The Man Who Sold the World (9 page)

SOUND AND VISION #1:
Love You Till Tuesday

Filmed January–February 1969; unseen until home-video release, 1984

T
he David Bowie on display in his 1969 TV special—titled after a single that had flopped nearly two years earlier—was a chirpy, camp, sometimes sensitive clotheshorse from Carnaby Street who resembled no one on the pop scene more than Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits. He was a passable mime, an unlikely rock'n'roller (as he proved when mimicking Elvis Presley's pelvis thrusting as he lip-synced to “Let Me Sleep Beside You” [A47]), and a rather clumsy actor, trying his best to sell songs he had long since outgrown. So deadening and coy was the overall effect, in fact, that even the debut of “Space Oddity” [1] must have made little impression on the hapless TV executives who received copies of this low-budget showcase. So it is not at all surprising that, despite issuing excited press releases about the prospect of a screening in Germany, Kenneth Pitt was unable to secure any interest in
Love You Till Tuesday
during 1969. Instead, he retained the reels and the copyright, and the special received a belated premiere on videocassette in 1984, when Bowie's career was altogether more secure.

Above all else, the TV special demonstrated that neither Bowie nor Pitt knew what to do next, or which version of Bowie they were trying to market. The inclusion of several clips featuring the members of Feathers—who broke up as the filming concluded—simply clouded the issue. In retrospect, the collapse of Bowie's relationship with Hermione Farthingale was a pivotal moment in his career. It freed him to work as a duo with John Hutchinson, who helped to widen his musical vocabulary, and it also provided him with a sharp emotional focus, reflected in the songs that poured out of him over the next few weeks. “With a guitar and memories of Hermione on my back, I thumbed through my mind and got involved with writing,” Bowie told disc jockey John Peel. “I have walked through no less than fifteen songs in two weeks and some of them were very bad.” Meanwhile, there was one quantifiable benefit from the TV special: without it, he would probably never have written “Space Oddity”—a song that was perfectly timed to capture the imagination of a record company.

Before then, Bowie the mime artiste was added to the bill of a short tour starring Tyrannosaurus Rex, the cult hippie duo fronted by his friend Marc Bolan. One reviewer noted that Bowie “was convincing in his act as an old man carried into the world of fantasy by smoking a fragment of ‘pot,' also as a man who eventually becomes famous by donning a mask which eventually sticks to his face.” But mime would never make Bowie famous; the songs that he wrote in the spring of 1969 held more promise.

 

[2] JANINE

(Bowie)

Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased. Re-recorded July 1969;
David Bowie [Space Oddity]
LP

“Janine,” Bowie announced on his 1969 demo tape, “is named after a girl who I met once and is the girlfriend of a guy called George [Underwood], who does very nice album covers.” Less charitably, he added later: “It's how I
thought
he should see her.” Yet the character of “Janine” was virtually absent from the song; the focus was on the narrator, whose deliberately obtuse
*
use of language helped to isolate him from his lover. Bowie may have been using the disguise of his friend to explore facets of his own psyche that he was unwilling to explore. Certainly, as an artist who set out to blur his own identity (Jones? Bowie? Ziggy Stardust?), it was telling that he chose to explore that theme so openly: if Janine murdered the narrator, it would be someone else who died, he declared, not him.

This psychological complexity was strangely at odds with the playful exuberance of the music, Bowie and Hutchinson ending the demo with the wordless chorus from the Beatles' “Hey Jude,”
*
and Bowie drifting into an impression of Elvis Presley on the record. The latter was wonderfully chaotic, like a herd of buffalo careering through the studio, with Mick Wayne's electric guitar cutting across the Dylanesque acoustic guitar changes that rooted the song,
*
while Bowie plucked haphazardly at an African thumb piano. Almost shouting a high harmony behind his chorus vocal, Bowie stretched himself to an A beyond his normal range.

