoccupied by perfection, Bowie’s damaged left pupil became an intrinsic and arresting part of his enigmatic identity.” He embraced his feature right up to his death in 2016, with his different-coloured eyes featuring in the advertising campaign for his final album, Blackstar.
Throughout his career, he made 27 studio albums, 128 singles, four soundtracks and 72 music videos. Bowie – real name David Robert Jones – was born in 1947 and raised in Bromley, south-east London. He met Mr Underwood when they both enrolled for the Cubs in 1956 and they later went on to study at Bromley Tech.
“We started talking, mostly about music,” Mr Underwood said. “When we got a bit older, we used to go around Bromley High Street chatting up girls and trying to impress people. David was just learning how to do that.” Despite their altercation, the pair remained friends until Bowie’s death. Telegraph Magazine: Page 74