Buy 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
Upcoming dates
Recommendations
An EXTRA LONG excerpt from The London Boys: David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the 60s Teenage Dream
The London Boys is OUT NOW (ish)
After two years of hard work (including that time I went insane and wrote 44,000 words in three weeks over Christmas) my new book The London Boys: David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the 60s Teenage Dream is real and available to touch and smell and, ideally, read.
I am astonishingly proud of this book. It’s one of those things that started as a mad idea and was willed into reality out of sheer stubbornness (“Can’t you write The Magic of David Bowie, and then The Magic of Marc Bolan as two books?”, asked a commercially minded business brain at my publishers, “No, that’s not what I want to do!”). It’s really important to me to not write a book that already exists. Straight biographies of Marc & David are ten a penny, and they’re mostly very good. I’ve read almost all of them – please ask for a list of recommendations. I wanted to write a different book. I was interested in what happens when we look at both stories together – what does it tell us about the people, the time, the place, and about art and music. It was originally meant to span their entire career, before I realised how much bigger the story could be. So I lopped it off in 1970. There’ll be a sequel. That’s the next job.
So far, people have responded really well. The initial reader reviews popping up on GoodReads have been really encouraging. People get it, and that’s the most I could ask for. Honestly, you work hard on something like this, and you throw everything at it, you put you mental health, your job and your relationships on the line as it takes over your whole brain and … then it’s out of your hands and people are going to judge it. It’s terrifying.
The book is now available to buy from my website (see above or below for the link). It’ll follow into book shops and Amazon later in this month, so I’ll probably do another desperate plea for you to buy it then as well. If you get it from me you’ll be Supporting The Author, and it’s also available signed, and in a special edition that includes a collection of my best music writing culled from twenty years at the critical coalface. If you enjoy it please leave a review on Good Reads, Amazon, or anywhere else. Word of mouth is how these things thrive. Of course if you don’t enjoy it, my advice is just to keep quiet.
THE LONDON BOYS IS AVAILABLE TO BUY HERE!
Mock up of the London Boys cover
Monthly musings – Twitter and all that
It’s been a month now since I left my job at Twitter, where I’d worked for almost seven years. You can read about that decision in the last issue. I have, as yet, no regrets. As a great man once sort-of said, “don’t think of it as quitting to go freelance because the company you loved has been taken over by a billionaire megalomaniac on an insane whim, think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush”.
The first month of freelance life has been very kind. I now have “clients”, and have been doing proper grown up writer things like getting up at midday and working until 4am to meet a deadline. I managed to write an article so controversial that it inspired two YouTubers with a combined reach of 700k subscribers to do special videos about it, and prompted people to send me abusive DMs accusing me of being a child abuser. The highly controversial view was “She-Hulk and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power were quite popular, actually, even though people complained a lot.”. So, ya know, it’s all going to plan.
Meanwhile, at Twitter, a service I still love and a company full of people I adore, things were going less well. Elon Musk’s proposed takeover reached its inevitable end point, with the combustable tech bro assuming full control. It took him a week to, reportedly, sack 50% of the company (the numbers haven’t officially been released), with my colleagues, many of whom I’d worked with since 2015 and consider close friends, informed via email that layoffs were imminent, and to await their doom, which would fall before the sun rose in San Francisco. A lot of them found out when their access and laptops simply stopped working. Among that 50% was my entire former team. A dedicated, astonishingly talented group of people numbering over 150 and stretched across the world. I watched as the results came in. Exchanged messages with a few friends. It was heartbreaking. Mostly I was glad I avoided this horrible experience, even though ultimately for me the result would have been the same, but part of me felt I should be facing it shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues. I’d barely been gone a month. I still felt part of the team.
This was awful on a personal level, but it’s got profound implications for Twitter as well. I have to be careful how I approach this subjects because I “signed a thing” when I left, but broadly, the Curation team, to which I belonged, were responsible for contextualising what you see on your feed, fighting misinformation and “fake news” and with true objectivity and solid journalistic sense, helping people navigate the chaos of big news stories. I’m not sure what the service is going to look like without that. Some of our work was very visible (the bit that became known as “the description man”), but a lot of it was more subtle. You’ll notice it when it’s gone.
