SHOCK AND AWE: "the monster with the thousand eyes is shouting to be fed"

When it came to writing about Bowie for S+A, I fancied going deep with his fascinating fixation on and deep debt to Anthony Newley - which nearly all Bowie biographers seem to glide past in embarrassment.

Seems to me that there is much more discernible evidence of Newley influence in Bowie's singing and sensibility, than there is of the much-trumpeted (because cooler) supposed influence from Velvet Underground and Lou Reed.

You can really hear the debt in this clip above for "The Man Who Makes You Laugh" (an expanded rewrite of his earlier "The Joker"). There's the braying way that Newley pushes his voice into ugliness at points in the song, the meta aspect (showbiz's love of songs about showbiz), the mime and Pierrot elements that creep in and out of Newley's delivery, the borderline grotesqueness of it all.

The thematic - the pathos of the entertainer's craving for attention, the unseemly exhibitionism of performance itself - seems to be a subtext to Bowie's whole career.

(And perhaps that's what he actually recognised in e.g. Mott the Hoople - Ian Hunter's commentary on rock'n'roll - rather than their purported "punkness").

Look around you Mister Clown, you're drowning in your dreams

A sea of strangers, each one reaching out for you

Make us laugh, Mister Funny Man

Fame at last, Mister Funny Man

Could the love you crave be waiting in some woman's heart

Or must you spend these endless nights alone among the crowd

Bowing for their laughter in the dark

Wiping off the custard pie that life just loves to throw

Knowing when the audience goes home, that you'll be alone

Look at me, look at me, I'm the funny man

Have you ever heard such clever stuff before

Applauded Time magazine, "He's the laughter machine"

I'm the man who makes you laugh

You killed 'em at the Palace and you thrilled 'em in L.A.

The waiters at the deli know it all by heart

Make us laugh, Mister Funny Man

Be a daft, dummy, funny man

Everyone's an audience and life's a funny line

But when the curtain's sinking are you thinking of the day

Mother gave your dancing shoes a shine

Pushed you on the stage and whispered, "Kid, you'll be alright"

The spotlight hurts your eyes

But stirred the spark that burns now in your heart

Look at me, look at me, I'm the funny man

And my home is any microphone that's free

Me with nerves of caffeine, I'm the laughter machine

I'm the man who makes you laugh

The monster with the thousand eyes is shouting to be fed

Get your head together for the second show

Make us laugh, Mister Funny Man

Autographs, Mister Funny Man

Fear will drink your whiskey while you think of her embrace

Trying to forget her, though her letter of goodbye

Stares as you repair your painted face

When did she discover that the spotlight was your love

I ask my own reflection and I see the funny man is me

Look at me, look at me, I'm the funny man

"Hello, folks," it seems the joke was all on me

But that's all in the dream of the laughter machine

I'm the man who makes.....

Ha, ha, ha, ha

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Newley + Bowie (director's cut / prototype excerpt from S+A)

....Not just for the resemblance of vocal style –the Cockney vowel sounds, the un-rock’n’roll clarity of enunciation, the stagey emphases—but because the shape and range of Newley’s career (singer, songwriter, star of stage, TV and film) served as Bowie’s model and ideal.

This fixation on Newley, regarded as belonging to the square world of showbiz, amused and bemused Bowie’s contemporaries. Looking back on their friendship in the Sixties, Bolan recalled going round to Bowie’s place in South London, where “he always played Anthony Newley records.” He speculated that Bowie’s explorations of mime in the late Sixties came from Newley’s use of mime elements in his huge hit musical Stop the World - I Want To Get Off. Above all, Bolan claimed, Bowie didn’t have any kind of gut connection to rock’n’roll; his orientation, if anything, was English music hall. “He was very Cockney then... We were all looking for something to get into then. I wanted to be Bob Dylan, but I think David was looking into that music hall humour. It was the wrong time to do it, but all his songs were story songs... They had... a very theatrical flavour, with very square backings.” One of his early producers Gus Dudgeon mused, several decades later, that the young Bowie worked from “the assumption” that Newley-esque “was the only way he could sound. Why did someone with such a unique ability to write ... unusual songs for the time, sound like someone twice his age?”

