Glom of Nit issue #16
Pre-order The London Boys: David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the 60s Teenage Dream
Buy The Magic of Terry Pratchett
Buy Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album
In this issue:
Musings
Stuff I’ve written/Done since the last newsletter
Book updates (Pratchett/Manics/Bowie N Bolan and MORE)
Recommendations
An EXTRA LONG excerpt from The London Boys: David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the 60s Teenage Dream
A reminder
So before we go any further A point of admin … (for reasons that will become clear, I need to rather emphasise the commercial messaging here, something that is not exactly instinctive to me). If you stay tuned there will be pictures of kittens, and later a fairly lengthy extract from the book.
THE LONDON BOYS IS AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER HERE!
Mock up of the London Boys cover
The London Boys: David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the 60s Teenage Dream is out on October 30 through Pen & Sword History, regular readers will know it has rather consumed my life for the past two years or so. I’m really, really happy with it … I think if you’re a fan of either artist, or a fan of classic pop and rock music, or interested in the social history of post-war London (which, honestly, is what this is) then you’ll like it. You can pre-order a signed edition from my website, right here, for £18. Which is a snip for supporting an independent author, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Musings
Name: Marc Burrows
Occupation: WRITER
You may or may not know that despite all the music and writing that I foist on you, dear readers, I do actually have a “real” job. Well, sort of. I imagine nurses, cleaners, lorry drivers and air traffic controllers wouldn’t consider it a “real” job at all; but I did have a salary, a pension, health insurance and a desk in an office building. Ya know – job stuff. I won’t dwell on it much, because it’s not really important, but if you’re interested I worked for Twitter, in what is known as the Curation team. Those explanation of what’s trending? I wrote those (sometimes). I verified information, I analysed data, I wrote copy and essentially I told stories. Those stories were told with other people’s Tweets, but they were still stories all the same. It was journalism – perhaps not of the sort the more traditional newspaperman would recognise, but journalism all the same. My job was basically to work on this hugely important corner of the internet that regularly impacts the world and try and make it more useful and less dangerous, and I was proud to do so. I’ve been doing it for seven years, man and boy.* That’s the longest I’ve ever been in the same job. The average length of time in a job in the UK these days is 2-3 years. I was practically an old timer.
Well, not anymore.
This month, after thinking about it for a long time, I took the decision to jump off the cliff-side of full-time employment, with only the ghost of a parachute and the hope of a safety net. It wasn’t them, it was me. Partly, seven years is a long time, and I think I’d gotten comfy and complacent. Partly, it was that through various jobs I’d been reading people’s horrible opinions about the news for a living since I was in my twenties (I’m now 41, even if I do have the face of a 12-year-old), first at the Guardian (I wrote this about the experience) and then at Twitter. There’s only so long the human brain can cope with that. Essentially, I was the filter that kept the particularly stinky bits of online discourse away from the noses of the vulnerable. It was time for someone else to work as the internet’s air freshener. I’d done my bit.
There’s more to it than that, though. Russell T Davies once said “you’re not a writer if you don’t write. You can’t just say you’re a writer and not actually do it”, and honestly I felt like I haven’t been writing enough. I was finishing work exhausted and needing to turn my brain off. I should be elbows-deep in the guts of a book by this point of the year, and I’ve barely got going. I want to write more articles and reviews. I want to pitch more books. I want to write another stand up show. I want to make more music, and promote all the the things that I’ve done. I did some hard sums, and realised that I was finally at a point where making the jump was foolhardy but not actively suicidal. I’m going to have to construct the parachute and the safety net on the way down, but it’s possible It can be done. I’ll try and take on some slightly more boring bits here and there; commercial copywriting and social media stuff I would rarely mention in this newsletter, just to help keep the lights on (I wrote this Twitter thread outlining what I can do), but from now on that is going to be the part-time job. From here on in, I am throwing myself into writing and creating and trying to live the life I have always wanted. It may well go disastrously wrong. Wish me luck.
This whole process has been made easier by some new arrivals in my flat (though they don’t pay rent, the absolute freeloaders. Just when it would come in useful). I’d like to introduce you to my new friends Zaphod and Trillian; two adorable idiots who will be keeping me company on this journey.
"Oh, were you planning on sitting here?"
"They're behind me, aren't they?"