The heartbreaking thing for me, is that we were a team who really believed in what we did. Twitter is incredibly powerful. People like Musk, Donald Trump and others could create havoc in markets and news with the push of a button. The system can be gamed to surface harmful stories and conspiracy theories. It can define the news agenda, and make or break careers. (It’s also full of joy, silliness, smart takes, stupid jokes, zealous fandom and ridiculous trivia, which people forget). We knew we were working on something with great power to cause harm, and we were there to make it better. Between us, we created something I believe was quite extraordinary, that began as a handful of people dragging Tweets into the right order, and ended with a couple of hundred of the cleverest humans I’ve ever known doing a range of incredibly complex work. I’m so proud to have been part of it.
If you want to know more, and if you want to hire some of the incredible people I worked with, the Tweet below from my colleague Andrew Hague is a good start.
So Twitter’s Curation team is no more.
This site 👇 was recently launched to tell the world about our work. Give it a look for two reasons:
1) to see how it will impact your experience
2) if you want to hire the people behind it, get in touch via DM
https://t.co/vGdlDSYh8r
As for what happens next? I don’t know, truly. That’s up to Musk. (He also sacked the Human Rights team. Make of that what you will.) He might have a plan. I hope so. I still love the platform, and I use it for everything from serious news to stupid jokes (and to sell books, of course). I want the best for it. But more than that, I want the best for my teammates.
Stuff I've written/done since the last newsletter
There’s no such thing as being straight - New Statesman
Young people are increasingly identifying as bisexual, which can only be a good thing.
John Cleese on GB News: the hero of the right - New Statesman
The Monty Python comic, and latest GB News signing, was once anti-establishment. Now he is merely “anti-woke”.
Happily, these shows have proven to be huge hits – extremely popular with audiences and critics alike, despite the trolling.
Blind Ambition Review - HeyUGuys
If Blind Ambition were a drama, the elevator pitch would surely be Cool Runnings but make it wine”, and frankly you’d be amazed if Disney or Netflix weren’t sniffing around already – on paper, this is winning stuff. We follow four young refugees through a textbook cinematic trope: underdogs entering a niche event dominated by snobby […]
The Origin Review - LFF 2022 - HeyUGuys
It’s fitting that Andrew Cummings debut feature opens with stories told around a campfire – it has themes that date back, not just to the birth of cinema, but probably to the beginning of storytelling itself … not for nothing is this titled The Origin. We have the terror of the night and the mysteries […]
God Said Give Em Drum Machines Review - LFF 2022 - HeyUGuys
“A lot of Black artists that were instrumental in innovation get forgotten,” says Detroit techno legend Juan Atkins, “or purposefully white washed.” His comments play out over footage of Little Richard performing ‘Tutti Frutti’, electrifying, raw and sexy, giving way to the then-more acceptable cover version by Pat Boone, cosy, sexless and dull. The same […]
Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths Review - LFF 2022 - HeyUGuys
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s eagerly awaited return, following the one-two Oscar punch of Birdman and The Revenant, manages to be at once wilfully obscure, completely beautiful and so staggeringly on the nose it could form the bulbous centrepiece of a clown’s face. Whatever else it achieves (and it achieves an awful lot) few films are so […]
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio Review - LFF 2022 - HeyUGuys
How do you imagine a Guillermo del Toro-directed stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio? Think it through. What would the visual style be like? What directions might the plot take? What themes would be emphasised? What would the mood be? Got all of that in your head? Good. You’re almost certainly right. If you’re thinking of a […]
Empire of Light Review - LFF 2022 - HeyUGuys
Twenty three years after American Beauty, Sam Mendes returns to the LFF with a film rhyming some of the themes of his debut – lives either stuck between two states or else going nowhere, social imprisonment, brutal intolerance, unlikely outsiders finding one another and release through cinephilia. Stylistically, though, Empire of Light, Mendes’ ninth film, […]
Upcoming gigs and events
November 12 – Live stand up set at Some Antics spoken word night, Cotesbach, Leicestershire.
I do stand up way too infrequently these days, so I’m really looking forward to this. Details here.
November 14 – The London Boys book launch
This is guestlist only and it’s basically full, BUT if you want to come drop me a line and I’ll see what we can do. I’ve got some really special stuff planned, and the venue, The Lower Third on Denmark Street, is perfect.
December 2 – Before Victoria live in London
My band, Before Victoria, will be appearing alongside my Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing colleagues Flesh Tetris and our old friends, New York’s Frenchy & The Punk, at the Black Heart in Camden. Tickets available here.
