Les Mighall – Drums with Davie Jones and The Lower Third
Les Mighall was a drummer with The Lower Third, the Margate group joined by Davie Jones – the future David Bowie – in the spring of 1965.
Together with guitarist Denis “Tea-Cup” Taylor and bassist Graham Rivens, Mighall was part of the Lower Third line-up that was already established before Jones joined the group. His time alongside Jones was short: within a few months Mighall had left and Phil Lancaster took over on drums.
Mighall therefore belongs to a very specific point in Bowie’s early history: the first stage of his association with The Lower Third, before the better-documented later line-up and before David Jones publicly established the name David Bowie.
- Name: Les Mighall
- Born: 10 March 1943
- Died: 11 March 2008
- Instrument: Drums
- Band: The Lower Third
- Worked with Davie Jones: 1965
- Lower Third colleagues: Denis “Tea-Cup” Taylor and Graham Rivens
- Replaced on drums by: Phil Lancaster
- Bowie period: The earliest months of Davie Jones and The Lower Third
The Lower Third before Davie Jones
The history of The Lower Third began in Margate, Kent, before David Jones became involved with the group.
The band’s early history is sometimes described differently in retrospective sources, particularly concerning its beginnings under the name Oliver Twist and The Lower Third. What is firmly relevant to Mighall’s Bowie connection is that, by the time the musicians decided to pursue professional work in London, the core group included guitarist Denis Taylor, bassist Graham Rivens and drummer Les Mighall.
They therefore had an established musical relationship before meeting Davie Jones. Bowie did not originally assemble The Lower Third as his own backing band; he joined musicians who were already working together.
Moving towards London
The Lower Third emerged from the lively music scene around Margate and the Kent coast. As their ambitions developed, Taylor, Rivens and Mighall moved towards professional work and increasingly focused their activities on London.
This placed the group within the rapidly changing British music scene of the mid-1960s, when rhythm and blues, beat music and the developing mod culture were reshaping clubs and live venues across the capital.
At the same time, Davie Jones was reaching the end of another stage of his own musical apprenticeship.
Davie Jones before The Lower Third
The Manish Boys with Davy Jones – “I Pity the Fool”, released in 1965.
By the spring of 1965, Jones had already worked with several groups, including The Konrads, The King Bees and The Manish Boys.
The young singer and saxophonist was ambitious but had yet to achieve commercial success. His early recordings were heavily influenced by American rhythm and blues, while his musical interests were continuing to develop alongside the changing British beat scene.
After his period with The Manish Boys came to an end, Jones was again looking for musicians with whom he could continue performing and developing his own material.
Davie Jones joins The Lower Third
The Lower Third held auditions at La Discotheque in Soho, London, and Davie Jones successfully joined the group in the spring of 1965.
The resulting line-up featured Davie Jones on vocals and saxophone, Denis “Tea-Cup” Taylor on guitar, Graham Rivens on bass and Les Mighall on drums. Neil Anderson is also documented as contributing occasional vocals during this period.
For Mighall, this marked the beginning of his brief direct association with the musician who would later become David Bowie.
Davie Jones and The Lower Third on stage
The Mighall line-up belongs to the earliest live period of Davie Jones and The Lower Third.
One documented appearance took place at the Grand Hotel in Littlestone, Kent, on 17 May 1965. Further performances followed during the spring and early summer as Jones established himself as the group’s frontman.
The surviving documentation for these early appearances is less complete than it is for Bowie’s later career, and not every performance from this period can be reconstructed with certainty. What can be established is that Mighall was the drummer during the first months of Jones’s association with the band.
A new direction for Davie Jones
Davy Jones – “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving”, 1965. The recording illustrates the harder musical direction associated with the later Lower Third period.
The Lower Third arrived at an important transitional point in Jones’s development.
His earlier groups had drawn heavily on American rhythm and blues. The Lower Third also worked from an R&B foundation, but Jones increasingly wanted to adapt that music to the harder sound of contemporary British beat groups.
Looking back on The Lower Third in a 1983 interview, Bowie described the group as attempting to be a rhythm-and-blues band and recalled that they played a considerable amount of material associated with John Lee Hooker, trying to adapt it to the “big beat”.
That recollection helps place Mighall’s short period with Jones in its proper musical context. This was still an exploratory stage, before Bowie had developed the distinctive songwriting and artistic identity that would define his later career.
Les Mighall leaves The Lower Third
Mighall’s time alongside Davie Jones did not last long.
By the summer of 1965, Phil Lancaster had taken over as drummer in The Lower Third. Sources commonly place the change around July 1965.
The surviving published evidence does not provide enough reliable detail to reconstruct Mighall’s personal reasons for leaving. It is therefore better to record the personnel change without attaching an undocumented explanation to it.
His departure created an important dividing line in Bowie’s Lower Third history: Mighall belonged to the first months with Jones, while Lancaster became the drummer during the subsequent and better-documented phase of the group.
The recording question
The distinction between Mighall and Lancaster is especially important when discussing recordings attributed to Davie Jones and The Lower Third.