"bless you my child"
As you can see, I now have two more mouths to feed (the tropical fish are a lot easier to cope with as a pet owner. At least they would be if they didn’t quite literally choose violence so often). If you’re a fan of my writing and want to support me, the best way to do so is obviously by buying books and music – and ideally doing so directly from me, through my website (see all the links above), and by spreading the word, recommending my work and leaving things like Amazon ratings. You can also, if you really wanted to, show your appreciation by buying me a coffee using this excellent little service, though that’s not at all compulsory! From now on, every penny I earn puts off the day when I have to get a proper job again, by just a little. The plan is, eventually, to never actually have to … Thank you so much to everyone who has ever read, listened to or recommended my work and given me the confidence to take this step.
Marc Burrows – Full time writer
Stuff I've written/done since the last newsletter
For those who are neither monarchists nor republicans, this is the strangest time - New Statesman
We’re happy to watch the funeral and raise a glass to His Majesty, but mostly we want a return to normal telly, to watch the football.
If you’re looking for a documentary that tells you about David Bowie, the man, researched and presented with clear-eyed, journalistic rigour, then Moonage Daydream is not it. You won’t learn Bowie’s date of birth, the names of his first school or first girlfriend or children, his personal politics, favourite colour or even the nature of […]
The last thing I did before starting work today was put the Imperial March over King Charles' entrance to Westminster Hall and OH MY GOD. SOUND UP. https://t.co/XbWoIDVAne
I’m being very secretive about what my next book is about. Anyway, here’s the research library I keep on my desk. https://t.co/sb9Dq253iY
Recommendations
Music, movies, telly, books and more I’ve enjoyed this month
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins
I was SO proud of Rob when I read this. Rob and I have told the same story, and done a lot of the same research so I think I can appreciate some of how this was put together and the skill and thoroughness with which it is written. I did a lengthy Twitter thread on why I loved it so much, which you can read here.
Tolkien’s Grave - Andrew O’Neill | Has Rings Of Power got J.R.R. Tolkien spinning?
Tolkien is said to be spinning in his pissed-and-shit-upon grave. Comedian Andrew O’Neill investigates.
New Album Zen Ghost now available for pre-order – Acoustic Alternative
The wonderful Frenchy & The Punk, who have dragged us across the US on tour TWICE since we met them back in 2010 have a new record out. Here’s how to support it.
Flesh Tetris - Slimy Garnish (Official Video)
This is completely stupid and I love it.
One of our best bands are back, and they are so on form it makes me sick. Catch them on tour with THE MANIC STREET GOD-DAMN PREACHERS in the US this Autumn. It is taken all of my will power not to spend my last ever regular pay check on this.
HISTORY LOVERS and fanciers of goth nonsense, please do indulge in and enjoy the word of Melanie Clegg, editor of my last two books and “sweet titbit for the devil’s mouth”. She’s very good.
Excerpt from The London Boys: David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the 60s Teenage Dream
Please bear in mind that this is a WORK IN PROGRESS. Much of this will change, a lot of it might even go. Please please don’t share it.
Chapter Two: Awopbopaloobop-Abop-Bam-Boom
David and Marc were boys in the right place at the right time. Bill Haley had broken down the door, and the rest of America’s big-name rockers soon barrelled through after him, notably – and definitively – the instantly iconic Elvis Presley, the preposterously charismatic teenage good ol’ boy from Tupelo, Mississippi who would soon define the modern pop star in a way that has never really changed. Both boys were huge Presley fans. Marc would parade down the streets of Stoke Newington singing ‘Teddy Bear’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, obsessed by Elvis’s grace and power, practicing his hip-swivels in the mirror. When David discovered that he and the ‘king of rock ‘n’ roll’ shared a birthday he was ‘mesmerised’, as he would tell The Telegraph in 1996. ‘I couldn’t believe it. He was a major hero of mine, and I was probably stupid enough to believe that it actually meant something’. American rock ‘n’ roll pushed both boys into music; they soaked it up from their opposite corners of London, making it part of their identity and swearing it would be part of their futures. Fortunately, one parent per London boy was happy to encourage the preposterous idea of rock ‘n’ roll stardom in their respective darling son. Peggy Jones had little interest in David’s musical ambition, but her husband was keen to enable it, and would take him to the many charity concerts and events he helped organise for Dr Barnardo’s. David’s cousin, Kristina, remembers a trip to the Royal Variety Performance, as she told Dylan Jones for his book David Bowie: a Life –
I remember one afternoon in the late 50s when David was introduced to Dave King, Alma Cogan, and Tommy Steele. ‘My son is going to be an entertainer too,’ [his father] said. ‘Aren’t you, David?’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’
The solidly working class Sid Feld, by contrast, had little time for Marc’s daydreams of rock stardom. He regarded rock ‘n’ roll as a passing fad, something that would never put dinner on the table, however much Marc would promise that he’d one day buy his parents a Cadillac and a big house of their own, as Elvis had for his. Phyllis, however, who adored her youngest son, could rarely refuse him anything. Her own mother, Elsie, had told her that Marc would rise to the top when she’d first seen him as a baby. Phyllis believed it.
