Ching-a-Ling

Ching-a-Ling.
Ching-a-Ling (edited version, promo film).
Ching-a-Ling (demo, 1969).

He had avoided it as long as possible, but by the summer of 1968 David Bowie had become a hippie. He grew his hair down to his shoulders, sat around his manager’s house naked, cooked macrobiotic meals, joined a communal arts lab and, saddest of all, formed a folk music trio.

This was Turquoise, soon to be rechristened Feathers. Turquoise was founded by Bowie, his first serious girlfriend Hermione Farthingale, ballet dancer and amateur singer, and London folkie (and former guitarist for The Misunderstood) Tony Hill, who soon was replaced by John “Hutch” Hutchinson, former lead guitarist of Bowie’s old band The Buzz. Hutchinson had recently returned to the UK from Canada, his head full of the new Canadian folk music (Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen), and he found that Bowie now “was into softer things…he didn’t need a band to pump it out anymore.”

Following in the path of grubby hippie groups before them and the countless numbers after them, Feathers played a meager circuit of university halls and folk clubs. It was a bit of passive rebellion on Bowie’s part—his manager Ken Pitt, desperate to get Bowie some paying gigs, had pushed him to develop a cabaret act, which went nowhere, and landed him a brief spot in a Lyons Maid “Luv” ice cream commercial (directed by Ridley Scott!). Bowie later described Turquoise/Feathers as being in part just a device to spend more time with his girlfriend, but the group also reflected Bowie’s belief that since he wasn’t getting paid anyhow, why not form a “non-commercial” band that performed just for the joy of it?

So Feathers played sets consisting of recited poetry, a few recent Bowie compositions (like “When I’m Five”) and some Jacques Brel covers, interspersed with mime routines. “Ghastly,” the mime Lindsay Kemp recalls in Marc Spitz’s new Bowie biography. The band’s enforced democratic vibe (everyone sang, everyone played guitar) resulted in, as it typically does, a determined sense of mediocrity.

The only Feathers record was “Ching-a-ling,” which Tony Visconti recorded on the sly—booking a session at Trident Studios without managerial approval and hoping the track would get picked up by a label. The b-side was meant to be Tony Hill’s “Back to Where You’ve Never Been,” but as Hill was suddenly replaced by Hutchinson, that idea naturally fell through. “Ching-a-Ling” is not bad and not memorable: it simply floats along like a soap bubble. It may be the most depressing thing that Bowie recorded in the entire decade.

Recorded on 24 October 1968 (Bowie’s sung verse is cut on most versions of the track; it’s no loss); on Deram Anthology (the full version finally appeared on the David Bowie reissue). Bowie and Hutchinson recorded a demo version in mid-April 1969.

Top: (l to r) Hermione Farthingale, David Bowie (cropped hair due to his role as an extra in The Virgin Soldiers), Tony Visconti, John Hutchinson. Ca. October 1968.

When I’m Five

When I’m Five (demo, 1968).
When I’m Five (BBC Top Gear 1968 recording; promo film).
When I’m Five (1969 demo).

Als das Kind Kind war,
erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett
und jetzt immer wieder,
erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön
und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall.

(When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again,
many people seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by chance.)

Peter Handke, “Lied vom Kindsein.”

Thereafter all his dreams and plays were inspired by the magic words, “When I’m five an’ can see.” The sentence served as a mental spring-board to jump his imagination off into a world of wonder where he could see “dest—dest as good as big folks.”

Margaret Prescott Montague, “What Mr. Grey Said.”

“When I’m Five” is a sung by a child who wants to be a child. Or to be more precise, a true child, a child of five or seven, one who seemingly has the business of childhood sorted out. Age is the most salient of childhood’s hierarchies; age truly matters, each year has its own weight and presence, in a way it never quite does again. To a four-year-old, a seven-year-old (the first climacteric year, the year of permanent teeth) is an aspiration, a 10-year-old is a high master, while those over 13 belong to the Great Otherwhere, a sullen land full of dark, awful mystery.

Bowie’s “When I’m Five” is a thematic sequel to “There Is a Happy Land” (not just thematic—Bowie reuses “Happy Land”‘s bridge). Where the latter was sung by an all-seeing narrator who occasionally took the voice of the children he observed, “When I’m Five” is entirely first-person. It’s both endearing and embarrassing—Bowie sings in a pinched, awkward voice (matched visually by his mime-like performance in the promo film Love You Till Tuesday) and performs without a trace of self-consciousness. It feels quite personal for a Bowie lyric, which up until now have rarely been autobiographical: there’s a reference to “my Grandfather Jones,” as well as a crying father and a mother who keeps secrets tucked away in a drawer.

