“I'm In This Up To My Neck”

The Konrads, The King Bees, The Manish Boys. The Lower Third, The Buzz. The Riot Squad and The Hype. A baseball team called the Dulwich Bluejays, and a mime about the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Fifty years on from the release of David Bowie’s debut album, Michael Bonner takes a very close look at Bowie’s quietly momentous 1960s, and learns from many friends, lovers and accomplices how David Jones became Rainbowman, and invented the majestic creature mythologised as David Bowie. As his former girlfriend says, “Everything David did in the ’60s led up to the ’70s…”

A MONG the attractions, one visitor recalls, there was a puppet theatre, a stand offering Tibetan goods and Tarot readers dressed in colourful kaftans. There were burgers for sale, cooked on a makeshift wheelbarrow barbeque, stalls selling medicinal herbal remedies, underground newspapers, candy floss, exotic teas and authentic psychedelic posters from california. The event, a free festival, had been advertised in The International Times, promising “live music and discs from starting time at noon through to closing time at 8.00pm”. The location for this momentous gathering? The South london suburb of Beckenham. It might not be the place you would automatically expect to find a counter-cultural happening; all the same, during one luminous summer’s day in the late ’60s, over 1,000 commuter-belt dreamers and progressively minded heads descended on the town’s croydon Road Recreation Ground. There, clustered around a Victorian wrought-iron bandstand in the middle of the park, revellers enjoyed music from the Strawbs, Bridget St John, comus and other kindred spirits.

The date – Saturday, August 16, 1969 – was propitious. on the same day, Woodstock audiences were grooving to the Dead, The Who and Jefferson Airplane – and the Beckenham Free Festival was intended to celebrate a similarly optimistic, egalitarian spirit. “We were into personal development, growing into a new way of being, a new way of organising, a new social order, all those hippy dreams,” says co-organiser Mary Finnigan. “The festival was a very worthy affair,” says singer-songwriter keith christmas, who appeared on the bill. “They believed in a hippy lifestyle, they believed in sharing.”