Gold
sunlight splashed our faces as Tash and I got off the 227 bus and
walked down Beckenham High Street towards our first encounter with
The Man Who Fell To Earth.
In
our Friday dregs of uniform, tennis rackets and straw boaters wedged
under our arms, we squinted in silence along Southend Road until we
reached the scariest house on the street. ‘Haddon Hall’, number
42.
A
red-brick cross between a Gothic church and the Addams Family
mansion, with stained-glass windows, mangled balconies and turrets.
I remember straining my eyes to look for bats.
It
was the summer of ’69, our last summer as children. The year of
Woodstock and Monty Python, of men on the moon. Bryan Adams would
later immortalise the season in a song. Natasha Holloway and I,
classmates from Bromley Grammar, had for some time been secretly
aware of David Bowie, known around our way as Davie Jones. He’d
been friends with ‘Face of ‘68’ teen idol Peter Frampton at
Bromley Tech, where Peter’s father was Head of Art. Davie had
dropped the Jones to avoid confusion with Davy Jones when the Monkees
emerged, and had been building a reputation as a songwriter, singer,
sax and guitar player and mime artist with his own Arts Lab studio in
the back room of a pub, the Three Tuns, on Beckenham High Street.
We
were taken to the Arts Lab by an exotic Indian photographer, Hy
Money, whose daughter Lisa was in my class at Oak Lodge Junior. Hy
was also a fine artist and folk-singer, who held regular soirees at
her home. She danced like Isadora Duncan, and had a friend at the
Arts Lab who played sitar.
It
was there that we first saw Bowie. We couldn’t take our eyes off
his. His right pupil was so massive that it almost obliterated the
iris. One eye was luminously blue, the other a dull, owlish grey.
He wore a washed-out pink tee shirt over a blouse with a wallpaper
pattern, one half of his hair ruffled, almost curled, the other side
swept back. He had bits and pieces of teeth. We had never seen
anything like him, it was love at first sight. He was surrounded by
gerbil-cheeked girls with curtain hair, and moody guys with
moustaches and guitars. Giggling behind Hy, clicking away with her
camera, we made a pact to find out where he lived.
Little
could I have known the extent to which David Bowie would influence my
life or my future. Nor that, a quarter of a century later, I’d find
myself a guest at his fantasy island home on Mustique, actually
sleeping in his bed - in his absence, mind.
The
autograph we were on the hunt for took several attempts. David was
never at home when we called round. Three or four times his American
girlfriend Angela, later briefly his wife, stood chatting to us on
the doorstep. She was bleached-looking, sexy and beautiful, with an
unusual nose, and large hands. She gave us signed photos. Tash and I
remained determined to get to him ourselves.
Luck
looked in eventually, that summer Friday afternoon. David answered
the door, in his dressing gown, an open bottle of nail polish in his
hand. ‘Come in,' he grinned, showing us into a huge Christmas-coloured
room, with bottle-green walls and red velvet furnishings. Angie
wasn’t there. David excused himself, returned from the bathroom
after a couple of minutes, lay down on the floor on some stale
pillows and resumed decorating his nails, applying the varnish with a
cocktail stick for want of a brush. His pale face seemed to hang out
of place, as if attached to the wrong neck - much as it does today,
since his heart surgery. Even so, as if having reinvented himself
yet again, he continues to defy time - looking nothing like a man who
turns sixty seven today.
He
was friendly. We were thrilled - particularly as we had wormed our
way into his house behind our unsuspecting parents’ backs. We
talked about astrology, reincarnation, karma, Tibet, the mystic stuff
we'd read he was into. We were trying too hard to look intelligent.
If he noticed, he didn’t let on. He asked if we believed in UFOs,
and what we thought of Marc Bolan. Tash the joker sang ‘Ride A
White Swan’. He talked about his many failed auditions for ‘Hair’,
the risque stage musical of the day. Tash asked him about ‘Space
Oddity’, his new single. David said he was ‘out of his gourd’
and ‘totally flipped’ over it. It was later chosen as the theme
track for Apollo 11’s televised moon landings. Tash asked him
‘How does it feel to share a birthday with Elvis?’David was born
on January 8th,
1947, twelve years after The King.
