‘It’s time we were united and stood up for our curls.’
Opposite a graffitied skateboard park and just up the street from Brixton’s premier music venue – The Academy , is Stansfield Road where David Robert Jones was born in 1947. His family stayed in Brixton for just six years before they moved to the South London suburb of Bromley a few miles a way. Bowie went to Bromley Technical College and studied art and graphic design (incidentally he was taught by Peter Frampton’s father).
David Bowie’s first proper band, formed in November 1963, was called Davie Jones and the King Bees – and they released one single called ‘Liza Jane’ on the 5th June 1964. The band sold few records and soon split up due to their relative lack of success.
Davie Jones and the King Bees performing in 1964
Later in the same year David appeared on the BBC’s Tonight programme, a current affairs show presented by Cliff Michelmore. He was asked to appear after starting the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to long-haired men.
The London Evening News reported on the society quoting Bowie;
“It’s really for the protection of pop musicians and those who wear their hair long,’ explained the founder and president, David Jones, of Plaistow Grove, Bromley. ‘Anyone who has the courage to wear their hair down to his shoulders has to go through hell. It’s time we were united and stood up for our curls.’ David is in the process of enrolling members. ‘Everybody makes jokes about you on a bus, and if you go past navvies digging in the road, it’s murder!’”
Bowie in 1965
Bowie showing off his lovely long hair to Barry Langford 1965
Bowie’s next band was Davy Jones and the Mannish Boys and after playing as the backing band for Gene Pitney on a Gerry and the Pacemakers’ tour they released a single in March 1965 – a cover of Bobby Bland’s I Pity The Fool. On the b-side, however, was Bowie’s first ever recorded composition called ‘Take My Tip’ (Jimmy Page was the young session guitarist).
The Mannish Boys’ manager Leslie Conn arranged for the band to appear on the BBC show Gadzooks! It’s All Happening but the producer Barry Langford insisted that Bowie cut his long hair. Bowie, of course, refused and Conn cleverly organised a protest outside the BBC with fans holding banners such as ‘Be Fair To Long Hair’.
The BBC eventually backed down on the condition that if there were viewer complaints the band’s fee would go to charity. No complaints were received and the band kept their fee. Over the next couple of years Bowie sang with a band called The Lower Third and subsequently a group called The Buzz. Success still eluded Bowie and both bands were short lived although making recordings for the labels Parlophone and Pye.
It was during this time that he changed his name to Bowie to avoid confusion with the singer in The Monkees and in 1967 he recorded an album as a solo project and called it simply ‘David Bowie’. Unfortunately the record again sold poorly and it would be two years before Bowie recorded again. During the sessions a novelty single recorded at the same time called ‘The Laughing Gnome’ which would became a number six hit when it was released in 1973.
In 1968 the choreographer and mime artist Lindsay Kemp let Bowie appear in his show Pierrot in Turquoise, it was said, in return for sex. Kemp was a fantastically camp character, very self-consciously avant-garde, and once described a performance of his at school (realistically setting the tone for the rest of his career!) -
“I first danced Salome in the dormitory of my boarding school, naked except for layers of toilet paper, heavily rouged with the red paint I’d rubbed off the wall. The boys in the top bunks played mouth organs, and I danced to entertain them. I was busted, of course, not for the decadence of my performance but for the wastage of school resources, namely the toilet paper.”
Bowie 'in mime' at the Middle Earth Club, 19th May 1968
Kemp and Bowie had a very close working relationship and Kemp would become a huge influence on the future star especially in the creation of alter ego characters on stage . Thus Kemp, indirectly through Bowie, influenced an innumerable amount of performers and bands over the next twenty years or so.
After a few weeks of performing together in Pierrot in Turquoise Bowie disappeared one night with the artistic director of their show – a woman called Natasha Korlinov. Lindsay Kemp was devastated and tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrists, failing however in his attempt. Two months later Bowie returned back to Kemp, but unfortunately this time it was the turn of Natasha to try and kill herself, eventually surviving an overdose of sleeping pills.
In 1968 Bowie, as a solo mime artist, opened a show for Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex – the performance was apparently a version of the Chinese invasion to Tibet. Performing with Bolan meant that Bowie was introduced to Tony Visconti who was producing T-Rex at the time. Bolan and Bowie were at similar stages of their career – both incredibly ambitious but wavering between different musical styles and ideas – but desperately looking for an approach that would find them success. Visconti became the catalyst that realised this for both of them.
During the same year Bowie, with John Hutchinson and the ballet dancer Hermione Farthingale, formed a multi-media band, initially called Turquoise but subsequently known as Feathers.
David Bowie and Feathers at Trident Studios, London 1969
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Bowie and Farthingale were soon seeing each other and this may have been Bowie’s first serious relationship in his life. Unfortunately Hermione soon left Bowie, running off with a male fellow dancer – Bowie later wrote;
“I was totally head-over-heels in love with her, and it really sort of demolished me..it set me off on the Space Oddity song”.
It took him along time to get over Hermione and his next album contained two songs about her – Letter to Hermione and Occasional Dream. The album also contained the song Space Oddity which was to become the reason for Bowie’s first brush with fame, something he had been seeking for years.
