Bowie Odyssey 71

By Simon Goddard

Britain, 1971. Strange land of hot pants, moral outrage, anarchist bombs and sexual revolution. As Marc Bolan is hailed as the nation’s teenage saviour, the forgotten hope called David Bowie searches for the spark to relight his fire. He finds it in London’s gay clubland and the stoned fields of Glastonbury, the speedy streets of New York City and his new rock’n’roll allies Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. The ignition for songs about life on Mars and cosmic messiahs, starry alter-egos and bold fashions fit for the ultimate Seventies superstar...

In the sequel to Bowie Odyssey 70, Simon Goddard continues his groundbreaking immersive narrative of the world around Bowie, through the second year of the decade he changed pop forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781787592285

Book preview

ONE

‘Is that David Bowie?’

THE BELLE OF THE BALL ASKS PRINCE CHARMING, her lips so close her breath tickles his ear. It’s the only way she can be sure he’ll hear her above the booming buh-buh-buh-buh of The Jackson 5. Beneath their feet flashes an aurora borealis of reds and greens as the lights under the crowded coloured Perspex dancefloor flicker to the bubbling beat, though these two would cast a limelight strong enough without it. She is a starlet: Hollywood by way of Chelsea, Terry de Havilland heels spreading the gospel of glitz with every tread. So is he: a blond Nureyev in a home-sewn ballet of jacket and culottes, every stitch flattering his lithe physique like cotton applause. They come not merely to dance, but to dazzle. And they do.

‘OH MY GAAAD!’

Not two minutes ago a new admirer blew up in their faces like a Texas oil gusher.

‘YOU TWO LOOK FAAABULOUS!’

An invitation followed.

‘COME OVER AND SIT WITH US AND HAVE SOME CHAMPAAAGNE!’

The messenger then sashayed back to one of the red velvet booths surrounding the dancefloor occupied by the other half of ‘US’ – a longhaired creature in something like a dress. It was the girl who recognised the face beneath its fringe: the same cute face that sang the song she loved a year or so ago about the loneliness of space. But where that head used to be covered in short blond curls, this one has hair like Rapunzel. That’s why she had to ask her friend: ‘Is that David Bowie?’

IT IS. David Bowie, known for ‘Space Oddity’ and nothing else, sits in a salmon-pink floral gown enveloped by the velvet upholstery, legs crossed and skirted, one hand absently toying with the stem of a glass as he stares across the rainbow ripple of bumping bodies. On the table in front of him sighs a plate of limp lettuce and jaundiced ham, deposited ten minutes earlier by a blur of a waiter in dungarees by Mr Freedom. David, frocked by Mr Fish, doesn’t touch it. Identical plates wilt undisturbed in the adjacent booths, compliments of the management who include a ‘snack supper’ in the price of entry to satisfy late licensing laws. The salad is purely superficial. So are the clientele. The men from the magazine that once was Jeremy came, saw and catclawed scathing judgement a year ago. ‘Here the ultimate is cool. Fashion. Poise. The trendy dolly set where the impression is that if any of the boys, or girls, have sex it’s in front of their bedroom mirror – on their own.’ The trendy dolly set sum it up in a single phrase: ‘piss-elegant’. It’s the only style that counts in the Sombrero.

Nothing here being what it seems, ‘the Sombrero’ isn’t really the Sombrero. The club’s proper name, as its silver matchbooks remind, is Yours Or Mine? The actual Sombrero – El Sombrero – is the Mexican restaurant above it on Kensington High Street at the corner of Campden Hill Road. ‘Eees good!’ swears the advert. ‘Eees very good!’ El Sombrero is unmissable on account of the neon sombrero mounted outside which lights up at night beside the ground-level entrance to the club in its basement. Both are owned by the same little Swiss man called Harry who opened the Sombrero as a café in the Fifties, choosing the name because he liked holidaying in Spain. When it burned down in the Sixties he rebuilt it, enlarging the cellar into a nightclub, the first in London with an illuminated dancefloor, which he brought over from Switzerland. Dining above or dancing below, it’s all ‘the Sombrero’.

The unruly queue to what nobody calls Yours Or Mine? snakes along the front of the restaurant, waiting to reach the foyer beyond the neon hat. Once past two butch Yugoslavian doormen and the cherubic cloakroom boy, it’s down the stairs to be greeted by the flamboyant manager, Amadeo, a sweep of blond hair and a Noël Coward cigarette holder clenched between his large teeth, removed only to welcome his regulars with a three-syllable ‘dha-rrr-ling!’ A podium waits beyond the bottom step, lure to a steady pageant of Glorias out-Swansoning one another as they make their entrance. Only when they’ve posed long enough to be seen by all – tossing a wrist, batting an eyelid or tilting a chin in imaginary close-up – have they finally arrived.