‘No
idea, kiddo’, David drawled. ‘Ask him’.
He
was already on his way to becoming the most iconic rock star of all
time, with a string of alter egos, images and sounds that have stood
the test of time. He would achieve huge success as an actor, with
movies like Nicolas Roeg’s ‘The Man Who fell To Earth’ and
stage roles such as ‘The Elephant Man’ on Broadway. Tash and I,
die-hard Bowie fans, did six more years at school, with a few little
alter egos of our own. I was ‘Ground Control’ to her ‘Major
Tom’. We’d write coded messages in our rough books during class:
‘take your protein pills, put your helmet on’. ‘Planet Earth
is blue, and there’s nothing we can do ...'
Against
the odds, in July 1973, we obtained tickets for the legendary gig at
Hammersmith Odeon. We went weighed down with glitter, David’s
initials etched in brass studs into the navy leather of our platform
boots. That night, an already burnt-out, drug-abused Bowie, backed by
guitarist Jeff Beck as well as Mick Ronson, retired Ziggy Stardust
and the Spiders from Mars, to the distress of millions. Before he
went, the all-time favourites: Changes, Life On Mars, Ziggy Stardust,
John, I’m Only Dancing, All The Young Dudes, Suffragette City, and
Space Oddity, re-released as a single that year.
Eight
years elapsed before I saw him again. By then, I’d spent three
years at college in London, a year in Paris, six months in New York.
I had immersed myself in the London music scene, and was freelancing
in the press office at London’s Capital Radio. In 1981 I went to
Montreux with Roger Scott and Nick Elgar, to assist at a recorded
interview with Freddie Mercury, whose definitive biography I would
write. Queen were working in their own Mountain Studios on the shores
of Lake Geneva. When we arrived, David Bowie, a neighbour, was there
too. They were recording what would become the number one hit ‘Under
Pressure’.
David
didn't recognise me. Why would he.
Two
years on, life had come full circle. I found myself backstage at the
Birmingham NEC for the start of Bowie’s ‘Serious Moonlight’
European tour, to promote ‘Let’s Dance’. By now a music
writer, I was there to interview him. The spangled, half-strangled,
androgynous weirdo who had vanished from the scene five years
earlier, had metamorphosed into an athlete filming an ad for
breakfast cereal. He was barely recognisable: cool, elegant,
clean-cut, his hair baby-blonde to offset a classy pale suit. In
place of the tombstones, he now flashed perfect white teeth.
‘I
was tired of the idea of being a freakish cult figure’, he told me.
‘I wanted to do something more accessible, more soulful, a bit
more R & B, and I’ve been overwhelmed by the response. I
certainly didn’t expect this much limelight. It’s a joy to me.
I have never performed like this before in my life. I feel so much
more relaxed, now that I’m not carting some character around with
me any longer. At long last, I think I have learned how to be
myself.’
By
this time, his stormy marriage to Angie dead and buried, Bowie was
involved with his personal assistant Corinne Schwab. It was obvious
to all that he and ‘Coco’ were lovers, but he didn’t want to
talk about it. Anyway, she was in the room. I found myself staring
at an unravishing woman with lank hair and a chilly smile, trying to
fathom the attraction.
A
band member read my mind.
‘She
does everything for him,' he explained. ‘I mean everything.
Ange never did, and it's a revelation to him. David just sits back
and lets Coco do the lot.’
The
way David explained it, ‘She is a very good friend, she became the
most important person in my life in the mid-70s. My whole lifestyle
at that time made me quite bonkers, and I had a complete breakdown.
Coco was the one person who told me what a fool I was becoming, and
she made me snap out of it, I’m glad to say. Sex is not all there
is. There really have to be relationships in your life to make it
worthwhile.’
