Bowie by Wendy Leigh Read Free Book Online Page B

the King Bees started their set, the guests were in the middle of eating and ignored them, chatting away to each other instead.
    “I did not realize how tiny Bowie was until I saw him on the stage that night. The thing I noticed was that he had really small feet. He was very pleasant but subdued: He seemed tired, even a bit nervous,” John Bloom said. “But most of the people in the room were in their sixties, and they didn’t understand or like the kind of songs David and the King Bees were singing. I wanted the party to be special for my wife, and I was worried that it would turn out to be a disaster.
    “So I went up to Billy Wright, who captained England at football, and before David and the King Bees launched into their next song, on my request, Billy went up to them and told them nicely to pack up. I was very sorry, and I gave Leslie £100 for David and the King Bees on the spot. Then Vera Lynn came on next and sang, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover,’ ” John Bloom said.
    Fortunately, David’s failure to wow the establishment at John Bloom’s anniversary party didn’t sour his new manager, Leslie Conn, on him at all. Despite the fiasco of his anniversary party, John Bloom also somehow still retained his belief in David as well.
    He remembered, “I sent Leslie another £400 for David and the King Bees, and the next thing I knew, Leslie called me and told me he had got a record deal for them.”
    That record deal was with Decca Records, and, on June 5, 1964, David’s first record, “Liza Jane,” an arrangement of the old standard“Li’l Liza Jane,” produced by Leslie Conn, was released as a single. By then, David had left Bromley Technical High School and was working in an advertising agency called Nevin D. Hirst on London’s tony Bond Street, where he was employed as a junior visualizer (now known as a storyboard artist, a freelance artist who sketches out commercials and advertisements at the behest of the company’s art director.)
    David worked in advertising for a year and along the way was able to glean the basics of advertising and marketing, drinking in the ethos of the industry as epitomized by the words of the adman in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest : “In the world of advertising there’s no such thing as a lie, there’s only the expedient exaggeration.”
    All of this would color his future dealings with the media, so that Ken Scott, who produced several of his early albums, would go on to observe, “You never quite knew when he was being honest. It’s not something I realized at the time, but seeing various explanations in interviews of something I’d known about, I’d think, ‘Ah, so that’s what you’re like.’ ”
    David’s schooling in the mores of advertising, marketing, and self-salesmanship would color his future pronouncements (most likely his slick explanation of the choice of Bowie as a last name), which meant they were not always strictly accurate. At the time, though, he kicked against the conventionality of his working life.
    “He only took the job for his father’s sake. His father thought that all this business with groups and music could well be a passing fad and that, at least if he spent a year or so at work, it would give him some stable grounding to fall back on,” his mother, Peggy, remembered, adding: “So David went to work there, though not without protest. I can remember him coming home and moaning about his ‘blooming job.’ ”
    On Saturdays, he had a morning job at a local record store, Vic Furlong’s, but it didn’t last long—Furlong fired him because he considered him to be a dreamer who talked too much. Nonetheless, musicremained his goal, his raison d’être. “I never, ever thought about the big house or the big car or anything like that. It never entered my mind,” he once said of his youthful ambitions.
    In his spare time, he was single-minded about his music, so dedicated and determined that he ran the risk of alienating his