ANGIE: Life With David or When Will Those Clouds All Disappear?

I’ll never forget the day Angie Bowie rang me up and asked for Nick Kent’s address. When I asked why she wanted it, she replied, “I’d like to have half a ton of*wet cement delivered to his front door.”

Poor old Ange.

She has quite a reputation for things like that. Her freakouts are frequent and of epic proportions.

On the other hand, she’s been known to answer fan letters for five or six hours at a stretch and it’s a long time since June Bolan or Bianca Jagger did that.

These days she’s best known as a professional failer of auditions, as a chat show guest and the frequent subject of photo spreads. She’s about as upfront as a rock star’s wife can get without actually playing in the band. She’s got her own fan club, and her husband’s fans find her almost as fascinating as David himself.

Depending on the circumstances of meeting, Angie Bowie is both well-hated and well-liked. Many people in the business have got Angie Bowie horror stories to tell, and yet I’ve always found her both excellent company and very considerate.

Whatever Bowie’s up to, she’s usually right in there. During the tours, Angie was the liason between him and the fans, even going to the trouble of taking down addresses and writing letters. Some fans even got Angie-notes from Japan.

Under the thinnest of thin disguises, she’s modelled as “Jipp Jones,” failed an audition for the lead in a Wonder Woman TV series, and attempted to embark on a career as a straight actress. She’s also taking a considerable interest in the career of her close friend Dana Gillespie. She does a lot more than just stand around posing at concerts.

Poor old Ange.

She spends most of her time getting numbered as some kind of superbitch and she really isn’t like that .at all — most of the time. Also, the fact that every ten minutes spawns a rumour that she and D.B. are headed for the Great Divide can’t be too good for the Health, Education and Welfare department of the head either. * * *

The pencilled signed thumb-tacked to the star-rail read “Tony Ingrassia rehearsing Sheila. ”

Covent Garden rehearsal studios don’t exaclty rate four stars in the AA Guide, but this one is quite spectacularly tattered. No lights on the stairs, large starbursts of wallpaper ripped away to reveal pockmarked plaster, crippled furniture, a table that’s obviously seen life as she is really lived, a single glaring lightbulb handing disconsolately from the ceiling— The Rehearsal Studio.

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It’s like a stage set in itself, and right there behind the table is the star of the show, Angela Bowie in the too, too solid flesh. Short white hair in impeccable waves, eyebrows conspicuous by their absence, a black see-through dress with strategic non-seethroughable sections. One of the latter areas has slipped a bit and one highly appetizing and almost unnaturally crimson nipple surveys the scenery with an air of perky but baffled incomprehension.

An upturned biscuit-tin lid does duty as an ashtray and the table serves as a suitable spot to lay down one’s weary cassette.

Well, now — your Lindas and yer Yokos and yer Biancas are quite public these days. What brought you all out of the closet?

“Maybe it’s a difference in attitude on the part of women in general. Maybe the motivation for getting married was different ten years ago. You know a wife was a very bad thing to have it you were Elvis Presley. He waited a long time before he married Priscilla.

“I got to confess to you,” ripostes Ms. B. “I wasn’t into rock at all before I met David. But when your motivation for getting married is not based on possession, then owning up about having a wife is a very different thing.

“1 mean, anybody who professes to practice faith and devotion in the 70s may think they’re telling the truth, but it’s just an illusion. Maybe I just move in very different circles, but I know very few people who really behave like that. That doesn’t mean that it’s not commendable, or that it’s not good if it works for you, but I’m sure that if you really like someone you’d prefer to stay with them on a basis of pleasure and enjoyment rather than frustration or boredom.

“Paderewski had groupies. One was my music teacher. .. she was fifty years old. ”

“Things have totally changed for people who are entertainers. If anybody said that Bill Haley didn’t have groupies I’d be sure they were lying. I mean, Paderewski had groupies. One of them was my music teacher at my school. She was fifty years old.

