大象传媒

By Bob Stanley

I grew up in Croydon, which to some is South London, to others Surrey, but has its own distinct identity - distinct enough to be the focus of the young David Bowie's ire. “It was my nemesis, I hated Croydon with a real vengeance” he told the writer David Quantick in 1999. “It represented everything I didn't want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from."

Bowie had been born in none-more-urban Brixton, but raised in Bromley, immediately to the east of Croydon. They are the Springfield and Shelbyville of the southern commuter belt. My mistrust of mock-tudor Bromley was almost as strong as Bowie's distaste for the bare concrete of Croydon.

Of course, Bowie wasn't exactly enamoured of Bromley either. I was born the year he released his first single, the rough and ready R&B Liza Jane, in 1964. He found his voice quickly on a series of singles that were all about escape and mod re-invention in central London, at that point the limit of his travel aspirations.

London was only fifteen minutes away from East Croydon station for me, but it was an entirely different world. It was around 25 minutes from Sundridge Park, the station closest to the terraced house on Plaistow Grove,which was home to Bowie for a full ten years. It will be the station Bowie had in mind in Can't Help Thinking About Me, his terrific 1965 single and his first great song. In it, he has disgraced his family, needs to escape, packs his bags and waits on the platform (one neat lyrical detail is that an ex-girlfriend calls out to him "Hi Dave" - I never think of him as a Dave!). In his book Rebel Rebel, Chris O'Leary compares the song to Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar, the main difference between the two being that Bowie catches the train at the end of the song, whereas Billy bottles it and stays in suburbia: "I've got a long, long way to go, I hope I make it on my own."

Once in the Smoke, Bowie documented the mod scene and made it sound like hard work - The London Boys, arranged beautifully by Tony Hatch, was all pill-popping loneliness; the superficially chipper I Dig Everything has a line about talking to "the time-check girl at the end of the phone". These songs are rare, largely autobiographical songs in Bowie's catalogue. After one album for Deram and a stack of failed singles, his career seemed to be going nowhere - in 1968 he wrote the caustic London Bye Ta Ta and moved back to the suburbs, to Beckenham, to re-invent himself with the Arts Lab and a free festival he put on for the sleepy town. It was in Beckenham he wrote Space Oddity, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. He hadn't needed to leave suburbia after all - Bowie's lesson to me and to thousands of others was that you could find real inspiration, magic and dreams in the suburbs; Bromley and Croydon, it turned out, were places where you could re-invent yourself as often as you wanted.

A note from Bob: To defend my home town, Croydon has done a fine job of re-inventing itself, first as the space-age Manhattan of Surrey, which meant it could stand in for German cities on film sets. More recently, it has wanted to become the Barcelona of the south. People might laugh - I'm sure Bowie did - but at least it's trying.