Recommendations
Music, movies, telly, books and more I’ve enjoyed this month
Please Don't Take Me Back, by Martha
The wonderful Martha have a new album out and it is a JOY.
You Will Not Die, by Darren Hayman
One of England’s nation treasures, Darren Hayman, releases a wonderfully bleak, yet oddly hopeful synthtastic record. It’s everything I love about him.
One of the best things I saw at the London Film Festival, and absolutely worthy of your time, if you can track it down. Take tissues. Contains bonus Rhea Seahorn.
EXCERPT: The London Boys – Bowie Bolan & The 60 Teenage Dream
Chapter 17: Mime All Mime
Through the tail end of 1967, right across 1968 and into 1969 it seemed like David dabbled in every kind of performance art except making pop records. It wasn’t that his interest in the medium had faded, which was the explanation that he often gave later for the lack of progress he made at this point; he was still writing songs, still finding ways to perform them, still making demos, and still fascinated by the romance and culture of pop – it’s just that no-one was especially interested in paying him to record any of it. Crisis talks were ongoing at Decca/Deram over David’s future; the label wasn’t threatening to drop David, but neither was anyone making any particular steps toward furthering his recording career. Having failed with the Visconti-produced ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’, Ken Pitt had gone back to the label’s selection committee suggesting they release the re-recorded version of ‘When I Live My Dream’; the classiest ballad in David’s repertoire, backed with a new Visconti produced number, ‘Karma Man’; one a crowd pleaser you could take home to meet your mother, the other a niftily progressive pop tune that explored David’s interest in Buddhism. The Decca committee again declined. A few months later Pitt offered another selection of new Bowie tunes recorded with Visconti, ‘In The Heat of the Morning’ and ‘London, Bye Ta Ta’, two propulsive, contemporary sounding and cinematic pop numbers, both displaying David’s increasingly sophisticated songwriting, the latter of which being arguably the first of his recordings to sound more like the Bowie of the early seventies than that of the mid-sixties1. The Decca selection committee again declined both and by mutual agreement Pitt and Bowie walked away from the label. David’s supporters at Deram were disappointed, but had been scuppered by their stuffier parent label at every turn; the relationship had clearly run its course. Flop, dropped (ish) and roll, yet again. The Decca/Deram phase of Bowie’s career had lasted two years, and was the most concerted and organised effort yet to boost him to the status of mainstream star. Decca had the means, the money and the contacts; David had the songs, the ambition, the imagination and the look – so why had it gone so badly wrong? Hugh Mendl, the label’s A&R, put it down to happenstance, telling Paul Trynka that ‘the fates were against us’. That’s partly true: you can never underestimate the importance of ‘right time, right place’ in the pop world, of catching the wind just right, of circumstances coming together in perfect alignment. Who knows how many geniuses have remained in obscurity because the bus was late and they never got talking to that TV producer in the pub who would give them the break they needed? On the other hand, there’s an argument that for an act that’s genuinely special, well, another bus will be along in a minute. David, after all, did eventually become a huge star.2 When Dick Rowe turned down The Beatles it wasn’t the end of The Beatles. MGM told Walt Disney that cartoons about a mouse ‘would never work’3. Twelve publishers rejected the same industry-changing manuscript for the first Harry Potter book. Hardly anyone makes it on the first try without some sort of Faustian pact.4 Bowie’s music simply fell between the stalls. He had spent the first half of the decade surfing just behind the cultural wave, sometimes a follower of the cutting edge, sometimes a barometer of it, but never a leader. The stylistic shifts he’d made from ‘Rubber Band’ onward, culminating in the first David Bowie album, were a specific move away from what we’d now call the zeitgeist – an attempt to establish himself on his own terms, rather than as a poor man’s version of The Who or The Pretty Things. There was the Anthony Newley influence, of course, but even that was a left-turn from the rock ‘n’ roll mainstream, a concerted and specific effort not to do what you’d expect a nineteen-year-old wannabe pop idol to do. Striking out in his own direction was an admirable and creative move. It’s what we want our pop stars to do. Deram were happy to go on the journey, because everyone understood and trusted a specific vision - it’s just that, unfortunately, however much you believe, however much you enthuse, there’s only so far you can manipulate the excitement of others. David’s Deram phase was the right idea at the wrong time, or possibly the wrong idea at the right time. It lit the touch paper, but the kindling never caught. Marc Bolan, meanwhile, had made the opposite choice – instead of leaning away from the public tastes, he’d found an existing scene to lean into. For all the gleeful creativity of My People Were Fair …, for all of its big swings into weirdo-space, it was launching into a scene that already had Syd Barrett, The Incredible String Band, ‘I Am The Walrus’ and Donovan. ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ and ‘Rubber Band’ were, on the face of it, far more prosaic, safe, almost old-fashioned songs in comparison to ‘Scenescoff’ and ‘Debora’, which felt adventurous and mysterious but were released at a time when being the right kind of adventurous and mysterious was, ironically, a safer bet, at least in terms of finding a niche audience to build from. David had deliberately turned away from scenes and trends, while Marc had thrown himself headlong into one. Both tactics could have failed or succeeded spectacularly, and it could easily have been the other way around.
