Chapter 1

Living in Lies by the Railway Line

1947–1969

He was a postwar baby, born in London in 1947. He was part of the new world, two years after the end of the old. A London baby. He went to school in Brixton before being cast out to the suburbs. Even when he was young he knew he wanted to be bigger than he was, wanted to be a bigger man. When he started to work in advertising he thought he’d broken through, but he had no idea what was to come. In the beginning, he was feeling his way—he was in the Kon-Rads, the King Bees, the Mannish Boys, David Jones and the Buzz, Davey Jones and the Lower Third, Feathers, the Hype—but he had no idea who he was going to be when he’d finished.

David Jones was born on January 8, 1947, at 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, the son of a cinema usherette and a promotions officer for Barnardo’s. He lived there until he was six, when his family moved farther out to Bromley in Kent. While his father was middle class, his mother came from a poor, working-class family. David used to say that there was a dark cloud over her side of the family, as it was full of mental instability. When he let his guard down, or when he wanted to amplify that side of his upbringing, he would say that “tragically” two or three of his aunts committed suicide. He would say that this seemed to be something he would hear constantly while growing up: How so-and-so has left us now. He said once, “I guess most of us have battled with reality and something else all of our lives. I think [my elder half-brother] Terry probably gave me the greatest, serviceable education that I ever could have had. He just introduced me to the outside things. The first real major event for me was when he passed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on to me, which really changed my life. He also introduced me to people like John Coltrane, which was way above my head, but I saw the magic and I caught the enthusiasm for it because of his enthusiasm for it. And I kinda wanted to be like him.” Terry—the savant of cool jazz—would adumbrate his life as a sort of ticking clock of impending, accelerated mortality. As for his mother’s sisters, his aunt Vivienne was diagnosed with schizophrenia, his aunt Una died in her late thirties having experienced periods in a mental institution as well as electric shock treatment, while Aunt Nora actually had a lobotomy because of her “bad nerves.”

David Bowie: I had a very happy childhood, seriously nothing wrong with it. I was lonely but I never really wanted and certainly never went hungry, but I obviously saw people deprived around me and kids going to school with their shoes falling apart and kids looking like urchins. It left an impression on me that I never ever wanted to be hungry, or at the wrong end of society.

Kristina Amadeus (David’s cousin): David’s parents, especially his father, “John” Jones, encouraged him from the time he was a toddler. His mother, Peggy, spoke often of our deceased grandfather, who was a bandmaster in the army and played many wind instruments. David’s first instruments, a plastic saxophone, a tin guitar, and a xylophone, were given to him before he was an adolescent. He also owned a record player when few children had one. When he was eleven we danced like possessed elves to the records of Bill Haley, Fats Domino, and Elvis Presley. David’s father took him to meet singers and other performers preparing for the Royal Variety Performance. I remember one afternoon in the late ’50s when David was introduced to Dave King, Alma Cogan, and Tommy Steele. “My son is going to be an entertainer too,” he said. “Aren’t you, David?” “Yes, Daddy,” David squeaked in his childish high-pitched voice, his face flushed and beaming with pride. Although Uncle John never lived to see David’s huge success, he was convinced it would become a reality.

Wendy Leigh (biographer): David grew up petted and privileged. He wasn’t a working-class hero by any stretch. It was actually quite a suburban life, even though it was in south London, in Brixton. His father was the number-one PR at Dr. Barnardo’s, so David was immersed in the idea of presentation from a very young age. He was taken to all the shows by his father, introduced to celebrities, and he learned how to promote, how to sell himself. No one ever talks about the fact that he was incredibly influenced by his father, who had access to this exciting outside world. Every performer needs to be a great seducer, and David learned that from an early age. His father showed him a lot of love. He showed him how to get on, how to charm, and how to practice the art of being nice.