Yet Anthony Newley wasn’t actually “square,” a middle-of-the-road performer catering to the middle aged. He had one of the more outlandish imaginations in the showbiz realm. Yes, he was the classic all-round-entertainer of variety and vaudeville tradition. Mentored during the Second World War by a music hall veteran, he had been a child performer, playing the Artful Dodger in a film version of Oliver Twist, and appearing in TV shows. Newley also scored a smatter of hit singles that jumped on the rock’n’roll bandwagon, but evinced scant real feel for the new youth music. By the early Sixties he was performing in musicals he’d written with partner Leslie Bricusse like Stop The World – I Want To Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd. Their success in American established him as hugely popular cabaret performer, both onstage and with TV specials. Near the end of the Sixties, Newley wrote, directed and starred in a film musical that was wackily ambitious but a huge flop: Can Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe and Find True Happiness?, described by Playboy as "a zany erotobiography that looks like a Marx Brothers' movie shot in a nudist camp".

What characterized all of Newley’s work to varying degrees was the combination of arch Englishness (prissy yet self-mocking gestures) and mime elements often compared to Marcel Marceau (as with the Pierrot-like tragic clown figure Littlechap, the Everyman protagonist of the life-as-circus allegory Stop The World). Other hallmarks were an absurdist-existentialist humour tinged with fatalism, and a ‘meta’ quality: performance that comments on itself, characters that step in and out of persona, action that breaches the fourth wall. A classic example of these traits is Newley’s song “The Man Who Makes You Laugh”, the blues of a comic, a “laughter machine” who feeds “the monster with the thousand eyes”, i.e. the insatiable, fickle audience. Performing the song on a British chat show, Newley hams it up in his inimitable style, miming putting on make-up in the dressing-room mirror of the audience’s gaze.

All of these elements - mime, meta, music hall, mugging - were intensely present in The Strange World of Gurney Slade, a remarkable TV series broadcast in the autumn of 1960, which starred and was devised by Newley, although actually written by two other people, Dick Hills and Sid Green. The opening episode starts with Newley, playing the actor Gurney Slade, who has the role of Albert in a TV sitcom or soap. Surrounded by the drudgery of everyday working class life—a family and its lodger, the arrival of a sanitary inspector, discussion of eggs and preferred ways of cooking them – Albert is silent, ruminative, disengaged. Failing to pick up his line, to the consternation of his fellow actors and the studio technicians, Albert abruptly walks off set, past the flabbergasted director (“you must be ruddy mad, we’re on the air”), out of the ‘Stage Door’ and into the street, where—suddenly liberated—he capers manically down the street.

A mish-mash of mime, the Theater of the Absurd, and the tradition of Anglo-surreal comedy that includes the Goons, Gurney Slade constantly disrupts realism throughout all six episodes. (It's notable also that it's from the hum-drum social realist naturalism of the TV soap that Slade breaks loose, escaping into a whimsical world that's both meta-theatrical and this-is-a-dream psychedelic). Newley addresses the viewer directly, but also converses with a stone, a dustbin, a coquettish cow, and a dog. The latter tells him he’s a fan of Lassie but not Rin Tin Tin, who’s “too exaggerated.... not true to life” because he runs past too many trees without taking a pee. A pretty young woman steps out a Klean-O vacuum cleaner advertising poster and she and Slade dance together down the street. But suddenly we’re looking at the scene from the viewpoint of a passer-by, who sees Slade holding hands with thin air – a glimpse ahead to the broken reality-structures of Antoniono’s 1966’s Blow Up.

