Chapter 1Brixton Boy

Foreword

I spent the first twenty years of my working life reporting on a divided city. The city was Belfast, not Berlin. My beat, for the Irish Times, was checkpoints and funerals and the slow administrative machinery of a state watching its own citizens — the walls that governments build, the walls that communities build against each other, and the arithmetic of what those walls do to the people who grow up in their shadow. When I moved from newspaper work to books, the subjects I chose were people whose lives had run up against that machinery. Nobody who knew my shelf expected David Bowie to appear on it. A pop star, they meant. A man in makeup. Not my subject.

The answer to that objection is a window. In July 1977, in the control room of Hansa Studios in West Berlin, David Bowie recorded an album approximately one hundred meters from the Berlin Wall. The control-room sightline included the Wall itself. East German border guards, with binoculars, watched the studio while the studio worked. I had stood at sightlines like that one. I knew what it did to a person, being watched across a barrier by armed men — and I knew, from long observation, that most people who could leave such a place did. Bowie had gone there on purpose. He had chosen the most surveilled city in Europe as the place to repair himself, and he had done his finest work under the binoculars. That choice was the thing I could not stop turning over. It is the reason this book exists.

I expected, when I began, to write about an interlude — the famous Berlin years, three albums, a recovery, an episode. What I found instead was that division was not an episode in this life. It was the substrate. The house on Stansfield Road in Brixton, still carrying the bomb damage of 1942 on its street, was divided between a mother who could not consistently show love and a father who was consistently elsewhere. The family was divided from its own history — a half-brother sent away, a half-sister given up. The brother, Terry, when he returned, was progressively divided from his own mind, and the boy who loved him watched it happen and understood that the same inheritance might be waiting for him. The eleven-plus examination divided British children into their futures at eleven, and it put David Jones on the wrong side of that wall too. Berlin, when he finally arrived at it, was not a departure. It was the first city whose geography matched what he already knew.

A note on the record. I have worked, in this book, the way I was trained to work: from the published record, the press archives, the chart and court and probate paper where it exists, the memoirs of the people who were in the rooms, and the extraordinary volume of recorded interviews the man himself left behind — a body of testimony so large that his own voice now narrates his own posthumous documentary. Where the accounts conflict, I have said so. Where the legend has outrun the evidence, I have tried to say that too. A reporter's habits do not lapse because the subject wore a costume; if anything the costume obliges more checking, not less.

What makes David Bowie worth a book is not the costumes. It is the answer he built to the question the walls kept asking him. He watched division take his brother, and he answered it by refusing to be reducible to any single self that could be taken. He stood at the most literal border of the twentieth century and wrote a song about two lovers meeting beneath its guns — heroes, the song insists, if only for one day. I spent my career documenting what walls take from people. This is the first life I have written in which a man looked at the wall and made something the wall could not confiscate.

He was watched his whole life — by border guards, by cameras, by an audience of millions — and he kept the only file that mattered, the private one, closed until two days before the end. I have written about men who kept secrets from states. I had not, before this book, written about a man who kept one from the world out of something like courtesy. The biography that follows is my attempt to be worthy of that discretion while still doing the job. The record is laid out. The reader will judge.

— Edmund Halloran, Dublin

Chapter 1 · Brixton Boy

40 Stansfield Road in Brixton, South London, is a terraced house on a residential street that runs between Acre Lane and Brixton Hill. The street belongs to the housing stock that Lambeth's Victorian developers had thrown up across the 1880s — two story brick houses in continuous runs, each fronted by a small bay window, each backed by a narrow garden separated by brick walls from the adjacent properties. The houses had been built for the lower-middle-class clerks and tradesmen who worked in central London and who could, on the wages the late-Victorian economy provided, afford the cheap suburban expansion the rail lines had made possible. By 1947, the houses were sixty years old, tired, and marked — across their masonry and their roofs — by the Luftwaffe bombs that had fallen on South London across the five preceding years.

David Robert Jones was born at 40 Stansfield Road on January 8, 1947, a Wednesday. The delivery was at home. The attending midwife was a local woman whose name the family record has not preserved. His mother, Margaret Mary Jones — known to everyone as Peggy — was thirty-three. His father, Haywood Stenton Jones — known as John — was thirty-four. It was John's second marriage. Peggy already had a son, Terry, from a previous relationship, and a daughter, Myra Ann, who had been placed for adoption at birth. Terry was nine. He was living with his grandmother in Yorkshire, across the period immediately preceding David's birth.

