His Animal Grace
The story of Lindsay Kemp, David Bowie, Kate Bush and Bateman's Buildings
“Walking down Bateman Street a few weeks ago I was happy to see my own house in Bateman’s Building was still standing and the windows still looked a bit unwashed as they did when I left forty years ago. The house really should have a blue plaque because David Bowie often visited me there. We had many happy days, weeks, months there. We began our love affair there…”
Hazlitt's, an exclusive hotel located on Frith Street, offers guests a glimpse into Georgian decadence with its opulent townhouse rooms which once served as a nurses' hostel. The hotel was recently extended behind towards Bateman’s Buildings, the alleyway that runs down from Soho Square parallel to Frith Street. According to the project’s architects it was an alley “associated with discarded syringes and drunks relieving themselves”. Writing in 1895, the journalist William Le Queux described it as “a narrow and exceedingly uninviting passage… lined on each side by grimy, squalid-looking houses, the court itself forming the playground of a hundred or so spirited juveniles of the unwashed class.”
An unlikely place for history to be made, Bateman’s Buildings was where experimental performance art conjoined with rock music. Musical theatre was reinvented for the age of stadium rock and MTV in a small flat above a strip club. For much of the 60s and 70s the flat was home to Lindsay Kemp. On his death in 2018, the Artistic Director of Ballet Rambert described him as “one of the most remarkable men ever created in British theatre.”
True lies
Like many of the stories we have been exploring, Lindsay Kemp ’s begins far from London. It’s a story that shares something with the fictional Billy Elliot, the northern boy who battles prejudice to achieve his dream of being a dancer: “I’d dance to entertain the neighbours. I mean, it was a novelty in South Shields to see a little boy in full make-up dancing on pointe.”
It was at Bradford College of Art in the mid 1950s where he met David Hockney who persuaded him to pursue his ambition in London - a place to be accepted and to explore its creative possibilities. He was accepted by Ballet Rambert on condition that he first did his national service. During his time with the RAF he took to wearing eyeshadow and Indian bangles, leading to a psychiatric evaluation which excused him from further service. His training developed further with the mime artist Marcel Marceau, and by the 1960s he was running his own dance company, working as a performer, choreographer and teacher. Kemp became a pioneering performer and dancer who fused together different styles of performance - ballet, Kabuki, Spanish dance and mime - an approach that was both radical and innovative. It was also intensely personal, and inspirational to those musicians he later worked with. He described how he worked in a radio interview for the BBC:
“I reveal everything of myself… it is all true. There are some lies but they are true lies… That is to say, what began as imagination becomes reality. I need fantasy to become reality. I need the dream so I can make the dream come true.”
In the summer of 1966, while much of London was obsessed by England’s performance in the World Cup finals, Lindsay Kemp claims to have other things on his mind: “I remember watching a bit of the World Cup together with David on our flickering black and white TV, it was the year that England won the World Cup and we soon got fed up… we were much more interested in each other.“
His is a story in which true lies are at times difficult to disentangle from truth. Most accounts, including Bowie’s own, suggest that the two met for the first time during 1967 not 1966 - but what is true and significant is the impact that their relationship had on our culture, and indeed on each other.
By the summer of 1967 David Bowie was on the verge of giving up on his brief musical career. His first solo album, an eclectic and unfocused affair that the writer David Buckley later described as "the vinyl equivalent of the madwoman in the attic” was a commercial flop that led him to seriously consider joining a Buddhist monastery in Scotland. Then a friend took him to see a performance of Kemp’s show called Clowns at a small theatre off St Martins Lane which opened with the song ‘When I Live My Dream’ from Bowie’s album. After the show “he came to my dressing room and he was like the archangel Gabriel standing there, I was like Mary. It was love at first sight. Then he fell in love, he fell in love with the show and with my work, with my world.”
The very next day Bowie started doing Kemp’s classes at the Dance Centre in Covent Garden, who says “After the first class, we walked – my feet didn’t touch the ground – we walked arm in arm from Floral Street to Bateman Street, where we continued to dance and to create.” Their creation became the show Pierrot In Turquoise. According to Kemp, Bowie suggested ‘turquoise’ because it was the Buddhist symbol of everlastingness. But neither the show nor their relationship would share this quality. The tour of their show around the country came to a dramatic halt when Kemp discovered his partner romantically involved with Natasha Korniloff, the show’s costume designer (who later designed for Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Ballet Rambert).
While Bowie’s days as Kemp’s lover were over, the latter’s influence on the young singer had only just begun. All the accounts from that time by associates and friends suggest that while Bowie had yet to find a coherent focus for his music, he had a natural charisma and presence. Kemp’s philosophy that everyday life was theatre, and through performance you explore different elements of yourself appealed to Bowie, who was not entirely sure who he was. However, as Paul Morley has observed, Bowie realised that it was through the world of Kemp that he was “on the way to finding the truth or the best sort of lies.”
Jamming good with Weird and Gilly
It took a few more years for everything to fall into place. According to journalist Nick Kent “David had spent the 60s developing. He’d learned all the chords, He’d spent hours, days, weeks, months, learning to play. He did the work.” And perhaps of all the work he did leading up to Ziggy Stardust in 1972, none was more important than applying and exploring everything he had learned from Lindsay Kemp: playing with gender, using make-up, the Mr Fish man dresses, costume and his disciplined stagecraft. Kemp gave Bowie technique. Never a great mime, dancer or actor, Bowie learned how to use elements from all of these crafts in his creation of personas and his mastery of movement on stage.
