Yes, it was going to be a hit, all right. But if David Bowie believed the tiny planet called pop was big enough for the pair of them, he certainly didn’t. Not King Mod. Not The Boppin’ Elf.
Not Marc Bolan.
THEY WERE BORN the same year, 1947, in the same sacred city of London. January 8’s David Jones a Wednesday’s child, full of woe. September 30’s Mark Feld a Tuesday’s child, full of grace. All that separated them was 265 days and the river Thames. While, to the south, David came of age in Brixton and Bromley, on the north bank Mark Feld was learning to preen and pose on the streets of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill. He received a similar baptism of rock ’n’ roll fire at the age of nine from Elvis Presley. In the winter of 1956, as David was watching cousin Kristina dance herself delirious to ‘Hound Dog’ the young Mark was already on his first guitar trying to learn ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ from a treasured 78 r.p.m. single. By 1958, as David was strumming skiffle tunes at scout summer camp, ten-year-old Mark was at the heart of the action in Soho scampering behind the counter of the 2 I’s, helping serve coffees in the hope of a first-hand encounter with a real life pop star – a tinkling teaspoon away from Vince Taylor.
Mark Feld was short but pretty, a pint size rock ’n’ roller who sculpted his dark quiff and curled his lips just like his hero, Cliff Richard. Until the pint size rock ’n’ roller became a teenage dandy. At 14, he was a walking mannequin of sharp-suited Italian fashions plucked from the rails of Petticoat Lane or Sportique, the Soho mod paradise two doors along from the 2 I’s on Old Compton Street. Until the teenage dandy became a Cockney Dylan. At 17 he made his first demo warbling a version of Bob’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ in a fisherman’s cap and rollneck jumper, swapping his birth name of Mark Feld for that of Toby Tyler. Until Toby Tyler went on holiday to Paris in early 1965, returning with preposterous tales of meeting a black-magic wizard and another change of name. Keeping ‘Mark’ but swapping the hard Hackney ‘k’ for a softer French ‘c’. The surname he adapted from his current flatmate, actor James Bolam, star of the BBC comedy The Likely Lads. Until forever, Marc Bolan.
Like David, Marc knew the importance of not being himself, of burying his birth certificate in a cocoon of self-mythologising bluster. When they met in Leslie Conn’s Denmark Street offices during the brief period he managed both – Davie the mod, Marc the self-appointed ‘King Mod’ – they saw in one another a strange alternate self, at once alien yet unnervingly familiar. Different hair, different eyes, different height, different voices, different affectations … but an uncanny kindred rock ’n’ roll spirit. The Starman and the Metal Guru, neither entirely sure which was destined to become which. It was mutually fascinating, and a bit alarming, more so to Marc who felt the first bruise of competition when he learned David had already beat him to releasing a couple of singles.
Marc didn’t have to wait long to catch up. His first, November 1965’s ‘The Wizard’ was, he insisted, inspired by that life-changing trip to Paris, supplying the press with cock and bull anecdotes of befriending the magician he claimed levitated before his eyes, ate human flesh and crucified cats. The song itself was a simple yarn about meeting a wizard in the woods, sung with a hazy Dylanish twang over an urgent Motown thump, a mesmeric riff and some bewitching woodwind. Recorded in the same Decca studios where David cut his respective debut, ‘Liza Jane’, in a straight comparison ‘The Wizard’ was the better pop record – gently bizarre, intriguingly brief – if no more successful.
It took Marc another year and a half of failed follow-ups, vocal tweaks, visual tucks and a liberating interlude with riotous noise-mods John’s Children before he settled in his role as the tinker sprite wrapping his gizzard around gems of fantasy gibberish in hippy duo Tyrannosaurus Rex. His spaced-out partner went by the name of Steve Peregrin Took (by birth, Steve Porter) and restricted himself to bothering bongos and vocal harmonies. Together they sounded like a Hare Krishna playing nursery rhymes on a ukulele being pursued by a frantically clopping pantomime horse. A sound which, even within the post-Pepper watershed of psychedelic nonsense perfuming the charts of late 1967, wasn’t the easiest on human eardrums.