Some of these lives are penny-poor, but their chic remains priceless. Many are gimcrack Cinderellas, underpaid boutique assistants taking the merchandise they sell but can never afford out on the tiles for a midnight twirl before hanging it back on the rails to be sold on as factory-fresh Yves Saint Laurent. Even the most destitute boast the apparel of rich imagination: a bedsheet becomes a toga and a cheap plastic crown of laurel leaves painted gold makes a daytime nobody a disco Nero. No awkward questions are asked. Everyone is taken at face value and nothing here has more value than face. It is a place to be what you wish, not what you are. King’s Road queens, Mandraxed coquettes, hustlers, dandies, fops, tarts, gigolos and speed freaks. All damned, but in the glow of the Sombrero, all damned beautiful.

The most beautiful never go on Saturdays, the air too soured by the hick perfume of awayday amateurs. Better are odd nights midweek and best of all Sunday, the in-est in-crowd’s favourite, when those who come to sparkle and be envied sparkle brightest and are envied greenest. The ones who never queue, never pay and who, when not dancing, blow pearls of Polari slang between cigarette puffs in the DJ booth with Antonello, a handsome, dry-witted Italian hairdresser who supplies the sounds to keep the black bombers ticking till 3 a.m. Ones like the glittering Fred and Ginger currently stealing glances at the homi-polone they think might be the one-hit-wonder David Bowie.

Fred is a Freddie, but Ginger is a Wendy – a streetwise Fulham girl, slender, attractive and naked if not in Quorum, Biba or similarly swish fabric. Most days she sleeps long past noon after working nights as a hostess at Churchill’s on New Bond Street, her job to flatter its wealthy gentlemen into leaving the premises several hundred pounds poorer on a bellyful of champagne and caviar. Few can resist Wendy’s allure. Freddie is six foot, fair of hair with eyes of blue, registered with a model agency though the main benefactors of his pulchritude are a rougher sort of trade. First and fashionmost he is a tailor, for now employed taking in alterations on the King’s Road but conserving his full talent for the private industry of the little sewing machine he uses like an indispensable fifth limb. He is an entirely self-stitched creation, even his name, ‘Freddie Burretti’, a necessary Italianate embroidering of Bletchley’s Fred Burrett. His wardrobe is his world and the world a catwalk to exhibit his wardrobe, complemented, always, by black lace-up shoes with thick cork soles.

Together, they rent a flat in Holland Park, more threadbare than the location suggests save for an Aubrey Beardsley print on the wall as a concession to class. There are two bedrooms: one a double where they sleep together, though not as lovers, the other spare for Freddie’s occasional assignations. Two black sheep cast out from their families who’ve since found sibling love in one another, neither are yet 20 years old. Freddie is brother and domestic mother, Wendy the little sister alien to the use of a dishcloth, too busy waiting for the next rap on the door from ‘Fifi’ and his hoisting gang bearing dresses shoplifted to order from the pages of the latest Vogue. You’ll sometimes see Freddie and Wendy in Chelsea, down La Douce in Soho, or over in Earl’s Court at the Catacombs or the Boston – wherever the straight grey world of Courtelle-sweater Janets and their Hai Karate Johns never interferes. The same reason they love the Sombrero best of all.

IT IS ANGIE, David’s wife, who first hears about the Sombrero, and it is Angie who persuades him they should go. He doesn’t resist. She’d been tipped off by one of the gals in Al Parker’s, the West End theatrical agency where she’d been temping to bring in some extra cash. But if they hadn’t told her, sooner or later somebody else would have. The Sombrero was much too Angie a kind of place to hide its whereabouts from her for very long: wild fashion, hot disco and packed with more queers than a plainclothes policeman can shake his stick at. Within seconds of arrival, it is already everything they said it would be, and more.

David is quick to gauge the piss-elegant climate and fixes his mask accordingly. But inside his heart skips. In his long tresses and floral print dress he realises he is no longer the most fascinating creature in the room. Nor the most androgynous. David spots Freddie dancing with Wendy in his first sensory-overloaded blink like the optical ringing of an orchestra chime. He sees handsome, stylish, pretentious; a peacock, an actor, an incorrigible poser; a lost boy, much like himself. David needs to have his curiosity satisfied but is unused to making first moves unaided. That’s why Angie is here.

‘OH! AREN’T … THEY… FAAABULOUS!’

David dispatches Angie to cross the dancefloor and lure them to their booth. The scene flickers before him like a silent movie. Angie confidently approaching, eyes glowing, arm pointing, the girl and the boy flashing their eyes over in his direction, nervous smiles, mouths moving, their every word a mystery buried beneath the lovelorn holler of little Michael Jackson.

Angie returns alone.

‘THEY’RE COMING OVER.’

Freddie and Wendy are still holding conference. Freddie decides she’s right. It is David Bowie.

‘What do you think?’ asks Wendy. ‘Should we go over?’

Skipping to a stranger’s table at the first sniff of champagne isn’t the piss-elegant thing to do. Instinct says no. But intrigue says yes. Freddie purses his lips. Then a smirk. ‘Come on, then.’

The dancefloor blinks blue as the tempo changes to the African boogie of Miriam Makeba’s ‘Pata Pata’. Angie’s radiating smile claps to their cool approach as two become four. Necessary introductions. ‘Wendy.’ ‘ANGIE.’ ‘Freddie.’ ‘David,’ says David, and his guests nod like they don’t already know. The light is soft but clear enough for mutual close inspection. Freddie is fascinated by David’s skew-pupilled eyes, one gleaming infinitely bluer than the other. David calculates Freddie’s hair, lips and cheekbones and decides he looks a lot like Mick Jagger: possibly the next Mick Jagger.

