Anew David Bowie was born on a beach near Hastings in the summer of 1980. Bowie was on location filming the video for Ashes To Ashes, the song that would become his second No.1 single, when something happened that, he said, profoundly changed him.
Director David Mallet was filming Bowie as he walked up the beach dressed in the pierrot outfit he wore on the cover of Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), when an old man and his dog walked into shot. The director and crew yelled at the guy, asking him to get out of the way. The man – who probably walked there every day – was unfazed: “Screw you,” he said, “this is my beach”.
So Bowie took a seat next to Mallet and waited for it to blow over. Eventually the old guy is walking past and Mallet says to him, “Do you know who this is?”
The old guy looked Bowie up and down. “Of course I do,” he said. “It’s some cunt in a clown suit.”
Bowie thought it was hilarious (“That was a huge moment for me,” he said later. “It put me back in my place and made me realise, yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit”) but it had a wider impact. When he told the story years later, Bowie said the incident “profoundly changed” him. The “whole facade”, he said, “came crumbling down”.
Things were changing in the world of David Bowie. His relationship with manager Tony DeFries and Mainman finally ended in 1982 after a protracted split. Scary Monsters had been his last album for RCA, the label that had been his home since Hunky Dory in 1971. The label
