“I can work the scene babe, I can see the magazines”
In the week that David Bowie entered the UK Top 20 at #13 with Space Oddity, DISC and MUSIC ECHO magazine rewarded him with his first ever front cover. *
The pictures was taken by @AlecByrneArchive at Paddington Street Gardens, London, in September 1969.
Inside was an interview feature by Penny Valentine who had long been a champion of David’s. Her love of Space Oddity only cemented her belief that Bowie would amount to something special. Here’s the concluding paragraph:
““Space Oddity” is the first tenuous link in a long chain that will make David Bowie one of the biggest assets, and one of the most important people British music has produced in a long long time.”
The front cover also featured new skinhead band, Slade. Ironic that both these newcomers would have to wait for the emergence of the glam rock movement before they found lasting success.
Skinheads themselves had dampened David’s enthusiasm for performing live, as he recounted to Timothy White for Musician magazine in 1983:
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MUSICIAN: When Space Oddity hit England in 1969, weren't you suddenly faced with a weird juxtaposition in live performance - something that later Bowie might have conjured up - where you'd be doing Dylanesque shows in front of pissed-off skinheads?
BOWIE: It was odd. I was not prepared for that at all. It was, unfortunately, a very good song that possibly I wrote a bit too early, because I hadn't anything else substantial at the time. What I was involved in to a lesser or greater extent at that point was what were known in England as the "Arts Labs". The idea was to encourage people to locally congregate at this meeting house in Beckenham and become involved in all aspects of arts in society. To come and watch strange performances by longhaired, strange people. They started out with altruistic aims. We'd all contribute to the funding, but those things were always broke, owing money left, right and center. You'd hire Bunuel films like Un Chien Andalou for people to see and not be able to pay for rental. Then you'd have poets who'd come down from Cumberland in their transit vans to read, and so on.
In the midst of all this, I'd written this little thing about Major Tom and gotten it recorded, and I was told I had a concert tour if I wanted it! I thought haughtily, "I'll go out and sing my songs!" not knowing what audiences were like in those days. Sure enough, it was the revival of the mod thing which had since turned into skinheads. They couldn't abide me. (laughter) No! No way! The whole spitting, cigarette-flicking abuse thing by audiences started long before the punks of 1977 in my own frame of reference.
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Thankfully, the fast-moving music scene of the early 70s was more prepared for David Bowie when he returned as a “Cosmic Yob” in 1972.
You will have noticed that the beautiful painting we have posted with the magazine cover is a piece by @saracaptainart (based on another of Alec’s shots taken on the same day), called AN OCCASIONAL DREAM.
* The cover of NME in January 1966 doesn't count as it was a paid for advert for Can’t Help Thinking About Me.
#BowieAlecByrne #SpaceOddity50 #DBCP2019 #SaraCaptainArt