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David Bowie · S1 E4
Lindsay Kemp
A mime artist, a dance teacher, a theatrical world where gender is fluid and performance is everything. Kemp gives Bowie the stage language he will use for the rest of his life
A basement studio in Covent Garden, London, 1967. A nineteen-year-old failed pop singer walks into a mime class taught by a man in white face paint, and the course of rock performance changes forever.
David Bowie, Boys Keep Swinging. Official music video, 1979. Bowie appears as three different characters in drag, each one walking a runway before ripping off their wig and smearing their lipstick. The gender play, the theatricality, the use of costume as transformation: this is Lindsay Kemp's influence made visible.
“David came to my class and within weeks he was better than students who had been with me for years. I didn't teach him to perform. I gave him permission to perform.”
— Lindsay Kemp, in Jones, Dylan. "David Bowie: A Life." Preface Publishing, 2017
The Mime Teacher
Lindsay Kemp is a dancer, mime artist, and theatrical provocateur who trained under Marcel Marceau in Paris. His classes at the London Dance Centre are part movement, part philosophy, part performance art. He teaches that the body is the instrument, that silence can be louder than any amplifier, and that the line between male and female on stage is whatever you decide it is.
London Dance Centre, Covent Garden
Floral Street, Covent Garden, London. The basement studio where Lindsay Kemp held his classes. Bowie attended throughout 1967 and 1968, absorbing the theatrical movement vocabulary that would define Ziggy Stardust's stage shows five years later.
TAP TO REVEAL: What was David Bowie's first ever theatrical role?
Boys Keep Swinging, David Bowie (1979)
Recorded during the Lodger sessions with Brian Eno in Montreux, Switzerland. Eno had the musicians swap instruments: drummer Dennis Davis played bass, bassist George Murray played drums. The deliberate looseness gives the song its unhinged, off-kilter energy. Listen for how the vocal switches between cheerful pop and something far more knowing and subversive. That trick, playing it straight and strange at the same time, is pure Lindsay Kemp.
Lindsay Kemp trained under the world's most famous mime artist. Who was it?
Kemp & Bowie: The Details
When I Live My Dream, David Bowie
From David Bowie's self-titled debut album (1967), recorded during the exact months he was studying with Lindsay Kemp. This is Bowie at his most orchestral and theatrical: a sweeping ballad that sounds more like a West End curtain call than a pop single. You can hear the Kemp influence in every note, the drama, the grand gestures, the feeling that every phrase is part of a performance far bigger than just a song.
There is already a Davy Jones on Top of the Pops, and he plays tambourine for The Monkees. If David Jones wants to be a star, he needs a new name, and he picks one from a nineteenth-century frontiersman and a very large knife.
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