THE ROCK & ROLL ARCHIVE | David Bowie | The Complete History of David Robert Jones
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SEARCH FOR DAVID BOWIE
PART THREE
LINDSAY KEMP, MIME & THE THEATRE OF TRANSFORMATION
The failure of David Bowie's first album in 1967 might, in another young musician, have represented the end of an experiment. For Bowie, it became something more useful: a reason to look elsewhere.
The record had failed to establish him as a commercially viable pop artist, and the musical identity he had constructed during the preceding years was beginning to feel increasingly inadequate. David Jones had already discovered that simply writing songs and performing them was not enough. He needed to understand something deeper how an audience could be transported by a performer.
The answer came through the theatre.
In 1967, Bowie encountered the extraordinary world of Lindsay Kemp, the British mime artist, dancer, choreographer and theatrical visionary whose work would have a profound influence on the young performer.
Kemp's approach was almost the opposite of conventional pop performance. He did not regard the performer simply as a singer delivering material to an audience. Theatre, movement, costume, gesture, sexuality, fantasy and spectacle could all become part of the performance.
For Bowie, this was a revelation.
He had already shown an instinct for creating characters and experimenting with his appearance. Now he began to understand that identity itself could become an artistic medium.
ENTER LINDSAY KEMP
Lindsay Kemp was an intensely theatrical figure. His performances drew upon mime, dance, avant-garde theatre and European theatrical traditions, creating extravagant visual worlds populated by outsiders, dreamers and fantastical figures.
Bowie became one of his students.
The relationship was enormously important, although Bowie would eventually move beyond Kemp's influence and develop his own language. What Kemp gave him was not a ready-made style but a new understanding of performance.
Bowie learned to use his entire body.
A raised hand could communicate as much as a lyric. A change in posture could alter the identity of the performer. A stare, a gesture or a movement across a stage could create tension without a word being spoken.
This education would eventually become central to Bowie's career.
The singer who had once stood on stage with a guitar was beginning to imagine himself as something much larger.
MIME AS A NEW LANGUAGE
Mime offered Bowie an escape from the limitations of conventional pop performance.
He could explore emotions and ideas without relying upon songs. He could create characters without explaining them. He could communicate through movement and physical presence.
This was particularly important because Bowie was still searching for his artistic identity.
The 1967 David Bowie was not yet Ziggy Stardust.
He was not yet the Thin White Duke, Major Tom, Aladdin Sane or the alien visitor of The Man Who Fell to Earth.
But the foundations were being laid.
The idea that Bowie could become someone other than David Jones and that audiences could participate in that transformation was beginning to take shape.
Kemp's theatre provided a laboratory in which Bowie could experiment.
THE IMAGE
One of the most intriguing products of this period was The Image, a short experimental film made in 1967 and directed by Michael Armstrong.
Bowie appeared as a mysterious figure emerging from a painting and confronting a young artist.
The film is brief, strange and unsettling.
It is also historically significant because it provides one of the earliest surviving examples of Bowie experimenting with the visual possibilities of performance beyond the traditional stage.
The young Bowie is already interested in ambiguity.
He does not simply perform a song. He becomes an image.
That distinction would become fundamental to his career.
Over the following decades, Bowie would repeatedly blur the boundaries between musician, actor, character and artwork. The seeds of that approach can be seen in these early experiments.
THE PERFORMER AS ART
Bowie's growing interest in mime and theatre also connected with the broader artistic culture of late-1960s London.
The city was experiencing an extraordinary collision of music, fashion, theatre, visual art and youth culture.
The old boundaries between disciplines were becoming increasingly porous.
Rock musicians were becoming fashion figures. Fashion designers were working with musicians. Artists were experimenting with performance. Theatre was becoming more experimental, while London's underground culture provided young performers with spaces in which conventional rules could be ignored.
Bowie absorbed all of it.
His ambition was gradually becoming larger than that of a conventional singer-songwriter.
He wanted to create a world.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MOVEMENT
The physicality Bowie developed through mime would later become one of his greatest strengths as a performer.
His early career had sometimes presented him as an unusual-looking young pop singer, but theatre taught him that appearance alone was not enough.
The body had to tell the story.
This would become particularly evident when Bowie eventually created characters such as Ziggy Stardust.
Ziggy was not merely a haircut, a costume or a collection of songs.
He walked differently.
He moved differently.
He looked at the audience differently.
He occupied the stage differently.
That understanding can be traced back to Bowie's exposure to Lindsay Kemp.
Theatre gave him the vocabulary.
Bowie would eventually invent the language.
