DEAR BOY: THE LIFE OF KEITH MOON

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW 

ABOUT HOW THE BOOK CAME ABOUT

Of all the many hundreds of books I commissioned and edited for Omnibus Press during the 33 years I worked as the company’s Managing Editor, none gave me greater personal satisfaction than Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, it was a best-seller, spectacularly so by rock book standards; secondly, it was an exceptional book, beautifully written, researched in enormous detail and very long, especially bearing in mind that its subject died at the age of only 32; and thirdly – and perhaps most importantly – it treated the highs and lows of Keith Moon’s extraordinary life in equal measure, truly a ‘warts and all’ biography of the highest quality, as was reflected in innumerable positive reviews. 

There was one other reason, of course. The book would focus on The Who, the rock band I admired more than any other, about whom I had written two books myself and for whom I had worked as an archivist sourcing tracks for their 1994 box-set and subsequent upgraded catalogue CDs. Also, I had known Keith and interviewed him at length for Melody Maker back when I was a staff writer on the paper. My relationship with The Who might therefore have led some Who fans to assume that Dear Boy was in some way my initiative but it wasn’t. First and foremost, Dear Boy, the title and everything else, was Tony’s idea. 

        It was in early 1994 when Tony presented me with his lengthy proposal, a list of potential interviewees and how he was going to set about the project, complete with timeline, chapter breakdown and word count. It was his idea to publish it in the first week of September 1998, almost exactly 20 years to the day after Keith Moon’s death. Tony assumed, correctly, and I agreed, that this anniversary would stimulate media interest that might help promote his book but in order for this to happen it had to be delivered in plenty of time for it to go into production and be available in bookshops on the requisite date. To this end it was contracted four years before we planned to publish, Omnibus acquiring UK and Australasian rights, and Avon, under their Spike imprint, publishing in the USA where it was titled Moon: The Life & Death of a Rock Legend [1]. Now published in the US by Harper Collins, there are also German, French and Brazilian language editions, as well as a graphic novel, and 2026 sees its 28th year in print across different editions [2], the latest an Omnibus title in their ‘Remastered’ series due for publication on April 9. 

The US Edition

Back in 1995, the book’s meticulous advance planning gave Tony two years in which to complete his research; around 130 interviews with people who knew Keith, fellow musicians, Who staff, friends and lovers, music journalists, anyone and just about everyone whose paths crossed with that of The Who’s mercurial drummer. Naturally, his first port of call was the group: Entwistle said yes [3], Daltrey no [4], Townshend dithered, ultimately declining as he felt that dredging up memories of Keith might jeopardise his newly-found sobriety [5]. Former co-manager Chris Stamp said yes, as did Bill Curbishley who took over the Who’s management from Stamp and Kit Lambert in the mid-1970s. Perhaps more importantly, the three people who had lived with Keith as an adult – ex-wife Kim, subsequent girlfriend Annette Hunt, then Annette Walter-Lax, and personal assistant/driver Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler – all said yes.

From his home at the time in Manhattan, Tony, along with his then-wife Posie and their six-month-old son, moved to the UK for six months in 1996 so he could better conduct the European research. He travelled up and down the UK interviewing everyone he could get hold of, went to Ireland to meet Oliver Reed and visited Stockholm, twice, to interview Annette (who initially asked for payment, ultimately declined). Quite late in the day, back in the States, he spent a weekend in Austin, Texas, where Kim lived with her second husband, Faces/Small Faces keyboard player Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan. This was the only interview that Kim, who died in 2006, ever gave to anyone. Quite a few noted musicians were also interviewed, among them, in alphabetical order, Mick Avory, Ginger Baker, Jeff Beck, Alice Cooper, Ian Dury, Dave Edmunds, Bobby Elliott, Steve Ellis, Chris Farlowe, Steve Harley, Roy Harper, Bob Henrit, Bruce Johnson, Howard Kaylan, Jim Keltner, Corky Laing, Carlo Little, John Otway, Reg Presley, Viv Prince, Noel Redding, Dave Rowberry, John Sebastian, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, Zak Starkey, Mark Volman and Joe Walsh. From the acting world came Ann-Margret, Larry Hagman, Karl Howman and Oliver Reed. Tony even tracked down all the members of The Beachcombers, the group for whom Keith played before he joined The Who. 

His research complete, Tony spent the best part of a year in the writing, delivering his manuscript 10 months before publication date, thus enabling me the luxury of ample time to edit and do whatever work was necessary before handing it over to our production department. He had hoped to finish the book by the summer of 1997, at which point he had a UK holiday booked, but when this didn’t happen I asked to read the chapters he had written thus far. So keen was I to read what Tony had written about Keith that I took a draft of this home on the Friday night after it arrived which, as it happened, ushered in the same weekend that Princess Diana died. I’d stayed up late glued to our home computer screen on Saturday night and well remember our five-year-old daughter Olivia waking me quite early on Sunday morning to complain that the cartoons she wanted to watch on TV had been supplanted by the sad news from Paris. That day we took Olivia and her two-year-old brother Sam to a sparsely-attended London Zoo where the name-plate on the cage of ‘Diana the Gorilla’ was covered over by a dark cloth to avoid offending royalists with tender sensibilities. 

But I digress. Once the complete text was delivered to me on Halloween, I quickly realised that Tony had produced something very special and decided to go all out on editing and production. I suggested one change to the chapter structure to which Tony complied [6] and brought all my reserves of Who knowledge to bear in making subtle changes here and there. I commissioned Richard Evans, the Who’s go-to graphic designer, to design the book’s jacket and Tony, Richard and myself spent an afternoon visiting big London bookshops to inspect covers of biographies that we thought the retail trade regarded as prestigious. The big seller at the time was Diana: Her True Story In Her Own Words by Andrew Morton which featured on its cover a black and white picture of the late princess against a white background, so we opted for something similar with a head and shoulders portrait of Keith [7] and an embossed title in gold lettering. For the insides I commissioned an artist friend of my wife to create a postage-stamp sized drawing of a snare drum flying over the moon to use at the start of each chapter, and a tiny jester’s hat, drum and wine bottle to indicate breaks in the text where asterisks are normally placed. Once the manuscript was typeset I commissioned my friend Johnny Rogan to prepare an index and, being the English language and rock scholar that he was, he suggested further amendments to the text to polish what I knew would be a jewel in Omnibus’ crown. 

I didn’t stint on the photo research either, and between them our staff researcher Nikki Russell, Tony and Richard came up with everything we needed; childhood pictures, Keith in pre-Who groups, Who shots, Keith with Kim and many others and several that illustrated particular instances in the text, 51 pictures in all across three eight-page sections. I also communicated my enthusiasm for the book to everyone else at Omnibus, not least sales manager Frank Warren, his PA Hilary Donlon and our Contracts Manager Andrew King, all of whom readily jumped on the Dear Boy bandwagon. “You were like a record company when it’s flying,” says Tony. “You had the set-up that would make writers want to be on your label. I recall a lovely publication lunch for all the staff at the restaurant where the Marquee used to be. You allowed me to order a Chateauneuf-du-Pape blanc that was both rare and expensive, and you’d have okayed a second bottle but that was the only one they had. I think we downgraded.”

