The Man Who Told My World

1972. Hoxton. Reddish lights up on a council house living room. The predominant colour tan, Faux leather settees purchased on the instalment plan.  They were big enough so we could hide behind them when the tallyman called although often I was sent out - a human shield against humiliation I suppose. What a job marking off weekly payments against advances for carpets, furniture, crockery. I hope some of the notebooks  are preserved in a museum though lately it feels like they might be needed as a training tool for the next big society idea. Later would come the catalogue shopping which my elder brother spent hours doing as I tried to scrape together enough Embassy coupons and Green Shield stamps for a guitar,

I was used to presenting this begging posture - only sent for messages to the shop when the weekly bill was due. Did I have a pleading face or was my burgeoning Uriah Heep impression truly effective?  On my lap sat a lined exercise book, covered in offcuts of homebase wallpaper easily lost against the background of said wallpaper in the panic of a Monday morning. Life was not all drab routine - sometimes the book contained graph paper for Maths problems -  like me I guess. My hair was just short enough to pass muster at daily inspection by the Jesuit brothers. Sit down for this revelation that will shake you to the core: some of the brothers were alright, especially when you were having serious doubts about life’s direction. Bohemia truly was only a place studied in O level History lessons  causes of WW2; Art just a lesson you could go wild in.Then came Bowie.

He brought the counter culture into into our living rooms in a way that had not happened before or since. I came of age in the 70s that much derided ten years often represented (perhaps fairly)  as a 60s tribute decade. Much of the culture was secondhand - Dylan/ Beatles/ Stones still the Holy Trinity with a host of lesser saints and sinners below them Albums were for serious folk - “heads” as we called them and boy did I want to be one.

To mark my gravitas  for all to see I dumped the war comics foregoing the poetic charms among which one line remains with me still

“For once the cowardly Germans had chosen to stay and fight”.

The war had ended 40 years earlier but in London it felt like it was only months since Hitler had bitten the capsule. I grew up an  immigrant in a house bordered by Turkish Cypriot to one side and Greek Cypriot - a sort of UN buffer zone. One was a tailor, the other a barber and like the Maltese and Italian families of a certain generation I am fairly sure the older women did not speak much English. The sweatshops they worked in are now gastropubs and oddly a very chic barbers where if clients are asked if they need something for the weekend they probably reply - an ayurvedic spa treatment, a craft beer and a decent sound system, The world Bowie made. Their sons and daughters made up the dramatic personae of my adolescence- first dates with someone’s sister, football with a cousin, flicks with a mate - Bowie was our glue.

We recent arrivals to  Hoxton had no family connections to the war unlike the Cockneys around us, the grocers, butchers, flower sellers, jellied eel stewers. And did they go on and on and on about it. War films on telly, Airfix soldiers including the subhuman Japanese and the heroic Russians - even though we were repeatedly told we were about to be overrun/ overcooked by them. I guess such figure now would come in a set: paramilitary costumed riot police and T-shirt and jeans clad protesters with their hands up. War ruins such as bombed out churches and houses, some with complete Andersen shelters  were our Eden. Out in morning, back at night playing ...war of course. All day. Everyday. Into that wartime world was born David Jones. Bowie was a son of London too more than anywhere else  with all the humour and energy that implies - if you haven’t yet seen it check out the Youtube video Jazzing for Blue Jean where his wind-up, self deprecating, patter merchant comedy is to the fore.

Smiles were frowned on by the music community. The problem was rock was as progressive as the KKK - they also shared an interest in  devaluing anything with black origins - like blues , soul, rock and roll, This meant the  concept album as expounded by Yes...And then  Lights up. Enter Ziggy Stardust.

Bowie taught us how to reject this drabness - to imagine a different world - one being born every day afresh, reinvention of the self,  gender just a label. Crushing conformity was the enemy of us all so we rebelled - first in small ways: dyed hair, makeup, piercings - and eventually punk DIY culture where passion, commitment and feel outranked technical ability. He opened Pandora’s Box - allowing us to view life as a performance. Thus we can imagine a new world rejecting the grey certainties predicated on the oppression on the many.

I got the guitar from my Dad - a Hofner President from an Irish showband player and spent my Tesco’s wages on a David Bowie book I still have today. When you learn an instrument by internalising the chords and lyrics to  All the Madmen/ Young Dudes, Bewlay Brothers and Rock and Roll Suicide it is fair to say your approach to life is somewhat different to the 12 bar blues players everyone else seemed to be. At my one and only guitar lesson from a maestro of the above scene the previous owner of the guitar was surprised  that I could play diminished/augmented but not the three chord trick. He set me to that and changed my life preparing me for punk some years in advance; it also meant I could write my own songs now.

I kept going and after some months could play Queen Bitch at almost the speed of the record- now to work on the vocals. My favourite Bowie singing is actually on Pinups - possibly because they are cover versions. His vocal performances on Low are up there too - though I was convinced that he was playing with the tape speed - a mistake I learnt years later with the release of the sound and vision guide vocal on a TV ad for a phone. Anyway got the impression honed, got an old Watkins amp too that would feed back horribly with the semi acoustic, someone at school gave me a bootleg of Max’s Kansas City and suddenly Lou Reed was in my life too. That helps - recommendations from Bowie meant a lot to most of us and I see many musicians still touring via that connection to an audience made up of many old friends.

I think of Bowie’s work as political in two ways. My Ziggy copy was on Dynaflex a cheap, thin, vastly inferior vinyl used by RCA to keep their profits high as plastic was expensive during the oil crisis of 73/74. It felt far less endurable than the ex-jukebox 45s without the middles I bought from the local store. My brother and I literally wore it out - so inbuilt obsolescence and geopolitical factors in one easy move. More importantly , he taught us that we should celebrate the difference - body shape, ways of seeing/ being in the world but not of it. In that wonderful difference is the political challenge the powers that be truly fear. I see the big hand on the clock of progress being gripped in an iron glove but the little hand will keep ticking slowly but surely each second a tiny motion forwards. As we move into an era of the White norm comparable to forcing women back into the kitchen post WW2 we must keep the tiny hand moving - get inked, get a guitar, get resisting,