Yesterday marked the 52nd anniversary of the release of David Bowie's first LP - which is surely excuse enough to alert new readers of this blog to my "Gnome Thoughts ..." series about David Bowie's early musical influences.
This began when I bought a songbook entitled The Vintage David Bowie which had quite a few songs from that album, along with other Deram era compositions, prompting thoughts about the irony and distancing apparent even in these prentice works. Where had all this come from?
Snippets from an interview with Anthony Newley in Spencer Leigh's book Halfway to Paradise provided at least a partial answer, prompting me to write a follow-up post. Newley referred to himself - persona? product? - in the third person, making me think that perhaps Bowie hadn't just mimicked the older star's singing but had been inspired by his whole approach. Newley told Leigh that his acting background had given him a greater freedom when launching himself as a singer:
I could afford to be silly and they [his UK contemporaries] couldn't. The whole rock'n'roll thing was so desperately serious and it all came from America but I sounded like a Cockney kid who was having a good time.
I also began to wonder about the effect of another figure on Bowie: Alan Klein, a songwriter linked to him via Ken Pitt. Klein played the role of Tristram, Earl of Cricklewood, in the New Vaudeville Band, but had also written the song (and stage/film musical) What a Crazy World, an attempt to express himself in a way which wasn't simply a reheated version of American influences, much as he admired the original rock'n'rollers.
And after What a Crazy World Klein had recorded an album called Well At Least Its [sic] British which drew on a variety of styles but contained what Damon Albarn would later describe as "an embryo of cynicism": the songs didn't talk about the certainty of achieving goals, as their American equivalents might; they were all about admitting the possibility of failure, that this might all be Big Talk From a Little Man, as one title put it, and even advanced the theory that Love's Just a Word in a Song. In his song-by-song Bowie book Rebel Rebel, Chris O'Leary (who cites this blog) describes Well At Least Its British as the "secret parent" of Bowie's first album, pointing out that the same team were involved in its creation.
This led me to consider other English songwriters who weren't emulating the American model, such as Ray Davies and the team of Myles Rudge and Ted Dicks, whose "larky" songs and use of accents might also have fed into Bowie's first album - indeed, I later found a forum where Bowie had spoken about the pair's Toll the Bell for Minne Dyer, a neat story in song about a spinster with a double life which didn't seem that far removed from some Deram ditties.
Further related matters suggested themselves for what was now becoming quite an extensive series of posts: I began to think about the general background of artists like Bowie, John Lennon and Alan Klein, growing up in the fifties and these "Gnome Thoughts From a Foreign Country" (ie the past, as in LP Hartley's introduction to The Go-Between) eventually ran to 38 pieces.
The story isn't over yet; my exploration of the work of Alan Klein is ongoing and I shall keep the reader posted about developments.
In the meantime, however, if you haven't already read it I hope you enjoy the Gnome Thoughts ... series. The first post can be found here and a post-by-post guide to the series as whole is here. Find a guide to the Alan Klein material here.
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