#modernists

Anna Kavan - Julia and the Bazooka - Peter Owen - 1970 (jacket design by Keith Cunningham)

Virginia Woolf and Sir Maurice Bowra, photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell, June 1926 (from the National Portrait Gallery archives)

When I discussed these works in a class this year, we couldn't decide whether these seemed to be criticizing society for having turned out this way, or if these scenes were made simply to say, "this exists, and this is what life has become, whether you want to think about it or not." Even now, I'm still mixed; despite that, these still resonated with me. These peaceful moments are valuable times of respite, but sometimes seems to highlight just how tired everyone is. Or, to quote my professor, "what the world looks like when coffee stops being something to partake in socially and turns into a requirement to make it through the day. "

Ornette Coleman Quartet

– [ Excerpt From: Carolyn Burke. “Foursome”. Apple Books. ]

DAVID BOWIE: A MODERN LOVE David Bowie created many exotic characters and dressed in ways that back in the 1970s could get you arrested but as Andrew Vaughan explains he was always a Mod at heart. When we were thirteen our "Glam" hangouts were the front rooms of Orrell, near Wigan. For Studio 54 read 39, 42 or 44 Vicarage Road. If we fancied a game of snooker while we listened to music it was our house. If we fancied fooling about it was Geoff Bradshaw’s or Pey Halliwell’s across the road. By now our mums were out at work and you couldn’t swim in the rezzies or play cricket all of the summer holidays. Here, we’d phone girls up in the vain attempt at inviting them around, or phone for taxis for people we didn’t like down the bottom of the street. It was all typical teenage stuff but it was all played out to the soundtrack of David Bowie.It was the ‘Starman moment’ that made Boy George realise he was gay! Or so he’s recounted on numerous occasions.The moment David Bowie put his arm around the frankly very heterosexual-looking Mick Ronson on ‘Top of the Pops’ was the moment something twitched in George O’Dowd’s pants. Two-hundred miles north this teenage lad just thought: “This record’s brilliant!” Sure Bowie looked odd but it was his music that mattered.The fantastic haircut helped but basically it was just a great song.‘Top of the Pops’ mattered back then and what mattered to us working-class kids was that we had a new musical hero. It was a short sharp shock to the system but during the next few years Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane were played, played out and then we went back to Space Oddity and Man Who Sold the World and back to that hazy crazy sixties debut album entitled David Bowie via the reissued The World of David Bowie.Most of the songs on David Bowie came from when the man was simply known as Davy Jones. Davy Jones the Mod about town or sometimes Davie Jones the Mod about town. It's aways hard to keep up with the Joneses. He was with the the Konrads, the King Bees, the Manish Boys, the Riot Squad and Buzz. They played blues and soul, beat and pop. Looking for that hit, always moving on until Davy Jones eventually became David Bowie (to avoid confusion with The Monkees' lead singer Davy Jones); releasing his self-titled debut album in 1967. It's an album of its time and reflects plenty of the genres of music that were around at that time. Catchy baroque pop and novelty tunes along with more meatier efforts dealing with everyday issues such as peer pressure in Join The Gang and class issues in Maids of Bond Street . Then there are the out-and-out love songs such as Love You Till Tuesday and When I Dream My Dream all delivered in that Anthony Newley vocal style with touches of music hall and echoes of Kinks’ Englishness. While the album is often looked at as nothing more than a gateway to Bowie's later work - and there are lots of pointers in there as to what was to come - I like it. A lot. It stands up on its own merits and while it is never going to get you on the dancefloor there are some tunes in there while it will make you smile, and it will give you an idea where David Bowie's head and the nation's mindset was at in the summer of 1967. It is available in various formats and if you are not bothered about owning the original vinyl on Deram then there are - according to Discogs - 57 versions available. However, it might be worth picking up the 1995 album London Boy  released on Spectrum Music via Decca Records.This is basically the David Bowie album put the tracks The Laughing Gnome (we’ll quickly skip over this), the majestic Karma Man and the exquisite The London Boys.The London Boys is Bowie's first truly