He
talked about his twelve year-old son Duncan, formerly Zowie, of whom
he had won custody and with whom he shared his life in an New York
apartment and a house in Lausanne. They skied together there.
Skiing was his only sport.
I saw him backstage at
‘Live Aid’ two years later, then again at the premier of
‘Absolute Beginners’ in 1986. We'd exchange a brief kiss, and
he'd say ‘You again!’
In 1987 he was planning
the Glass Spider World Tour, which would kick off in Rotterdam on May
30th. I spent a
couple of months negotiating an exclusive interview for the Daily
Mail, where I was now a rock and pop writer. But when the time
came, the Editor, Sir David English, didn't want to let me go.
‘How
the hell are you going to make it to Rotterdam in your
condition?’ he quizzed me. ‘You can’t even fly.’
I
was six months pregnant. A huge and minor detail. Determined to have
my major exclusive with the rock star I’d worshipped since
childhood, I said I’d get there. Train, ship, train. It was some
journey. I found myself knocking on David’s dressing room door
backstage at the Feyenoord football stadium, outside Rotterdam.
‘
You again!’ His
eyes fell to my enormous bulge.
‘What
happened
to you.’ He pinched my cheek. Saw that I was wearing one green,
one brown contact lens.
‘Very
funny. Shall we do this?’ My baby, now twenty six, attended her
first-ever Bowie gig before she was born.
It
was the ultimate stadium rock spectacle. Choreographed by Toni Basil
of ‘Oh-Mickey-You’re-So-Fine’ fame, it was the culmination of
all the performing skills he'd honed down the years. Even Peter
Frampton, Bowies’ old school mate from Bromley Tech, had joined him
to play lead guitar. Caught up in the excitement, I remembered only
afterwards that I hadn’t made arrangements to get back. The trip
from hotel to stadium had been easy enough, but for the return
journey, not a cab to be had. I wandered outside into a milling
throng of about 80,000 fans, all trying to make their way home.
Beyond the stadium lay the kind of wasteland you wouldn't want to
venture into after dark. I was not exactly in any fit state to make
a run for it.
I
nipped back inside and lurked a bit. David poked his head round the
door of his dressing room.
'You
again. What’s up?’
I
explained.
Within
minutes he'd despatched a minder, who returned with a couple of Dutch
policemen. Negotiating with them personally, he arranged a police
escort to deliver me back to our hotel.
You
hear a lot of negative stuff about David Bowie. From personal experience,
I have to dismiss most of it. It is his spontaneity, kindness and
sardonic humour that I’ll always remember. And the music, of
course. That, and the magical month I spent with my daughter at his
Balinese home on Mustique, where I escaped to in November 1995, to
begin work on my first definitive biography of Freddie Mercury.
Freddie
died of AIDS-related illness in 1991. The following year, David
performed outstandingly at his Wembley Tribute concert. He also
married Somalian supermodel Iman Abdulmajid in Florence, with whom he
now has an fourteen year -old daughter Alexandria Zahra. The
Mustique home, which Bowie had put together with Coco Schwab, had
become surplus to requirements. Before he sold it, to Time Out
publisher and poet Felix Denis, David wanted people to experience
the place.
Built
of Balinese and Indonesian teak on a peak above Brittania Bay looking
out towards St. Vincent, the house, with its infinity pools and
exotic pavilions, was a true tropical paradise. Time was on hold. I
remember getting into his bed that first night, shattered from the
long journey but ecstatic at the thought. Just a gauche Bromley
schoolgirl who had idolised a rock star since childhood. Look at me
now.
The next day, the house
chef took us to visit Mick Jagger at his house on the beach, and
later let us in to Princess Margaret’s old house, Les Jolies Eaux
(he had a key). We misbehaved, I'm not really ashamed to say. We read
her letters, jumped on her beds, played hide-and-seek in her
wardrobes. At Basil’s Bar on the beach that night,we toasted
David with the cocktail he referred to as a ‘Penis Coladis’, and
drank to his long, against-odds health.
It
doesn't get better.