“Entertainers in any field — classics, pop, avant-garde, makes no odds — have always been surrounded. Groupies are the people who make it all worthwhile. Fans will sit very quietly and applaud at the end of numbers, and they’re well-loved, but it’s the groupies who scream and shout and want you to know they’re there. So if you can’t accept that fact you really shouldn’t get married in the first place-; you should just be a close friend.

“So I was never hoodwinked into thinking that faith and possession were virtues.”

Beatle fans always gave Beatle wives a hard time, but Bowie fans seem to have considerable affection for Angie.

“I really dig them, too. I don’t know about the Beatle thing because I really don’t remember that. I may have sounded coy when I said that I didn’t know anything about rock and roll until I met David, but that’s the truth.

“It’s a different situation now, because sexuality’s different. I think the openness is very important, but it’s like totally depressurising the sexual drive instead of keeping the pressure within the body and causing frustration.

“Fans are smart. They bang on cars and try to get in to see you, and what could be more wonderful? I don’t understand how anyone could not think about the fans. They’re the ones who make it worthwhile. The music business doesn’t make it worthwhile. You don’t make records for record company executives, you make them for people.

“It doesn’t matter whether they’re old fans who stay very cool, or young fans who cry when they see you. Anybody who’s, an entertainer is into audiences and that’s what they’re feeding off. The parasitic element of entertainment is that you must feed off that audience.”

Alright, Ange. Lay it on us. Howdja meet yer old man?

“I was, invited out to dinner by a mutual friend and he happened to be at dinner. I was doing economics at Kingston Polytechnic and I had a boyfriend who was a record company executive — can you believe it? — and I went to see him at The Roundhouse in a band called Feathers.

“The record company executive refused to sign David, and I broke up with him because I thought he was a schmuck. I said, ‘You don’t recognise talent when you see it.’

“The band were great. They were on with The Who that night. That was my first taste of rock and roll. I saw Feathers, Scaffold and The Who.

“I was astounded by The Who. I didn’t think people did things like that. I couldn’t believe Pete Townshend. I was totally destroyed by him. I just sat there and thought, ‘I’ve got to go and have dinner with this horrible record company executive afterwards.’

“There is nothing musical about me, . . I’m surprised that I can even dance in a disco. ”

“Feathers broke up, but in the meantime one of the other executives from the same company had managed to persuade the management not to listen to the other dude and he got them a deal. This led to ‘Space Oddity.’ Literally two weeks later he was in the studio doing that.

“We were very lucky, I suppose, because we were never successful in the beginning. If we had been, it would have been very hard for me to suddenly come to terms with it. -

‘Space Oddity’ came out and it started to become a hit in the summer, and by the end of August and September it was building up and his manager, Ken Pitt, was rather unprepared for if. He didn’t like the way the deal was set up. It hadn’t been set up through him. He didn’t want David to be successful, he wanted David to be obedient.”

What was it like being around when Bowie was getting songs like “The Width Of A Circle” together?

“David and I are very fortunate in that I’m not musical. There is nothing musical about me, neither a rhythmic beat of the foot nor a vigorous clapping of the hands. I’m surprised that I can even dance in a disco.

“Now that kind of ignorance is a vital piece of equipment when you’re dealing with someone who’s so totally ahead of everybody else. I had no basis for comparison, and everything he played me sounded great.

“He always wrote about things that fascinated me. The Man Who Sold The World was conceived during a period when we were really having a rough time. We were really poor, we didn’t have any money. Our band were really frightened.

“We didn’t understand Tony DeFries, who we’d just met. We didn’t understand that it would be alright just like he Said it would. We’d sit in OUT big house with nothing in it and think, Jesus, I hope it all works out.”

How do you ask a nice lady like Angie how it feels to be married to the man who everybody on the planet and his dog Eric think is the world’s king faggot?

Here’s what you do. You say, “How does it feel to be married to the man who everybody on the planet and his dog Eric think is the world’s king faggot?”

TURN TO PAGE 76.

ANGIE

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41.

