Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

opportunities. Deram had gone quiet after the
release of David Bowie; Tony Hall, one of David’s
supporters, had left, while Mendl and his friend Dick
Rowe, both responsible for the label, were beset
with political problems. Instead, the main focus of
David’s commercial activities started to centre
around his publishers, Essex Music.
David had been introduced to Essex by Tony Hall,
an old friend of the company’s celebrated proprietor,
David Platz. Ralph Horton had signed David to
Essex during Pitt’s trip to the USA, much to Pitt’s
chagrin, for he had been chasing a much bigger
advance. But this alliance would prove vital over the
next couple of years, placing Bowie within a
sprawling musical nexus which included production
companies, overseen by Denny Cordell and later
Gus Dudgeon, plus publishing clients that included
Anthony Newley, Lionel Bart, Lonnie Donegan, The
Moody Blues and, from the spring of 1967, Marc
Bolan. This ensured Marc and David continued to
tread similar career paths, although they diverged
when it came to songwriting, for while Marc kept his
songs to himself, David was evangelistic about
pushing his own material and getting it heard.
The motivation was social as well as
professional. For David, sharing his songs was how
he related to people. In the later days of The Riot
Squad he would happily spend hours teaching his
songs to Croak Prebble, who replaced him as
singer. The same applied to his involvement with
The Beatstalkers, then Scotland’s leading live band,
a tight-knit posse of Glaswegians who would have