Free Bowie: A Biography by Marc Spitz

with sticks.”
    “He was always his own man,” Peter Frampton says. “He didn’t toe the line at all and it got him into trouble occasionally. Basically he had an idea of what he wanted to do and he did it. He made his own syllabus. If you were up for it, he’d take you all the way. You’d do a year and a half of what you were normally doing in college. He was a great artist himself but his joy was teaching. What he got back from what he was giving. I think his enthusiasm was something that people like David just latched on to. They saw a good thing. They couldn’t believe that this guy was actually for them.” Owen Frampton was vociferous where John Jones was taciturn, and there was none of the Terry-related domestic drama in the art room. It was a safe space in which to create and scheme and feel strong and valuable.
    “I believe he had an estranged father,” says Peter Frampton. “Remote. For David being not only talented on the musical side but also very arty, he loved my dad and saw this man would push him and was open. He became some sort of a father figure, yes.”
    Under Owen Frampton, David learned to be both disciplined and an insurgent at the same time. He was and remains unusually professional in his approach to his rule breaking. If his classmates were wearing pointy-toed shoes, David would wear round-toed creepers. If their ties were tight, his tie would be loose. Peggy would taper his trousers and jackets to his specific details. He had an image in his mind of how he wanted to look, derived, mainly, from films and the album sleeves that lined the bins at Furlong’s, and scrounged whatever he could from the local department store and, whenever possible, the shops in London.
    “Clothes were a really big deal,” Kureishi says, alluding to some communal Bromley-ite mind-set. “In the suburbs it was about originality and not being like other people. Being slightly different, sophisticated. You could get good clothes in Bromley but it helped if you wanted to be ahead of the other kids to get something amazing in London.”
    Owen Frampton also encouraged Jones and Underwood to take their campus band as far as they could. He allowed them to keep their instruments in his classroom and even encouraged his young son to fraternize with them. Young Frampton was already an accomplished guitarist and was soon a friend of both boys. Twenty years later, he’d come alive, of course, but at the time, he was simply Professor Frampton’s child. Hisgroup the Little Ravens performed alongside George and the Dragons at campus fetes and once at a school-wide talent competition.
    Although Peter Frampton and David would remain friends and move in and out of each other’s lives as both became pop stars (Frampton, ironically, would beat David Bowie to stardom as a guitarist with the Herd and Humble Pie in the late sixties), Frampton would not stay long at Bromley Tech. Owen Frampton’s charisma and approach to education cast a long shadow for his son.
    “I was only there a year because I found it difficult being at the same school as my father,” Frampton has said. “A few kids, shall we say the one half percent who didn’t get on too well with my father, made my life rather like a living hell.” Frampton would soon transfer out of Bromley.
    The newly Beat David Jones was a magnet for the young girls from local Bromley High School and Bromley Grammar, and even some fellow students at the all-boys Bromley Tech. It was around this time, he claimed to have lost both his hetero and homosexual virginity.
    “When I was fourteen, sex suddenly became all-important to me,” he told Cameron Crowe in their
Playboy
interview in ’76. “It didn’t really matter who or what it was with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So it was some very pretty boy in class in some school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs. And that was it.”
    Both boys and girls were attracted to him because of his newly