Luckily for Tyrannosaurus Rex, their biggest fan was also their most influential. The BBC’s John Peel was so besotted with the duo that he invited them to play his regular DJ nights at a cellar club in Covent Garden. It especially suited Marc’s love of Tokienesque gobbledygook that the club was called Middle Earth. It also attracted a young American producer just relocated from New York to London, now on a mission to sign his own pet project. A mission which ended one night in Middle Earth when 23-year-old Tony Visconti caught Tyrannosaurus Rex in all their indefinable eccentricity.
Visconti introduced himself after their set and asked if they needed a producer. Marc told him he’d have to join the queue, being the eighth to approach them that week, somewhere behind John Lennon. An outright lie, as Visconti only suspected when Marc rang his office the next morning haggling for an audition. Over the coming weeks, the producer’s New York world-wisdom was sharp enough to scythe through Marc’s havering bravado and befriend the lovable charmer beneath. When he learned Marc lived in a bedsit with a shared toilet and no bath, he invited him to come and use the tub in his own flat once a week. There they’d drink wine with their girlfriends, discuss books and poetry and listen to favourite records. And sometimes there was the added surprise of other visitors. Like another young and slightly odd singer Visconti had just been paired with. A queer coincidence, thought Marc. There, in the cosy bohemian den of his producer’s flat, finding himself saying ‘hello’ again to the boy with the crap shoes and teeth like a broken zip he’d first clapped eyes on over some tins of paint in a Denmark Street office three years earlier.
‘Marc, David. David, Marc … have you guys met?’
In their subconscious pop marathon of tortoise and hare, by the summer of ’68 Marc was many miles out in front. David’s career had decelerated since his debut album. He’d only just started working with Visconti, producer of the doomed ‘London Bye Ta-Ta’ which put an end to his Deram contract. While David floundered without a label, in desperate thoughts of monks and mime, Tyrannosaurus Rex’s debut single ‘Debora’ rattled its way to number 34. By no means ‘a smash’, but definitely ‘a hit’. The band’s first album also made the top 20 despite the burden of its exhausting title: My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair … But Now They’re Content To Wear Stars In Their Brow. Adding to David’s envious indignation, its cover was designed by his best friend, George.
Marc could comfortably afford to be magnanimous in victory over his old acquaintance, inviting David to support Tyrannosaurus Rex that June at a prolific headline show at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Providing, that is, he didn’t sing but performed his mime act about the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Which he did, his turn ruined by the heckles of left-wing students and hippies irate over his damning portrayal of China’s communist Red Guard. In the wings, Marc couldn’t help but laugh.
Possibly by way of consolation prize, in the aftermath Marc gave David a present. It was a new toy instrument, a miniature battery-powered synthesizer with a flat metal keyboard played with a stylus which produced a noise like a bumblebee trapped in a toaster. It was a trifling gesture. An innocuous token of a strange, uneven camaraderie. A whim of generosity from winner to loser.
Marc Bolan would live to regret it.
AS FRANK BORMAN and his Apollo 8 crew splashed down safely back to Earth in the last week of 1968, David was still trying to create a new career for himself outside pop music. False hope teased with his first screen role in the war drama The Virgin Soldiers. He’d impressed at his audition, turning up with a cropped military haircut before he’d been cast. For his troubles, he was given a blink-and-miss walk on.
Kenneth Pitt, meanwhile, had his own masterplan to reboot David’s career. A half-hour film showcase, Love You Till Tuesday, featuring songs from his debut album, a short mime sketch and a preview of David’s latest
band project, a folky trio called Feathers. Pitt suggested it could also probably do with a brand new song. David obliged and added ‘Space Oddity’, acting out the plot in silver spacesuit, crash helmet and a chunky wig to disguise his now redundant soldier cut. An ignominious unveiling of a tune which, as Marc had just told him, sounded like a hit. Or it would have been had the film been shown at the time. Sadly for Pitt his investment in Love You Till Tuesday paid no dividends, remaining unseen by the public until the 1980s. The film’s obscurity was a definite blessing for its shaky first draft of ‘Space Oddity’, even if it denied the world the prophetic Ziggy fable of its mime sketch. ‘The Mask’ was David’s story of a man who finds a mask in an old junkshop. First he wears it to amuse his family and friends until, after a local concert, the mask makes him a famous star. ‘Autographs, films, television, the lot … it had a very strange effect on me, though.’ One night at the London Palladium, basking in the applause, he tries to remove the mask but finds it permanently affixed. He struggles to wrestle it off his face only to strangle himself, dying on stage in front of his fans. ‘The papers made a big thing out of it. Funny, though – they didn’t mention a thing about a mask.’
