Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

much!’ Bill Harry had a similar encounter, accused of
interfering, and when Defries announced, ‘From now
on, all interviews must be conducted from my office,’
Harry quit as David’s PR.
Today, Bill Harry insists that Defries could never
measure up to other managers he worked with, like
Led Zeppelin’s famously aggressive Peter Grant. ‘I
couldn’t work with Defries. I found him quite
unpleasant, and inflexible.’ But Harry and Bob
Grace’s accusations that Defries had left Bowie to
fend for himself would not be repeated, for in the
forthcoming weeks, Tony Defries would reinvent
himself as completely as his client.
David Bowie had fought his way back into
contention, more or less unaided. But Defries was
the man who’d build an army behind him.
Tony Defries was already an expert in reinvention
and repackaging. Born in 1943, reputedly near a
secret airfield in north London, and just five years
older than David, he claimed to have had a similar,
‘fractured’ childhood and viewed his life in a similar,
almost mythical sense. His grandparents had fled
from Russia, and the young Defries had, he would
tell listeners, been put into care for a year when he
was just a few months old; a devastating experience,
during which he clinically died at one point from an
asthma attack. Like David, he was conscious of
growing up amid wartime ruins, in his own case as
part of a Jewish family living on its wits in
Shepherd’s Bush, dodging gangs of Irish, Greek and
Turkish Cypriots, whilst building a business selling