Our hunch about the 20th anniversary of Keith’s death proved correct. In the month of Dear Boy’s publication Mojo magazine featured Keith on its cover, and our Rights Manager Helen Donlon somehow achieved serialisation in the Sunday Mail. Charles Shaar Murray’s extensive review occupied the whole of the front page of the Daily Telegraph’s arts section. In the week of publication we threw a launch party at The Borderline in Soho where we gave away Dear Boy t-shirts, and among those who attended were Dougal Butler, Richard Barnes (Pete Townshend’s one-time flatmate who coined the name ‘The Who’), former Who tour manager John ‘Wiggy’ Wolff, Doug Sandom, the drummer in The Detours whom Keith succeeded in the spring of 1964, and Paul Kemp, the drummer in Who tribute band Who’s Who. A spitting image of the real Keith, Paul managed to get a group of revellers thrown out of an after-hours bar later in the evening. “Keith would have approved,” notes Tony, who was among them. 

Furthermore – and much to our delight – on the Sunday before it arrived in the shops we were able to sell it at a Who fan convention held at the Astoria Theatre in central London, which 11 years later would be demolished to make way for a Crossrail station. The date was September 6, the day before the 20th anniversary of Keith’s death, and in many ways the convention acted as a tribute to him.

The queue of Who fans snaking past our trestle table to snap up Dear Boy remained in place throughout the entire afternoon. While UK fans who bought a copy got it one day early, many American fans who flew over for the convention got theirs three months early as the US edition wasn’t published there until the following January [8]. In the event many US fans bought several copies as Christmas presents for their Who fan friends back home, blithely overlooking how its weight might impact on their baggage allowance. Tony was on hand at the convention to read extracts from the stage and sign copies of his book, as did Kitty Moon, Keith’s mum, who also turned up, accompanied by Lesley, the younger of Keith’s two sisters.

CC and Tony at the convention, 

and a pile of empty boxes that once contained copies of Dear Boy.

In all we sold 400 copies of Dear Boy at £20 a throw directly to fans that day, and late in the evening – after the Who’s Who tribute band had performed – I took the tube home to Shepherds Bush clinging on to a plastic bag containing the best part of £8,000 in £10 and £20 notes. It was a fantastic result, a precursor to the book’s ongoing success, and dumping that bag of cash on my boss’ desk the following morning was as satisfying for me as everything else connected with Dear Boy, not least the subsequent realisation that it eventually outsold Thatcher’s official biography. 

And so we come to the 2026 edition, published as a pocket paperback, though at almost 600 pages it’s a bit too chunky to fit into anything but an XXL pocket. At the start there’s two new forewords, one by Tony and the other by Keith Moon’s daughter Mandy, now Amanda De Wolf. Mandy, who became a grandmother in 2023 and now lives in California, admits that she was only eight when she last saw her father and never really knew him, only his life and legacy as detailed in Dear Boy. 

        It’s slightly bizarre to realise that, had he lived, Keith would have become a great-grandfather at the absurdly early age of 77 – but then again absurdity clung to Keith Moon like moss to a stone – and evidently continues to do so 48 years after the Dear Boy’s death. 

------------------------

[1] The US publishers felt the title Dear Boy might lead some to believe it was a book aimed at a gay audience. 

[2] In 2005, Omnibus published a revised trade paperback edition with a new 20-page Afterword comprising material Tony gleaned from interviews with acquaintances of Moon who contacted him after the book’s initial publication.

[3] John gave Tony one his frankest ever interviews, revealing not only his love of Keith but his deep frustration at the stop-start nature of The Who’s career following Keith’s death, for which he blamed Townshend. 

[4] I don’t believe Roger grasped the scope the project. No doubt assuming Tony was planning to write a brief, sensationalist paperback full of scandalous stories, he was approached and declined several times and was probably shocked by the eventual appearance of a 576-page hardback that in his opinion didn’t portray him as he would have preferred. In an interview with Record Collector magazine shortly after Dear Boy’s publication he suggested the book was merely the recollections of ‘alcoholics and drug addicts’. This prompted me to write to Record Collector pointing out that of the Who’s inner circle of six (Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle, Moon, Lambert and Stamp), he was the only one who wasn’t an alcoholic or drug addict at one time or another. It later transpired that Roger felt its publication might impact unfavourably on his commercial interests in a film he planned to make about Keith, a film which, incidentally, has yet to go into production despite having gone through multiple scripts and prospective directors and lead actors. Incidentally, Dear Boy was optioned almost immediately on publication as source material for a movie, and when Roger was interviewed by Sky News some years ago a copy of Dear Boy was prominently displayed on a shelf behind his head. 

[5] Pete faxed Tony to the effect that he, ‘no longer had anything to say about Keith that is kind’. Shortly before the book went to press Tony heard that Pete apparently regretted his decision, which is exactly what those close to him intimated would happen. A few weeks after its publication, backstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire following a solo show, Pete told me that Tony ‘should be very proud of the book he had written’. 

[6] The dramatic opening to Chapter 27 was initially towards the end of Chapter 26. I felt it warranted a more prominent position. 

[7] The photograph of Keith on the cover of Dear Boy was taken by David Magnus in 1965. 

[8] The US publishers actually requested that I delay our publication so that it coincided with theirs, but I was having none of it.

(Thanks to Tony for help with this post. tonyfletcher.substack.com )

KEITH ALTHAM - PR TO THE STARS

The music writer and PR Keith Altham, whose death aged 84 was announced yesterday, was a fixture in my life for over 50 years. He’d seen it all and done it all, and no one I know, probably no one in the world, had a richer fund of hilarious stories – many of them salty and unflattering – about the music business and those who toil within it. I never came away from spending time with Keith without a smile on my face.

        Keith was already a seasoned music business insider by the time I reached Melody Maker in 1970. He began his career writing for Fabulous in the early 1960s, then graduated to NME, and he interviewed and wrote about everyone, Beatles, Stones, Who, you name them. When he branched out into PR in 1971 his client roster read like a Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. He was down to earth and practical, and didn’t stand for any prima donna behaviour from anyone, no matter how famous they were. His 1999 book No More Mister Nice Guy! is series of letters to those clients of his, 37 in total, and he doesn’t mince words. It’s one of the funniest music books you’ll find anywhere.

        At various times Keith represented the two groups, The Who and Slade, with whom I became the closest during my years on Melody Maker, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the only two stars who come of out of No More Mister Nice Guy! smelling of roses are Pete Townshend and Noddy Holder. He and I tended to think alike. 

        His escapades with Keith Moon could fill a book, and I can still recall spending a hair-raising afternoon in 1971 with the two Keiths and ‘Legs’ Larry Smith at the Chertsey Agricultural Show. Quite why Moonie and Legs had decided to enter the ‘tossing the hay bale’ competition no one knew, or cared, but they did and Keith Altham was on hand to ensure that the local papers got all the photos they needed. When his great pal John Entwistle died, Keith wrote, knowingly: “His dexterity and imagination on the bass guitar – often considered a basic and pedestrian instrument in other groups – was an integral part of the Who’s classic wall of sound, so much so that that the three instrumentalists and one vocalist on stage often sounded like a full orchestra on the charge. John’s complex rhythms always provided an explosive cannon at the rear.”

