It Begins With US – featuring an intriguing first meeting between Defries and Bowie early in January 1970.
This episode of the MainMan podcast series celebrates 55 years since Tony Defries met David Robert Jones, better known as David Bowie born on January 8, 1947, was 22 years old and Tony was only 26. This meeting took place, at the London offices of the legal firm that Tony was working for, early in January before David turned 23. David explained that he was unhappy with his existing manager and was keen to explore other options.
It was immediately apparent to Tony that the contract with David’s manager Ken Pitt was signed in 1967 when David was 20 years old. Under British law at that time David would have been regarded as a minor who needed adults, parents, guardians, etc. to sign for him. In other words when David signed with Ken he was not an adult.
By the time David met Tony he was an adult who could take responsibility for his own actions, sign contracts and enter into legally binding arrangements. This is very important because it illustrates that there was a clear road in Tony’s mind to immediately relieve David from the Ken Pitt management contract and most likely relieve him of his other contractual commitments and essentially clear the way for a new era in his creative, artistic and commercial development.
Tony’s first impressions were that David was not particularly mature for someone of his age, he was very childlike in many ways, but Tony knew he was enormously talented, possibly because of that childlike quality. Tony could see and hear that he could write astonishing songs because those songs, and there are many examples, tell compelling stories. Imagine who would consider “Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall, I’m not quite right at all” as a suitable lyric for a song? But for David, over time, that becomes one of his most important songs, ‘All The Madmen’. And that idea, again is expressed in the line, “I’d rather stay here with all the madmen than perish with the sad men roaming free”.
“Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall, I’m not quite right at all” – All The Madmen.
And as Tony came to know more about David he realised how those lyrics – and many that followed over the years – represented his feelings about his brother Terry who was committed to an asylum. Terry was that madman, but also his hero. In those early songs David sang about isolation a lot.
For example ‘Space Oddity’ talks about a stranded, essentially condemned to die astronaut, not a happy song. But the conjuring up of a vision of Earth that somehow looks different today to that astronaut who knows he’s not going to survive, who’s telling ground control that he won’t make it and they’re not telling him that he won’t – they’re silent on that topic. They issue instructions but they don’t provide recovery. Major Tom doesn’t make it back home. So David’s telling a story of an astronaut with great expectations, great hopes – but on a mission that is doomed.
So once Tony realised David had the potential to become a star – what’s his next step? As he recalls ‘what’s the course of action that I need to take for this client, because after all I’m working for a law firm providing legal advice and legal services and what David is asking is ‘Can I run away from my manager? Can I get free of this contract that I entered into in 1967?’.
From what David told Tony in that first meeting, the litany of poorly paid live performances in small venues as an opening act, as part of a mime troupe, as a single performer, as a performer with possibly two or three other musician members, sometimes only one – he feels he is on a road to nowhere. Making 50 pounds a night a few times a week is unlikely to ever pay off. For most musicians or vocalists in those days you could make more money by simply doing sessions where you don’t have any expenses.
Whereas playing live means that by the time you’ve got to a place, wherever it is located, paid your band and got paid for the gig, you’re not left with any money. Especially if your manager is taking a percentage of whatever it is you earned gross, you’re left with even less money. That’s not a recipe for success. Going out as the opening act for, let’s say, T-Rex getting paid, in this case, £120 to do six or eight opening act gigs and having to pay your own expense of getting there and staying there, there’s no way, even in those days when £120 was worth a lot more than it is today, that you could make a living.
If you were a successful songwriter and other people sang your songs then you had a better chance of making money but in David’s case nobody was promoting his songs, nobody was asking other performers to sing his songs.
One of the first things Tony did when he came along and took charge was say to Barbra Streisand’s agent, ‘can you get Barbra to cover a Bowie song?’ And she did. For her album Butterfly she recorded ‘Life on Mars’ . Why hadn’t anyone done that for David before? Because they didn’t believe that his songs were sufficiently important for other people to want to record them. That was clearly wrong.
But David was perceived, on one hand as a mime artist and on the other as an acoustic guitar player. These are both wrong that was not David was much more a very skilled, naturally talented songwriter. None of David’s previous managers had realised his immense talent. When Tony first met him David had recently been chasing Marc Bolan around the country doing essentially a mime performance with his then girlfriend Hermione as an opening to T-Rex shows. This is not going to get David anywhere because he’s not singing, he’s miming, which means he’s a silent performer on a stage where people have come to see and hear music.
There’s an interesting scenario during that tour that was a turning point. Backstage one night Marc Bolan gave David a little gadget called a Stylophone which is one of the earliest handheld electronic instruments. David liked the sounds he could create on it so much that he incorporated them into the recording of Space Oddity.
In order to assess exactly what projects Ken Pitt had booked for David while he was his manager, Defries arranged for the legal firm Goodman, Myers, Smith & Co to undertake an investigation in to the income receivable by David during the period that David was signed to Ken Pitt Management Ltd.
One of the items in the investigation, was a commercial for Lyons Ice Cream on January 22, 1969, directed by Ridley Scott and Bowie was paid 26 pounds. At the time Scott and Bowie were complete unknowns who later both became world famous figures.
Extracts from that report are available in the Episode 68 Gallery – hit the link at the bottom of this page.
Tony provided David with the language for a handwritten letter to Ken Pitt explaining that he no longer wished to continue with their management agreement.
A full copy of that letter is available in the Episode 68 Gallery – hit the link at the bottom of this page.
After Ken received the letter he wrote a detailed reply. As you would expect Ken was not happy that David wanted to terminate the agreement, especially after all the work Ken believed he had put in to promoting David’s career. Plus he believed he had developed a close personal relationship with David.
A full copy of that letter Ken wrote to David is also available in the Episode 68 Gallery.