For many years, Bowie’s best-known surviving Lower Third material centred on You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving and Baby Loves That Way, recorded during the period in which the group’s drum position was changing from Mighall to Lancaster.
Because historical sources and retrospective personnel listings do not always present the early Lower Third sessions in the same way, individual recordings should not automatically be assigned to Mighall simply because he had been the band’s drummer.
This became even more important following the announcement of previously unreleased Lower Third material in 2026.
David Bowie – The Shel Talmy Recordings
On 15 July 2026, the official David Bowie website announced David Bowie – The Shel Talmy Recordings, an archival collection devoted to Bowie’s early work with producer Shel Talmy.
The collection includes material recorded as Davie Jones, with The Manish Boys and with The Lower Third. Several previously unreleased recordings were identified as Davie Jones & The Lower Third, substantially expanding the officially available material from this early period.
David Bowie – The Shel Talmy Recordings.
The official personnel listing for Davie Jones & The Lower Third names:
Phil Lancaster – DrumsGraham Rivens – Bass
Denis Taylor – Guitar
Les Mighall – Drums
David Bowie – Vocals & Harmonica
The listing is historically important because it officially associates both Les Mighall and Phil Lancaster with the Lower Third material represented by the collection.
However, the published announcement does not provide a complete track-by-track breakdown identifying which drummer performs on each individual Lower Third recording.
For that reason, this article does not assign a specific Shel Talmy recording to Les Mighall unless a reliable session source can establish his participation.
The Lower Third after Mighall
David Bowie with The Lower Third – “Can’t Help Thinking About Me”, released in 1966, after Les Mighall had left the group.
With Phil Lancaster on drums, The Lower Third continued working with Jones through the second half of 1965.
During this later phase the group became more closely associated with Jones as frontman, while his songwriting and ambitions continued to develop.
Jones also adopted the professional name David Bowie during this period, avoiding confusion with another increasingly prominent performer named Davy Jones.
In January 1966, Can’t Help Thinking About Me was released under the credit David Bowie with The Lower Third.
Les Mighall was no longer a member of the band by that stage and should not be associated with this later Lower Third recording period.
Mighall’s place in the story
The importance of Les Mighall does not depend on extending his role beyond the evidence.
His documented place in Bowie’s history is already clear: he was the drummer in The Lower Third when Davie Jones first became associated with the group in 1965.
That placed Mighall alongside Bowie during a formative moment, after The Manish Boys but before the later Lower Third line-up, before the David Bowie name appeared on record, and years before Bowie’s breakthrough.
Mighall was therefore part of the working environment in which the young Jones continued learning how to lead a band, develop his songwriting and move beyond the rhythm-and-blues influences that had dominated his earliest recordings.
Later life
Verified information about Les Mighall‘s life and musical activities after The Lower Third is limited in the publicly accessible historical record.
Rather than reconstructing those years from unsupported claims, David Bowie World leaves that part of his biography open until reliable documentation can be established.
Mighall died on 11 March 2008.
Legacy
Les Mighall‘s association with David Bowie was brief, but it belongs to a genuine and important part of Bowie’s formative history.
He was already playing with Denis Taylor and Graham Rivens when Davie Jones entered their musical world. For a short period in 1965, the four musicians worked together as Jones began another stage in the long process of becoming David Bowie.
Mighall left before The Lower Third entered its later and better-known phase with Phil Lancaster, but that does not diminish his place in the chronology. He remains part of the earliest Lower Third line-up to work directly with Davie Jones.
First-hand testimony
No reliably sourced first-hand interview or quotation from Les Mighall concerning Davie Jones or his period with The Lower Third has been located for this article.
For that reason, no quotation has been reconstructed or attributed to him. A Les Mighall quote should only be added if an identifiable primary source – such as an interview, letter, contemporary document or direct testimony – can be established.
Official Website & Further Information
No verified official website for Les Mighall has been identified.
More about this period of David Bowie’s career can be found on David Bowie World:
David Bowie and The Lower Third
The official David Bowie website provides the personnel and track information for the 2026 archival release David Bowie – The Shel Talmy Recordings:
David Bowie – The Shel Talmy Recordings
Article Origin
This article was researched and written exclusively for DavidBowieWorld.com as part of the David Bowie Collaborations & Creative Circle Archive.
Because surviving biographical information about Les Mighall is limited and published accounts of The Lower Third‘s earliest history do not always agree in every detail, this article deliberately distinguishes established facts from uncertain or incomplete documentation.
Particular care has also been taken with the early recording history. The official 2026 personnel information for David Bowie – The Shel Talmy Recordings names both Les Mighall and Phil Lancaster as drummers associated with Davie Jones & The Lower Third, but does not provide a complete track-by-track allocation between them. No individual recording is therefore attributed to Mighall here without sufficient supporting evidence.
If further verified photographs, documents, interviews or first-hand testimony concerning Les Mighall become available, this page can be expanded accordingly.
© DavidBowieWorld.com – David Bowie Collaborations & Creative Circle Archive.
