David Bowie - Child of the Future
“And I cried for all the others till the day was nearly through
For I realized that God's a young man too”
Some groups took to glam rock with such ease that it’s hard to imagine them doing anything else, others looked uneasy as if they just wanted to run off stage and get changed, Bowie however simply became glam rock. He didn’t seem to wear the makeup or the clothes or put on the style, it was as if he had emerged fully formed from some music/style cocoon. Even though I could hear someone with the same name singing a cringe worthy song called “The Laughing Gnome” on Ed Stewpot’s Junior Choice it didn’t seem possible that Bowie had a past – especially one as embarrassing as that.
But the thing that most impressed me about Bowie wasn’t the makeup or the image, it wasn’t even the singing or the music, it was the song writing. He was the first person I heard that used references I knew in his songs – I remember listening to “Life On Mars” for the first time and on hearing the line “from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads” thinking to myself “There must be a Norfolk in the US, he can’t be singing about something in England”.
Bowie’s famously reinvented himself through the years and dragged me through a number of styles as I’ve held onto his musical coattails. However I only have to hear the start of Queen Bitch and I’m a teenager once more watching Bowie and wondering what planet he came from.
Born David Jones, Bowie began his music career at the age of 13 learning to play the saxophone and playing with a number of school groups. It was also while at school that he obtained one of his most famous features, the permanently dilated pupil, after being stabbed with a school compass. On leaving school at the age of 16 he became a commercial artist while continuing to play sax in a number of bands including Davey Jones and the Lower Third, the King Bees and the Manish Boys. While they were all good enough to record singles, none of them troubled the charts.
It was in 1966, at the age of 19, that Davey Jones became David Bowie in order to avoid confusion with the famous Davy Jones of the Monkees. The change of name did not unfortunately lead to a change in fortunes, Bowie played with styles including the release of a number of Mod-ish singles on Pye and various music hall / cabaret style recordings on Deram but nothing brought him commercial success – although “The Laughing Gnome” would come back to haunt him in later years. Ever the performer Bowie briefly studied with a mime troupe before forming the Feathers, his own mime company, in 1969 and then moving on to experimental art with Beckenham Arts Lab.
Bowie’s break into the charts came in September 1969 with his classic “Space Oddity”. The tale of Major Tom merged perfectly with the public fascination with space (the first moon landing had only been 2 months previously) and saw Bowie reach number 5 in the charts. Success however could not been maintained and when his follow up failed Bowie was seen commercially as a one-hit wonder.
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