        As for Slade, it was Keith’s suggestion in 1969 to turn them into skinheads and their manager Chas Chandler, always keen to generate publicity, good or bad, leapt on the idea. Years later, when I was researching my Slade book Feel The Noize! Keith was enormously helpful, and we spent three days together in Walsall, spending time with Noddy, Jim Lea, Dave Hill and the group’s tour manager Graham ‘Swin’ Swinnerton. He was particularly close to Chas and in 1996 we took a train to Newcastle together to attend Chas’ funeral in Cullercoats on Tyneside where Keith gave a eulogy, mentioning – to everyone’s astonishment – that at one time Chas had plans to link Perth to Sydney by canal. 

        Keith was always happy to share his memories with anyone and everyone. In 2018, he and I were among guests who attended the premiere of a movie entitled Should Have Been There, a documentary about Melody Maker in the 1960s and 70s that focused on the work of our photographer Barrie Wentzell. I took along my son Sam, then aged 23 and a massive admirer of Jimi Hendrix. Aware that Keith had known Hendrix well (it was Keith who’d suggested Jimi set his guitar alight at the London Astoria back in 1967, and he was the last journalist to interview him in 1970), I steered them both to a pizza restaurant in Leicester Square when the film was over and for the next hour he delighted Sam, who was spellbound, with stories about the great guitarist. 

This photograph was taken following the movie premiere I refer to above. Keith is second from the left, in a hat, and I'm stood just behind him, alongside Chris Welch and his wife Marilyne. Barrie Wentzell is in the centre, and my son Sam is second from the right. 

        For the past 20 years or so Keith and I met twice a year at the Bull’s Head in Barnes where a group of music industry veterans gather together to reminisce about how things were before big business and computers ruined everything. It was always a pleasure to spend time with Keith, even though in recent years his health wasn’t what it was. Four years ago, Keith’s daughter Nancy asked me contribute to a book to be presented to Keith on his 80th birthday. Here’s what I wrote: 

Lines of the occasion of KA’s 80th

(With apologies to Pete Townshend)

People try to put him down

Just because he gets around

He’s a prince among his peers

Hope he lives for 100 years

This is Keith Altham

Keith Altham, baby

Why don't we all kneel and p-p-pray

To wish our Keith a happy birthday

I’m not tryin’ to cause a big s-s-sensation

Just tryin’ to give him v-v-veneration

This is Keith Altham

This is Keith Altham, baby

He ain’t gonna f-fade away

‘Cos we all like what he has to s-s-say

I love him ‘cos he loves The Who

An’ if you don’t dig that well screw you too

Talkin’ ‘about Keith Altham

Keith Altham, baby

RIP old pal. 

PUNK AT 50

Dear Mojo Editor

PUNK AT 50 – HOW IT CHANGED EVERYTHING screams the strap line on the cover of last issue of Mojo, with Johnny Rotten, eyes ablaze, alongside. Well did it? 

In 1976, the year the Pistols began to make waves, over 100,000 fans turned up to watch the Stones at Knebworth. Bowie played six nights at Wembley Empire Pool, Paul McCartney’s Wings three. In 1977, Pink Floyd played five nights at the same venue. Heavens only knows how many fans turned up at Knebworth in 1979 to watch Led Zep, well over 200,000 anyway. And that same year The Who played Wembley Stadium, around 80,000 I guess. A glance at the best-selling LPs for those years – step forward Abba, Rod Stewart, Floyd, Zep, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Bee Gees, etc – reveals a remarkable dearth of punk acts. And let’s not even bother with the situation in America. 

All of which leads me to conclude that the ‘punk revolution’ was created largely by staff writers from the hawkish weekly music press baying for the blood of the dinosaurs and not by the overwhelming majority of fans. To a degree, this is reflected on pages 26 and 27 of this same issue of Mojo where an in-house ad features 24 covers, only one of which – the current Sex Pistols issue – can be said to feature a ‘punk’ act, unless you count Paul Weller who wouldn’t be seen dead in a torn tee-shirt. 14 of those covers feature acts that predate punk, most of whom released their first records in the 1960s. 

This would seem to confirm the view that, try as they might, the idea that the punks slaughtered the dinosaurs is a myth. 

This is not to say that punk didn’t blow away a few cobwebs that needed blowing away, or that several acts carried along in the same momentum didn’t produce some great records. But let’s not get carried away. Punk didn’t change everything. Nothing much changed in the long term. It just created a new(ish) rock genre.

Great Miles Davis CD, by the way.

Regards

Chris Charlesworth

EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert

Baz Luhrmann caught the Elvis bug while directing his 2022 blockbuster biopic that starred Austin Butler as the star and Tom Hanks as Col Tom Parker, his scheming manager. In the course of his research for that film – reviewed here (https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2022/06/elvis-movie.html) on Just Backdated – he discovered a cache of largely unseen concert and rehearsal footage of Elvis that he’s brought to the big screen for what is not just the most impressive screen presentation of Elvis on stage but also, in newly discovered interview footage and voice-overs, the most revealing.

It’s now over 70 years since Elvis exploded out of Memphis which no doubt explains why Luhrmann felt it necessary to preface the on-stage material with an express train ride through his early career for those too young to know, but anyone who’s taken an interest in Elvis will already be familiar with the footage from his early B&W TV appearances and movies, as well as conscription into the army which shaped his career thereafter. Once that’s through we see Elvis rehearsing with his core band, location unknown, during which he sings ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’, ‘Runaway’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Something’, quite beautifully too, at least when he concentrates. 

Although the precise date is not made clear, these preliminaries lead up to a show at the Las Vegas Hilton, presumably one of the earliest, probably in 1970. We see him in his all-white jumpsuit lingering at the side of the stage as the band begin. He looks a tad nervous, his leg twitching. Then someone draws the curtain aside for him and he steps out… BOOM. This is what we’re here for. Elvis grins, then zips into a fast-paced ‘That’s all Right’, and he sounds marvellous, as does the band, fat and punchy with enormous drive, and in the cinema it’s very loud, deep thumping bass and crackling lead guitar. 

        This is Elvis before the fried banana and bacon sandwiches took their toll and he looks and sounds terrific, the most handsome, sexiest man on the planet who can sing like no one else. No wonder those watching – we see them all in the crescent-shaped supper room, tier after tier, row on row of elegantly dressed customers, mostly female – go potty. Then he’s into ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Polk Salad Annie’, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ and a phenomenal segue back and forth between ‘Little Sister’ and The Beatles’ ‘Get Back’.

        Elvis entertains as well as sings – in one of the interviews he describes himself as “an entertainer”, which I thought was revealing – and he can be cheesy. He enjoys fooling around with the women at the front, kissing them, touching them, and at one point completes a song with what looks like a dark blue bra on his head. Some of this tom-foolery might be designed to show that he’s human after all, and not the godlike superstar his fans adore, but it detracts from the act, even if it amuses the band and his back-up singers.        

        The concert footage is cleverly interspersed with rehearsal footage of the same songs – they switch back and forth – and though from time to time there’s an issue with the lip-synching, it doesn’t really matter. In between we get the interviews, some from a 1970 press conference at the Houston Astrodome – the first venue outside of Vegas where Elvis performed after his 1969 comeback – and some from the 1972 conference in New York prior to his Madison Square Garden shows that year. Still more, as voice-overs between songs, have evidently been sourced from hitherto unreleased interviews suppressed by Parker who was notoriously reluctant to allow Elvis ever to speak to the press. Parker, incidentally, is seen occasionally throughout, invariably in unflattering situations, occasionally flogging tat. 