Your interviewee will then totally outvibe you by replying, “I think that’s wonderful. I never thought of it like that. I think it’s great. I love it. It all depends on your knowledge of the gay culture, or which I can happily say I’m a member.

“It includes a wide variety of individuals. Without wishing to go through a big long hoo-hah there’s one commonly known as The Stud. David is a Stud.

“If someone who’s gay reads, ‘Look, I’m gay,’ he thinks, ‘Oh, you mean you’d ball anything.’ When a person who’s straight reads it he thinks, ‘Oh, he must be one of those people who goes up to Hampstead Heath.’ See what I mean, it’s two different things.

“How can you say to a writer, ‘Look, I’m sorry but you’ve got things wrong. I’mlgay, but I don’t mean that I like to get it; I like to give it.’ It’s really unfair to lay a trip like that on a guy. He’s probably a queen anyway and just being cool about it.”

While large sections of the planet and his dog Eric are looking in on David Bowie, Angie is on the proverbial inside and looking out.

“It’s very strange that you should say that, because that’s getting right down into it. I’m very bolshie, Very aggressive. If I hear anybody in a bar talking badly about David, I’ll take them outside and beat them up.

“I got pulled out of a ballroom by five policemen for beating a guy up. It was at a Gravesend gig when we fir«t started. David was headlining, and all they wanted to do was bop. David came out, you know, a fuzzy-haired folk singer.

“He made me promise that I would never do it again. I’m a very subservient not true. I beat some people up in Japan. Not fans, guards who were picking on the fans. There’s warrants out for mv arrest.

“At the. airport they said to me, ‘Goodbye, Mrs. Bowie, please don’t come back.’

“So because I get very stroppy, if I hear people talking bad about him, I get very uptight and I don’t forget it. I never forget anyone, not a face, not a name. I’m very quick to take a person’s name.”

Angie Bowie’s going round taking names, huh?

“Well, you know it’s true. When people put me uptight I remember it. David says it’s the most evil part of my personality, and I think he’s probably right. On the other hand, when I adore people, I’d do anything for them. They all tease me at the office because I answer fan mail.”

So what is Angie Bowie doing in this godforsaken armpit of a rehearsal hall? Another extension of the Jipp Jones thing?

“I’m not becoming a model called Jipp Jones. I’m sorry if it appeared this way. I love doing things if they come off good, and I did. some photographs which came out great. People said, ‘They’re really beautiful, you should do more.’

“I would never be a model, it’d be the most boring thing in the world. I’ve always wanted to be an actress. I’m rehearsing now for a play called Sheila, written by Tony Ingrassia who did Pork. It’s a play which is part of a trilogy, but mainly one of a pair. The other one is called Fame, and we’ll be producing that one for sure.

“It’s going to be either West End or Broadway. We’re not sure which, because of Equity. I’d like to do it here for the fans, because a lot of them had said that they’d come and see me, which is great. Also, ,I’d like to do it here .because I don’t really know New York that well.”

A lot of what goes on around the Bowie machine is to a certain extent misinterpreted. I suggested to Ms. B. that she was one of the leading players in a long-running piece of fiction.

“That’s a lovely phrase, but it’s very hard to answer, honey. It just makes us all tighter. People think that you don’t care after a while.

“You may just say to yourself, ‘I don’t care, say what you want. Buzz off, bastard.’ That might be what you say to yourself, but that’s not what you think. You think, ‘Why did you say that?’ I mean you’ve heard me on the phone to you'screeching about things.”

Yeah, like that Kent business.

“Absolutely, I mean I wanted to kill him. Other people aren’t as drastic as I am. David’s, never like that, he never means anybody any malice. I just want to kill them for being so horrible and for not looking at something and seeing it for what it is.

“I get totally distraught. I can’t hink in a logical fashion. I just think in this dramatic fashion, thinking that they’re evil and that they’re doing it on purpose. Of course, that’s not fair because they’re probably not like that at all.” (Courtesy of the New Musical Express)