Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

There is an intriguing footnote to David Bowie’s
acquisition of the manager who steered his career
over the next four years. Ken Pitt ascribes his
conversion to David Bowie as being inspired by his
performance of a Judy Garland song. But Bowie’s
MD and bassist Dek Fearnley, who arranged most
of the material, is adamant that, at that performance,
The Buzz closed their show with an entirely different
song, Tony Newley’s ‘What Kind of Fool am I?’. The
discrepancy perfectly illustrates David Bowie’s
ability to be whatever the object of his attention
wanted him to be.
In later years, Bowie fans and writers would make
much of the subtext of that night’s conversation,
which saw Ralph Horton hand control to Ken Pitt,
and in some imaginations many of the undercurrents
of that evening were comparable to Joe Orton’s
Entertaining Mr Sloane, the play that immortalised
London’s gay culture. But the participants were more
complex than the clichés we’ve inherited. Ken Pitt, a
fan of Judy Garland, devotee of Oscar Wilde, and
supporter of the emerging Campaign for
Homosexual Equality, was also a married man, who
often mentioned his romances with Hollywood
glamour models.
Tall and gangly, rather refined and formal-looking,
Pitt could expound with equal enthusiasm on the
virtue of Keats and The Velvet Underground in his
clipped, measured tones, and was a master of the
elegantly phrased, slightly waspish letters that were
an essential management tool in London’s old-