The pushy young pop star

From The Daily Mirror:

Record mogul Chris Wright was getting fed up with the pushy young pop star who kept turning up at his office with his American wife.

The singer had made it to number five in the charts a few years earlier with some track called Space Oddity but Chris thought he was “a one-hit wonder... a pop artist, not an act with any longevity.”

“David Bowie was in our Oxford Street office, in London, all the time, often pleading for money to go and make demos,” he explains.

“He’d come in with his wife, Angie, who appeared to wear the trousers.

“Our receptionist would ring around – but we would all pretend to be out!”

It was 1971 and Chris and his partner Terry Ellis were doing very nicely at Chrysalis, the record label, music publishing firm and management agency they founded in a Shepherd’s Bush bedsit four years earlier.

When Bowie recorded a “disappointing” album called Hunky Dory they still refused to sign him and he went off to RCA.

As talent-spotting misses go, it’s right up there with Decca rejecting the Beatles in 1962 because “guitar groups are on the way out”.

Let us be thankful RCA was more instinctive...

David Bowie Changes

Still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets and
Every time I thought I'd got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But Ive never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
Im much too fast to take that test

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
So the days float through my eyes
But stil the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Don't tell them to grow up and out of it
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Wheres your shame
Youve left us up to our necks in it
Time may change me
But you can't trace time

Strange fascination, fascinating me
Ah changes are taking the pace Im going through

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Oh, look out you rock n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Pretty soon now you're gonna get a little older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
I said that time may change me
But I can't trace time

Happy birthday, David Bowie!

More Bowie over at the Dolores Delargo Towers Museum of Camp