‘Do you sing?’ asks David.

‘I used to be in the school choir,’ says Freddie with a coy flutter. ‘But that was before my voice broke. I really had a very good voice before. Like most young boys.’ His eyes dapple with mischief. ‘No,’ he continues, ‘I design clothes. I make all my own.’ He gently pinches his lapel. ‘I made this.’

David twitches an eyebrow. ‘Could you make something for me?’

Freddie’s gaze drops down to David’s navel and back up again. ‘I could.’ He raises his glass to his lips and takes a long, delicate sip. ‘If you give me your measurements.’

David smiles. Wendy giggles. Angie howls.

‘OH, DARLING! PLEASE, YOU MUST MAKE DAVID SOMETHING FAAABULOUS!’

More bubbles are poured, infinities of unspoken kinships noted. By the bottom of the bottle an alliance of enfants terribles is forged. They talk, they drink, they dance; all the while David and Freddie softly scrutinise one another, each an artist beginning to sense that the search for their next muse is over.

Numbers and vows to reconvene again are exchanged. Their first visit to the Sombrero will not be David and Angie’s last; by the earliest blossom of spring they will be as much a part of its fabric as red velvet, rent boys and ‘Lay Down’ by Melanie, Antonello’s habitual four-minute warning that the party’s over. For some it continues, Freddie and Wendy taking their appetites down the road to a Persian café with the rest of their pep-pilled dawn chorus. But not for David and Angie, who totter into a taxi, Beckenham-bound, minds kaleidoscoping in blissful aftershock as they slump down in the backseat. Their bodies rock to the soft rhythm of the road, his hand on her knee as his eyes begin to droop. Hers follow. Then suddenly snap wide open.

‘OH!’

Pinprick-sized ears formed from cells not grown a week ago to hear the thump of Melanie are tingling with new sensation. She gasps again, louder, and David stirs from his Jagger-faced dream. Angie places his hand on her tummy.

‘Can you feel?’

Beneath the skin, tiny legs are dancing.

TWO

JAGGER-FACED DREAMS turn to terror on a 43-foot screen. The film, Performance, stars the Rolling Stone as Turner, a rock star recluse, abandoned by his demon, sectioning himself to a claustrophobic bedlam of psychotropic orgies with his two girlfriends in a Notting Hill townhouse. A suspicious interloper moves in downstairs, a bruised James Fox with slicked-back hair, crudely dyed the colour of red-hot-red. He says he’s a juggler, ‘Johnny Dean’, but Jagger doesn’t believe him, nor should he. Fox is really a gangster named Chas: a shooter, a whipper, a wrecker of Rollers with battery acid, a general putter of frighteners on flash little twerps, he’s now on the run from his own firm after killing an acquaintance. His last salvation, this bohemian ‘pisshole’ in Powis Square.

‘If you were me, what would you do?’ asks Jagger.

‘It depends who you are,’ answers Fox, and in the blink of a bisexual trip the pop idol and the mobster slowly realise they are one and the same – each only a performer of the character they think they see staring back at themselves in the mirror.

As its poster says, it’s a film about ‘MADNESS AND SANITY, FANTASY AND REALITY, DEATH AND LIFE, VICE AND VERSA’. The hippie press are calling it ‘the heaviest movie ever made’, which explains why it’s been gathering dust for two years on the censor’s shelf, awaiting the queasy snips only now allowing it to receive its charity premiere at the Warner West End four days before David’s 24th birthday. The first red carpet of 1971 sees a bleary parade of rock musicians, actors, disc jockeys and models, but no Mick Jagger. He’s stranded at a Parisian airport at the mercy of Janvier fog. As a second best, Keith Richards drains the Fleet Street flashbulbs, arm in arm with his partner and the film’s co-star Anita Pallenberg, about to be seen in an hour’s time rolling starkers under a bedsheet with Keith’s best mate in glorious Technicolor.

David’s face is not famous enough for the premiere but in his first lungful of turning 24 he winds through Leicester Square to see it for himself. Only to see himself. His colourless London of Portobello litter and ciggie-stinking phone boxes on Wandsworth Bridge Road. His fortress flat of paintbox walls, guitars and speakers, rails of strange clothes, freaky antiques and exotic rugs. His and Angie’s bed jumping with women kissing men who may be women kissing women who may be men. His voice when lips move and say, ‘I’m ’avin’ a laugh, you see, with my image.’ He is Turner of Beckenham, freecloud poet. ‘I want to empty my skull, completely.’ He is Chas of Brixton, cocky little wide boy. ‘I like a bit of a cavort.’ One and both, vice and versa, Jones and Bowie.

‘The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Right?’

The die is cast, in red-hot-red.

Performance blows David’s mind.

THE BOY CALLED MARK FROM WALNUT COURT, the block of flats across the road from David, sits listening to him