For now, the major label dream was over. Pitt had been able to get tempting deals for Bowie in 1966 precisely because he was such an unknown quantity – a young man full of potential and a possible jackpot for the right lucky buyer. Now, though, he was damaged goods. He’d rolled the dice and lost. A halfcentury later we think of Bowie as an artist who constantly reinvented himself. Didn’t like this Bowie? It’s okay, there’ll be a new one in a year or so. However, there was no reason why anyone in 1968 would be expecting that sort of creative evolution. Bowie was the ‘Anthony Newley guy’, the ‘Laughing Gnome’ guy. That version of Bowie had failed, and failed publicly. It would be a big ask for anyone else to take him on. Pitt, at David’s request, tried to interest The Beatles’ Apple records but found absolutely no interest there5 or anywhere else, though he had at least been able to get Essex Music to agree to an extension to Bowie’s publishing contract, squeezing another £1,500 of badly needed money out of David Platz and into David’s pocket (he had earned just £322 in the whole of 1967). Pitt, thinking wistfully of the $10,000 that would have been arriving into the Bowie coffers had Ralph Horton not dropped the ball so badly, rolled up his sleeves and started thinking of ways that he could keep his boy in immaculate shirts and haircuts.6 ‘There were times,’ he wrote rather mournfully in The Pitt Report, ‘when I felt I was the only person in the world who believed in his talent’. Given David’s primary creative pursuits in 1968, it’s unlikely that earning money was at the front of his thinking. In their final meeting with Decca, in which all agreed to terminate Bowie’s recording contract, David told Hugh Mendl that he was planning to focus on a career as a dancer rather than as a musician. Mendl had felt that this unlikely move couldn’t possibly be serious, and assumed that Pitt and Bowie had some grand plan to jump ship to another label with a guaranteed smash hit in mind. It proves that at least someone at Decca had faith in David’s talent – perhaps more than he deserved at this point. Despite Pitt’s hopes, the 1967 David Bowie album had opened very few doors for his client. Indeed, it’s tempting to think that Bowie’s debut album might as well not exist for all the good it did his career in the long run - but this is not necessarily true. Pitt had purchased a stack of copies to send out to business contacts, TV and radio producers and other showbiz types;7 this was one of the reasons he had wanted Bowie to record an album in the first place. ‘We really planned the Deram album like a CV,’ Pitt told Chris Welch in an interview for Mojo in 2003. ‘We never thought it would sell or that anyone would buy it except ourselves.’ One of those copies was sent to the dancer and acclaimed mime artist Lindsay Kemp, of whom Pitt’s secretary was a fan.