The song was written in 1968 but was planned to be recorded and released to coincide with the lunar landing the following year. A plan that worked and the BBC eventually used the track for their coverage of Apollo 11 and the first moon landing in 1969. Considering the importance of the event (men landing on the moon, not the BBC playing David Bowie) the BBC wiped the tapes of the moon-landing a few years later.
Space Oddity famously used the cheap, portable battery-operated Rolf Harris advertised stylophone – Marc Bolan later wrote;
“I remember David playing me ‘Space Oddity’ in his room and I loved it and he said he needed a sound like The Bee Gees, who were very big then. The stylophones he used on that, I gave him. Tony Visconti turned me on to stylophones. The record was a sleeper for months before it became a hit.”
Ironically Visconti saw the song as just a novelty and left the production to an assistant Gus Dudgeon who would soon become famous as Elton John’s main producer. The original video made for song actually features Hermione Farthingale.<span class=”lb-half”></span>
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Bowie put the finishing touches to Space Oddity while living with Mary Finnigan (as a flat-mate and occasional lover) at Foxgrove Road in Beckenham, South London. Finnigan and Bowie ran a folk club on Sunday nights at The Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street but the night slowly turned into what became to be called the Beckenham Arts Lab. During the summer of 1969, The Arts Lab hosted a Free Festival at a local park. The festival was later immortalised by Bowie in his song Memory of a Free Festival.
An unshaven Bowie organising free festivals at Foxgrove Road, Beckenham 1968
In 1969 Bowie met the 18 year old Mary Angela Barnett (he later said that ‘they were fucking the same bloke’ – the record executive Calvin Mark Lee) and they were married in the Bromley Registry office on Beckenham Lane in 1970. He was by now well on his way to become the rock superstar he had spent years craving for.
The first, entitled ‘Men For Men’, notes around twenty venues where men could meet ‘soul or bed-mates and/or escape the attentions of the fat girls with whom you flew over on your chartered 747′. One of these clubs, under the sub-title of ‘non-dancing clubs’ was called Gigolo at 328 King’s Road (now a carpet shop) and was described by the book as an “Aptly named, hot, incredibly packed coffee bar. A frotteur’s delight. Lots of Spanish waiters and terrified Americans. The Rolls-Royce outside could be the one to whisk you away from it all.”
In the second chapter called ‘Women for Women’ and written by the novelist Maureen Duffy, there is mention of just one venue – the famous Gateways Club.
The Gateways had been in existence at 239 Kings Road on the corner of Bramerton Street in Chelsea since the thirties. It became more or less exclusively lesbian during the war when a huge number of women came to London to work or were stationed nearby and needed somewhere to go they could call their own.
The once green door in Bramerton Street that led down to The Gateways club
A man called Ted Ware took over the club during the war, purportedly winning it in a poker game (“I raise you my lesbian members-only club…”). He married an actress called Gina Cerrato in 1953 and she soon took over the running of the club, joined, after a few years, by an American woman called Smithy who originally came to England as a member of the American Airforce. After an arranged marriage in the early sixties Smithy stayed in London for the rest of her life.
Gina at the Gateways
Gina at her usual place by the door (screen grab from the film)
Smithy behind the bar
The membership fee during the sixties was just ten shillings (50p) and no guests were admitted after ten o’clock to discourage people who had spent their money elsewhere. Maureen Duffy explained that ‘rowdies or troublemakers’ were often banned immediately. Being excluded in those days was more than just embarrassing, it was unbelievably inconvenient – the nearest alternative lesbian club would have been in Brighton. Dining out with a girlfriend was often too expensive for a lot of women and even into the sixties women wearing trousers were actually banned from most restaurants. Pubs were still unpleasant places for women especially if unaccompanied by a man. In 1969 the London Spy guide book’s main advice for women looking for a drink was, essentially, to avoid pubs if they were alone, saying;
You may be thirsty, but nobody, nobody will believe you.
So for many lesbians the Gateways Club was the only relaxing and affordable place they had to go.
The Kings Road in 1968
Boutique shopping on the Kings Road 1968
After entering a dull green door on Bramerton Street there was a steep set of steps leading down to the cloakroom (looked after usually by Gina) and the entrance to the club. The smokey windowless cellar-like room was only 35ft long and featured a bar at one end ‘manned’ usually by Smithy. Entertainment was a fruit-machine by a pillar in the centre and a jukebox opposite the bar. It was never known whether Gina and Smithy were a couple (Ted eventually died in 1979) but many suspected they were.
Regulars of the Gateways at the bar (screen grab from film)
During the eighties the club became quieter probably because other lesbian and gay venues were opening in London, and eventually Gateways only opened at weekends. The local neighbourhood in Chelsea was also becoming more and more upmarket and the club lost its late-licence in 1985 due to complaints about loud music. Not long afterwards the famous green door was subsequently closed for ever.
