Video will appear as you scroll through the story
David Bowie · S1 E1
Stansfield Road
Born David Robert Jones in Brixton, 1947. A working-class family, a half-brother named Terry who opens the door to jazz and Beat poetry, and a restless kid who never quite fits in
Brixton, South London, January 8, 1947. A boy is born to a charity worker and a cinema usherette in a rented room at 40 Stansfield Road, and they name him David Robert Jones.
David Bowie, Life on Mars? Official music video directed by Mick Rock, 1973. A cinematic eruption about a girl trapped in a world too small for her imagination, born from a rejected attempt to write English lyrics for the French tune that became "My Way."
40 Stansfield Road
The house is a narrow Victorian terrace in Brixton, a working-class neighborhood still pockmarked by Luftwaffe bombs. David's father, Haywood Stenton Jones (everyone calls him John), works as a promotions officer for Barnardo's children's charity. His mother, Margaret Mary Burns (Peggy to everyone), works at a local cinema. Post-war London is grey, rationed, and exhausted, but the Jones household has one thing most neighbors don't: music.
Stansfield Road, Brixton
40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, London. The Victorian terrace where David Robert Jones was born. A blue plaque now marks the house. The family lived here until David was six, when they moved south to the suburbs of Bromley in Kent.
Terry
Peggy has a son from a previous relationship. Terry Burns is nine years older than David, and he becomes the most important person in the boy's early life. Terry brings home the records and books that change everything: John Coltrane and Charles Mingus on vinyl, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg on the page. He takes his little brother to see jazz musicians play in Soho clubs.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did a six-year-old in Brixton hear American rock and roll before almost anyone else in England?
The Bewlay Brothers, David Bowie
The mysterious final track on Hunky Dory (1971). Bowie never fully explained the lyrics, once calling it "the vaguest of all the songs on the album." Most scholars believe it is about Terry Burns, the half-brother who introduced young David to jazz, poetry, and a wider world. If this episode made you curious about the bond between David and Terry, this is the song where that relationship lives, beautiful and coded and impossible to pin down.
What famous song was born from Bowie's rejected attempt to rewrite "Comme d'habitude" with English lyrics?
Life on Mars?, David Bowie (1971)
The song started as frustration. In 1968, Bowie's publisher asked him to write English lyrics for "Comme d'habitude," a French pop song. He wrote "Even a Fool Learns to Love," and the publisher rejected it. Three years later, Bowie returned to the chord progression and wrote something far more ambitious. Rick Wakeman plays the piano. Mick Ronson arranged the strings without any formal training, humming parts to session musicians who wrote them down.
David is a quiet kid with one extraordinary gift: he notices things other people miss. But at fifteen, a fight with his best friend over a girl will leave him with something the whole world will notice.
0 XP earned this session