        Among other things Elvis disparages his movies from the Sixties, sounding almost apologetic, talks about his background in gospel music and expresses a desire to perform in Europe. He sounds humble, as if the direction his life has taken still puzzles him, and he sometimes seems to have difficulty explaining himself.

        But it’s the music that matters and although later footage in the second half of the movie – probably from 1972 when he was beginning to tire – doesn’t quite hit the spot as much as the earlier material, we get an all too brief ‘I Shall Be Released’, from a rehearsal, ‘Burnin’ Love’, ‘Love Me’, ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’, ‘You Were Always On My Mind’, ‘Oh Happy Day’, the hymn ‘How Great Though Art’, ‘Big Hunk Of Love’, ‘In The Ghetto’, ‘Walk A Mile In My Shoes’ and a stupendous ‘Suspicious Minds’. The curtain comes down after ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’. 

        No review of this movie would be complete without showering praise on Elvis’ superb band, mostly notably James Burton on lead guitar, Jerry Scheff on Fender bass and Ronnie Tutt on drums. All of them play as if their lives depend on it. Shamefully, they are not even mentioned in the closing credits. 

SLADE & STEELY DAN – AN UNLIKELY PAIRING

For reasons that continue to baffle their fans, Slade and America were uneasy bedfellows during the period when they achieved their greatest success in the UK. My theory is that it was simply bad timing. In 1973, the year they first visited the US, the counry wasn’t prepared for Noddy Holder’s showmanship, the ‘audience as part of the show’ style that subsequent rock acts, most notably Bruce Springsteen, employed, or, quite simply, the clothes they wore. Instead of being too little too late, they were too much too soon.  

        Reading my Just Backdated memoir not so long ago, Don Powell, Slade’s indefatigable drummer, came across a quote from Steely Dan’s Walter Becker that implied Slade weren’t among his group’s favourite acts. “How they ever managed to get enough money together to come here and tour is a miracle,” Becker told me when I interviewed him and his partner Donald Fagen in April of 1974. 

Slade, of course, were pals of mine in those days and I’d done my best to promote their interests in the columns of Melody Maker, mostly on the strength of their live shows. Now MM’s man in America, I had waited ages for an opportunity to interview the notoriously reticent Steely Dan men, and thought it best not to come to Slade’s defence lest Donald and Walter walk out on me. 

        “Steely Dan doesn’t have a, nice word to say about us, do they?” Don emailed me earlier this week. “I remember when they supported us. I think, they experienced the wrath of our notorious road crew.”

        In the event Slade were amongst a host of acts Becker and Fagen didn’t much like, among them Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. They described Black Oak Arkansas and “absolute trash” and grudgingly admitted that Yes and ELP were skilled musicians, even though their music was not to their taste. “I will grudgingly admit that English bands are more polished performers,” said Becker. “Their recordings are more carefully made… but I can’t understand how that is.”

        My email exchange with Don on this matter prompted him to do a bit of research that unearthed the promotional advert at the top of this post and also that on May 5 & 6, 1973 Slade appeared on a three-act show, in between bill toppers Humble Pie and openers Steely Dan, at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco. Although Humble Pie and Slade seems like a reasonable mix to me – both boasted fantastic guitar playing singers – whoever though it was a good idea to have Steely Dan open up this show needed their head examined. Clearly this would have been the Slade gig at which Becker and Fagen watched from the wings, horrified at the antics of Noddy and his boys. 

        Slade’s American adventure, especially the period when they lived in New York, roughly between 1975 and 1977, is generally dismissed as a something they’d prefer to forget. They slogged their guts out on the road for scant pickings, failed to generate much in the way of record sales, lost a good deal of money and returned to the UK with their tail between their legs. 

But America wasn’t entirely indifferent to Slade, as the advertisement above – albeit it a concert from before they went to live in the US – demonstrates. In those days the Philadelphia Spectrum held around 18,000, and Slade topped the bill there over the Eagles and others “quite a few times”, according to Don. It's interesting to note that Lou Reed, of all people, opened the show. Another city where Slade drew big crowds was St Louis where I saw them twice, and you can find my report on an early 1974 show here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2014/08/slade-ambassador-theater-st-louis-mo.html

DONNA SUMMER

A four act show always runs the risk of dragging, even when the organisation is as meticulous as it was last Saturday at New York’s Radio City Music Hall when Archie Bell & the Drells, Donna Summer, Bobby Womack and the Temptations all appeared in one of a series of concerts promoted by black WBLS disc jockey Frankie Crocker.

But the use of two stages, one at the rear and one at the front which rose as the curtains closed on the rear, kept the show moving with the kind of precision that every road crew must dream about. Apart from a ten-minute break before the Temptations, there was no delay at all, Summer following Bell and Womack following Summer so quickly that their respective songs almost segued into one another.

My most particular interest lay in Womack and Ms Summer, as did that of Mick Jagger who, I was reliably informed, was closeted up in the balcony of this massive ancient theatre chatting before he went on with Womack who wrote ‘It’s All Over Now’, one of the Stones’ biggest early hits.

Donna Summer has had a massive disco hit in the US with ‘Love To Love You Baby’, and her album of the same title, the first side of which contains a 16 minute and 30 second version of the same song, is also a hot seller. Her act is based entirely around this song, although she sang two other numbers besides, one of which was a dead ringer for ‘I’m A Man’, the Steve Winwood classic recorded by the Spencer Davis Group. 

Entering the stage rather as Cleopatra entered Rome, carried by a couple of hunky guys and wearing a gold hairpiece, Donna opened with a brief version of ‘Love To Love You’ accompanied by a couple of dancers and a biggish back-up unit called Smoke. There followed the two other songs and a five-minute spell of instrumental funk noodling before she reappeared for a final, lengthy reprise of ‘Love To Love You’, on which she was joined by six dancers, three amorous couples, and plenty of dry ice.

While Ms Summer warbled the lyrics and cooed in the orgasmic fashion of the record, the dancing couples, all dressed in skin tight, flesh-coloured garments that gave the impression of nakedness from where I was sat, simulated various sexual positions. It all seemed a bit Benny Hill meets Carry On Up The Khyber to me and the audience, bored rather than shocked at this massage parlour display, responded limply. 

        It took Bobby Womack and his excellent band to stop the giggling and bring back the music. Most of Womack’s material was new, up-tempo funk. He pushed it along with hoarse vocals, and was perpetually prodding at the band to get the most out of them, especially the three-piece brass section. Looking rather like a Cuban revolutionary in his beret and khaki clothes, he strapped on a Les Paul during his final two numbers and sounded remarkably like Hendrix.

He was good but rather anonymous. He didn’t play ‘It’s All Over Now’ – I was rather hoping Mick would join him for this as an encore – but he didn’t get one, even though I thought he deserved one. Both Bell and his Drells and, most especially in the light of their hit-strewn back catalogue, the Temptations delivered traditional black soul, complete with fancy steps, nice vocal harmonies and, in the case of the Drells, some Kung-Fu action. 