It was the younger of the two that started first. Sid and Phyllis, doting parents that they were, allowed him to spend the money he was earning helping his dad assemble market stalls at the weekend on singles. He had Eddie Cochran and Elvis, Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins. The real deal. He would blast the songs at maximum volume on the cheap radiogram in the small bedroom he shared with his brother, prompting the downstairs neighbours to hammer on the ceiling with a broom. Marc’s listening became absolutely obsessive; he would press his ear against the speakers straining to hear the clicks and intakes of breath and the sound of the pick hitting strings on ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ By 1957 bopping to tunes in his bedroom was no longer enough; he needed to be making this glorious noise himself. The previous year, Sid had made him a makeshift drum kit out of wooden fruit boxes salvaged from the market, held together with elastic bands and augmented by an old snare drum. It never felt enough – it just didn’t scream rock ‘n’ roll. Really, only one instrument could. One day, leafing through his mother’s Sunday Pictorial newspaper on the bus to his grandparents’ house, Marc caught sight of a line drawing of an acoustic guitar and knew that it was all he had ever wanted. Elvis played an acoustic guitar. Billy Haley and Eddie Cochran played hollow-body guitars that basically looked like acoustic guitars. Guitars were rock ‘n’ roll. They were its essence, as a 1958 piece in ABC Film Review said, ‘the guitar has become a kind of status symbol for a type of music that, although it may only have a short life is certainly having a merry one’. The instrument cost either £9 or £14 (reports vary), but either way it was more than the family bought home in a week; that was okay, though – as with almost any luxury item at the time it was available on the ‘never never’ – via hire-purchase – and the doting Phyllis Feld was happy to keep up the monthly repayments. Thus on 30 September that year, Stoke Newington’s latest rocker unwrapped the birthday present that would change his life.
Learning to play this new treasure was initially irrelevant: the important thing was to own it. Marc would spend hours in his room, perfecting his wiggles and struts as he emulated Elvis in the mirror, chopping out a hopeless noise on the out-of-tune strings. The first song he attempted was ‘Hound Dog’, in the charts at the time and probably Presley’s raunchiest, rawest record. Things like chords and tuning were unimportant– he just mashed the strings and rocked. It was a prop; a channel for his inner rock ‘n’ roller to come out. Marc would carry his guitar, caseless, around the neighbourhood just to be seen with it. By now he’d learned to style his hair like Elvis and duck walk like Chuck Berry. Rock ‘n’ roll was everything. The next stage was to form a band.
Fortunately Marc wasn’t the only proto-rocker in Hackney. He and a school friend, Stephen Gould, would jangle and clang on their guitars together, making up songs and perfecting their Elvis sneers. Other local kids drifted in as well, united by their love of the new sounds, among them siblings Susan and Glenn Singer, their cousin Helen Shapiro, who had an extraordinary singing voice, and a school friend of Gould’s, Melvyn Fields. The six children with rudimentary chord skills, two guitars, a ukulele, a snare drum and a bass made from a tea chest, a broom handle and a bit of washing line, rehearsed a short set of chart hits including Elvis’s ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Teddy Bear’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ and ‘Got a Lot O’ Livin’To Do’,the Everly Brothers’‘Bye Bye Love’and Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be The Day’, practicing in the Goulds’ living room. They even managed a handful of low-key gigs, performing for cups of tea and the odd shilling in a local cafe or entertaining the kids who had to trudge back to school for lunch during the holidays while their parents were at work. Marc would later mythologise his first group, retrospectively naming them ‘Susie and the Hula Hoops’ (a name neither Gould nor Shapiro remembers), and claiming a history of gigs in London that simply didn’t happen. There’s a solid reason why Bolan would later play up this brief chapter of his career, of course: Helen Shapiro would beat him to pop stardom by almost a decade, having a string of top ten hits between 1960 and 1962, and at fourteen became the youngest female solo act ever to have a UK number one – a record she still holds. Highlighting his early link to Shapiro deepened Marc’s backstory, and plumping up the significance of ‘the Hula Hoops’ enhanced his credentials as a born popstar. In fairness to Marc, he did stand out amongst his peers: he was the youngest in the group, a whole school year below his friends, chubby, short and a little bolshy with a magnificent Elvis quiff – the only kid anyone knew that had managed to get the hair right. He carried his guitar everywhere and was, even then, obsessed with clothes and fooling around with girls. The ‘Hula Hoops’ were just children playing at rock stars really, but their later pedigree makes their existence a genuinely interesting pop footnote.
