THE ROCK & ROLL ARCHIVE | David Bowie | The Complete History of David Robert Jones

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SEARCH FOR BOWIE

PART FOUR

MARY, HERMIONE, THE FEATHERS & THE ARTS LAB

By 1968, David Bowie was still a long way from becoming David Bowie.

The Mod suits had gone. The blues bands had come and gone. The stage name had arrived, but the character behind it was still searching for somewhere to belong.

He had recorded songs, appeared on television, experimented with mime and theatre, and begun to understand that becoming an artist was about far more than simply writing and performing songs.

Then came Mary Finnigan.

Finnigan was a young woman involved in London's counterculture and creative scene, and when Bowie moved into her flat in Beckenham, it became much more than a place to sleep.

It became a creative headquarters.

Mary later remembered Bowie as an extraordinary character: intense, curious, ambitious and seemingly incapable of sitting still creatively. He was absorbing everything around him, music, theatre, fashion, art, literature, philosophy and the people he encountered.

London in the late 1960s was changing rapidly and Bowie was right in the middle of it.

Soho, Chelsea, Notting Hill and the emerging counterculture were full of musicians, actors, artists, designers and outsiders experimenting with new ways of living and creating.

Bowie was watching.

And learning.

HERMIONE FARTHINGALE

Then came Hermione Farthingale.

Bowie met Hermione in 1968 and fell deeply in love with her.

She was a dancer, actress and performer, and she introduced Bowie to another world one where music, movement, theatre and visual performance could exist together.

For Bowie, this was enormously important.

He had already discovered mime through Lindsay Kemp, but Hermione helped reinforce the idea that a performer could create an entire world around a song.

Bowie wasn't simply interested in singing anymore.

He wanted to become something.

The couple became inseparable, and their relationship would influence some of Bowie's most beautiful and introspective early material.

But they also became collaborators.

Along with musician John Hutchinson, they formed a trio known as Feathers.

It was an unusual combination.

Bowie sang and played guitar. Hutchinson provided guitar and vocals, while Hermione brought her background in dance and movement.

Feathers was part folk group, part theatre company and part performance experiment.

It was another stepping stone.

Another piece of the puzzle.

THE ARTS LAB

At the same time, Bowie was becoming increasingly involved with London's experimental arts scene.

One of the places that fascinated him was the Arts Lab, an experimental arts centre founded by Jim Haynes in Drury Lane.

The Arts Lab represented the kind of environment Bowie was drawn towards: unconventional, collaborative and completely open to experimentation.

Film.

Poetry.

Theatre.

Music.

Dance.

Performance art.

Everything could exist in the same space.

For an artist who was beginning to question the traditional boundaries between singer, actor and performer, this was fertile ground.

Bowie's early career had often involved trying to work out where he fitted.

At the Arts Lab, he didn't necessarily have to fit anywhere.

He could simply experiment.

And that became increasingly important.

THE IMAGE

Bowie's fascination with acting and performance also continued.

In 1969 he appeared in The Image, a short film directed by Michael Armstrong.

It was an unsettling piece of work in which Bowie played a mysterious young man who appears to emerge from a painting.

It was one of his earliest acting performances and another indication that the conventional image of the singer-songwriter was becoming too restrictive for him.

The Bowie who would eventually create Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke was beginning to reveal himself.

Not yet fully formed.

But there.

BECKENHAM

And then there was Beckenham.

Away from the clubs and recording studios of central London, Bowie found a different kind of creative environment in the south London suburbs.

The house became a meeting place.

Musicians, artists, friends and fellow travellers came and went.

Bowie was fascinated by the idea of creating a community around creativity rather than simply chasing success through the traditional music industry.

This would eventually lead to one of the most important events in his pre-fame career.

The Beckenham Arts Lab.

Bowie and Mary Finnigan became heavily involved in creating a space where local artists could perform and exhibit their work.

It was not simply about music.

It was about creating a scene.

And Bowie was beginning to understand something that would become fundamental to his career:

The world surrounding the music could be just as important as the music itself.

THE FREE FESTIVAL

In August 1969, Bowie helped organise what became known as the Beckenham Free Festival in Croydon's Stanmer Park.

It was intended as a celebration of music and the arts.

There was food, poetry, theatre, art and live music.

And Bowie performed.

This was still the same David Bowie who had struggled for years to find his audience.

But something was changing.

He was no longer simply waiting for someone else to give him an opportunity.

He was beginning to create his own opportunities.

His own audience.

His own environment.

His own mythology.

And that instinct would become one of the defining characteristics of his career.

SPACE ODDITY

Then, almost unbelievably, the moment arrived.

Bowie had been writing and recording new material, and one song in particular seemed to capture the strange mixture of theatre, science fiction, isolation and imagination that was beginning to define him.

“Space Oddity.”

The song was inspired partly by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had made a huge impression on Bowie.

But Major Tom was not simply an astronaut.

He was a character.

A creation.

A man floating away from Earth and becoming increasingly detached from the world below.

The song allowed Bowie to combine his fascination with science fiction, theatre and storytelling with the folk-influenced songwriting he had been developing.

Recorded with producer Tony Visconti and featuring musicians including Mick Wayne, John Lodge and Herbie Flowers, it represented another leap forward.

Bowie was finally beginning to sound like himself.

THE MOON LANDING

Timing, as it turned out, was everything.

“Space Oddity” was released in July 1969, just as the world was preparing for one of the greatest events of the twentieth century:

Apollo 11 and the first Moon landing.

The BBC used the song during its coverage of the mission.

Suddenly David Bowie had entered the public consciousness.

The strange young man who had spent years experimenting with bands, theatre, mime and performance had finally found a character and a song capable of capturing the imagination of a much larger audience.

“Space Oddity” eventually reached No. 5 in the UK charts.

It was Bowie's breakthrough.

But it wasn't the finished article.

Far from it.

DAVID BOWIE

There was still another transformation to come.

The David Bowie of 1969 was not yet the Bowie of Hunky Dory.

He wasn't Ziggy Stardust.

He wasn't Aladdin Sane.

He wasn't the Thin White Duke.

But the ingredients were now beginning to fall into place.

The music.

The theatre.

The clothes.

The characters.

The storytelling.

The visual imagination.

The fascination with identity.

And the understanding that David Jones did not necessarily have to remain David Jones.

He could reinvent himself.

Again and again.

The next few years would see Bowie move through folk, rock, glam, theatre and avant-garde experimentation at extraordinary speed.

He would meet the people who would help build his musical world.

He would develop his songwriting.

He would discover new sounds.

And, most importantly, he would begin constructing David Bowie not simply as a stage name, but as an artistic identity.

The boy from Brixton was finally becoming the man who would change rock & roll forever.

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And the next transformation was about to begin

The next section naturally takes us into Chapter Five: 1970 The Man Who Sold the World, including Bowie’s marriage to Angela Barnett, the arrival of Mick Ronson, the Arnold Corns experiment, the The Man Who Sold the World album and the beginnings of the glam-rock Bowie we know today.