The house they were bringing David home to was not, by any reasonable 1947 standard, a welcoming environment. It was damp. It was cold. It was short on coal, on food, on the kinds of small comforts that postwar rationing was withholding from essentially every British working-class household. Peggy had been, across her own adult life, emotionally unstable in ways that the subsequent family accounts would progressively characterize as drawn from mental-illness patterns that ran through her maternal family. She loved her son without being able, in the ways small children require, to demonstrate the love consistently. John Jones, a promotions officer for the children's charity Barnardo's, was more emotionally present than Peggy but was also substantially more absent in the daily sense — his job required regular travel across London and to provincial offices, and his household presence was, across David's early childhood, irregular.

The emotional climate at 40 Stansfield Road was not, in the subsequent David Bowie biographical literature, remembered warmly. Peggy's depressive episodes produced periods of household coldness that David, as a child, absorbed without fully understanding. John's absences produced long stretches in which Peggy was alone with David, and occasionally with Terry, and those stretches carried weight because Peggy's capacity to mother without support was limited. The house was emotionally undernourished in ways that the subsequent career of the child who grew up in it would spend several decades externalizing and attempting to process.

There were, however, two consoling features. The first was the radio. Peggy kept a Bakelite Pye set on the kitchen sideboard tuned to the BBC Light Programme, and David, sitting at her feet on the linoleum floor, absorbed the dance bands and crooners and big-band swing arrangements that the postwar BBC was still broadcasting in 1948 and 1949 and 1950. He was three years old when he first sang along audibly to a record. He was four when his mother began telling visitors that her younger son had perfect pitch. The claim was probably an exaggeration. The auditory absorption it pointed at was real. David Jones became, across the late 1940s, a child whose primary sustained interaction with the adult world was mediated by the speakers of the family wireless rather than by the conversation of the adults sharing the house.

The second consoling feature was Terry.

Terrence Guy Burns, Peggy's son from her pre-marriage relationship with a French Free Forces soldier named Jack Isaac Rosemberg, returned to the Stansfield Road household when David was approximately four years old. The return was the consequence of a collapse in the Yorkshire arrangements that had kept Terry away across the years of John and Peggy's early marriage. Terry's grandmother, who had been the primary carer during those years, had died. Terry had no alternative caregiver. Peggy and John took him into the Brixton house.

He was, at the moment of his return, thirteen. He was, in every available account, tall, intense, and extraordinarily alert to the cultural currents that the postwar London environment was beginning to generate. He read. He listened to jazz on the radio. He took an intense older-brother interest in David that the age gap — nine years — made possible. David, who had been previously the only child in a house whose emotional temperature was cold, found in Terry the warm adult-adjacent male presence that his formal father was unable to consistently provide.

What Terry gave David, across the subsequent six or seven years of shared household residence, was cultural orientation. Terry introduced David to jazz, the Charlie Parker bebop sides and the Thelonious Monk piano figures and the John Coltrane modal explorations, through the seventy-eight rpm records he had begun collecting on his apprentice wages. Terry introduced him to the Beat Generation, to Kerouac and to Ginsberg and to Burroughs, whose paperbacks reached British readers across the late 1950s through the City Lights imports the London bookshops were beginning to stock. Terry introduced him to the London Soho clubs where the British Beat subculture was developing around the imported American jazz.

Terry, however, was already — across those same years — showing the behavioral signs that would, by his early twenties, produce the formal schizophrenia diagnosis that would determine the subsequent shape of his life. He heard voices intermittently. He had visions. He experienced periods of disconnection from the ordinary social framework that the adults around him inhabited. The symptoms were initially attributed, in the conservative postwar British interpretive framework, to Terry's sensitivity or eccentricity. They were progressively revealed, across his late adolescence and early adulthood, as the presentations of a serious mental illness.

David watched this happen. He was eight, ten, twelve as the progression advanced through his half-brother's behavior. He did not have the clinical vocabulary to name what he was observing. He had the perceptual registration of it. He understood that the adult whose attention had been the central emotional sustenance of his young childhood was progressively becoming inaccessible to him. He understood that the family tree — the mother's side — carried something that moved through it generationally. He understood, at the level of childhood foreboding, that whatever was happening to Terry could, plausibly, also happen to him.

The understanding would organize substantial portions of his subsequent artistic work. The "Aladdin Sane" album of 1973. The "Jump They Say" single of 1993 (which directly addressed Terry's 1985 suicide). The repeated engagement across his catalogue with themes of alienation, identity fragmentation, fear of psychic collapse. All of these can be traced, with reasonable confidence, to the childhood experience of watching his admired older half-brother progressively lose the cognitive footing the rest of the family was maintaining.

