Video will appear as you scroll through the story
David Bowie · S1 E3
Five Bands
The Kon-rads, The King Bees, The Manish Boys, The Lower Third, The Buzz. Five bands in three years, each one a dead end, each one teaching him something new
Decca Studios, London, 1963. Sixteen-year-old David Jones records his first ever demo with a school band called The Kon-rads, and the label says no.
David Bowie, The Jean Genie. Official music video directed by Mick Rock, filmed on the streets of San Francisco, 1972. The raw, blues-driven riff at the heart of this track is pure R&B energy: the exact sound young David Jones was chasing through five bands and four years of dead-end singles.
The Kon-rads
The Kon-rads are exactly what you would expect from a group of Bromley teenagers in 1963: matching outfits, cover versions, youth club gigs on Saturday nights. David plays saxophone and occasionally sings. He pushes the band to write originals, but the others just want to play Chuck Berry and Cliff Richard. By the end of the year, he is gone.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did a sixteen-year-old with no connections land his first real music manager?
“He had more front than Selfridges. This kid had no track record, no connections, nothing. But he walked in like he owned the place.”
— Leslie Conn (Bowie's first manager), in Jones, Dylan. "David Bowie: A Life." Preface Publishing, 2017
The Society for Long-Haired Men
After The King Bees collapse, Jones joins The Manish Boys, named after a Muddy Waters track. They release one single, "I Pity the Fool," produced by Shel Talmy, the same man producing The Who and The Kinks. It flops. But in November 1964, Jones appears on the BBC's Tonight program as the founder of "The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men," his first national television appearance.
The London Boys, David Bowie
A 1966 single that barely sold but tells you everything about where Bowie's head was at the end of the five-band era. It is about the mod scene in London: the pills, the loneliness, the desperation to belong. While his bands were playing three-chord R&B, Bowie was already writing orchestral mini-dramas about outsiders. This is the first recording where you can hear the David Bowie of the next decade.
Before producing The Manish Boys' single "I Pity the Fool," Shel Talmy was already producing records for which two legendary British bands?
The Jean Genie, David Bowie (1972)
Written on the tour bus during Bowie's first American tour in late 1972. The name is a play on Jean Genet, the French novelist and criminal turned playwright, but the song itself is a swaggering blues stomp inspired by Iggy Pop's lifestyle. Bowie plays harmonica and rhythm guitar. The riff borrows its DNA from The Yardbirds' "I'm a Man," a track the teenage Jones almost certainly heard in the Bromley clubs where his early bands played.
David Bowie has a name but no audience. Then he walks into a dance class run by a mime artist named Lindsay Kemp, and everything he knows about performance, gender, and stagecraft gets rewritten in a single evening.
0 XP earned this session