David Bowie: The Pitt Report

Kenneth Pitt‘s Inside Account of David Bowie’s Formative Years

David Bowie: The Pitt Report is one of the most important first-hand accounts of the years before David Bowie became an international star. Written by Kenneth Pitt, Bowie’s manager and close associate during much of the period from 1966 to 1970, the book documents a young artist whose identity, music and ambitions were still developing.

First published by Design Music Ltd. in 1983, the book runs to approximately 223 pages and contains numerous photographs and pieces of visual documentation from Pitt’s archive. A paperback edition was subsequently published by Omnibus Press in 1985. Unlike most Bowie biographies, The Pitt Report does not attempt to tell the story of Bowie’s entire life. Its value lies precisely in its narrower focus: the difficult and extraordinarily creative years that preceded his establishment as a major artist.

Kenneth Pitt before David Bowie

Kenneth Pitt was already an experienced figure in the entertainment industry before David Bowie entered his life. Born in 1922, he worked as a publicist and artist manager and had professional dealings with a wide range of performers. His background belonged to an older tradition of show-business management in which an artist might be developed not simply as a recording singer but as an all-round entertainer capable of working in music, television, theatre and film.

That background would have an important influence on the way Pitt approached Bowie’s career.

Pitt did not encounter a finished artist waiting to be promoted. He became involved with a young musician who had already passed through several groups, released unsuccessful records and changed both his musical direction and professional identity repeatedly.

Ralph Horton, who was managing Bowie at the time, brought Pitt into the situation. Pitt initially became involved alongside Horton before eventually taking over Bowie’s management himself. By April 1967 he had become Bowie’s sole manager.

A Young Artist Still Searching for an Identity

One of the most valuable aspects of The Pitt Report is that it presents Bowie before hindsight made his success appear inevitable.

The David Bowie of the mid-1960s was ambitious, imaginative and prolific, but commercially unsuccessful. Singles had failed to reach the charts, record companies had lost interest and his musical identity was changing rapidly.

Pitt nevertheless recognised something unusual in him.

Rather than concentrating exclusively on finding a hit single, Pitt encouraged and supported Bowie’s broader cultural development. Their relationship extended beyond conventional business management. Pitt introduced Bowie to books, theatre, films, performers and music and exposed him to cultural influences that were outside the normal world of a young London pop singer. Bowie even lived for a period at Pitt’s flat near Manchester Square in London.

Contemporary descriptions of the book emphasise this unusually close relationship. Pitt was manager, adviser, friend, patron and, for a time, an important part of Bowie’s everyday life.

This makes The Pitt Report something more intimate than a conventional music-business memoir.

From David Jones to David Bowie

Pitt entered Bowie’s professional life during the period in which David Jones was becoming David Bowie.

The name change was partly a practical necessity. Another Davy Jones was becoming internationally known through The Monkees, making confusion increasingly likely. Bowie needed an identity of his own.

The change of name ultimately became symbolic of something much larger. Reinvention would later become one of Bowie’s defining characteristics, but during the Pitt years this process was still beginning.

Pitt’s recollections are therefore valuable because they document Bowie before the public identities of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane or the Thin White Duke existed. The theatrical instinct was already present, but Bowie had not yet discovered the form in which it would bring him international success.

The Search for a New Record Contract

After Bowie’s relationship with Pye Records ended, Pitt played a direct role in finding another opportunity.

In October 1966 Pitt financed a recording session at RG Jones Studios. Bowie and musicians associated with his group The Buzz recorded material including Rubber Band and a new version of The London Boys. Pitt subsequently took the recordings to Decca, where they helped secure Bowie a contract with the company’s Deram label.

This episode illustrates one of the central themes running through Pitt’s years with Bowie: persistent investment in an artist who had given the music industry little commercial reason to believe that success was imminent.

The Deram contract gave Bowie an opportunity unusual for a young artist without a proven hit record: the chance to make a full album.

