John Lennon, Liz Taylor and a sketch book: The night that changed David Bowie’s life
It’s easy to assume that musicians who exist in that god-tier realm of greatness are rattled by nothing. Surely, for legends of that scale, nothing really scares them. Very little could make them nervous, shy, or small when the whole world bows to their greatness. But at their core, these musical gods are just people—with the same social anxiety as the rest of us, feeling the same giddy nervousness at the thought of meeting one of their own heroes. There’s perhaps no better proof of that than the story of the night David Bowie met John Lennon.
It was 1974. At this point, John Lennon’s controversial comment that he was bigger than Jesus was still proving true. Even years after The Beatles split, the world was still absolutely manic over the members, and Lennon remained not only one of the world’s favourite musicians but one that other musicians revered and respected.
David Bowie certainly did. A few years younger than the Fab Four, Bowie was one of the countless musicians who was raised on the band. As a British musician, he was inescapably inspired by them, both by their career and the sheer scale of success they had achieved. But he was also enamoured by their experimentation, a trait that he would come to truly hone and represent in his own career. In 1974, he was only just getting started as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars saw him hit the big time in 1972, shooting him to global stardom and making him, like Lennon, a figure of obsession.
As two of the leading lights of British music and creativity, their eventual meeting was inevitable. I’m sure they could have orchestrated it sooner if one of their managers called up the other. But, especially on Bowie’s side, he was far too shy.
“He was terrified of meeting John Lennon,” Tony Visconti recalled Bowie’s nerves about meeting the man he saw as a looming legend. In fact, it took them being thrown together at Elizabeth Taylor’s party of all places to finally force him to buck up the courage. However, at that moment, the initial meeting was largely anticlimactic as Bowie essentially had the kind of interaction any fan would have. “I think we were polite with each other, in that kind of older-younger way,” Bowie remembered.
Obviously, Lennon knew who he was, though, so the classic hi-hello of a fan meeting an idol took on a new level as he added, “So John was sort of [imitating Lennon’s accent], ‘Oh, here comes another new [rocker].’ And I was sort of, ‘It’s John Lennon!’ I don’t know what to say. ‘Don’t mention the Beatles, you’ll look really stupid.’”
But it was years later, when the two had a private meeting, that their future friendship blossomed in the most awkward yet heartwarming way possible. As Bowie was once again too nervous, he brought along Visconti to buffer the situation when Lennon invited him to chat more at his hotel.
“For about the next two hours, John Lennon and David weren’t speaking to each other. 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,” the producer recalled. Bowie was so nervous that he seemed to have gone completely mute, unable to find the courage or the words.
However, Lennon seemed to like it. Maybe there was something refreshing about it. No doubt, all day, every day, all he encountered were screaming fans and people desperate to talk to him. Instead, here was someone just wanting to sit in silence. “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.’ So David said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea’, and he finally opened up. 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,” Visconti said, and so the friendship was born.
They’d go on to collaborate on ‘Fame’, but mostly, and, more importantly, they’d go on to cultivate a deeply special friendship. It was the night that gifted Bowie his “greatest mentor” and a truly dear friend until the day Lennon sadly died.
