David Bowie once opened for T. Rex as a one-man mime act
T. Rex’s iconic frontman and principal songwriter Marc Bolan first met David Bowie in 1964, a time when the pair were budding hopefuls in London’s folk scene. While Bowie was interested in rock and roll music and Bob Dylan’s folk, much of his early enthusiasm was reserved for dramatics. As his theatrical debut album of 1967 and his subsequent chameleonic persona sequence attest, Bowie was a thespian portraying the role of a musician.
Bowie and Bolan first met through their manager after he offered the teenagers cash in hand to paint his office in London. The pair reportedly hit it off, bonding over a shared passion for fashion. “I’m King Mod. Your shoes are crap,” Bolan said, as Bowie recalled in Nicholas Pegg’s The Complete David Bowie.
“Bolan was slightly younger but much less introverted than David, giving him the influence of an older sibling,” wrote Marc Spitz in Bowie: A Biography. As Bowie struggled through his numerous formative bands and the underwhelming reception of his 1967 debut album, Bolan appeared to storm ahead, initially with John’s Children and then fronting the initially psychedelic T. Rex.
By 1969, Bolan was a national star and had achieved a healthy portion of airtime on John Peel’s famous BBC Radio 1 show. That year, Bolan invited Bowie to open for T. Rex during their UK tour of ’69. Per Bolan’s request, Bowie performed his one-man mime routine, which depicted China’s invasion of Tibet.
Although Bowie was an experienced mime artist who had trained with choreographer Lindsay Kemp, his performances were met with derision from the audience at most of the gigs. Not only was mime an unpopular art form, but many members of the T. Rex fanbase also turned out to be sympathetic to Chinese Communist revolutionary Chairman Mao.
Bowie’s performance was “ruined by heckles of left-wing students and hippies irate over his damning portrayal of China’s Red Guard,” Simon Goddard wrote in Ziggyology: A Brief History of Ziggy Stardust. Bolan “couldn’t help but laugh,” he added. Fortunately, Bowie didn’t have to drown his sorrows for long. Later that year, he made his first significant career break with the release of his single ‘Space Oddity’. It coincided with the Apollo 11 moon landing and became a global sensation as he inched closer to The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory.
In a letter penned to John Peel in 1999, Bowie remembered his short stint opening for T. Rex back in ’69 and the crucial advice he received from the legendary DJ.
“Dear John,” he wrote. “When you worked with me on the T-Rex tour, and I was doing a mime piece based on the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese, you were somewhat non-plussed that the audience didn’t like the piece where the back row of the audience lifted their hands up with Chairman Mao’s little red book, and there was a whole feud going on between me and the audience”.
Adding: “You decided that the problem was that I was doing mime. You didn’t like mime. And until I came here to America, I never realised that you were right. Nobody in the world likes mime. Thanks for the advice about the songs. I’m glad I stayed with the songwriting.”
By 1972, with the release of Ziggy Stardust, Bowie had become a force on the global stage and a true competitor for T. Rex, who had achieved similar success with 1971’s Electric Warrior. As the two figureheads of glam rock, the pair entered a jealous rivalry of sorts. “I don’t consider David to be even remotely near big enough to give me any competition,” Bolan told Cameron Crowe of Cream in a 1973 interview.
As the decade played out, Bolan’s influence began to crumble as Bowie soared through his soul-infused Young Americans era and the subsequent, critically lauded Berlin Trilogy. Thankfully, Bowie and Bolan buried the hatchet, and all jealousy seemed to have abated when Bowie appeared as a guest on Bolan’s TV show, Marc, just nine days before the latter’s death on September 16th, 1977.
Watch a mime segment performed by Bowie in 1969 below.