David Bowie — The 1967 Album

Bowie’s first full-length album, David Bowie, was released by Deram on 1 June 1967.

The record bears little resemblance to the rock music that would later make Bowie famous. Instead, its songs draw upon music hall, orchestral pop, theatrical storytelling, character sketches and distinctly English forms of songwriting.

Songs such as Uncle Arthur, Sell Me a Coat, Love You Till Tuesday, Silly Boy Blue, She’s Got Medals and When I Live My Dream reveal an artist experimenting with narrative, character and performance.

Pitt was closely involved with this period and even wrote notes connected with the album. The official David Bowie website has subsequently drawn attention to Pitt’s contemporary presentation of his young artist, including his attempt to make Bowie appear a year younger than he actually was.

The album failed commercially.

From a later perspective it would be easy to treat the record merely as an unsuccessful beginning. The Pitt Report, however, places it within an ongoing process of development. Bowie had not failed to become Ziggy Stardust; Ziggy Stardust did not yet exist.

He was experimenting.

Beyond the Recording Studio

Pitt understood that Bowie’s ambitions extended far beyond making pop records.

During these years Bowie became increasingly interested in acting, mime, theatre, visual presentation and mixed-media performance. Pitt actively sought opportunities in these areas.

This distinguishes Pitt’s management from a purely record-company-centred approach.

Rather than attempting to restrict Bowie to one musical identity, Pitt helped create opportunities through which Bowie’s other interests could develop. Although this approach did not produce immediate commercial success, several of these experiences became fundamental to Bowie’s later artistic vocabulary.

The idea of inhabiting a character, controlling physical movement, creating a visual identity and treating a concert as theatre would later become central to Bowie.

Lindsay Kemp and Mime

One of the most significant developments was Bowie’s association with dancer, actor and mime artist Lindsay Kemp.

Bowie studied mime with Kemp and appeared in Pierrot in Turquoise in 1967–68. The experience exposed him to a theatrical environment very different from the conventional world of British pop groups.

Mime taught Bowie how the body itself could communicate character and emotion. Kemp’s mixture of theatre, dance, costume, sexuality and visual exaggeration offered another model for what a performer could be.

In later years the influence of theatrical performance would become obvious, but during the Pitt period this was still part of Bowie’s education.

Pitt’s willingness to support these interests is important. His management strategy sometimes appears old-fashioned when judged against the rock culture that Bowie would soon enter, but it also gave Bowie space to develop skills that a conventional pop manager might have regarded as irrelevant.

New Music and Tony Visconti

After the commercial disappointment of the Deram album, Pitt continued searching for a musical direction that might suit Bowie more effectively.

One significant consequence was the arrival of Tony Visconti.

When Pitt explored the possibility of finding Bowie another producer, Denny Cordell was approached but declined. His assistant Tony Visconti was suggested instead. Bowie and Visconti quickly established a connection, beginning one of the most important creative relationships of Bowie’s entire career.

Their association would eventually extend far beyond the Pitt years, through albums including The Man Who Sold the World, Young Americans, the Berlin-period recordings, Scary Monsters and, decades later, Blackstar.

Seen from that perspective, Pitt’s management period contains several seemingly small developments that later became enormous parts of Bowie’s history.

The Velvet Underground

Another remarkable episode concerns Pitt’s return from America in late 1966.

Pitt obtained an acetate of the then-unreleased debut album by The Velvet Underground and Nico and gave it to Bowie. Bowie became fascinated by the group, particularly I’m Waiting for the Man, which he quickly incorporated into his own performing repertoire.

The official Bowie archive has confirmed Pitt’s role in introducing Bowie to this music before the Velvet Underground album had received its normal commercial release.

This is more than a colourful anecdote.

The Velvet Underground’s combination of experimental music, street-level subject matter, art and performance would resonate throughout Bowie’s later career. Pitt could not have known how important that influence would become, but his introduction helped establish one of the connections that shaped Bowie’s developing musical world.

