Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

It was with the Manish Boys that David Jones first
started to get “out there.” The London mod scene
was changing. The speedy tempos were slowing
down as marijuana and the heady poetry of
American singer-songwriters like Simon &
Garfunkel, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Scott
Walker of former teen idols the Walker Brothers,
and, of course, Bob Dylan influenced the scene—
Dylan toured England in ’65, as captured in future
Bowie documentarian D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t
Look Back, and briefly plunged the then
impressionable David into a black-clad “Dylan”
phase. The Beatles released Rubber Soul late in
the year, marking a sea change in their own sound.
Even the formerly clean-cut Beach Boys, as big if not
bigger in England than they were in America,
became gleefully expansive with the lush, symphonic
Pet Sounds album and the staggeringly inventive,
Theremin-tinged “Good Vibrations” single the
following year.
Young London professionals now embraced a
louche, jaded pose, exemplified by actor/filmmaker
David Hemmings (another future Bowie tour
documentarian) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966
film Blow Up. In that film Hemmings, a photographer
based on premier London fashion lensman David
Bailey, receives a giant, polished wooden propeller
for his loft space, simply, one assumes, because it is
something unusual to look at. Anything to remain
interested. Sensing this zeitgeist, David knew
instinctively that the Manish Boys, who were quite