Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

and dress in sharper relief. The Arts Lab, like
Turquoise and Feathers, baffled the older man, and
he kept away.
“To call it an Arts Laboratory was a bit of a
misnomer,” Pitt has said. “It was just a room
attached to the Three Tuns Pub.”
Guitarist Keith Christmas, who would play on the
Space Oddity album and hung out and performed at
the Lab that summer, was only a bit more charitable.
“It was just a wee committee of people,” he says.
“It was all sort of quite peace and love in a very
middle-class sort of way. Beckenham is a sort of
suburb of London which is very middle-class.
Terribly, terribly middle-class. It had a big garden out
the back. It was sort of terraced and it was stretched
back to the car park. So of course in those days
when sort of smoking dope was fairly illegal, people
could go out in the garden and smoke and chat.”
It’s fair to surmise that the infectious, almost
pathological focus and drive of the young Angie
Bowie, then Mary Angela Barnett (and only a few
months out of her teens), was a force that ultimately
helped steer David away from the leafy, insular Arts
Lab life and its attendant navel-gazing complacency,
and toward the earth-shaking rocker he would
become in the seventies. Angie had known of David,
having been briefly introduced to him by Calvin Mark
Lee during a performance of Feathers at the
Roundhouse, a converted railway roundhouse, on
March 3, 1968.
How Angie materialized is a matter that varies