David Bowie, portrait of the teenage artist | Culture

A micro-story that deserves to be read. The birth of Bowie, translated by Alex Cooper for Chelsea Editions, is a beautiful book. The author, Phil Lancaster, does not pretend to be a writing professional: he played drums in The Lower Third, a group where David sang, when he was 18 years old. Nothing particularly significant happened there, apart from changing his stage name from Davey Jones to…

A micro-story that deserves to be read. The birth of Bowie, translated by Alex Cooper for Chelsea Editions, is a beautiful book. The author, Phil Lancaster, does not pretend to be a writing professional: he played drums in The Lower Third, a group where David sang, when he was 18 years old. Nothing particularly significant happened there, apart from changing his stage name from Davey Jones to David Bowie. This triviality has its value: in the end, here we have the universal chronicle of any band from the mid-sixties.

I correct: perhaps news did happen. David had already recorded with The King Bees and The Manish Boys, groups whose names revealed militancy in African-American music and subsequent dedication to covers. In 1965, with Lower Third, he discovered the ease of composing plus the desire to connect with a youth subculture: the mods, following the lead of The Who. They act dressed up, with a tie, and David even cuts his blonde hair, which had given him some popularity as the founder of a chimerical Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, after being jovially interviewed by the BBC.

They operate in the London music scene, which offers abundant opportunities. Before releasing his first LP, in June 1967, David had already been through three record labels and starred in half a dozen singles. Technically professional albums, thanks to producers like Shel Talmy or Tony Hatch, with the presence of session menu of the caliber of Jimmy Page and Nicky Hopkins. But Bowie and The Lower Third enjoy no material rewards: they charge a few pounds per gig, to be divided among four people after the manager takes his cut. Yes, they perform in now legendary venues such as the Marquee, the 100 Club or the Parisian Golf-Drout, but they travel the roads in an old ambulance in which musicians and equipment are piled up, where many nights they end up sleeping.

That’s if a relationship doesn’t arise. David is handsome and, as one observer says, he is so thin that “the girls want to take him home and feed him.” Discreetly, he also experiments with men. It is a tolerant and porous little world: one of Bowie’s fans turns out to be Mandy Rice-Davies, involved in that Profumo scandal that sank Harold Macmillan’s conservative government.

Bowie’s ambition becomes evident: he knows how to cajole successive managers. And there is no loyalty to his musicians: he regularly changes bands. He doesn’t even clearly remember what he was doing with Lower Third. In 1983, he claims that they played songs by John Lee Hooker; Lancaster specifies that there was nothing of that kind in the repertoire. bluesman.

David’s early ability to reinvent himself still dazzles. In the sixties, in anxious search for success, he constantly renewed image and sound. Exercises modhippy, activist underground, singer in competitive festivals (Malta International Song Festival!) and where do you frame your time as a mime? Musically, he jumps non-stop: rock & roll, rhythm and blues, modorchestral pop, singer-songwriter… until in 1969 he finally got it right with Space oddity, a melancholic variation on the plot of Kubrick’s 2001 film, which magically coincides with the Apollo XI moon landing. You’re already in the thick of it, it’s just a matter of modulating your offering. And again, wow, getting a haircut.