Bowie: A Biography (24 page)

Back in Haddon Hall ideas were brewing and the living room, kitchen and tiny rehearsal bunker were hopping with energy and feedback around the clock as Bowie, Ronson, Visconti and Cambridge wrote and played. “Memory of a Free Festival,” the second single from
Man of Words
, was issued in June of 1970, split into two parts, on the A and B
sides. An ode to the Arts Lab, it failed to capitalize on “Space Oddity”’s success. David was starting to worry that he was going to be remembered as a one-hit wonder.

As they plotted their next moves, Angie presided over the salon, typically as hostess and muse, feeding and advising her mates. “Angie was real cool,” says Dana Gillespie, who attended many meals at the Haddon Hall salon during this period. “You could literally give her a potato, an onion and a carrot and she’d feed four musicians and three friends. I used to go down there and hang out with them. Angie was always supportive of David. She always listened to his songs as they came off the production line and she’d always say, ‘That’s fabulous.’”

Angie says, “I would do my best plotting during what other people would think was my downtime—when I was washing dishes or ironing shirts. Because there’s something about menial tasks that makes one very creative. And in those times, I would have all kinds of brilliant ideas and more schemes and more plots …”

When she wasn’t cooking and critiquing, Angie was costuming. “Determined to make David’s band the smartest in the land, I would preach to the boys about their day-to-day appearances,” she recalled. “It’s just as essential to look handsome off stage as it is on.”

“It was theater that I was interested in,” she tells me. “I wanted the band to be big, huge and musical. I wanted it to look as great as theater looked. Be as brilliantly lit as theater. It was to be an experience. I’d spent seven years going to classical concerts every week at school. Just the venues were magnificent. They raised your spirits, and raised your heart. So when I got involved with David’s career, all I could really add to the mix, because the music was great, was the theater. I thought if I could mix serious theater and the music, no one’s doing that.”

Ray Stevenson, who became a member of the informal salon that was being conducted inside Haddon Hall, insists that that idea to create a highly theatrical and colorful rock experience was his.

“I had this philosophy: observe the trend and do the opposite,” he says. “I mentioned this to David. Who said it before? Possibly the surrealists. Duchamp. Or maybe back to da Vinci. The trend was denim, singer-songwriter stuff. These people in denim pretending to be just like the audience and they really weren’t. And then doing the opposite would be
rebelling against that. ‘We are superheroes.’ It was one of those evening conversations that kind of finished. We moved on to, I don’t know, cooking after that. Just the next time I went back to Haddon Hall, Angie was sewing all the costumes. Ever since there has never been any acknowledgment of that conversation. It all comes back to ambition. I didn’t realize how ambitious he was. There’d be a bunch of people including myself sitting around smoking dope and he wouldn’t. He just wanted to absorb and use whatever was said.”

Angie purchased a sewing machine and began making stage costumes for this as yet unnamed new group. With Alice Cooper–mania on his mind, Bowie was chatting over the Haddon Hall phone line to Kenneth Pitt one day when he happened to quip, “It’s all hype, isn’t it?” Something clicked and he realized that he’d stumbled on the perfect name for this new, attention-hungry crew. They wanted to generate some hype, so they would
literally
generate Hype.

By the spring of 1970 it was official. The Hype, referred to sometimes simply as Hype, were born, outfitted in Angie’s costumes and with newly christened, sensationalist stage personas. Bowie was Rainbow Man, his costume a prism of rainbow colors; Visconti was Hype Man, a sort of crime-fighting, bass-playing superhero; Cambridge was Cowboy Man, with a hat and fringe; and Ronson, his blond hair newly dyed jet black, was the pinstripe-suited Gangster Man.

In an interview with
Melody Maker
that month, Bowie explained the group’s creation: “I deliberately chose the name in favor of something that sounded perhaps heavy because now no one can say they’re being conned. Especially nowadays there’s a lot of narrow mindedness among groups or at least behind the organizers who claim to be presenting free music for free people but I don’t see how they can because they’re so hypocritical in everything else. I suppose you could say I chose Hype deliberately with tongue in cheek.”