Love You Till Tuesday

Perhaps the most ambitious project initiated during Pitt’s management was Love You Till Tuesday.

After Bowie’s Deram recordings failed to establish him commercially, Pitt conceived a promotional film that could demonstrate Bowie’s abilities to television producers and potential backers. Rather than relying on records alone, the approximately half-hour film presented Bowie visually as well as musically.

The project was filmed in early 1969 under director Malcolm J. Thomson.

It included existing Bowie material alongside newer compositions and visually staged performances. The project was intended as a professional showcase rather than as a conventional feature film.

It failed to secure the television opportunity Pitt hoped for and remained unreleased for many years. The original film eventually appeared commercially in 1984.

Yet one element of the project became extraordinarily important.

Bowie needed new material for the film.

Among the songs that emerged was Space Oddity.

The Birth of Space Oddity

Space Oddity transformed the story.

Early versions of the song were recorded during the period surrounding the Love You Till Tuesday project, and its development can therefore not be separated completely from Pitt’s efforts to create new opportunities for Bowie.

The official Bowie archive has subsequently described archival interviews in which Pitt discussed the unaired television project for which Space Oddity had been written.

The song’s story of Major Tom was strikingly different from Bowie’s earlier work. It combined narrative songwriting with contemporary fascination with space exploration and existential isolation.

A new studio recording produced by Gus Dudgeon was released as a single in July 1969.

The timing was extraordinary. The Apollo 11 Moon mission brought space exploration into homes throughout the world only days later.

Space Oddity became Bowie’s first major hit.

After years of unsuccessful singles, aborted projects, rejected recordings and experiments, David Bowie finally had the breakthrough for which Pitt had been working.

Success Did Not Solve Everything

One of the fascinating aspects of the Pitt story is that Bowie’s first major success did not strengthen their partnership permanently.

Instead, success arrived at exactly the point when Bowie was beginning to outgrow the professional structure within which Pitt had developed him.

By 1969 Bowie’s environment was changing dramatically. He was involved with the Beckenham Arts Lab, surrounded by younger artists, musicians and alternative cultural influences and increasingly interested in controlling his own career.

His musical direction was changing as well.

The whimsical theatrical pop associated with much of the Deram period was disappearing. Longer, darker and more ambitious songs were emerging.

The artist Pitt had first encountered was becoming someone else.

Beckenham and a Changing David Bowie

The Beckenham Arts Lab and the environment surrounding the Three Tuns became an important part of Bowie’s life during 1969.

Bowie was no longer simply trying to establish himself as an entertainer within the existing music business. He was becoming involved in an alternative artistic community that experimented with performance, poetry, music and communal organisation.

The change was both cultural and personal.

Bowie’s relationship with Hermione Farthingale had ended. He subsequently met Angela Barnett, who would become his wife in March 1970.

Pitt’s world and Bowie’s new world increasingly seemed to belong to different generations.

That does not mean Pitt suddenly became irrelevant. Rather, the relationship that had once served Bowie’s needs was gradually becoming unsuitable for the direction in which Bowie wanted to move.

The Second David Bowie Album

In November 1969 Bowie released another album originally titled David Bowie, later better known as Space Oddity.

The record showed how rapidly he had changed.

Songs such as Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed, Letter to Hermione, An Occasional Dream, Cygnet Committee, Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud and Memory of a Free Festival presented a far more expansive songwriter than the artist heard on the 1967 Deram album.

The album contained folk, rock, psychedelia and increasingly ambitious lyrical themes.

Pitt was still Bowie’s manager, but the artistic centre of gravity was moving.

Bowie had begun assembling the musicians and relationships from which the next stage of his career would emerge.

Tony Defries and the End of the Partnership

By late 1969 and early 1970 Bowie became increasingly dissatisfied with his management arrangements.