The family moved from Brixton in 1953, when David was six. John Jones had received a promotion at Barnardo's that raised the household income sufficiently to permit relocation. They moved to Bromley — a suburban town approximately nine miles southeast of central London, in the commuter belt that the postwar British middle class had been consolidating into — first to Bickley, then to Bromley Common, and in 1955 to 4 Plaistow Grove in Sundridge Park. The Plaistow Grove house was smaller than the Brixton house but was in a substantially better neighborhood. Bromley offered decent schools, quieter streets, the lower-middle-class suburban respectability that Peggy had always wanted and that Brixton had been unable to provide.

David attended the Burnt Ash Junior School across the Bromley years of his childhood. He was, per the accounts of his teachers and classmates, a quiet and observant child. He was not remarkable at sports. He was not remarkable at academics. He was remarkable, in the ways that subsequent artistic children are remarkable, at drawing and at performing — he was the student who could reliably produce a convincing impersonation of each of his teachers, the student who drew compulsively in the margins of his notebooks, the student whose imaginative engagement with the world exceeded the standard range the Burnt Ash curriculum was designed to accommodate.

In 1958, at age eleven, he transferred to the Bromley Technical High School — the local secondary school that Bromley Council operated for the students who had not passed the eleven-plus examination that would have routed them into the more academically elite grammar school. The Technical High School was not, in the postwar British educational hierarchy, a prestigious destination. It was the school for the children whose test scores had marked them as better suited to manual or commercial careers than to the university-preparatory track. David, upon entering it at eleven, was being institutionally classified as a boy whose future would probably not involve Oxford or Cambridge.

The eleven-plus examination that David had sat in 1957 had been administered at Burnt Ash Junior School. The exam tested mathematical reasoning, verbal comprehension, and general intelligence across a structured three-hour assessment that determined, at age eleven, which educational track each child in the British state-school system would follow for the subsequent five years. The exam had been introduced under the 1944 Education Act, which had reorganized the British secondary school system into three tiers: grammar schools for the academically selected, technical schools for the vocationally oriented, and modern schools for the remainder. The Bromley Council had, in its local interpretation of the tripartite system, concentrated the vocationally-oriented technical-school provision at Bromley Technical, the institution David entered in September 1958. Approximately thirty-two percent of Bromley children who sat the eleven-plus in 1957 received grammar school places. The remaining sixty-eight percent, including David, did not. The figures were not unusual for the British state-school system of the era; the eleven-plus selection rate was, across most local education authorities, calibrated to produce the professional class the postwar economy required without overproducing it. David's failure was, statistically, unremarkable. Its biographical significance was, however, real: it placed him in the educational institution where Owen Frampton's art department would find him.

The classification was not, it turned out, accurate — David would, across his adult life, read widely and would develop the kind of self-educated intellectual sophistication that the grammar-school track had been designed to produce. But the eleven-plus result that routed him to Bromley Technical rather than to a grammar school was, in the psychological sense, one of the small-scale early experiences that shaped his subsequent relationship to British class hierarchies. He was, in the classification the test had imposed, not quite-working-class but not quite-middle-class — the in between position that much of subsequent British youth subculture would, across the 1960s and 1970s, occupy.

Bromley Technical did, however, have one feature that turned out to matter. Its art department was, unusually, strong. The art teacher, Owen Frampton, father of the musician Peter Frampton who would subsequently become one of David's musical contemporaries and who would tour with him on the Glass Spider production twenty-five years later, ran the art program that David progressively came to treat as the one class whose material engaged him. David spent, across the four years he attended Bromley Technical, increasing amounts of his time in the art room. He drew. He painted. He studied the art history that Frampton's curriculum introduced, the European modernists Frampton was championing in the late-fifties art-school revival, the British pop-art movement consolidating around Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake, the theater-and-performance traditions Frampton connected to visual art through the new pedagogical framework that arts education was developing.