brilliant song. It appeared as the B-side to Rubber Band - from the David Bowie album - and slipped under the radar. It is a classic. It's Bowie's downer to David Bowie's uppers. It's a reflection on another side of the scene. The pills, the aspirations and depressions, the lack of money, the loneliness and the yearning for home. "A London boy, oh a London boyYour flashy clothes are your pride and joyA London boy, a London boyYou think you've had a lot of funBut you ain't got nothing, you're on the run" It is possibly the most depressing song you'll ever hear but its dark lyrics are quite, quite beautiful. It may have been seen as Bowie's goodbye to the sixties, maybe at the time it may have felt like his farewell to his career in music but Bowie was not for giving up. Like many he moved into hippy circles, produced the glorious folk rock of Space Oddity, went heavy metal with The Man Who Sold The World, returned to folk (albeit sprinkled with a little glitter) on Hunky Dory before he went Glamtastic and became the megastars that were Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. Yet through all the craziness he remained a Mod at heart and when he was contractually obliged to produce an album in 1973 he returned to the sixties with an album of covers entitled Pinups.And what an album it is. It's basically Bowie and the boys doing the songs he loved back then. It's raw, it was recorded quickly and the energy bursts through the speakers. Dissed at the time by many Bowie purists the record has aged beautifully. With songs from “Syd's Pink Floyd”, The Who, Them and the Kinks to name a few it is a garage rock album to be played loud and often. Yet amidst Mick Ronson's guitar and Aynsley Dunbar's Moon-Like drums the band slip in a version of The McCoys Sorrow - a song so beautiful that it'll make you weep. It was in the charts for four months and was everybody's favourite song. It was a song for all the girls with their long blonde hair and their eyes of blue and a song for all the boys who wanted all the girls with their long blonde hair and their eyes of blue. It - like the whole album - is just WOW. And that's just the music. Add in the cover and the packaging and it is just so, so iconic. On the back cover there is Bowie photographed by Mick Rock in a Tommy Roberts’ box-jacketed, wide-trousered suit designed by Derek Morton, who later became Sir Paul Smith’s head of menswear. Then on the front it's the Thin White Duke and Twig the Wonderkid - this time photographed by Justin De Villeneure, Twiggy's then boyfriend. How we gazed at that photo. Seventies Twiggy all tanned and gorgeous and all of us down at Chris Ball's hairdressers armed with a copy of the album trying to get the crop. Happy days. The iconic photo was in fact originally intended for the cover of English Vogue magazine after De Villeneure was commissioned by Bea Miller, the London editor , to photograph a cover of Twiggy and David Bowie together. However, De Villeneure ended up giving the picture to Bowie to use on the PinUps cover instead, saying in 1999: "Twiggy and I were in Los Angeles when Aladdin Sane had just been released.  We heard Twiggy's name come over the radio in David's song Drive In Saturday.  I had just photographed a couple of Vogue covers and I thought it would be a good idea for David to be on a cover with Twiggy.  He would be the first man on a Vogue cover.  I called him in France.  He loved the idea and arranged a photo-session.  When he saw the finished picture he asked if he could use it for his album sleeve.  I said to him "I've just flown to Paris for Vogue especially to do their cover."  Then I asked David "How many albums do you sell?  He said "About a million, hopefully." Vogue would sell about 80,000 copies in the UK. I owned the picture, so I let him have it. I was a little arrogant then!  Vogue didn't talk with me for years after.  They were very angry.  I knew that I had made the right decision giving David the photograph when months later I was driving through Los Angeles and I saw a 60-foot billboard of the album cover on Sunset Boulevard." Of course, like all good modernists Bowie moved on. Through various incarnations, numerous new characters and many music styles but at the heart of it he was still Davy Jones from Brixton. He was always in and out of Soho, still referencing the sixties, still listening to the groups that played the Marquee and Eel Pie Island whilst always wearing sharp suits. A Mod 'til his final day doing - as The Who proclaimed and he interpreted on Pinups, "Anything for something new. Anyway, anyhow, anywhere" he chose. #BOWIEFOREVER   This article first appeared in the magazine Sharpen Up