How one punch defined David Bowie’s career: “I did him a favour”
On a US chat show, David Bowie once joked, “I reinvented my image so many times that I’m in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.” The chameleonic and kaleidoscopic reinventions that Bowie swirled through like an alchemist of identity were a calling card for his otherworldly artistic talent. They were not just character studies or quirky conduits for creativity; they redefined what was possible in rock music. As fate would have it, Bowie happened upon the powers of reinvention at an early age and quite by chance.
“When you’re young, you’re still ‘becoming’,” the ‘Life on Mars’ singer once said, “Now I am more concerned with ‘being’.” While the Starman was still very much in the embryonic phases of ‘becoming’, a pivotal creative moment would be thrust upon him. “When I was about 12/13 years old,” Bowie explains, “I had a fight.” It all started over a gripe with a school buddy.
The boy in question was George Underwood, a lifelong friend of Bowie’s. Underwood, a famed painter in his own right, fleshed out the details behind the fight in an interview with The Telegraph, stating: “Just to get the story straight, it was about a girl we both fancied.” He continued: “She came to my 15th birthday party – everyone was drunk at about eight, including David.”
Recalling the debacle fondly, he added: “I was sensible and managed a date with her. David phoned me on the day and said she had told him she didn’t want to meet me because she wanted to go out with him.” This was, in fact, a wily old trick by Bowie, who swooped in on Underwood’s patch and copped a blow to the eye for his troubles and nothing more.
“Neither of us had even kissed Carol Goldsmith,” Underwood told the BBC, “She was just a girl that we both fancied.” However, an innocuous schoolyard tiff, followed by a seemingly innocuous punch, ended up with Bowie in hospital a week later having suffered anisocoria, causing an enlarged pupil and the illusional appearance of different coloured eyes. The muscle that holds the pupil open was damaged by the blow, distorting the appearance of the young lad’s iris.
This would be a defining moment in Bowie’s life. It was as though it had been prognosticated by some otherworldly mystic figures of fate, well aware years in advance that he would become an illuminating catalyst for the virtue of expressive individualism.
Throughout Bowie’s career, his androgynous look imbued him with a captivating sense of enigma. He outwardly embodied his music and art with a miasma of creative mystique. It is fair to say that he seemed like some lauded pariah of humanity, a creative freak in the most endearing sense of the word. His unique eyes presented him with his first mask, and he has worn them ever since. As he once told Cameron Crowe of Rolling Stone, “Don’t expect to find the real me… the David Jones underneath all this.”
Even at the height of his fame, he self-imposed himself as a pariah of the status quo. This began with a reinvented appearance that caused quite a playground stir when he was around 14 years old, returning to the playground from the hospital to much hubbub. Suddenly, he was someone else under their uneasy gaze.
Latterly, this allowed him to fully inhabit characters of his own creation. He used them as a way of exhibiting something both deeply personable and usually yet wholly unreachable, extracting great depths from the concept of the ‘rock persona’. His chameleonic ways were not the quirks of a turncoat, rather they allowed him to propagate something deeper with a sense of sincerity. He was able to invite fans into a world of realised imagination. “I don’t want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up on stage,” Bowie once said, “I want to take them on stage with me.”
His fantasies from a very early age involved being a musician of some sort. George Underwood jokes that Bowie was in a line of boys being asked about what they’d like to be when they were older by a career’s counsellor, and Bowie bucked the trend of conventional answers by declaring, “I want to be a saxophonist in a modern Jazz quartet.”
Bowie was always determined to be different, and having two different-looking eyes made him inherently different. He was forced to embrace the outsider status of individuality from an early age, and he propagated it ever since. As Underwood, the culprit behind the creative messiah’s inception, once revealed, “[Bowie] said to me later, I did him a favour [with the punch] it gave him that enigmatic look… ‘people always talk about the eyes’ he said.”
Talking points were pretty much Bowie’s stock-and-trade. In retrospect, you can almost see him formulating the early thoughts of his future artistic design as his classmates stood agog and marveled at his new look when he returned from a short stint in the hospital following a rather rock ‘n’ roll squabble. He dared to be different in his career, but first, he simply dared to go out on a date. Becoming the Man Who Fell to Earth was a journey of baby steps, the first stride came courtesy of Underwood’s right hook.
