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There was general outrage, of course, and he kept the fires of publicity burning bright. He had already appeared on an early British album cover, The Man Who Sold the World, blond hair bouncing about his shoulders, wearing a dress. ("They were men's dresses," he explained later. "They didn't have big boobs or anything.") Now he boasted to the music press about being gay and claimed that he first met his wife, an aspiring fashion model from America named Angela Barnett, "when we were both laying the same bloke." Whether it was true did not matter. It was the image that mattered, and the impact that counted.
What began as fury and inspiration quickly became fashion. By 1973 rock audiences were all glammed up, while the music, by Bowie and fellow glitterbugs like Elton John and T. Rex, tried to keep going on the momentum of its own outrage. His concerts took on the dimensions of a Max Reinhardt extravaganza, with some added stage business that would have got Max busted back in old Berlin. Bowie would kneel in front of his lead guitarist Mick Ronson, clutch Mick's butt and apply his lips and tongue to the extremities of Ronson's Les Paul Custom.
Calculated outrage like this burns out fast, and Bowie was in danger of doing just that. Pale under all his stage makeup and already well into the high life, he was held together only by the weight of his old dreams. Born in Brixton, one of London's toughest neighborhoods, Bowie originally dreamed of being a painter. He describes his father Hayward Jones as "a gambler and drinker and layabout for most of his life. I have one brother and one sister that I know about." His mother Margaret Mary Burns was a movie usher when she met Hayward, who eventually settled down doing publicity for a children's home. He brought 11-year-old Davey some Little Richard 45s and, two years later, had to shell out for a saxophone. "I thought, 'This is the pliable stuff that I can use,' " Bowie recalls. " 'This is my paint and canvas, and I think I can be quite good at it.' " His older half brother Terry had passed along a copy of On the Road, and Jack Kerouac's hipster visions flowed nicely into the first rushes of swinging London.
But nothing came easily. In 1969 Bowie had his first English hit single, Space Oddity, a chilling five-minute movie of alienation starring an astronaut. He had already been on the fringes of the music business for five years, changing his name from Jones to Bowie to avoid confusion with a member of the Monkees. He also flirted with imitating everyone from Anthony Newley to Bob Dylan, and spent three years on and off studying with the mime troupe of Lindsay Kemp, who has been described by Rock Historian Nicholas Schaffner as "Scotland's ultra-camp answer to Marcel Marceau." "Lindsay taught me more about what one can do with a stage than anyone," Bowie remarks now. "Just one small movement can do a lot."