ELVIS: ALOHA FROM HAWAII

Earlier this week I watched Elvis: Aloha From Hawaii, a live concert augmented with additional songs, on Sky Arts. It’s been around for years, of course, but I don’t think I’d seen it before, not the whole thing. It took place in January, 1973, before Elvis lost control of his figure, and was a big deal because it was broadcast live via satellite to Asia and Oceania, then Europe. 

In view of this it might be assumed that Elvis would do something special but although he’s absurdly handsome and for the most part does a reasonable job, there’s something strangely routine about his performance. Most of the songs he sings are on the short side, mostly abridged versions of his hits, and he seems in a hurry to get the show over and done with, as if it has interrupted some activity that he would prefer to be doing. His band is superb, especially guitarist James Burton who gets a chance to solo brilliantly on two or three of the quicker R&R songs, but the overall feeling is that Elvis isn’t trying too hard. 

The audience don’t seem to expect more from him and they are undemonstrative, clapping fairly politely at the end of each song but showing little excitement. A few women close to the front or the catwalk become animated when Elvis approaches them, standing up to hand him white handkerchiefs (or perhaps freshly-laundered knickers) with which to mop his brow and he rewards some by tossing them scarves. A lucky few get a kiss on the cheek. When he leaves their immediate vicinity, the women sit down again, politely. As far as I could see, no one in this vast audience rose to their feet at any time during the show – unlike the crowds at pretty much every big rock show I saw in America.

This was clearly a show that Elvis had performed countless times before, and the slightly cheesy karate poses he adopts at the end of each song begin to look
hackneyed after a while, as do his occasional attempts at humour. A comment about his trousers splitting during ‘Suspicious Minds’ simply spoilt any drama that  generated during an otherwise excellent interpretation, adding to a feeling that Elvis treated the show frivolously, almost as public appearance in much the same way as, say, soldiers in red coats march up and down outside Buckingham Palace, with the music secondary to the opportunity simply to see him in person, perhaps to confirm that he’s still alive

Cheesier still were songs, three – all ballads from the movie Blue Hawaii I think – that accompanied the scenes of romancing couples as they traipse around Hawaii’s beauty spots, thus lengthening the film of the show by about 20 minutes, which means the actual concert didn’t last much longer than an hour, about half as long as shows by premier league rock bands of the era. These songs evidently weren’t part of the concert but were tacked on later and appeared designed to promote Hawaii as a tourist destination.

Towards the end, during an instrumental break between songs in the ‘American Trilogy’ medley, Elvis seemed lost in thought, gazing absent-mindedly at the ceiling. Perhaps he was wondering what it all meant, how very little he needed to give of himself to please his fans. It was all over soon after that, a dramatic ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ closing the show. He walked off very quickly. “Elvis has left the building,” someone announced before he’d had time to do so. 

To my utmost regret, I never saw Elvis perform live, let alone reviewed him in concert, though my two predecessors as Melody Maker’s US Editor, Roy Hollingworth and Michael Watts, both did. Roy attended a press conference that Elvis and his manager Colonel Tom Parker gave on 9 June 1972, the same day Elvis appeared at Madison Square Garden and described the show as a “fiasco… not very good at all. The audience was as responsive as a lot of doped sheep. Lazy, he had been lazy.”

Our colleague Michael was almost as unimpressed when he reviewed Elvis at Nassau Coliseum out on Long Island the following June. While allowing that Elvis’ voice is “deeper and richer than ever” and none of his songs – Michael lists 11 – are “bummers” which he sings well, he performs them all “mechanically. His act seems to be a whole medley in itself, cutting short on each one, running straight into another. The machine is so well greased it all slips painlessly through the mind. It’s showbusiness without melodrama and that’s the worst.” 

        Like Roy, Michael comments on the relentless hawking of Elvis merchandise, even as the crowds were filing out. “There are full colour posters of Elvis… superb reproductions… only two dollars,” rings in his ears as he left the arena, repeated six times. 

By the time I got to America for my stint as MM’s man there, Elvis had evidently decided to bypass New York. He wasn’t seen there during 1974, ’75 or ’76, though he was back at Nassau Coliseum in July of ’75 which just happened to coincide with my visiting the UK for a few weeks. He performed in smaller cities within an hour’s flight of NY but the press office at RCA Records was unusually uncooperative when I asked (more than once) if it was possible for them to arrange transport for me to see an Elvis show. In contrast, virtually every press officer from every other label laid out the red carpet for me to fly to see anyone anywhere in America, usually the next day with an interview and a night in a hotel thrown in too. Perhaps MM was on a blacklist after Roy and Michael had taken their scalpel to the King Of Rock’Roll. Reading what they wrote this week, I would probably have drawn similar conclusions, perhaps worse as a couple of years down the line Elvis’ concerts were deteriorating fast. 

This might explain why, after I’d left MM but was still living in New York, I somehow got hold of two tickets to see a cancelled Elvis show at Nassau Coliseum that would have taken place in September, 1977, about a month after he died. It was one of about a dozen cancelled shows. 

A month before Elvis died I was in Memphis, tour-managing a group formed by the Muscle Shoals session guitarist Pete Carr and singer Lenny LeBlanc. While there Pete, Lenny and myself went to visit Graceland, just to stand by the gates with the wrought-iron outline of Elvis and look up the drive towards the famous mock Gothic porch and four imposing pillars on either side of the front door. I have every reason to believe that its famous occupant was in residence that day, so this was the closest I ever got to the singer whose records in the 1950s turned me on to rock’n’roll when I was 12 years old. I can’t remember who took our photograph outside the gates – that’s me in the middle, Pete on the left, Lennie on the other side – probably one of their band, or even how I came to have a copy of it but I treasure a print still. About six weeks later Elvis was carried out of Graceland on a stretcher. So I never did get to see him. 

JOHN & PAUL: A Love Story In Songs by Ian Leslie

I can recall with unusual clarity the first time I ever heard The Beatles. It was the second Sunday in January, 1963, and I was 15 and already a committed pop fan. I was in the passenger seat of my father’s car, a white Triumph Vitesse, being driven from Skipton back to boarding school at York. On the car’s back seat was his red Roberts radio, tuned into the BBC Light Programme, its reception enabled by a cable that snaked its way to an aerial clamped outside the rear window. The programme was Pick Of The Pops, hosted by DJ Alan Freeman, freshly appointed to the role, and as we cruised through Harrogate, sometime between 1 and 2pm, he played ‘Please Please Me’, the group’s second single, just released.

Hello, I thought, that sounds different, funny, really good, terrific in fact. Who on earth is it? I strained my ears to listen but it was over too soon. I wanted to hear it again straight away but I couldn’t, of course, and I didn’t catch the name of the act. But the important thing is that I recognised something, the singing, the guitars, the harmonica, the oh yeas, in the two minutes of ‘Please Please Me’ that stood out from all the other records that Freeman played that day, stood out from pretty much anything I’d ever heard before in fact. I was an instant fan of whoever it was and I didn’t even know their name. 

Sixty-three years later, it is reassuring to be told yet again that my adolescent ears weren’t deceiving me. “‘Please Please Me’ is impatient, lusty, playful and reproachful,” writes Ian Leslie in this extraordinary book, and later: “[It] is a series of climaxes: the mouth organ’s clarion call; the opening harmony; the call and response; the sweet release of the chorus; the final oh yeahs. It combines Bing Crosby, the Everlys, Little Richard, girl groups and Motown, yet instead of sounding patched together it is utterly itself, unified by force of collective personality.” Quite. 

