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was in his room (no one found out), remained
cowering under his duvet, and after a few more
minutes of stomping up and down the hall, David left
the building.
Even a month later, when David told Iggy and
girlfriend Esther Friedmann about the fight, he was
still ‘devastated’, remembers Friedmann. The
incident showed the pitfalls of helping out people you
admired. Relations with Iggy, too, were strained. The
ex-Stooge had managed one fairly successful
album, New Values, under his own steam, but since
then he’d been growing increasingly depressed.
David and Coco had attempted to help, taking him
and Esther on holiday with them, including a trip to
Kenya, ‘but sometimes when people are good to you
it’s worse’, says Friedmann.
By September 1979 Iggy was in a bad way;
marooned in a residential studio in Wales, lost in a
haze of dope and booze, and seemingly unable to
finish the follow-up to New Values on his new label,
Arista. David drove out, with Coco, to help, cheering
up Iggy and the musicians with a long monologue on
Johnny Binden, the gangster, hanger-on and owner
of a legendarily huge cock which he’d displayed to
David’s former MainMain stablemate Dana Gillespie
and Princess Margaret, among others, on Mustique.
The story ended up being turned into a song, ‘Play it
Safe’. Bowie was dauntingly impressive – ‘like a
creative playmaster’, says keyboard player Barry
Andrews – but his visit seemed to highlight Iggy’s
failure at finding his way through the corporate maze.
Both men shared similar demons – egotism,