Live, the Hype’s set consisted of covers and material off
Space Oddity
and the upcoming
The Man Who Sold the World
. Critical reaction was mixed. They made their debut opening for the denim-clad and longhaired hippie clan Country Joe and the Fish at the Roundhouse in late February of 1970. “Musically it was a great gig,” Visconti writes in his autobiography.
“Although we were heckled initially, and called a variety of homosexual epithets.”

Disc and Music Echo
magazine observed of a later gig, “David had much more confidence and stage presence with this backing group, and as his songs are suitable for grooving to as well as just listening to, the brightest hope could well change categories,” but dismissed the show as a “disaster” in terms of technical execution. Still, it was clear that Bowie was beginning to come into something with the Hype. It was a baby step in platform shoes.

“It should have been a complete rethink,” Stevenson says. “They got the costumes right but they were still doing old songs. Those little ditties. They required new songs. The kind he later went on to write. ‘Fame’ would have been fantastic in those costumes. The audience were just milling around waiting for the main act.”

“For me this will always be the very first night of Glam Rock,” Visconti recalled in his memoir. “Marc Bolan was visible resting his head on his arms on the edge of the stage, taking it all in. Bolan never admitted he even went to the gig.”

In the spring of 1970, T. Rex released the magnificent, Tony Visconti-produced “Ride a White Swan” single. It was that rare track that manages to be both trivial and a model for how to conduct the rest of your life (“Ride it on out like you were a bird,” Bolan instructs). It was the first in a series of chart-topping hits that would make him the focal point of a Beatlemania-like pandemonium dubbed T. Rextasy. By the time Bowie set about rehearsing the music for his next album,
The Man Who Sold the World
, his old friend from the mod days seemed to have done just that. At one point, T. Rex sold one hundred thousand records in a single day. Bowie had not managed to come anywhere near that in nearly six years of trying.

Always on the verge of egomania, Bolan took to wearing top hats and T-shirts emblazoned with his own corkscrew-haired visage. In concert his duck walks, comic shouts of “Yeah!” and double entendres (“I’m gonna suck ya …”) were outsized.

“Boley struck it big and we were all green with envy,” Bowie recalled later. “It was terrible—we fell out for about six months. It was
[sulky mutter] ‘He’s doing much better than I am.’ And he got all sniffy about us who were still down in the basement.”

Eventually, as it had done in the sixties, the competitive spirit between Bolan and Bowie manifested itself as a positive energy force. They would continue to try to one-up each other, and as a result, they produced some of the greatest English pop music ever recorded. Bowie was far too busy with family and business concerns to wallow in envy as Bolan’s star went supernova. Angie was pregnant with their first child, and the pair were about to pursue a radical change in management.

Pitt took much of the blame for the success of peers like T. Rex and the relative obscurity of David and his ventures, only never directly. “[David’s] habit was to whine a lot and resist passive aggressively, never really speaking up for himself or taking charge of a situation,” Angie writes in
Backstage Passes
. According to Angie, Pitt would use his parental-figure status in Bowie’s life to quell any potential uprising, assuring David that things would right themselves if he would only trust in Pitt, behave himself and carry on. “Ken’s profile of the ideal son/client/sex object, on the other hand, was a young man eager for direction, convinced that Daddy knows best. And so the relationship staggered along under all that baggage,” she writes.

Angie decided that the time had come for her to act on this and again help her man out of a troubling and sinking arrangement. She decided to go to the Phillips offices for advice and turn to an acquaintance, A & R man Ralph Mace. She asked Mace if there was any way to break the management contract with Pitt, as all the inquiries she’d made were met with dismissal. In the British music business you did not break contracts. It wasn’t gentlemanly. It was anathema to the process.

“We had to hire someone to get rid of Ken Pitt,” Angie says today. “I had to go and find someone. I asked Ralph, ‘Look, does anyone know where I can get my hands on an attorney? Because all these British attorneys are scared shitless to break this contract.’”