The summer of 1957 also saw the young David Jones try his hand at singing in public, though it would be another year before he drew level with Marc and gained his junior rock ‘n’ roller merit badge. David joined the local church choir, as his beloved Little Richard had done; though it’s unlikely that rattling off ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ and ‘My Lord Is My Shepherd’ at St Mary’s in Bromley would have provided quite the same rush Richard got from singing gospel in the American south. This particular gig was rather short lived (‘not long enough to dirty a surplice,’ writes former manager Ken Pitt) but it did give him an opportunity to sing for his supper for the first time. The boys would get paid five shillings to sing at events like weddings, and a bonus day off school if the service took place midweek. It also gave him two lifelong friends in fellow choristers George Underwood and Geoffrey MacCormack – both of whom joined him in the local Cub Scout troop. Both would play roles in his musical development, as well as being among the very few friends he took through his entire life.
As the year progressed, the boys’ taste in music deepened, though guided in different ways. Marc’s musical education came from the radio, the movies and – most excitingly – seeing recordings of the live TV pop shows Oh Boy!, Boy Meets Girl and Wham! at the Hackney Empire on Saturdays, where he became the first amongst his friends to discover British rockers Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and, best of all, Cliff Richard, whose classic ‘Move It’ was another pivotal moment. More thrilling still was the day Eddie Cochran performed – Marc was allowed to carry the great man’s guitar into the venue after hanging around the stage door on the off-chance he could blag his way backstage. Of all the American rockers Cochran was perhaps the most perfectly formed: beautiful, ridiculously cool, innovative and a genuine teenager, meaning that when he sang ‘C’mon Everybody’, ‘Summertime Blues’ and ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ he imbued them with relatable frustration, fury, boredom and lust in a way few other artists of his era did. Cochran was killed in a car crash in 1960, aged just 21, forever freezing him in his youth. Marc was obsessed. All of this, plus a habit of hanging around Soho’s coffee bars when he should have been helping his mum on her Berwick Street fruit and veg stall, meant he had the jump on most of his friends in terms of music. When he bought a copy of Carl Perkins’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ (the shop had sold out of the Elvis version) and discovered that Perkins had not only recorded the song first, but had actually written it, he felt like he was unlocking rock’s secrets.
David’s education was different. Marc had to flounder around, finding what he could, learning what he could, absorbing it all piecemeal. David had a guide. Not only did his father move in a fairly impressive showbusiness circle, but his half-brother Terry returned from his national service toward the end of 1957 and the pair once again shared a room. Terry’s time living in Brixton as the Windrushers settled in, not to mention his travelling with the military, meant he was soaked in music that was far from the beaten path of suburban Bromley. David was already a pop fan, to this Terry added jazz, especially John Coltrane, Eric Drolphy and both Charlies, Parker and Mingus, on top of blues, soul, Caribbean bluebeat and the big band crooners – Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. David not only had rock ‘n’ roll, he now had the building blocks that comprised it. It was the teenage thrill of pop that gave him the biggest buzz, but David lapped up these tangentially related genres too, and in his head began to assemble the musical jigsaw that linked them all together, seeing the joins and the edges.
John Jones, as always, was happy to indulge his son’s musical passions, though drew the line at getting his little boy any serious gear at first. Instead he helped him put together a kind of pop starter kit, buying him a cheap tin guitar and a ukulele and helping him build a classic tea-chest bass, in which a bit of washing lined provides the note, a broom handle gives the tension and a wooden box becomes a resonator. Such cheap and home-made instruments, alongside washboard percussion and kazoos stuck in watering cans, were the building blocks of skiffle – the DIY British rockabilly which ran alongside and intermingled with the rock ‘n’ roll boom, blurring the line. In 1957, British teens were as likely to be listening to Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’ as they were Bill Haley or Little Richard. Skiffle had originally been jug-band music, an off-shoot of New Orleans jazz knocked out on homemade instruments, a ‘skiffle’ being a name for the tiny gigs thrown in front rooms to fund a musician’s rent. It was imported to the UK when British jazz obsessives started to get into the raw blues of Leadbelly and Muddy Waters17. Jazz heads like Ken Coyler, who would go on to play with Donegan, took trips to New Orleans, saw the jug bands and came back inspired; they wanted to nod to the sophistication of jazz, the power of blues and the inventive flair of the DIY Louisiana crowd.The pure racket and bare-bones simplicity of the resulting sounds stuck out like a sore thumb amid the British radio landscape of Vera Lynn and Glenn Miller. Skiffle – before Haley and the slicker American singers changed the game – became the sound of British rock.
