Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

halves of The Mike Cotton Sound’s trad jazzinfluenced
set. ‘Well done,’ the venerable twenty-sixyear-old
congratulated the wannabe bluesmen after
their set, ‘you must be very brave’.
Brave they seemed in the autumn of 1963, when
they played several brief shows at the Bromel. Yet by
December, when The Rolling Stones cracked the
Top 20 with ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, a tiny nucleus of
British musicians were about to refashion British
rock ‘n’ roll. Two bands emerged in the Stones’
wake: The Yardbirds, who’d taken over their
residence at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, and
The Pretty Things, whose Dick Taylor had played
with Keith Richards in an early incarnation of the
Stones. The Pretties were known around the
Bromley scene thanks to Dorothy Bass, David’s
schoolmate (and, briefly, George’s girlfriend), who
owned a car and was therefore recruited as the
Pretties’ roadie.
With the sense that they were about to catch a
wave, David and George stepped up their efforts to
form a full band. It was David who spotted a
classified ad in Melody Maker from a Fulham outfit
seeking a singer. The trio – guitarist Roger Bluck,
bassist Dave Howard and drummer Robert Allen –
were, in truth, more in tune with the spirit of Chet
Atkins than Muddy Waters, but Jones and
Underwood both worked on ‘roughen[ing] them up’.
Their set was based on songs which countless Brit
blues-boomers would cover: Elmore James’ ‘Early
One Morning’, Howlin Wolf’s ‘Spoonful’ and ‘Howling
for My Baby’. The band’s name, The King Bees,