A WORLD OF CHARACTERS
Bowie's fascination with characters was also beginning to separate him from many of his contemporaries.
Traditional rock performers generally performed as themselves, even when their stage personas were exaggerated versions of their real personalities.
Bowie increasingly questioned the assumption that the performer had to reveal an authentic self.
Why couldn't the performer become somebody else?
Why couldn't a concert become theatre?
Why couldn't a record create a fictional world?
Why couldn't an audience believe in a character for an hour, a night or an entire album?
These questions would eventually revolutionise his approach to popular music.
But in 1967 and 1968, Bowie was still experimenting.
There was no Ziggy.
There was no The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
There was not yet the internationally recognised David Bowie.
There was simply David Jones, a young London performer attempting to discover what he might become.
BEYOND THE DEBUT ALBUM
The failure of the debut album therefore needs to be understood in context.
Commercially, it was a setback.
Artistically, however, Bowie was moving forward.
He had discovered that the conventional route into pop stardom was not necessarily his route.
Instead of trying to reproduce what other successful singers were doing, he began assembling influences from completely different worlds.
Music.
Mime.
Theatre.
Fashion.
Art.
Literature.
Cinema.
Pantomime.
The emerging underground culture of London.
Bowie's genius would eventually lie partly in his ability to bring these apparently unrelated worlds together.
DAVID JONES BECOMES DAVID BOWIE
The transformation was not instantaneous.
Nor was Bowie ever simply invented by a single person, a single performance or a single moment.
His development was cumulative.
The teenage musician who had played saxophone had become a singer-songwriter. The singer-songwriter had become a recording artist. The recording artist was now becoming a theatrical performer.
Each stage left something behind.
The name David Bowie itself would become another part of that transformation.
By the end of the 1960s, David Robert Jones was increasingly conscious that his birth name could not carry the artistic identity he was developing.
The name Bowie had already been adopted professionally, partly to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees.
But the significance of the name would grow far beyond its original practical purpose.
David Bowie was becoming a character — and eventually, something even more complicated.
He was becoming a vessel through which different identities could appear.
THE SEEDS OF ZIGGY
Looking backwards, it is tempting to describe this period simply as the beginning of Ziggy Stardust.
That would be too simplistic.
Ziggy was still several years away.
What was developing in the late 1960s was the method that would eventually make Ziggy possible.
Bowie was learning that music could be visual.
That performance could be theatrical.
That identity could be fluid.
That costume could communicate.
That ambiguity could be powerful.
And, perhaps most importantly, that an artist did not necessarily have to remain trapped inside one identity.
The future David Bowie would repeatedly reinvent himself.
The seeds of that philosophy were being planted now.
THE LONDON LABORATORY
The London of 1967 and 1968 provided the perfect environment.
Carnaby Street, King's Road, Soho, underground theatres, art schools, clubs, recording studios and increasingly adventurous galleries created a cultural network in which Bowie could move between worlds.
He was not yet at the centre of London's counterculture.
But he was observing.
Listening.
Experimenting.
Meeting people.
Collecting influences.
Bowie was becoming an extraordinary cultural sponge.
He absorbed ideas from everywhere and eventually transformed them into something recognisably his own.
That ability would become one of his defining characteristics.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF ROCK STAR
The conventional route to rock stardom was beginning to change.
The 1960s had already produced performers whose appearance and personality were inseparable from their music. But Bowie would push that principle much further.
He would make the visual identity of an album as important as its sound.
He would turn concerts into theatrical events.
He would use fashion as a form of storytelling.
He would create characters who could exist across music, photography, television and film.
And he would repeatedly destroy those characters before they could imprison him.
None of this was fully formed in 1967.
But the young David Bowie was discovering the tools.
Lindsay Kemp gave him an understanding of theatrical transformation.
Mime taught him the power of physical expression.
Experimental film introduced him to the possibilities of the camera.
London gave him an environment in which these influences could collide.
And Bowie himself possessed the curiosity and ambition to absorb them.
WHERE ROCK HISTORY HAPPENED
For the Rock & Roll Archive, this period is crucial because it demonstrates that Bowie's transformation did not happen solely inside recording studios.
His development took place across London's interconnected worlds of music, theatre, art and fashion.
The performer who would eventually redefine the possibilities of the rock star was learning his craft away from the conventional rock stage.
The lesson was simple but revolutionary:
David Bowie did not merely want to make music. He wanted to create an experience.
The next stage would see Bowie increasingly immersed in London's experimental performance culture, while his personal and professional life began moving towards a crucial new partnership.
He was about to meet the people who would help turn experimentation into direction.
The search for David Bowie was entering its next phase.
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