How art brokered the friendship of John Lennon and David Bowie
When David Bowie released his ninth studio album, Young Americans, in 1975, the world got the partnership it never knew it needed. A blue-eyed soul and R&B masterpiece, it boasted the song ‘Fame’ alongside a reworking of The Beatles classic ‘Across the Universe’, with both featuring takes from John Lennon himself. At the time, Bowie and Lennon were great friends, and although the collaboration surprised many of their fans, very few were shocked at its brilliance.
The story goes that it was ‘Fame’ that emerged first out of their blossoming friendship, stemming from an old riff that Carlos Alomar had in his locker and Lennon’s nonsensical sounds that he proceeded to perform on top of it. The track then became the album’s biggest hit, with the partnership of Bowie and Lennon, and one of the most coveted in music history. Bowie would later describe the song as “a happy song. The melodic feel, everything about it, is happy.”
Despite ‘Fame’ and ‘Across the Universe’ being two of Bowie’s best cuts, it transpires that he and Lennon’s first meeting was somewhat awkward. However, the two finally broke the ice via a medium they both loved. When speaking during an interview in 2021 to mark the fifth anniversary of David Bowie’s death, his long-time friend and collaborator, Tony Visconti, looked back on that uncomfortable first meeting between Bowie and the former Beatles man. He recalled: “He was terrified of meeting John Lennon.”
However, Bowie finally agreed to meet Lennon in a hotel room in New York. The awkwardness was so palpable that Bowie quickly got in touch with Visconti and asked him to help “buffer the situation”.
“About one in the morning, I knocked on the door, and for about the next two hours, John Lennon and David weren’t speaking to each other,” Visconti recalled. “Instead, David was sitting on the floor with an art pad and a charcoal, and he was sketching things, and he was completely ignoring Lennon. So, after about two hours of that, he [John] finally said to David: ‘Rip that pad in half and give me a few sheets. I want to draw you.'”
And that was it. The awkwardness dissipated instantly: “David said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea’, and he finally opened up.”
Visconti concluded: “So John started making caricatures of David, and David started doing the same of John, and they kept swapping them, and then they started laughing, and that broke the ice.”
The duo became great friends, and before too long, Young Americans was released into the world. The rest was history.