John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs was published late last year to universal acclaim. I was hoping that Santa might drop a copy down our chimney but that didn’t happen so I waited until it was available in paperback, as it was last week. This edition has three pages of laudatory reviews at the front, eight similar snippets on the cover and I’ve been utterly absorbed by it for the last five days. 

        The reason for all the fuss is that it’s a different sort of Beatles book, not a biography or chronicle or diary, not a memoir by someone who knew or worked for them, not an exposé of disreputable behaviour, not an arty picture book, not a critical study, not even a structural analysis of their music, not really. It’s simply a deep dive into the minds of John and Paul, focusing almost exclusively on their relationship – the Love Story of the subtitle; a beautifully written account of how the two principal Beatles worked together in the studio, where their songs came from and how they wrote and recorded them, how John and Paul in particular bounced ideas off each other and how the ying and yang of their contrasting personalities somehow fused together to create a body of work that to this day remains the shining exemplar of popular music. 

        “The twentieth century tilted on its axis,” writes Leslie of the day in July 1957 when Paul introduced himself to John, nailing his colours to the mast at the close of Chapter 1. It wasn’t long before they realised that, musically, they could read each other’s minds. To the astonishment of everyone around them, not least producer George Martin, their rivalry drove them to get better and better until it simply exploded into a situation where communication stopped, like the breakdown of a marriage, a tragedy that even now leaves everyone scratching their heads (and authors writing books like this). 

        Seeking comparisons, many reviewers have likened John & Paul to Revolution In The Head, Ian MacDonald’s 1994 book, widely acknowledged as the pinnacle of Beatles criticism, but there are important differences: MacDonald is comprehensive, covering every Beatles track, Leslie is selective, choosing songs – 43 in total, not all written by them, a handful written after the split – that support or amplify his themes; MacDonald is disparaging, sometimes brutally, of songs he considers under par, of which there are plenty, Leslie does nothing but shower praise; perhaps most importantly, Leslie’s emphasis on the group’s principal songwriters gives it an entirely different feel to previous books on the group. George and Ringo barely get a look in.

        At the heart of John & Paul is the author’s theory that many of their songs are, in fact, coded messages between the two. Building on his knowledge of human behaviour, about which he has written extensively, Leslie interprets songs in ways that no previous Beatles critic has done; they might be songs of encouragement, or convey feelings of jealousy or vulnerability, or love or hurt, or simply friendship. In short, their songs are about, or aimed at, themselves and because of this the Beatles’ music contains hidden emotions that reveal themselves only after time, and this is the reason why, after all these years, it is still universally loved. 

        This might sound contentious but in many instances Leslie’s interpretations hold water. Try it: do they believe they can work it out; was the relationship getting better during the Pepper sessions; is Paul urging John to go and get Yoko in ‘Hey Jude’: does Paul want John to get back to him; does John plead with Paul not to let me down; is Paul telling John he’ll never do him any harm and can’t make it alone in ‘Oh Darling’; and surely the memories referenced in ‘Two Of Us’ are their own. And when John sings ‘Nobody else can see, just you and me’ in ‘Look At Me’, written in 1968, was he addressing Paul? After the split, of course, these messages became far more transparent: ‘How Do You Sleep?’ from his LP Imagine is John’s scathing, unfounded attack on his former song-writing partner, while ‘Dear Friend’, the poignant closing track on Wildlife, is surely Paul’s conciliatory message to John.

        Interwoven between this hypothesising is a concise and accurate resume of the group’s career, drawn – as Leslie freely admits – from existing sources, all credited in his acknowledgments at the close. The roles played by Yoko and Linda are discussed, along with revealing conversations and meetings between the two couples that reinforce the love John and Paul still felt for each other after the group split up. Suggestions throughout that John needed Paul more than the other way around go some way to redressing the balance as regards which senior Beatle was more crucial to the construction of their catalogue of songs. Leslie quotes many instances where John would bring a song to the group and how Paul would transform it, but far fewer cases where the opposite was true. John often arrived at Abbey Road with fragments, Paul with completed songs. In this respect Leslie mistrusts the somewhat inevitable canonisation of John following his murder, attributing much of it to Philip Norman’s revelatory book, Shout! The True Story Of The Beatles, first published in 1981. 

        Each chapter in John & Paul is titled after a song, a handful of which towards the beginning of the book are covers. Chapter 4, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, intrigued me insofar as there is no recorded evidence of The Beatles performing this much-admired song, only narrative evidence in Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In. “If there’s one of these lost cover versions I would love to hear, it’s ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, a Shirelles song Lennon liked to sing at the Cavern,” writes Leslie (and, by the way, so would I). “Lennon understood, in his bones, the emotion that animates ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’: wanting love and not trusting it to stay. What he learned from Smokey [Robinson] and from black teenage girls was how to communicate feeling rather than just feel it.”

        At the other end of the book, in a heart-rending closing chapter that considers ‘Here Today’, Paul’s hypothetical conversation with John from his 1982 Tug Of War album, Leslie bows out with the realisation that by sharing the love they had for one another with the world, the music it inspired has made this world “an immeasurably better place”. Who would argue with that? 

        John & Paul deserves to be read by every Beatle fan. My paperback edition has 433 pages including 24 pages of reference notes (including my own interview with Paul in 1971), a superb index and, as a sort of coda, a Q&A with the author conducted by Kate Mossman. Though well known, the eight pages of mostly b&w pictures are carefully selected to complement the text. 

RINGO – A Fab Life by Tom Doyle

Pity the poor drummers, left high and dry when the band no longer needs them, even one as famous as Ringo Starr. Singers and guitarists are shown the red carpet but drummers can’t figure out what to do with themselves. Charlie Watts sat in, but couldn’t drive, his high-priced cars while reading his ultra-rare first editions; Keith Moon drank himself to death; Ginger Baker squandered his riches on polo; Clem Burke played with a Blondie tribute band. Ringo tried pretty much anything and everything, and by 1979 was perpetually drunk. Diagnosed with a life-threatening intestinal blockage that year, a doctor told him that if he left the hospital without the recommended treatment he would die. To his great credit he sobered up, though it took a while, and is still with us, now Sir Ringo. In July he’ll be 86.

        There is no rational explanation why Ringo has, until now, been largely ignored by biographers but to the best of my knowledge A Fab Life – great title, by the way – is only the second [1] book to have been written on him while those about his band (and three bandmates) could fill a library. Perhaps the reason lies in this quote from Ringo’s close friend and fellow drummer Jim Keltner: “He seemed too overly humble… almost beyond humble… totally unaware that he’d done anything. That’s what I must have been like to be the drummer with The Beatles.”

Ringo’s diffidence is to blame, then, for the paucity of books about him but the truth of the matter is that his life is just as interesting, and indeed more comical, than John, Paul or George. Within a year of being drafted into The Beatles, just as they began their recording career, he found himself amongst the most famous men in the UK, and a year after that he was America’s favourite Beatle, and all the while he just kept grinning blithely and muttering plays on words, amusingly dry malapropisms that became known as Ringoisms, the best known of which was the title of The Beatles’ first film. 