Kemp absolutely adored the record; he loved Anthony Newley, but was also switched on enough to hear other influences and ideas under David’s facsimile – something that others had failed to do. For example, he heard the spirit of the dramatic Belgian crooner Jacques Brel, which is especially interesting when you consider that Bowie, who would become a huge fan of the singer, had yet to discover his music when he recorded his debut album; Kemp picked up the resonance between the two artists before David himself did. He also appreciated the echoes in the music of Victorian and early twentieth century music hall; the cockney singing style, the knack for storytelling and the sense of humour. Kemp was working on the fringes of London’s theatre and arts scene. He had trained with the Ballet Rambert school in London and with the great Austrian expressionist dancer Hilde Holger (who taught an almost meditative form of dancing in which body and mind were aligned as one) before going on to study with the legendary French mime Marcel Marceau. Kemp would spend his career blending theatre, dance, clowning, drag and mime to sometimes beautiful, sometimes comic, sometimes camp, sometimes erotic effect and would often be shunned by the dance world because of his mixing of such usually distinct disciplines. This creative blend would have been hugely attractive to Bowie, who had been flirting with combining pop and performance art since the days of the Lower Third, an itch he was briefly able to scratch with the Riot Squad. He knew that he could take it further. Kemp had been using ‘When I Live My Dream’, the grandest moment on the David Bowie record, in a show called Clown, running at the tiny Little Theatre Club, near Covent Garden, which featured Kemp as Pierrot, the tragi-comic ‘sad clown’ archetype which dates back to the seventeenth century. ‘It was a commedia dell’arte musical, a sort of backstage circus with songs,’ Kemp told Dylan Jones for his oral history of Bowie. ‘The show was very much inspired by Picasso’s early paintings of the blue and pink periods, of the hungry harlequins and Pierrot and their families and so on.’ David was absolutely entranced by the show and keen to meet the principles afterwards. It was, as Kemp has put it in several interviews, ‘love at first sight’. Unfortunately, the old adage of ‘if you can remember the sixties you weren’t really there’ does ring rather true in the case of Lindsay Kemp: he told his story many times across years of articles, biographies and documentaries, and the details varied significantly. We have to approach his account of their relationship with some caution – especially as there are few people left alive who can confirm the details (Kemp himself died in 2018). What we can say for sure is that within the next few days Bowie began attending Kemp’s classes at the Dance Centre on Floral Street near Covent Garden, which he kept up for a while.8 After one of the first classes he accompanied Kemp back to his flat and they became lovers.
Kemp’s impact on David was fairly profound. Ken Pitt had introduced Bowie to a higher class, artsier scene and Ralph Horton had shown him London’s more grown up gay life; Kemp, however, lived at an intersection of the arts, queerness and the counterculture, a scene closer to the one that had produced The Velvet Underground in New York; of drag queens, strippers, sex workers, fallen aristocrats, bohemians and the other fascinating exotica drifting around Soho’s nightlife, living and working in – as Angela Bowie describes in her book Backstage Passes – a ‘rad/lib/mystical/multisexual/commune.’ For Bowie, who idolised Andy Warhol, was obsessed with the Velvets and had a swooning soft spot for the Weimar Berlin of Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret, it was another tribe to belong to, another facet of his personality to indulge; Kemp would later tell The Guardian that Bowie ‘fell in love with the Bohemianism of my world’, a view which Bowie himself very much backed up; ‘His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘It was everything I thought bohemia probably was. I joined the circus’. Horton might have been the one who showed him the London gay scene, but it was only after meeting Kemp that he truly started to fold camp (with a hint of debauchery – not just the ‘ooh ducky’ caricature he’d occasionally played for laughs before this) into his persona, something that would serve him well in the coming years. Kemp considered there to be no difference between the tragi-comic, debauched Pierrot figure he presented on stage with its drama and indulgence, and his real bohemian life – David was learning that he could do the same. It was another building block in the facade he would create in the early seventies. To all intents and purposes, Kemp was David’s first ‘boyfriend’. They didn’t, as far we’re aware, put a label on their relationship (although Kemp occasionally used the word ‘boyfriend’ when discussing David in interviews), but they did act as a couple; with Kemp inviting David very much into his life. Like many people who encountered Bowie over the years, Kemp was absolutely besotted from almost the very first moment he clapped eyes on him ( ‘He became my muse’, he told Uncut in 2017). David spent many nights at Lindsay’s Soho flat being introduced to silent movies, music hall, the great French writer Jean Genet and new forms of theatre he had not yet come across; Japanese kabuki and mime, Ataud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’ and Esslin’s ‘theatre of the absurd’. David, in turn, introduced Lindsay to the Tibetan Society and Buddhist Centre, hugely important in his life at that point, and even took him home to meet his parents, whom Kemp adored (though we have no record of what they made of him). When Kemp and company went on tour in 1968, he and Bowie shared a bed. Lindsay was clearly besotted, it oozes out of every interview that this warm, funny, engaging and extremely camp man ever did. The extent of David’s own feelings are less clear – he never went into the details about his private relationship with Kemp, though he would talk about his respect for him as an artist, teacher and performer many times.
Copyright Pen & Sword Books & Marc Burrows, 2022
That’s all folks! If you have made it to the end of the newsletter please drop me a line via reply, Twitter DM or carrier pigeon. First one to do so gets a FREE copy of the London Boys.
Also it’s just nice to hear from you.
Take care
Marc B x