Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

acting as if he and his combo were as big as the
Fab Four or the Stones. “David had a total belief in
his own talent,” Conn has said. “He was amazingly
arrogant. ‘I’m the greatest and I don’t give a fuck who
knows it.’ He was totally dedicated to what he did.
He believed with a passion that he was going to be
a big star. And I believed in him as much as he
believed in himself.”
Conn signed the King Bees. He tried and failed to
get them a publishing deal with Dick James at
Decca but was resourceful in finding them work
playing a wedding anniversary party (for Bloom and
his wife) at the Soho venue the Jack of Clubs. The
reception was lukewarm, however, and immediately
diminished some of the band’s already puffed-up
bravado.
“It was all a bit embarrassing,” David later
recalled. “The party was posh with many of the
guests in evening dress. And we turned up in our Tshirts
and jeans ready to play rhythm and blues. We
really worked hard that night but many of them just
ignored us and carried on talking as though we
weren’t there.”
“Liza Jane,” Davie Jones and the King Bees’
debut single, issued June 5, 1964, on Decca’s
Vocalion Pop subsidiary, is the first officially issued
David-related product.
The A side, a traditional blues song despite
Conn’s songwriting credit, sounds as though it was
recorded in an airplane lavatory post-flush. It sucks
and hisses and churns but has real charm even as