This is a good-hearted book about a good-hearted man, and it covers all the important events in Ringo’s life, albeit not precisely in linear fashion. Wisely, Tom Doyle has opted to tell Ringo’s story through a series of snapshots, seventy in all, bite-sized chapters that are roughly chronological and in their often droll fashion somehow suit the character of the smallest, oldest and most lovable Beatle. There is a school of thought that Ringo, born Richard Starkey and known to his friends as Richy, is the luckiest man alive but he has lived up to his billing, even if his passage through life, as recorded here, occasionally reminded me of the character of Chance The Gardner from Being There, Peter Sellers’ last great movie role. 

If you’ve taken the trouble to keep tabs on Ringo’s extraordinary life during the past 50 years then you probably won’t find much that is new in this book. Nevertheless, Doyle has done his research admirably and listed among the many chapters every film in which Starr has appeared and every album that carried his name – and there’s lots of them, certainly more than I thought – and every one of them is critically analysed, their merits or otherwise noted in a detached manner.  One thing I didn’t know, and that Doyle makes clear, is that the well-known aphorism that Ringo wasn’t the best drummer in The Beatles, falsely attributed to John Lennon, was in reality a Jasper Carrott joke, uttered in 1987, that Carrott subsequently regretted. “I’ve never met Ringo,” says Carrott, “but if he was in the same room as me, I’d skirt around it very quickly.”

Of more import, perhaps, is the genuine love that Ringo inspires among his many friends. Aside from the period when he was so drunk that people avoided him, no one has a bad word to say about him, which reinforces the widespread view that he was the diplomat amongst the Beatles; bluff, warm and engaging, never one to raise his voice in anger or throw a tantrum, a born light entertainer who was probably more at home during The Beatles’ early years than those that followed. Indeed, Doyle’s portrait led me to feel a bit sorry for Ringo during those times in his life when he was drifting aimlessly, famous for having once been famous and, for a while in his middle age, little else. It comes as something of a relief when, sober, he rediscovers his love of drumming and goes back on the road with a series of bands under the Ringo’s All Starrs banner. 

Ringo: A Fab Life has 389 pages but, sadly, contains no photographs and isn’t indexed. This is poor, and can probably be blamed on excessive penny-pinching by Putnam, the publishers. What’s more, the Lennon quote on page 294 about the likelihood of The Beatles reforming isn’t credited to Melody Maker, let alone myself who conducted that particular interview in 1973. 

[1] The first was Ringo Starr: Straight Man Or Joker by Alan Clayson (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991, subsequently republished by Sanctuary) which appears to be out of print though used copies can be found on the Internet. 

DAVID BOWIE – TEN YEARS GONE (Part 2)

The switch in record labels from RCA to EMI in 1982 saw David Bowie pocket a reputed $17 million advance and move back into the musical mainstream, this time on his own terms. With EMI’s promotional muscle behind it, Let’s Dance (1983), produced by Nile Rodgers, became his best-selling album ever, its funk-driven title track a big hit with an even bigger hook. He was looking different now too, more mature and smartly turned out in stylish pastel suits, business-like yet as attractive as ever, his neatly coiffured blonde hair and easy smile as appealing as the sheen of Let’s Dance tracks like ‘Modern Love’ and ‘China Girl’. The Serious Moonlight tour that followed saw Bowie ever more accomplished on stage, his gift for presentation now executed with effortless panache, a crowd-pleasing spectacle of light, sound, movement and mime, all to accompany a catalogue of wonderful songs played by top class musicians led by guitarist Carlos Alomar. It was this vision of Bowie that in 1985 seduced a worldwide audience of millions at Live Aid, his four-song set during Bob Geldof’s all-star charity extravaganza a highlight of the event and a triumph of mass communication.

        The momentum, however, was not to last. Tonight (1984) failed to match the sparkle of Let’s Dance, presaging an artistic decline that lasted for almost a decade, exacerbated by the disappointing Never Let Me Down (1987) which in the fullness of time Bowie himself would resoundingly disparage. The global success of the new ‘normal’ Bowie, and the less-than-radical soundtrack that accompanied this latest model, proved to be his undoing. In distancing himself from the cutting edge, he fell between two stools, alienating both the new and less critical post-Let’s Dance audience that recoiled at his theatricality while at the same time frustrating the more discerning long-term fans who’d been drawn to his visionary zeal. Matters weren't helped by contractual obligations to a hungry new record label.  

        Bowie’s solution to this dilemma was to form a group, Tin Machine, in which he would claim to be ‘just another member’, an optimistic prospect to say the least. If nothing else the two heavy-handed Tin Machine albums in 1989 and 1991 and subsequent live recording a year later moved Bowie away from the spotlight to lick his wounds. His commercial stock was now at its lowest point since before the Ziggy era but he surprised the world again, not with music but by marrying the Somalian model Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid [1]. Iman clearly inspired the romanticism of Black Tie White Noise (1993) and seemed to finally settle Bowie’s restless spirit and curb his occasional lapses into hedonism.

        Thereafter Bowie’s muse would fluctuate across a series of thoughtful, occasionally acclaimed albums that were never quite as illustrious as those that preceded them but at the same time restored his reputation and sustained it for two further decades. There were tours in which he was never less than immaculately turned out, with favourite songs from the past judiciously blended with newer material and, like many of his peers, he made announcements to the effect that he would no longer play old hits, only to renege on the pledge a year or two later. How could he not perform songs like ‘Starman’ and ‘Heroes’ that had become touchstones in so many lives? How could he top the bill at the Glastonbury festival, as he did in 2000, and not perform songs that the vast audience craved? Some of his later records, Earthling (1997) in particular, were on the experimental side while others, notably hours… (1999) and the enjoyable Heathen (2002), were designed for mass consumption, as was the less successful Reality (2003). 

        To promote Reality Bowie undertook a huge world tour that stretched from 2003 into 2004 but in June of ’04 was abruptly cancelled when he suffered heart problems at Scheeßel in Germany. It is understood that he underwent a heart bypass operation. After surgery, Bowie returned to New York, his home for the past decade, where he would continue to live in relative seclusion for the remainder of his life. 

        From that point on the public was told very little about what was happening in the world of David Bowie. He stopped giving interviews around 2006 and his official website remained silent for extended periods. It was reported that he had declined a knighthood and that he wandered around downtown New York’s galleries and bookshops unrecognised, his preferred disguise on public transport a hat worn low and the pretence of reading a Greek newspaper. Like John Lennon between 1975 and 1980, he lived privately, in an expansive, four-bedroom penthouse in SoHo [2], enjoying his marriage to Iman and raising their daughter, his finances secure thanks to judicious management of his copyrights and assets. Although he made occasional guest appearances, notably with the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire, the long period of inactivity and the knowledge that he’d been a heavy smoker for most of his life fuelled rumours about his failing health. In the words of the noted music critic Charles Shaar Murray, we no longer knew who David Bowie was any more, even if we ever did.

        Since presentation was so crucial to Bowie’s craft it is safe to assume that the reason the world henceforth saw so little of him was because he could no longer present himself on stage or elsewhere in the manner he would prefer. Bowie would no sooner appear as a shadow of his former self than reassume the character of Ziggy Stardust so, rather than appear as someone who no longer resembled the David Bowie that was universally adored, he chose not to appear at all. Age, it seemed, was the great leveller, even for David Bowie. Nevertheless, his absence created a vacuum in which his star continued to shine brightly: the exhibition of his stage outfits and other memorabilia at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013 attracted record crowds and would tour the world.

