David Bowie’s ‘The Jean Genie’ lyrics sold at auction for £57,000
The run of albums by David Bowie in the early 1970s remains some of the most iconic glam rock ever made. Although Bowie had found his feet with Ziggy Stardust, it wasn’t until Aladdin Sane that he was cemented as one of the biggest acts in British music history. Those early songs are the building blocks of British rock and roll, and one of his classics has now been put up for auction.
The handwritten lyrics of ‘The Jean Genie’ were originally given to one of the Starman’s biggest fans back in the ’70s. The original lyrics went for £57,000 at auction, with auctioneer Paul Fairweather saying: “We’re well pleased with the price achieved for this historic set of lyrics.”
When asked about why the Bowie fan parted ways with the text, he mentioned being inspired by the auction behind Bowie’s original lyrics for ‘Starman’, which had previously gone for £203,500. While ‘Starman’ sits in MONA these days, a representative said that they had paid too much for Bowie’s lyrics the first time: “We got carried away and paid too much. It’ll make an appearance in the expanded library we are currently constructing, along with many other items we got carried away with and paid too much for.”
Despite the massive price tag, the lyric sheet offers a good insight into Bowie’s creative process. Aside from the lyrics that we know today, you can see different editing marks on the page where Bowie was fine-tuning every word. So while it might just be a piece of paper on the surface, this is the closest we will get to see of how Bowie edited his work. He may have been made up like an alien, but even he cut his teeth starting from scratch until ‘The Jean Genie’ fell out of him.
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