Between the 9th and 16th of June in 1968 The Gateways club became internationally famous when it appeared as a backdrop to many scenes filmed for The Killing Of Sister George, a movie starring Beryl Reid, Coral Browne and Susannah York. In 1960, York, a starlet at the beginning of her acting career and newly married, lived in a house at World’s End in Chelsea just a few hundred yards from the Gateways. Although it’s reasonably safe to say that York wasn’t a regular.
Susannah York at her Kings Road flat in 1960
The Kings Road flat with a rather avant-garde painting 1961
York on the embankment in Chelsea, 1965
York in 1967
A publicity still from Donald Cammell’s film Duffy 1968
Robert Aldrich, the director, whose previous film was the slightly more macho The Dirty Dozen, decided to include actual customers rather than extras when they filmed scenes in the club. Gina, Smithy and the regulars performed stiffly and uncomfortably in front of the camera but when the film was released, for a lot of people, this was the first glimpse of a hidden lesbian sub-culture they had ever seen.
Robert Aldrich celebrating Beryl Reid’s birthday during filming
York and Reid dressed for the Gateways fancy dress scene
Beryl Reid in the back of a taxi with nuns scene
When Beryl Reid was first introduced to The Gateways she said;
If I had been here before I did the play I’d never have done it. I didn’t realise they held each other and went to the gent’s loo.
Reid, when shown the script for the film, also baulked at the sex scenes (the original play had none, in fact when Robert Aldrich first went to see the play he didn’t realise it was about lesbians at all) and said;
They had me in bed making love to the girl…close like baked beans…I said ‘No, not on your nelly – or maybe her nelly’. I just could not do it. The thought made me sick. It may be silly, but that sort of physical contact, starkers, with another woman frightened me to death.
The younger actress Susannah York, who was used to playing free-spirited roles in some of her earlier films, was extremely uncomfortable with the ground-breaking sex scene in the film. Aldrich later wrote;
Susannah was a bitch to her [Coral Browne] because she [York] simply didn’t want to do the scene.
Coral Browne, Beryl Reid and Susannah York
The Killing of Sister George can’t be said to be exactly a ‘positive’ view of lesbianism and indeed a critic at the time it was released, suggested that the film ‘dealt with lesbians entirely through the eyes of heterosexual males’. It was a groundbreaking film in many ways and despite the somewhat cliched dialogue, the movie only condemned or criticised the various characters’ foibles and hypocrisies and not really their sexuality. Aldrich said of the character played by Beryl Reid;
Sister George’s loud behavior and individuality . . . are encompassed in her personality, they’re not a product of her lesbianism. . . . She didn’t give a shit about the BBC or the public’s acceptance of her relationships.
The scenes Aldrich filmed at The Gateways were actually notable for their lack of sensationalism (unlike other films at the time trying to cover similar subject matters) and showed the regulars dancing, drinking and flirting just like any other londoners in any other London club.
Beryl Reid learning to smoke a cigar for her role in the film
Buy Maureen Duffy’s novel The Microcosm (set largely at the Gateways Club) here
UPDATE: I got an email from Gina Ware, the daughter of Gina and Ted Ware. She wanted me to correct the fact about Ted winning the club in a poker game. It was actually a boxing match in 1943 being shown at The Dorchester! It cost £100 to transfer the licence.
Gina, interestingly, also wrote:
By the way, Gina and Smithy were not a couple in the romantic sense (though in some senses God knows whose business it is other than theirs bless ‘em). I do know the full story and can assure you I am right. But I can say this, I have never known a friendship like it. They were both at my father’s side when he died. Three more interesting, kind-hearted and unique people you will seldom meet.
I also found these amazing photos which are part of the LIFE collection. They are marked just as Chelsea with not even a date but they are of the Gateways Club and were taken around 1953/4.
Gina Ware around the time of her marriage in 1953
I received this email from Gina about the photographs (which are no longer online):
They are fantastic pictures. Lovely one of my old man bless him. And the pictures of the women speak volumes. Jill Gardiner (author of ‘From the Closet to the Screen, Women at the Gateways Club 1945–85′) and I struggled so hard to try to bring out the particular flavour – it doesn’t conform with the usual views in so many ways. Her publishers edited out a lot as did the Guardian when they published Mum’s obituary – hate to say it but they actually were very inclined to politically correct us in a way I found a bit sickening and counterproductive. Some of it I understand but some of it is just about not wanting to admit that these women were not quite as oppressed and in the closet as they would like to believe – they were not rescued from oblivion and misery by the gay rights movement and academic feminists, they were doing fine themselves – in fact many of the older women reckon they made things that were heading in the right direction (and were a lot of fun) worse. And this is working class women, not privileged arty sorts.
I have hundreds of postcards written by members back to my Dad at the club from all over the world where they were out exploring to find out what the gay scene might be. I even have one where someone writes to say she and her girlfriend were up Macchu Picchu (I think) in Peru and met another member – and that was in the 50s! The material I have gives such a unique view, so direct as well.
It’s kind of sad for me looking back at it all – I so wish I had someone left who would remember exactly who all those people were. Dad wouldn’t be surprised – he always said it was going to be an incomparable story one day. He used to laugh at the News of the World’s strapline ‘All human life is here’ – they don’t know they are born he would say!
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