As much as it’s an existentialist bagatelle, Gurney Slade is a satire / parody of television itself, with a running commentary about the conventions and clichés of what Slade mordantly refers to as “the golden age of British entertainment.” Late in the first episode, the camera cuts back to the soap opera from which Slade went AWOL: the family are huddled around the TV watching The Strange World of Gurney Slade. He spit ““I'm a walking television show. I can't get away from 'em. Big Brother is watching me, and Big Dad and Big Mum.... I'm like a goldfish in a bowl.... Leave me alone, will you? I've got a right to my privacy...switch me off."

These meta-television tendencies culminate in two hilariously subversive episodes that cast back to Pirandello’s 1921 Six Characters in Search of an Author and ahead to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which follows the plight of two minor Hamlet characters exiled to the margins of the plot). There are also elements that anticipate 1967’s The Prisoner, the cult series that combined Kafka and meta-TV (Patrick McGoohan had earlier played the hero in the spy series Dangerman and reappeared as the same character but trapped in a surreal prison known as The Village). Gurney Slade’ s court-room episode in particular resembles The Prisoner’s final episode, which also involves a trial. As if anticipating and preempting the series’s actual lack of success with the public, Slade is charged with appearing “on a TV screen” in front of “seven million viewers... for the purpose of amusing said viewers” but having raised “not one titter”. Slade’s show - The Strange World of Gurney Slade itself – is accused not only of being unfunny but of being “calculated to undermine our entire social structure.” In a further twist of meta-mischief, Slade’s clown-like defence lawyer Archie is clearly meant to be Archie Rice, the decrepit music hall performer portrayed by Lawrence Olivier in John Osbourne’s 1957 play The Entertainer, the film version of which came out earlier in 1960.

The final episode of Gurney Slade takes TV-about-TV even further, when Slade is confronted by the characters he created from earlier episodes, who now complain they’ve been insufficiently fleshed-out (“Do I like parsnips?” one asks) and fret about what will happen to them when the series is over. But a gentleman from the Characters Bureau turns up and finds roles for them in other series. As for Slade himself, he toys briefly with the faint hope that “perhaps I can persuade them to do another series”, but concludes that “for me this is the finish”. As “Gurney Slade” transforms by stages into a ventriloquist dummy, Anthony Newley strides onstage and carries away his now wooden mouthpiece / alter-ego.

One of the eerie things about watching Gurney Slade is that sometimes Newley will say a line and he’ll sound like the spitting aural image of David Bowie – that classless London drone, Cockney without the slang or the dropped aitches. Of course, it’s the other way around: it was Bowie who copped Newley’s phrasing and accent. Bowie was always upfront about the debt. “I was the world’s worst mimic – I mean, Anthony Newley. I was Anthony Newley for a year," Bowie told NME in 1973. "He stopped his world and got off, which is terrible, because he was once one of the most talented men that England ever produced. Remember the ‘Gurney Slade’ series? That was tremendous. A friend of mine has a collection of them, and there’s a lot of Monty Python in there – left-handed screws and right-handed screws.”

You can detect the seed of Ziggy Stardust in the idea of a performer who stands outside his own performance and comments on it. And you can glimpse “Fame” in the series’s ambivalent attitude to what Newley, in “The Man Who Makes You Laugh”, called “the spotlight” that “hurts your eyes but stirs the spark that burns now in your heart”. The business of show offers glory and escape from mundanity, but becomes its own kind of trap; the performance persona is first armour, then straitjacket.

At the start of Gurney Slade’s final episode, TV executives are shown around the studio by a guide, who points to the captions scrolling down the screen beside them and then discusses the “new design” performer, i.e. Slade. While “presenting problems – a tendency to produce jokes nobody can understand”, this “all-purpose model” will “do practically anything” – “singing, comedy, we hope to do some recording with it”—if paid “about 500 pounds a week.” Meanwhile Slade himself thinks aloud, ““they think I’m a machine: I’ll show them... I’ll just sit here and refuse to move,” unaware that his movements are being remote-controlled by someone in the control booth.