In 1972, their collaboration was briefly resurrected when Kemp performed in Bowie’s two Ziggy Stardust shows at Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre. There is no film of the performance, although Kemp was on stage for Queen Bitch and the title song. Also that year, Kemp appeared in the video for John I’m Only Dancing.
Bowie put Ziggy Stardust to rest at the Hammersmith Odeon just one year later, but his experimentation of rock music as performance art continued as Aladdin Sane, plastic soul boy, the Thin White Duke (with a detour as Thomas Newton), Iggy Pop’s piano player, Baal, Lindsay’s Pierrot (on the Ashes to Ashes video), the transatlantic pop star (with a detour as Jareth), the bloke in Tin Machine, the drum n bass internet service provider, Classic Bowie, and Lazarus.
Lily in my soul
In 1976 as Bowie navigated global fame as a rock star, Lindsay Kemp continued juggling his small one person shows with running dance classes from the Covent Garden studio. One afternoon a young woman joined his class, taking a break from her A Level studies. Kemp remembers her as “looking like a serious student, but as timid as hell! And of course she took a place at the back of the class. You know, I had to coax her forward, I mean she was extremely shy, extremely timid and the first thing I had to do was bring her out of herself, give her courage.” To inspire and reveal the inner artist of one iconic musical performer is by any measure a significant achievement. To do so twice is remarkable.
Kate Bush was still writing the songs for her debut album The Kick Inside when she was tutored by Kemp, and still seeking the persona and technique to connect with an audience. “I had almost given up the idea of using dance as an extension of my music, until I met Lindsay Kemp, and that really did change so many of my ideas. He was the first person to actually give me some lessons in movement. I realised there was so much potential with using movement in songs, and I wanted to get a basic technique in order to be able to express myself fully.”
With The Kick Inside she became the world’s first woman to have an entirely self-written million-selling album, and with Wuthering Heights was the first British woman to reach number one on the charts with her own song. Significantly, Bush took charge of all aspects of the creative and production process, down to setting up her own publishing company. Her 1979 tour is hailed as one of the defining multimedia rock tours of all time, weaving together music, dance, theatre, poetry and mime.
Movement and dance have been defining aspects of her work both on the stage and in videos, which follow from her training with Kemp: “I couldn’t believe how strongly Lindsay communicates with people without even opening his mouth. It was incredible, he had the whole audience in his control, just with his little finger. And it was amazing. I’d never seen anything like it, I really hadn’t. And I felt if it was possible to combine that strength of movement with the voice, then maybe it would work, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”
The two worked closely together in 1993 in the short film she made The Line, the Cross and the Curve which draws on songs from her album The Red Shoes. The film features Bush, Miranda Richardson and Lindsay Kemp who was the choreographer. On his death, Kate Bush wrote: “He was very brave, very funny and above all, astonishingly inspirational. There was no-one quite like Lindsay. I was incredibly lucky to study with him, work with him and spend time with him.”
Liberation and enchantment
The collaboration that began at Bateman’s Buildings was one significant stage in the creative relationship between music and theatre in Britain. That relationship is a unique and historically rich one, providing our popular culture with a distinctive character. While Shakespeare used songs and music as storytelling tools, we also find this technique used in medieval mystery and morality plays, setting the scene for musical theatre. While opera played a key role in the cultural identity of many other European countries, that was not the case in Britain. The musical theatre that evolved here used popular melodies rather than classical music and aimed from the outset to be accessible and popular to a wide audience. John Gay’s Beggars Opera (1728) is an early example of this, followed over a century later by Gilbert & Sullivan. The latter’s blend of barbed satire, theatricality and brilliant songwriting was first performed at Dean Street’s Royalty Theatre, becoming an immediate sensation. They came to prominence during the golden age of music hall, defining a relationship between songwriting and stagecraft that others would build on in the twentieth century.
Musical theatre was brought into the jazz age on both sides of the Atlantic, here most notably by Noel Coward. As the writer Paul du Noyer says: “In so doing he laid the foundations of English pop, and taught the British to use their native wit in the new transatlantic idiom.” It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that it’s physical proximity that brought together music and theatricality, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. All of London’s leading theatres and music clubs were largely within one mile of each other, as were the private members’ clubs where actors and musicians would meet post-performance. The dance studios, rehearsal spaces, costumiers and others meeting the needs of performers were also all in and around Soho. Glam, punk, goth and New Romantics - all with their own particular theatricality - have their origins in Soho’s square mile. And two rock bands who spent much of the 1960s performing in Soho - The Who and Pink Floyd - gave us the rock opera.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is more a song cycle than a fully fledged rock opera, although how we categorise it is fairly irrelevant. It remains a timeless masterpiece with a dramatic heft unmatched by any other music of its time. It is both liberating and enchanting, qualities that its creator learned from his time in Bateman’s Building. Two years before he died in 2018, Kemp said this in an interview for The Guardian:
“You need to liberate an audience, put them under a spell – it makes the heart surgery less painful. And that kind of mesmerism or hypnotism, I acquired at a very early age in order to stave off the bully’s blows or the mocking of the crowd. I made them laugh; I put them under my spell. There were times when I performed in very low cabaret clubs in the north of England wearing pink tights, pale makeup and a bowler hat. In order not to have beer cans thrown at one, one had to enchant those audiences – and I did.”
Walk with us!
Our next guided walk will be on Sunday 5 May. Details here: https://walkonthewildside.substack.com/p/the-music-and-politics-walk
We’re doing it as a fundraiser for Centrepoint - the charity that supports young homeless people.
I loved this. I’m a big Bowie fan and discovered LK through Bowie. I went to see him at Sadler’s Wells in the 80s.