Despite the presence of a tea chest bass in Susie and the Hula Hoops [sic], Marc never really vibed with skiffle – it wasn’t sexy or slick enough – and only had eyes for the pure rock ‘n’ rollers. Bowie, on the other hand, loved the genre. Perhaps it was due to his interest in jazz and blues, both of which had a more obvious influence on skiffle than they had on straight rock ‘n’ roll, or perhaps it was simply because a skinny white lad in English suburbia could never really pass himself off as the next Little Richard, but had a good shot at being the new Lonnie Donegan. David and his new friends were inspired by the excitement of music they could actually create themselves; that didn’t need the finesse required to play piano like Jerry Lee or guitar like Chuck Berry. Punk would inspire people in a similar way twenty years later, as would hip-hop in early 80s New York. Skiffle gave David the tools to finally make a proper racket of his own.
George Underwood, one of his two closest friends, was as inspired by the sounds as David was, and the two bonded over their love for skiffle. Underwood had managed to acquire a guitar of his own, a Höfner acoustic, and was already playing as a duo with a family friend, so quite naturally the two boys took to making music together. In the summer of 1958, the boys were taken on a camping trip to the Isle of Wight with their Cubs troop and insisted on bringing their skiffle starter kit with them – David’s uke and tea chest bass – which they used to entertain the boys around the campfire during a (presumably welcome) interval in all the Ging-Gang-Goolie-ing. Oddly enough, one of the songs performed that night was ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’, the very tune that indirectly led Marc Bolan to rock ‘n’ roll. As George Underwood would tell Paul Trynka in his book Starman: ‘neither of us had a claim to virtuosity, but we wanted to sing’.
Both London boys had now found their early rock ‘n’ roll groove. As we can see from their various friends, from Stephen Gould and Helen Shapiro to George Underwood and Geoffrey MacCormac, they were hardly unique amongst 1950s school children. They weren’t the first generation to graduate into rock ‘n’ roll: that honour fell to the older kids, the teens who were in a position to take their new passions seriously; the generation that produced the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who. David and Marc (and Elton and Rod and Freddie and all the rest) were their younger brothers, watching fascinated in the wings as pop music was forged before their eyes but still too young to do anything more than play make believe rock ‘n’ rollers.
Still, even amid these nascent sparks we can start to trace the difference between the two boys. Mark Feld was all flash and fizz, trying to run before he could walk, playing gigs before he could even play chords. He didn’t just want to play music, he wanted to be a star. David Jones, on the other hand, with his worldly father and cool older brother, was already taking being musical more seriously. That doesn’t necessarily make David the more authentic of the two children – they were both so undeveloped that there’s little to read into the comparison. It’s more that David, middle class and suburban, had the opportunity to explore the details of his new obsession, to be studious about it and learn. He had mentors. Phyllis Feld indulged and doted on her little boy, sure, but John Jones actually had an inkling of the world he was encouraging his son into. His support was more constructive, which meant that David’s earliest musical experiences were more focused and finessed. Marc, working class, raised in the inner-city and with no real mentors to learn from, didn’t have the same roadmap. He was making it up as he went along.
It’s obviously reductive to apply these very early musical adventures to either of the boy’s later careers. They were children; too young to be doing anything but making as glorious a noise as they could as they channelled the exciting new sounds they were discovering. It is tempting, though. Tempting to see those early flashes reflected in the shape of the rock stars they became: the excitable bopper and the serious artiste. It wasn’t as simple as that, not in 1957, 1967 or 1977, but if you squint you can just about make out those shapes as they formed.The London boys both had a long way to go, and many, many costumes to try on and discard before anyone paid any real attention, but as the fifties, a decade that had seen post-war want give way to carefree consumerism, drew to a close Marc and David had already seen glimpses of the future they wanted.The bright light of the sixties hurtled toward them, and both boys turned to face it head on.
© Marc Burrows 2022
Have you made it to the end of this newsletter? WELL DONE. First person to tell me so on Twitter or email me gets a free copy of Manic Street Preachers:Album by Album OR The Magic of Terry Pratchett OR a pre-order of The London Boys. And yes, I know I’m late sending out last months.
Please also drop me a line to say hello – it’s always welcome. Unless you’re pointing out a typo, in which case maybe have a think about whether that’s a good use of either of our vanishingly small lives.
That’s all folks
Marc x
* Alright, boy-ish man and slightly-older-man.