The “Bowie & Hutch” Covers

Love Song (Lesley Duncan).
Love Song (Bowie & Hutch, 1969).
Love Song (Elton John with Lesley Duncan, 1970).
Life Is a Circus (Roger Bunn).
Life Is a Circus (Bowie & Hutch, 1969).

After he and Hermione Farthingale broke up, Bowie reduced Feathers, their former folk trio with John Hutchinson, to a duo, writing songs with two-part harmonies. He and Hutch became a Simon-and-Garfunkel double act: Hutch singing low and playing the straight man; Bowie offering a new character—a chatty, fey persona able to crack up the audience between numbers.

Among Feathers’ concert repertoire at the time (February-April 1969) were Bowie compositions like “When I’m Five,” “Space Oddity,” “Sell Me a Coat” and “Ching-a-Ling,” along with a number of covers, including Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam” and “Au Suivant,”* Leonard Cohen’s “Lady Midnight” (likely a Hutch suggestion, as he was up on Canadian folk) and even Victor Young’s standard “A Hundred Years From Today.”

When Hutchinson and Bowie made their demo tape (which eventually sold Bowie to Philips/Mercury) in April, they mainly concentrated on newer Bowie compositions like “Janine” that would later wind up on Space Oddity. There were a few covers done for the session, however, suggesting that Bowie was considering them for possible inclusion (Bowie would soon make it a habit of having at least one cover per LP). They were:

“Love Song” was written by Lesley Duncan and later covered by Elton John on his 1970 Tumbleweed Connection. Duncan had a similar trajectory to Bowie—she cut a string of failed singles throughout the ’60s until finally breaking through at decade’s end (when John covered “Love Song”). Hutchinson has the lead vocal.

And “Life Is a Circus” was by the obscure folk group Djinn (so obscure that they’re often listed in Bowie references as an “American folk group,” though they were Brits, led by the late Roger Bunn, a sort of ‘fifth business’ character in early ’70s London).

Having a wife and child to support, Hutchinson soon realized he couldn’t survive playing the occasional meagerly-attended folk gig. So he left Bowie and went to work as a draughtsman. It wouldn’t be the end of Bowie’s association with Hutch, one of the more sympathetic figures in Bowie’s life, however, as he would later return at the end of the Spiders from Mars era.

Both are available on bootlegs like The Beckenham Oddity.

* Both covered by Scott Walker, the latter as “Next.”

Top: Gilbert and George perform Singing Sculpture, Cable Street, London, 1969 (Tate).

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.