In the same Bromley years David acquired the saxophone that would, across the next decade, be one of his developing instruments. He had pestered his father for a Grafton acrylic alto saxophone, the white plastic-bodied instrument that the British saxophone manufacturer was producing as a postwar low-cost alternative to brass. John Jones bought him one for Christmas 1961 from the Selmer shop on Charing Cross Road. David began saxophone lessons with Ronnie Ross, the Calcutta-born jazz baritone player who lived a couple of train stops away, at 6 Irving Way in Orpington, and whom David — on learning that a jazz musician of that standing was a local resident — had tracked down and talked into teaching him. Ross, who had been born in 1933 in Calcutta to Scottish parents, had been raised and educated in England, and had committed himself to the London jazz scene that the city's postwar musical expansion had been developing, was by 1962 one of the more respected baritone saxophone players in the British jazz circuit. He had recorded with the Jazzmakers across the late 1950s and had been associated with the British modern-jazz movement that had been emerging from the Ronnie Scott club circuit. His teaching practice supplemented the performance income that the British jazz market of the early 1960s, still a minority pursuit, could not fully sustain. Ross taught David for approximately eighteen months across 1962 and 1963. David would, decades later, hire Ross to play the closing saxophone solo on Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, a small repayment for the lessons that had set him on the instrument. Ross would die of cancer in London in December 1991, at fifty-eight. The Walk on the Wild Side session had been recorded at Trident Studios in London in August 1972, with Bowie and Ronson co-producing the Reed Transformer album. Ross played the solo in a single take. The solo — its slow, sinuous ascent from the bass register, its way of hovering over the closing chord as the song faded — became one of the most recognized instrumental phrases in the 1970s rock canon. Ronnie Ross, who had taught a fifteen-year-old to produce tone from a plastic alto saxophone in a house in Orpington, had produced it.

The art department was, in the retrospective frame, the place where David's artistic identity first consolidated. He was, at fifteen, a boy who understood himself primarily in terms of the visual-and-performative work he was doing in Frampton's art room rather than in terms of any of the other institutional identities his school was offering. The identification would continue across his subsequent career: David Bowie the musician always also considered himself David Bowie the visual artist, the painter, the performer whose musical work was one component of a broader cross-media practice. The origin of that self-understanding was, in the 1961-1963 Bromley Technical period, the afternoon sessions in Frampton's art room.

Chapter 2 returns to Terry. The progression of Terry's mental illness, across the 1960s, will provide the psychological substrate against which David's emerging artistic identity will take shape. Chapter 3 renders the schoolyard fight that, in spring 1962, will produce the famous asymmetric-pupil condition that would become one of the visible features of David Bowie's face across his subsequent career.

What Chapter 1 has established is the starting point. David Jones was born into a postwar South London household whose emotional climate was cold, whose family history carried mental-illness markers that would determine the shape of his half-brother's adult life, and whose cultural position was the lower-middle-class in decline that much of postwar British working- and middle-class experience was traversing. He was the child of that household. He would, across the subsequent sixty-nine years of his life, progressively construct a succession of alternative identities through which he would attempt to externalize, process, transform, and occasionally transcend the emotional material the childhood had deposited in him.

The first of the alternative identities, the David Bowie persona that would by 1967 replace the David Jones identity entirely, was still, in 1961, four years away. Before David Jones could become David Bowie, he had to leave school, fail at a succession of early musical projects, take a punch in the eye that would change the structure of his face, and encounter the combination of cultural influences (the Beat writers, the Velvet Underground, the mod subculture, the mime training with Lindsay Kemp, the occult reading with London esoteric-scene figures) that would, in aggregate, provide the raw material for the Bowie transformation.

But the Brixton years and the Bromley years had already deposited the substrate. The cold mother who could not consistently demonstrate love. The traveling father whose absences produced a household whose center was the absent figure rather than the present one. The half-brother whose intellect had opened doors and whose deteriorating mind had made David afraid of his own. The art teacher who had named him as a serious aesthetic intelligence at fifteen. The saxophone teacher who had given him a relationship with an instrument. The radio that had been the household's most reliable presence. The street outside the Brixton house, unrenovated since 1880, whose Victorian terraces still showed the bomb damage of 1942 across their roofs.

David Robert Jones, at fourteen, had already absorbed the materials he would, across the next sixty years, externalize as the most ambitious and most theatrical and most psychologically loaded body of work any major British rock artist would produce. He did not yet know it. Nobody did. The Bromley schoolboy who walked home from Bromley Technical down Plaistow Lane on a winter afternoon in 1961, his Grafton saxophone in its case knocking against his thigh, was the same person who would, at the taping on July 5, 1972, drape his arm around Mick Ronson's shoulders on the BBC television soundstage and change the future of British popular music. The fourteen-year-old did not know what he would become. He did, however, already know that he was going to be someone other than the boy his birth certificate had named.

The biography walks forward.