        That same year Bowie’s silence was broken dramatically with the unexpected release of The Next Day which took fans and everyone else completely by surprise. In what in hindsight can be seen as another superb piece of media manipulation, as impressive as any in his entire career, its unheralded arrival was a front-page news story in itself, Bowie deriving more publicity by doing absolutely nothing than other top-flight acts receive from the massive, not to mention expensive, advance promotion that is the norm in the 21st Century. A reflective, carefully crafted work, The Next Day won Bowie the Best British Male Solo Artist at the 2014 Brit Awards. The model Kate Moss, wearing one of Bowie’s original Ziggy costumes, picked up the award on his behalf while an enlarged 1973 photo of the real thing, in the identical costume, looked on from above, his arms outstretched and bare legs pinned together as if about to execute a dive into the audience. Best male? No competition, even at 67. 

        Two years later, on January 8, 2016, his 69th birthday, following another period of absolute silence, came the elegiac, brooding Blackstar, a recording which in hindsight seems to have been deliberately designed as a requiem. With lyrics that vaguely referenced his rapidly approaching demise, it will remain a moving, emotional epitaph, intentional in design, a unique and strangely appropriate climax to an extraordinary life.

        David Bowie passed away from cancer of the liver two days later. He’d evidently been diagnosed 18 months earlier and only a tight circle of family and friends knew the extent of his illness. Remarkably, it remained a close secret, so the announcement came as a profound shock to the world and inspired tributes from the high and mighty, fellow musicians and – most notably – multitudes of fans for whom David Bowie represented much more than simply a great rock star but an ideal, a way of life, an incentive to live as you choose and not be cowed by convention. Within hours of the news, these fans, many of them with blue thunderbolts painted on their faces, gathered in their thousands to sing his songs at locations associated with Bowie’s life and career where hastily erected shrines spoke far more about his impact on this world than any of the clichés uttered by the great and the good.

        I was at home in Surrey when I heard the news. The phone rang at 7.15am, unusually early. It was Paul, a local friend and writer of historical romances, telling me that BBC Radio Surrey had called him to ask if he knew how they could get in touch with me. “Why?” I asked. 

        “David Bowie is dead,” he replied.

         It took a moment to sink in and, truth be told, I thought he was saying something about his new record Blackstar, which I’d bought the previous day. 

         “I know,” I said. Then I checked myself. “Dead? That can’t be.”

         “It is, and they want you to call them.”

         “James Cannon?”

         “Yes.”

         I’d met James fairly recently. He and Suzanne Bamborough presented the 6am to 9am show on BBC Radio Surrey & Hampshire. I’d talked to him on air about John Lennon on the 35th anniversary of Lennon’s assassination a few weeks previously.

         So I called James, and began to talk. I fact, I didn’t stop talking about David Bowie until 4 pm in the afternoon about eight hours later, aside from the time spent on the train to London when I tried to gather my thoughts, all the while listening to a hastily-compiled playlist of Bowie music on my iPod. By then my voice had been heard on BBC Breakfast TV over a series of still photographs. This was at 8.20 when I was still in a state of shock, trying hard to sound articulate and not clichéd. This came about simply because someone at Broadcasting House had heard me on Radio Surrey and must have thought I sounded reasonably coherent and knowledgeable. When I thought about it later I realised what a privilege it was to be asked to talk about David Bowie to a watching audience that was probably in the millions. There were lots of people far more qualified than me who could have been invited to talk over the still photographs but I just happened to be available and there was insufficient time to get hold of, say, a producer who'd worked with Bowie in the studio, or a musician from his many bands, or a Bowie biographer. This a link to it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysudE9-MV2o

        Later, in London, I spoke to a score or more of BBC regional radio stations, firstly from my office and then from Broadcasting House. Much of what I said is part and parcel of what I have written in this blog post. 

         “He was the Hollywood rock star, as untouchable as the great movie stars of the thirties and forties, magnificent, superhuman,” I recall saying. “That is how he will be remembered.” It was a line I reiterated all day, over the phone to presenters up and down the country. After about five or six interviews it became strangely pat, like a mantra, and although I veered off line a bit with some personal reminiscences about meeting Bowie during my years on Melody Maker and working at RCA in the late seventies, it seemed to satisfy everyone.

         This hectic activity lasted from the moment I got up until 4 pm. I didn’t hesitate to consider whether talking about David Bowie was good thing to do or consider the integrity of what I was doing. I was a professional journalist, after all, and the media was my chosen path. It was my job, like it or not. No one offered to pay me for this and, of course, I didn't ask to be paid (though I do when I’m asked to appear in televised documentaries about rock acts). I didn’t have a chance to think really, to sit back and let the news soak in. David Bowie, alas, was dead.

        There was another, slightly surreal, element to all this. On the previous day I had bought Blackstar at Sainsbury’s, along with the week’s shopping. I played it in the car as I drove home, on the CD player in our living room as I read the paper and, having downloaded it on to my iPod, on a docking speaker as my wife and I ate our evening meal. We talked about it too, very atmospheric I thought, not particularly commercial, some lovely melodic moments, a bit jazzy if you consider a honking saxophone ‘jazz’, definitely the kind of album that will grow on me. It was my intention to listen to it more closely in the coming days, on earphones so I could hear the lyrics properly, and do a review on this blog in a day or two’s time. I did catch something in the title track about a single candle, a bit elegiac I thought, but I hadn’t heard enough of the lyrics, all of which I’ve now read more closely, to deduce that it was a farewell letter.

         After we’d listened to it a couple of time I decided to stick with Bowie for the time being and played his achingly lovely version of Paul Simon’s ‘America’ from the Concert For New York City in 2001. He followed this with a majestic, stirring ‘Heroes’ [3], of course, my favourite Bowie song, though ‘Starman’ runs it a close second. We listened to that too, enjoying it as ever. So it was that on January 10, 2016, the day David Bowie died, I had listened to his music all day without realising that he was dead.

        In the second decade of the 21st Century, when performers from rock and roll’s pioneering era seem to pass away with the inevitability of the changing seasons, the loss of David Bowie could be compared only to the deaths of Elvis Presley and John Lennon. “I am not a rock star,” he would repeatedly tell journalists. He was right. He was much more than that; untouchable, perhaps comparable to stars in the old Hollywood sense of the term, perhaps in his daring and ambition beyond compare, shining as brightly as any star on a cloudless night, truly one of the brightest we shall ever see. He’s up there now, looking down on us, and maybe, if you glance skywards and catch a comet flashing across the heavens, you might see David Bowie riding its fiery slipstream, laughing, singing and waving bye-bye, the prettiest pop star of them all. “If we sparkle he might land tonight…”

[1] Iman gave birth to their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, known as Lexi, on 15 August, 2000.

[2] After Bowie’s death in 2016, the penthouse sold for $16.8 million. 

[3] If after reading all this you feel the need for a quick injection of hi-octane Bowie or simply want to remind yourself what all the fuss was about, watch this on Youtube. Along with his Live Aid set, it's as good as it gets.