Shindig! Issue #179 – Davie Jones & The Lower Third

Wine glasses. Precarious vehicles. Shameless publicity stunts. Raw R&B.

As thrilling unheard recordings from 1965 shine a light on the early recordings of Davie Jones.

MARTIN RUDDOCK chronicles 10 months in the life of the boy who became DAVID BOWIE

David and The Lower Third gelled into a tough, loud unit over a summer spent constantly back and forward in their ambulance to coastal towns like Bournemouth, Portsmouth and St Leonards-on-Sea. “Looking back on it, it just felt like a lot of fun at the time, and quite mischievous,” David later said. “You laugh a lot when you’re young and a lot of it was very funny.”

One day he suggested wearing make-up on stage to his bandmates. “I thought that was really peculiar, and it looked rather good,” he later recalled. A bemused Lancaster relayed this to Rivens, who was driving the ambulance. “Fuck that,” uttered ‘Death’.

They’d continued to demo new material at Central Sound between gigs and jingle sessions, but Talmy again passed on beat ballad ‘I’ll Follow You’, and ‘Glad I’ve Got Nobody’ which cheekily swiped its intro from The Kinks’ ‘Everybody’s Going To Be Happy’. Finally in June, Talmy agreed to supervise two songs at a proper session at IBC.

Snotty and confident, ‘You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving Me’ was a catchy web of stop-start rhythms and wandering chord changes, sliding into furious freak-outs that sounded a little familiar. With ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ freshly-released, David encouraged The Lower Third to emulate The Who’s attack (minus the costly auto-destruction) and they became adept at conjuring mid-song explosions, with David assisting Taylor’s closing noise-out by running a wine glass across his strings as he played. “We were known as the second loudest group in London,” said Taylor. “The Who were the first.” They were starting to look like The Who as well, while Davie Jones, the boy who’d publicly refused a haircut three times in the last year now sporting a Daltrey-ish bouffant.

Flipside ‘Baby Loves That Way’, (featuring session man extraordinaire Nicky Hopkins on piano) was a sardonic “tribute” to Herman’s Hermits (complete with nasal Peter Noone impression from Davie), about a girl who “fools around with other boys, treats me like an unwanted toy”. David wanted the backing vocals to sound like “chanting monks” but settled for The Lower Third murmuring in the background while Conn and Talmy atonally yelled the chorus line. The single was scheduled for release in August, again on Parlophone. David and Lancaster ran into Chris Farlowe on Oxford Street while clutching an acetate. When Farlowe cheerily asked to listen, Davie shut him down with a curt “You won’t like it.”

In the meantime, Talmy tasked them with cutting a publishing demo of Canadian rocker Johnny Dee’s ‘I Want Your Love’ for The Pretty Things. They obliged with their own gloriously chaotic take, with Lancaster flailing at his kit while Taylor unleashed ominous fuzzy blasts with David assisting, repeating his wine glass trick. The Pretties stuck to their own arrangement when they recorded the song later that year for Get The Picture. Sharing a bill with his heroes on The Isle Of Wight in August, Davie kept quiet about the demo disc.

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