George Underwood (childhood friend): His dad was lovely, a really nice gentle man. His mum, well, even David didn’t like his mum. She wasn’t an easy person to get on with. She was very cold. Very insular. I think that’s why he liked coming round to my house, because my parents were totally different. “Hello, David, want a cup of tea, David?” My parents were very welcoming, but this wasn’t what would happen round at his house. Mrs. Jones would hardly ever say anything to me. I’m not sure what it was, but she was never happy. She always gave David such a hard time.

Don Arden (manager): I was brought up in Brixton around the same time as David Bowie, and everyone thinks it was a tough place, but it was actually rather nice and full of variety artists. Half the houses were owned by [Trinidadian pianist] Winifred Atwell, who had bought them for investment purposes, and she used to rent them out to music-hall acts and light entertainers. John Major lived a few streets away from me, and his dad was an acrobat and juggler. It later turned into a rougher neighborhood, but at the time we were brought up there it was very arty-crafty. If you were an artist in London, in music hall or variety, or in showbiz of one kind or another, that’s where you lived. So Bowie was surrounded by this extremely artistic community. It was vibrant in that way. He wasn’t just a performer, wasn’t just a singer-songwriter, he was an artist, and he got that because of where he was brought up. I’d go into the arcade in Brixton, under the railway arches, and buy my reggae and jazz records there, and David would do the same thing. We had local people round to dinner all the time, and they were all in the business, people like Dickie Henderson. There were also lots of places to go and see acts too, as the area fed off the people who lived there. So it’s no surprise he turned out the way he did.

Anne Briggs (neighbor): For a time as children we lived at Clapham in South London and were regular visitors to Brixton Market. There were all manner of traders, hawkers, stalls selling anything—Technicolor clothing which only the new residents of Brixton would wear, fruit piled up on shiny green fake grass cloths, vegetables of all kinds, and barrow boys with such constant and witty sales patter that people would gather round to listen and heckle. There were the West Indian traders with their Caribbean vegetables and lilting speech encouraging passersby to try their vegetables and fruit. Then there were buskers, always with their promoters, either providing music or awe-inspiring feats of physical flexibility, juggling or occasionally sword swallowers, all with their constant conversation attracting the crowd. Tanks of writhing eels in slightly murky water alongside stalls shrouded in white selling the little pots of jellied eels—no doubt to emphasize their freshness . . . ​Cockles, winkles and shrimps were measured in old half pint and pint tankards. Pills and potions offering miracle cures of some sort or another—if we hovered to try and read the packets we were whisked away.

Geoff MacCormack (childhood friend): I first met David when I was seven, at Burnt Ash Primary School, when he moved to Bromley—we had little brown uniforms. I’d already met George Underwood when I was four, at the local church school, St. Mary’s. I was in the cubs with David, in the choir together. We bonded over music, and both loved rock and roll, and as we grew older loved Little Richard. The Britain we grew up in was really quite grubby. There were still rations until the ’50s, and you’d walk to school via bomb sites. The music was bad, there was no decent food, and everything was gray, so when American music came along it completely changed everything. David’s father used to fund-raise with the stars of the day, people like Dickie Henderson and Tommy Steele.

I initially thought David was an only child, as he was only ever the only child in the house. I only found out much later that he had a brother. We never discussed it. I think it was a mutual understanding, as I had a brother who left home early to join the forces. He moved abroad and he wasn’t in my life either. So it was almost a mirror thing. David had a good relationship with his father, and he was always quite generous. He would always buy him records, and he got a lot of records through work. His father used to get American music that we’d never heard before and most of the country have never heard before. Most of the rock and roll we heard in this country was rerecorded by British artists for labels like Embassy that we used to buy in Woolworths. So to hear the real thing was quite rare and a real treat. David had Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” when that came out, “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley. He also had “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, although David’s mother wouldn’t let him play it in the house as she thought it was the devil’s music, which I suppose it was in a way. Our favorite was Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent.” When he did The Next Day, I told him I loved it, and he actually said, “It’s not ‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent,’ but it’ll do.” I remember him lending me a couple of records and I left them on the windowsill in the breakfast room at home, and...