While “When I’m Five” is embedded deep in the mind of childhood, there’s also a flavor of departure in it—the child wants to grow up, if at first just to be a greater child, but escape and adulthood are his final aims. The adult world, with all its worries, pettiness and wonders (spitting tobacco, marching in army parades, marriage), has come flooding in. After a period in which British pop music had been besotted with childhood, a change appears to be coming, darkness and strife on the horizon.

Bowie cut a demo of the song in early 1968, while the only proper recording he made of it was at a BBC session on 13 May 1968—the BBC version was the soundtrack to the “When I’m Five” sequence in Love You Till Tuesday. The Beatstalkers were convinced to cover the song, and released their bewildered version on their last single, c/w, appropriately, “Little Boy” (CBS 3936). It marked the end, both of the band’s connection to Bowie’s music and of the band itself.

In the Heat of the Morning

In the Heat of the Morning (BBC performance, 1967).
In the Heat of the Morning.
In the Heat of the Morning (Toy, 2000).

This marks the end of the line for David Bowie and his label Deram: it was the second single Bowie recorded that Deram rejected, despite the fact that, as with “Let Me Sleep Beside You,” Bowie was writing more commercial songs than he had in the past. It didn’t matter: Deram just wanted rid of him and Bowie left the label in April 1968.

So “In the Heat of the Morning” is a fragment of an uncompleted work. It was meant to be the centerpiece of Bowie’s second Deram LP, and Bowie and Tony Visconti do their best to shine it up: another luxurious strings arrangement, some odd instrumentation (guitar doubled with the Sooty Pixie Xylophone, the latter played by Tyrannosaurus Rex’s Steve Peregrin Took, who dubbed it the “Pixiephone”) and a Bowie vocal that’s ditched the Anthony Newley-isms for a sultrier, more commanding tone. Like “Sleep Beside You,” it’s basically a come-on with pretensions, but, hey, those can work sometimes.

First recorded in a BBC session on 18 December 1967, though the lyric was different and worse (“where cunning magpies steal your name“) and the opening riff hadn’t been developed yet. The proposed Deram single version was cut on 12 March 1968 and another BBC version was recorded a day later (as with “Karma Man,” the BBC version of this song might be its definitive recording—there’s more guitar, and Bowie’s vocal and the beat are much stronger, IMO). On Deram Anthology. Covered by The Last Shadow Puppets on their 2008 EP “The Age of The Understatement.”

Top: Shopping on King’s Road, 1968 (Another Nickel In the Machine).

Even a Fool Learns to Love

Even A Fool Learns to Love.

Someone must have enjoyed or at least tolerated Bowie’s lyrics for “Pancho,” as Bowie was offered further translation work at the start of 1968. This time it was for Claude François’ “Comme D’Habitude,” written by François, Gilles Thibault and Jacques Revaux.

“Comme D’Habitude” in the original French (here’s a multi-language translation guide) has the singer stoically noting that something has died—his lover, he’s realized, responds to his actions out of habit, “as usual,” and he goes on to admit that he too has been living without inspiration: it’s a post-mortem for a failed relationship, in which even the various infidelities, despairs and fights have a weary, bloodless feel to them. (François allegedly liked it because the song encapsulated his recent breakup with France Gall.)

By contrast, Bowie’s translation, “Even a Fool Learns to Love,” is purple, self-pitying and, worse, full of sad clowns—it’s basically another version of “When I Live My Dream” combined with some Pierrot-isms. It’s pretty dreadful stuff, and unsurprisingly Bowie’s lyric got shot down (Geoffrey Heath, who worked at Essex Music, later said that the powers that be “wanted a star to record the song, not this yobbo from Bromley”).

Soon afterward, Paul Anka heard “Comme D’Habitude” on French television and wrote a new set of lyrics for it, again completely at odds with the original song. Anka titled it “My Way.” You know the rest.

Bowie’s demo (which weirdly consisted of Bowie singing over François’ original recording) was recorded in January-February 1968. Bowie seemed to regret not getting the song—he performed it as part of his failed cabaret auditions later in 1968, and as Nicholas Pegg has noted, Bowie’s “Life on Mars” is something of a rewrite.

Top: Rudy Meisel, “Piccadilly Circus, 1968.”