Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

The Soho rhythm and blues clubs like the
Flamingo, the Craw-daddy and the Marquee
became places where a clever manager or label rep
could scout at both midday and evening showcases.
The crowd was overwhelmingly teenage and
hormonal, amounting in theory to a contained focus
group for selecting the next Beatles or Stones.
“Soho was one part of London then that you could
go to and you didn’t think you were in England
anymore,” Greg Tesser says. “It was because all the
smells, every restaurant or café, was either Greek or
Italian or French or Indian. It was something; it was
like an international zone. The club itself was
extremely sweaty. And lots of people had obviously
been taking Purple Hearts.” David Jones knew that
the Marquee and the neighboring coffee bar, the
Café Giaconda, where kids also mingled with
industry types, had officially become the center of the
universe, and he buzzed around this stretch
semipermanently, even sleeping in a van outside the
Marquee at one point. To his parents’ great concern,
he left his “junior visualizer” post at J. Walter
Thompson and committed to pursuing a career in
music full-time.
For a matter of weeks, David and Underwood
formed a blues combo (with Viv Andrews on drums)
called the Hooker Brothers. “We would try and copy
John Lee Hooker,” Underwood told me. “Of all the
blues records, his was the one we had the most
success with. So much so that we called ourselves
the Hooker Brothers for a short while, did a couple of