Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

indispensable to Calvin and Lou as a marketing
agent, I would be able to stay in London. So that’s
what I got busy doing. David was my first marketing
case.” She was essentially his A & R person as well,
helping Lee convince Lou Reizner to allow Bowie to
be signed to the label in the first place.
“[Reizner] hated me,” David told Cameron Crowe.
“She thought I was great. Ultimately she threatened
to leave him if he didn’t sign me. So he signed me.”
By the time they got together romantically, David
Bowie was a Mercury artist. The story of their union
has been told many times in many Bowie
biographies, as well as Angie’s own memoirs. At
Calvin Mark Lee’s invitation, she attended a record
release fete for another Mercury signing, King
Crimson. She was wearing a purple velvet threepiece
suit with a matching silk tie and stood out
among the hippies, professional and otherwise.
David, in T-shirt and simple trousers, could not resist
asking her to dance (famously inquiring “Do you
jive?”—a pick-up line that does not work unless you
are David Bowie). Angie did indeed jive, and soon
… they were jiving and then some.
“I came back from being away for a few days; the
flat was spic and span,” Finnegan recalls. “David
never ever cleaned up after himself. He was a total
slob. Always a sink full of dirty dishes, overflowing
ashtrays, clothes everywhere.” Given his fastidious
mother (“She was a very strange sort of
uncommunicative woman. Very straitlaced, very
stiff,” according to Finnegan), David must have