 

[3] AN OCCASIONAL DREAM

(Bowie)

Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased. Re-recorded July 1969;
David Bowie [Space Oddity]
LP

Nothing in the “David Bowie + Hutch” repertoire recalled the music of Simon & Garfunkel more than their demo recording of this melancholy reflection on a love affair, which ended with an arpeggio chord that demanded to lead into Simon's “The Sound of Silence.” Hutchinson's blueprint was followed exactly in the studio, suggesting that Keith Christmas—a singer-songwriter whom Bowie perhaps envisaged as Hutch's successor—had listened attentively to the demo. It was a subtle, flowing arrangement, with unexpected shifts of key and mood, and discreet application of woodwinds, but elegantly constructed (in a way that much of Bowie's earlier material was not) to allow smooth transition between otherwise dissonant elements. Trapped in the circularity of the chorus, the melody soared only when Bowie recalled the fantasy that gave the song its name, and as it escaped its shackles in the final movement, his voice conjured an eerie anticipation of the man who would croon “Wild Is the Wind” [131].

So personal was the lyrical landscape of the song, with its talk of a “Swedish room,”
*
that the inspiration can only have been the collapse of Bowie's relationship with Hermione Farthingale in February 1969, recalled with almost manic obsession. He couldn't bear to “touch your name,” he insisted, though by the time his album was completed in September he was prepared to use it openly in a song title [5].

 

[4] CONVERSATION PIECE

(Bowie)

Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased. Re-recorded August/September 1969; single B-side

Intended until late in the day for the 1969
David Bowie
album, “Conversation Piece”
*
might have tilted the record too pointedly toward the melancholy folk rock of his post-Hermione self-pity. It had the tightly restrictive melodic range of a French chanson, a modulation introduced only to shake off the air of gloom, and an ending that neatly embraced both prevailing keys. Oboe added decoration to what would otherwise have been a maudlin tune, and on the single occasion when the instrument ran off its country-tinged rails into an accidental discord (just after Bowie sang “so rudely”), it was masked by the subtle use of strings—a combination that led the ear to believe it was hearing a steel guitar.

Two years earlier, Bowie had employed his own mask to distance himself from his characters: he was the storyteller, the entertainer, the Actor (as he would bill himself on
Hunky Dory
). Here, as on “Space Oddity” [1], where Major Tom's alienation became his own, his characters were infested with his emotions. On his 1967 debut album, “Conversation Piece” might have been called “College Clive”: the heartrending tale, ladies and gentlemen, of a young man who read so many books that he could no longer connect with the real world. The 1969 incarnation of David Bowie wallowed in his narrator's narcissistic agony and the realization that he could no longer “read” conversation, on the page or in real life. His voice was a warm, husky purr, but the ghost of Hermione lingered over the track like a Gothic mist.

 

[5] LETTER TO HERMIONE (AKA I'M NOT QUITE)

(Bowie)

Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased. Re-recorded August/September 1969;
David Bowie [Space Oddity]
LP

The lingering resonance of the twelve-string acoustic guitar encourages experimentation with chord shapes not found in the instruction books. Hanging, open chords that would sound one-dimensional on a six-string instrument suddenly assume three-dimensional form on a twelve-string. Hutchinson and Bowie's investigations of chord variations lacking a root, by simple tint of lifting a finger from the fretboard, created the lush, appealingly unfulfilled landscape of this study in lost love and emotional transference. The latter turned Bowie's unashamed acknowledgment of his deepest passion into an admission—possibly unconscious, though painfully obvious in retrospect—that his pain had warped his sense of reality.