Marc Bolan’s begrudging enthusiasm for ‘Space Oddity’ wasn’t shared by Tony Visconti. When Pitt finally found David a new label, the fittingly planetary Mercury Records, Visconti declined the offer to produce the song. With Moon fever in the press as NASA’s Apollo programme gathered momentum, he thought it much too obvious a gimmick. Instead, the job was handed to the engineer on David’s first album, Gus Dudgeon, no stranger to cosmic pop having just co-produced The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s novelty hit ‘I’m The Urban Spaceman’ with Paul McCartney (together under the alias ‘Apollo C. Vermouth’).
Completed in the last week of June 1969, ‘Space Oddity’ was David’s first session at Trident, tucked in a Soho back alley just round the corner from the Marquee club and already the studio of choice for Visconti and Tyrannosaurus Rex. Dudgeon helped illuminate the song’s human drama with arranger Paul Buckmaster, his orchestral crescendo nicely echoing the Ligeti strings used in 2001. The finished ‘Space Oddity’ was a masterpiece of zero-gravity pop; Jacques Brel sings Stanley Kubrick with eerie robotic accompaniment from what sounded like HAL himself. The latter was David’s spontaneous finishing touch, writing a harmony part and solo for his new toy instrument, the Stylophone. A recent gift from a friend. Without ever wishing to, Marc had accidentally gilded David’s career-saving breakthrough.
Visconti’s suspicions about ‘Space Oddity’ were vindicated when it was rush-released five days before the launch of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission to place a man on the moon. A week earlier the single received its poignant world premiere through the PA system of The Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park on 5 July, an event overshadowed by the death two days before of their founding guitarist Brian Jones. On stage, Mick Jagger read an excerpt from Shelley’s poem ‘Adonais’ inspired by the death of his friend, Keats. ‘He is not dead, he doth not sleep.’ Later that evening on the other side of the park David witnessed his boyhood hero Chuck Berry support The Who as part of the Royal Albert Hall’s ‘Pop Proms’. The Who played their new album in its entirety, their ‘rock opera’ Tommy about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball prodigy who starts a youth cult until his followers rise up against him. David’s companion that night was his new A&R man and confidante, Calvin Mark Lee, an American-Asian with a doctorate in philosophy, famed in London party circles for wearing reflective diamond ‘love jewels’ in the centre of his forehead.
Eleven days later, Apollo 11 launched successfully from Cape Kennedy, Florida, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins towards the moon. A trio of real life Major Toms, they spent the next three days floating in their tin can staring down at the blue planet slowly receding into the darkness of space. Just after 9.15 p.m. British Summer Time on Sunday 20 July, the same lunar module Arthur C. Clarke had seen during construction while still writing and researching 2001 touched down on the surface of the Moon. Six and a half hours later, Armstrong made his giant leap for mankind. Three hundred and fifty years after Johannes Kepler had his first lunar dream, human beings had finally reached the Moon. There were no camel-legged, frail-skinned aliens waiting to greet them. Nor any black monoliths to pierce the cosmos with their ‘fire alarm’. Just craters, rocks, Moondust and, by the time they left, an American flag.
Over five hundred million people watched the Moon-landing live by satellite. None were more gobsmacked than David, hearing his ‘Space Oddity’ used during the BBC’s broadcast, stunned that the programme makers couldn’t have listened closely to its lyrics which left Major Tom marooned in orbit. The Beeb wouldn’t make that mistake again. Sharing the same distaste as Visconti, the corporation placed a temporary embargo on broadcasting any songs with an exploitative ‘space theme’ in the weeks surrounding the Apollo 11 flight, stalling the success of ‘Space Oddity’ for another two months. Two months of momentary consolation for Marc Bolan whose latest single, a warning of the electrical storm to come called ‘King Of The Rumbling Spires’, cartwheeled to a halt at a dismal 44. Two months where Marc was more than happy to have his ‘hit’ prediction for David proved wrong. Until, in late September, ‘Space Oddity’ managed to drift just inside the top 40. By early October it was inside the 20. Two weeks later, it was in the top ten.