Tony Defries, a lawyer who would subsequently become Bowie’s manager and establish the MainMan organisation around him, entered the picture.

The transition was difficult.

Pitt and Bowie had shared far more than a straightforward professional contract. Their relationship had involved friendship, financial support, cultural education and years of persistence during a period when Bowie had very little commercial value.

The termination therefore carried a personal dimension.

By 1970 their management relationship was effectively over.

The irony is striking: Pitt had remained with Bowie through years of commercial failure and lost him shortly after Space Oddity finally demonstrated that Bowie could become a successful recording artist.

Pitt’s View of Bowie

What makes The Pitt Report particularly compelling is that Pitt writes from the perspective of somebody who knew Bowie before fame reshaped the way people perceived him.

The book presents a Bowie who could be charming, ambitious, curious, restless and intensely determined.

It also reveals the extraordinary breadth of his interests.

Music was only one part of his developing identity. Theatre, literature, painting, mime, cinema, fashion, Buddhism and contemporary art all entered the mixture.

Pitt did not create these interests, but he frequently encouraged them.

Their relationship therefore complicates the simplified story in which Bowie supposedly escaped an old-fashioned manager and suddenly discovered his true identity.

The reality was more interesting.

Pitt helped provide an environment in which Bowie could experiment. Eventually Bowie’s ambitions became incompatible with Pitt’s methods, but many of the experiments Pitt supported contributed to the artist Bowie later became.

Pitt as Witness and Participant

There is an important distinction between The Pitt Report and a conventional biography.

Pitt was not merely researching events.

He was present.

He attended meetings, arranged recordings, financed projects, contacted record companies, travelled with Bowie, photographed him, kept records and corresponded on his behalf.

This proximity is the book’s greatest strength.

It is also something readers must keep in mind critically.

Every memoir presents events through the author’s own perspective. Pitt was writing about a relationship in which he had personally invested time, money and emotion, and whose ending had inevitably affected him.

His account therefore should not automatically be regarded as neutral. But that subjectivity does not diminish the historical importance of the book. On the contrary, it is precisely Pitt’s personal involvement that makes The Pitt Report such a valuable document of Bowie’s formative years.

Historical Importance of The Pitt Report

For anyone interested in David Bowie’s development before fame, The Pitt Report occupies a special place among books about him.

It documents a period that later biographies can reconstruct but Pitt actually experienced. His memories provide a view of Bowie before the mythology of the 1970s had been created: before Ziggy Stardust, before the major international tours and before Bowie had become one of the most recognisable artists in popular culture.

The book also demonstrates that Bowie’s later success did not emerge suddenly. Many of the ingredients that would define his career were already being assembled during the Pitt years: theatrical performance, visual presentation, experimentation with identity, an openness to new artistic influences and an unwillingness to remain within a single musical style.

Pitt’s contribution to this process should not be underestimated. Although their professional relationship eventually ended, his support gave Bowie opportunities to experiment during years when commercial success remained elusive.

Conclusion

David Bowie: The Pitt Report is much more than the memoir of a former manager. It is a first-hand record of one of the least commercially successful but most formative periods of David Bowie’s career.

Kenneth Pitt witnessed Bowie searching for an identity, experimenting with music and theatre, suffering repeated commercial disappointments and gradually moving towards the artistic independence that would define his career.

The story has an unavoidable irony. Pitt helped Bowie through years in which almost nobody could have predicted the scale of his future success. When that success finally began to arrive with Space Oddity, the relationship between manager and artist was already approaching its end.

For the Bowie historian, however, Pitt never disappeared from the story. His photographs, documents, memories and detailed observations preserve a remarkable view of David Bowie before David Bowie became a phenomenon.

Further information

For more about Kenneth Pitt, his years as David Bowie’s manager and his role in Bowie’s early career, visit our extensive biography:
Kenneth Pitt – David Bowie’s Manager During His Formative Years.