William Burroughs once described the tape recorder as “an externalized section of the human nervous system,” allowing someone to transfer unpleasant memories from the brain onto an external object, where they could be manipulated into a form that was easier to bear. Bowie later told Burroughs that “I'm not at ease with the word ‘love.' . . . I gave too much of my time and energy to another person, and they did the same to me, and we started burning out against each other.” He was referring, of course, to Hermione Farthingale, the subject of this song, the loss of whom pervaded so much of Bowie's work in 1969. More dramatically, and perhaps more truthfully, Bowie once recalled that being in love “was an awful experience. It rotted me, drained me, and it was a disease.” But that was a retrospective judgment: when he wrote the song he initially titled “I'm Not Quite” (itself a telling phrase, in isolation), he was still besotted with her memory. Throughout three beautifully sung verses, he wrapped his feelings around his fantasy of Hermione, in the desperate hope that they might become her own emotional skin. After describing the perfection of her life without him, Bowie wondered if Hermione might, just once, have called out his name, “just by mistake.”

Yet it would require a hard heart not to be touched by the open naïveté of this performance—a nakedness that Bowie would not repeat until the
Low
album. His voice grew husky and cracked with tears during the second verse, and unlike his laughter-to-order on “Love You Till Tuesday” [A37], this time it felt unfeigned. Keith Christmas set harmonics ringing on his guitar, sparkling like raindrops on a sunlit lake. And nothing spoke deeper than the scat vocal that began and ended the song, and which—to judge from their acoustic demo—was a Hutchinson innovation, in the style that David Crosby would soon make his own.

Hermione's memory was rarely far from Bowie's mind during the summer of 1969: chronicler Kevin Cann notes that when Bowie attended the Malta Song Festival in July, he wrote new words for a local folk song, which he titled “No-One Someone” and devoted to a girl who “loved to walk by the neon-lit fountains.” Yet by November he had mustered sufficient self-protection to boast, “I've never had any traumas with girls.”

 

[6] LOVER TO THE DAWN

(Bowie)

Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased

This four-minute acoustic demo captured the gestation of one of Bowie's weightiest compositions, “Cygnet Committee” [8]. It demonstrated the gulf between the melancholy romanticism of his collaborations with John Hutchinson and the harsh eye of his subsequent solo work; it also shed intriguing light on the balance of creative power in the “Bowie + Hutch” partnership.

As recorded in spring 1969, and presumably intended for their duo album, “Lover to the Dawn” introduced the opening theme of “Cygnet Committee,” but only as an intricate instrumental guitar passage, and included almost all of the second section, with its singing sparrow. Rather than entering the mythical terrain of “Cygnet Committee,” it moved through a series of sequences that were lopped from the later song—including a blatant imitation of the “hey, hey, hey” refrain from Paul Simon's “Mrs. Robinson.” The object of their lament was, inevitably, a young woman maligned as “bitter” and “crazy” because she no longer wanted to associate with these perfectly nice young men.

Yet this was far from being a vehicle for Bowie's sadness, in the vein of “Letter to Hermione” [5]. It was Hutchinson who took center stage here, with Bowie adding a harmony line that pushed his voice to its upper limits. In this form, it was a rather disjointed, derivative, and jaundiced pastoral, taking the Beatles' “Mother Nature's Son” and the entire oeuvre of Donovan as its model. Stripped of most of Hutchinson's decorations, it would soon become something altogether more intimidating.

The demo tapes that “David Bowie + Hutch” recorded in the early weeks of 1969 also included revivals of the blighted “Ching-A-Ling” [A55] and the more passable “When I'm Five” [A53], and two cover versions, Lesley Duncan's
*
“Love Song” and “Life Is a Circus,” by the harmony band Djin, both vehicles for duets in the Simon & Garfunkel style.

Bowie's partnership with Hutchinson ended for economic, rather than musical, reasons. For several weeks Bowie continued to consider himself a member of a duo, and it was definitely in that guise that he submitted a demo tape to Mercury Records' London office, staffed by his friend and, apparently, occasional lover, Calvin Mark Lee. Mercury duly offered Bowie a recording contract, by which time he was a solo artist. Lee was also responsible for another, equally momentous liaison: he reintroduced Bowie to nineteen-year-old Angie Barnett, who became his girlfriend. Bowie shamelessly moved her into the house that he was sharing with another sexual partner—with whom he was also engaged in his most committed espousal of the late sixties counterculture.