Mace turned to his boss Olav Wyper, who remained sympathetic to Bowie despite the lack of record sales for the
Space Oddity
album. “I was a friendly shoulder to cry on,” says Olav Wyper. “David had come to me before that and said that he felt totally frustrated. He felt he was ‘drowning,’ which was one of the words that he often used. He said he was
drowning in the relationship. And he didn’t feel that Ken really understood what he was doing creatively. The personal relationship, because Ken was clearly deeply in love with David, was completely skewing the commercial relationship. And he had this wonderful chance that he’d been given back the hit that he thought he should have had. And clearly I was at the center of that. He’d say, ‘You’ve gotta help me. You’ve gotta help me.’”

Wyper recommended an associate named Tony Defries to the Bowies. Defries, then only twenty-seven, with his great nose, neat gray suits and lacquered head of curly hair, carried himself like a man ten years older. Defries was not technically a lawyer.

Defries reportedly went out of his way to color his background so that it resembled more of a rags-to-riches story. The Defries family was of Dutch origin and had been living in Britain for three generations. His father, Edward, had been an engineer and had lost his fortune during the Great Depression, but by the time Tony came of age, he’d rebounded and had begun a thriving antiques dealership in the marketplace in Shepherd’s Bush. Defries tells of his father sending him through the markets of London to find the prices of competitors’ wares and report back so that his father could mark his own wares down. Whether this was a temporary chore or a way of life, however, remains part of his greater mystery.

The youngest of three and a sickly child with life-threatening asthma, Defries spent much of his childhood cot-bound in the family’s Croydon home. He attended a respected school, Heath, but resisted formal education. Like Bowie, he educated himself by devouring books and essentially teaching himself the ins and outs of the legal profession without actually becoming a lawyer. By his early twenties he was working at various law offices in London as a clerk. By the time he met the Bowies, he had already revolutionized one industry single-handedly.

“He had a very good legal mind but he was not a qualified solicitor,” says Wyper. “And he’d never claimed to be, which is why he always identified himself as a lawyer. One who practices the law. But he wasn’t actually qualified. And I knew this because he told me. He was a solicitor’s clerk who was looking for opportunity. He did eventually become very involved in intellectual property. One of the first things he did that got his name known in British showbiz circles happened when he was
representing photographers. At the time, they basically didn’t control their own work. And he set up the first association of fashion photographers and models. That’s the organization that most major photographers in the world now belong to.”

“He was always somewhat of a visionary,” says Laurence Myers, who would become Tony Defries’s business partner in the early years of his relationship with David Bowie. Then an accountant for South African pop music impresario Mickey Most, and now a theatrical producer, Myers was the entrance into show business that Defries was looking for, and soon the men were sharing an office and had formed a management company named GEM. “He was a visionary. I remember him telling me many, many, many years ago that one day everyone at home will have a laptop computer in their home,” he says today. “At that time, he was sort of eccentric. He had a very strange suit, I seem to remember. A sort of Doctor Seuss checked frock coat and this huge mass of hair. One day he said to me, ‘You know, models really get treated very badly. They’re stars, they don’t get paid, agencies never pay them, they exploit them. I think they should be stars.’”

The Bowies were often without money, cold and fretful, during the recording of the new album.
“The Man Who Sold the World
was conceived during a period when we were really having a rough time,” Angie writes. “We were really poor. We didn’t have any money. Our band were really frightened.”

Defries met David and Angie and patiently listened as they told their tale of woe. Bowie played him the material for the upcoming
The Man Who Sold the World
album, and Defries decided that he was in the presence of a major talent. Breaking a contract in the British music business was considered ungentlemanly and vile, but Defries insisted to David that he felt it had to be done and that he would ensure that it would be handled swiftly and cleanly. In Defries’s eyes it was Pitt, not Bowie, who had broken the arrangement by failing to make him the star he so clearly deserved to be.

Sure enough, within days, Kenneth Pitt, who had never heard of Defries before, was shocked to receive a legal notice in his morning mail. “All the plans for David’s imminent success had been made,” he writes, “but on April 27, they collapsed like a house of cards.”