Sat in the Notting Hill basement flat where David had first played it to him less than a year earlier, Marc fixed his evilest eyes on his television where ‘Space Oddity’ now vibrated from the speaker. On screen, David Bowie making his debut appearance on the BBC’s Top Of The Pops, surrounded by images of the Apollo 11 mission. And in his hands, the silly musical toy that had once belonged to Marc, its every fuzzy note stinging his ears and thrashing his ego with cruellest irony.
In early November, as ‘Space Oddity’ peaked at number five, David was sent on a short solo tour of Scotland. On the first night in Perth at the Salutation Hotel, ‘the Sally’ to its locals, as he began strumming the single’s B-side, ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’, the fair maids of Perth rushed to the front of the stage and began screaming at his feet. It was a sensation David had never experienced before. The shriek and sigh of unconditional adulation. ‘I would never have believed in a million years that people would scream at me,’ he said afterwards. ‘I stand bemused by it all.’ In the stratosphere high above the Sally, the approaching phantom of Ziggy Stardust smiled down fondly. His human vessel was almost ready to be occupied.
THE END CREDITS of the 1960s rolled to the tune of ‘Two Little Boys’ by Rolf Harris, the Australian entertainer who’d been first to endorse the Stylophone, a good year before ‘Space Oddity’. Ending a decade epitomised by pop’s cultural revolution, its last number one was an atypical sentimental relic of early-twentieth-century music hall: the simple yarn of childhood best friends whose love of playing on wooden horses leads to a poignant moment in adulthood fighting in the American Civil War. ‘Two Little Boys’ was a song of undying friendship, of a brotherly love never to be broken. A song which said next to nothing about the relationship between David Bowie and Marc Bolan as 1970 began.
In less than two years the see-saw had shifted. David was now the star, on Top Of The Pops and in the pages of Jackie magazine. Marc was still gargling madrigals about dragons’ ears and druids’ spears for fuggy student bedsits a-choke with joss-sticks. It wasn’t enough that Tyrannosaurus Rex still had the cult kudos of John Peel and the underground bible International Times. For Marc, their façade of hippiedom was gossamer thin. He still wanted to be Cliff Richard. Worshipped. Adored. Screamed at by girls sprinting to the front of the stage in Perth or wherever else.
For David, the year of ‘Space Oddity’ had been a life-changing maelstrom of euphoria tempered with despair. He had the hit single he’d always craved. He’d also met the woman who’d soon become his wife, a 19-year-old American-Cypriot called Angie Barnett. Casting the die for
their future marriage, they met through mutual bisexual lover, the love-jewelled Calvin Mark Lee. Casting the die for the future David, Angie was also studying marketing at Kingston Polytechnic, a skill she’d apply to her husband and herself as human products in the years to come.
But he’d also lost his father. John Jones died that August, only a few weeks before ‘Space Oddity’ entered the charts, never living to see his son achieve the dreams of showbiz success he’d shared all those years earlier in the doomed days of the Boop-A-Doop club. And, in a different sense, David was also losing his brother. After further schizophrenic outbursts, Terry Burns was admitted to Cane Hill, a late-Victorian psychiatric hospital on the south edge of Croydon. As David later claimed, ‘he’d be happy to spend the rest of his life there.’
David followed ‘Space Oddity’ with his second album, confusingly sharing the eponymous title David Bowie with his debut. But by the start of 1970 the pressure was already on for new material to maintain its success. Eager to make his mark on the new decade, eight days in, on his twenty-third birthday, he returned to Trident with Visconti this time to record what he hoped would be his next hit, ‘The Prettiest Star’. Not, as the title teased, another space ballad, but a love song written for his bride-to-be Angie. Its sentiment unconsciously echoed his own parents’ courtship with its mention of old movies and darkened cinemas, its prettiest star being the Garbo, not the galactic kind. The romantic mood was complemented by a sweet toe-tapping tune, a little too sweet for Visconti who decided it needed something, or rather someone, to add some missing rock ’n’ roll fire.