The King Bees – David Bowie’s First Commercial Release

Before The King Bees

The King Bees therefore represented something different: an opportunity for Jones to front a smaller group devoted more directly to the rhythm and blues music that increasingly fascinated him.

Formation of The King Bees

The band’s name itself reflected the same fascination with American blues and is generally associated with the blues standard I’m a King Bee, recorded by Slim Harpo and subsequently embraced by British R&B musicians.

The King Bees line-up

George Underwood was already one of the most important figures in Jones’s early musical life. The two had known one another since their school years and had performed together before The King Bees.

Underwood would later pursue a successful career as an artist and designer and remained connected to Bowie’s history long after their early band days.

Ambition beyond the local circuit

Jones was already displaying a level of ambition that distinguished him from many other teenagers playing in local groups.

He was not content simply to wait for a record company or manager to discover The King Bees. Instead, he looked for ways to attract attention directly.

One of his boldest moves was a letter to entrepreneur John Bloom, whose business activities had made him a widely recognised public figure in Britain. Jones essentially invited Bloom to do for The King Bees what Brian Epstein had done for The Beatles.

Bloom did not personally take over the band, but Jones’s approach led to a referral to Leslie Conn, an important figure in the next stage of his career.

Leslie Conn

Leslie Conn became one of the first professional music-business figures to take Davie Jones seriously.

His relationship with The King Bees was brief, but historically important. Conn provided contacts, management and promotion and ultimately helped Jones secure his first commercial record contract.

The association also produced one of the more amusing episodes in Bowie’s earliest career. The King Bees were given a booking at a wedding anniversary celebration connected with John Bloom, but their uncompromising R&B approach proved badly suited to the occasion.

The unsuccessful engagement did not end Conn’s interest. He continued working with Jones and helped arrange the opportunity that mattered most: a recording contract.

The Decca opportunity

Through Conn, The King Bees reached the professional recording system that Jones had been trying to enter.

A one-single arrangement was secured through Vocalion Pop, part of the Decca organisation. For a seventeen-year-old singer who only months earlier had been playing local halls and clubs, this represented a significant step.

The group recorded at Decca Studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, the same studio complex Jones had previously encountered with The Konrads.

This time, however, the purpose was different. The recordings were not merely a demonstration intended to attract interest. They were being prepared for commercial release.

Creating Liza Jane

Underwood remembered that Huey “Piano” Smith’s recording of Little Liza Jane had influenced what they were doing.

Leslie Conn later remembered the creation differently. He maintained that the musicians had been working around a six-bar blues pattern and that he contributed to the song.

The accounts do not fit together perfectly, and decades later there is little value in forcing them into a single definitive version. What is certain is that Leslie Conn received the songwriting credit on the released record and produced the single.

Recording the first single

Liza Jane and its B-side were recorded at Decca Studios in West Hampstead.

Jones took the lead vocal and played saxophone, while The King Bees supplied the guitars, bass and drums that gave the record its rough British rhythm-and-blues character.

The recording bears little resemblance to the sophisticated music Bowie would make later in the decade, but it captures him at seventeen absorbing and reproducing the American R&B music that fascinated him.

His singing is forceful and deliberately blues-oriented, documenting a young performer still experimenting with vocal style and musical identity.

Louie, Louie Go Home

5 June 1964 – Bowie’s first commercial release

On 5 June 1964, Vocalion Pop released Liza Jane backed with Louie, Louie Go Home, catalogue number V.9221.

The artist credit read Davie Jones with The King-Bees. Bowie was seventeen years old.

The release gave the young Jones something his earlier recording attempts had not achieved: an officially issued record available to the public.

Decades later Bowie’s official website would use the anniversary of Liza Jane to mark the beginning of his professional recording career.

Promotion and television

The release received a surprising amount of attention for an unknown seventeen-year-old singer and his new band.

Contemporary music papers reviewed the single, with several writers praising its forceful rhythm-and-blues sound even though the hoped-for sales never followed.

The King Bees also entered the rapidly expanding world of British television promotion. The group appeared in connection with programmes including Ready! Steady! Go! and the BBC’s The Beat Room, helping place Davie Jones before a national pop audience for the first time.

Jones also appeared on Juke Box Jury during this early period. These appearances formed part of his first experience of the close relationship between records, television, press coverage and visual presentation.

Live performances

The King Bees played a modest series of live engagements during their short existence in 1964.

Their appearances took place within the London and south-east England club circuit where young rhythm-and-blues groups could build experience and attract the attention of managers, journalists and other musicians.

These were small rooms and clubs, far removed from the arenas Bowie would eventually command, but they gave Jones opportunities to test material, develop his stage presence and observe other performers within the competitive British music scene.

Commercial failure and the end of The King Bees

Despite encouraging reviews and Conn’s promotional efforts, Liza Jane failed to sell in significant numbers.

The record did not become the breakthrough Jones hoped for, and the group’s connection with Vocalion did not develop into a sustained recording career.

Jones responded in a way that would become familiar during his early career: rather than remain attached to an unsuccessful configuration, he moved quickly towards another opportunity.

Within a couple of months he was fronting The Manish Boys, a more established R&B group from Maidstone. The King Bees were left behind after only a brief period, but they had already given Jones his first experience of the commercial record business.

The single becomes a collector’s item

Revisiting Liza Jane for Toy

A live return in 2004

Why The King Bees matter

The King Bees existed only briefly and left behind just one commercially released single, but their importance within Bowie’s story extends beyond the size of their recorded catalogue.

Through the group, Jones encountered management, a record contract, professional recording, press reviews, television promotion and commercial disappointment while still only seventeen.

Several characteristics associated with his later career were already visible: unusual ambition, a willingness to approach influential people directly, intense curiosity about contemporary music and an unwillingness to remain in a group once he believed another path offered greater possibilities.

Musically, he remained deeply indebted to the blues and R&B performers he admired. He was still years away from Space Oddity, Ziggy Stardust and international fame, and he had not yet adopted the surname Bowie.

The importance of The King Bees lies precisely in that distance. They capture David Jones before the reinventions, before the famous characters and before success, already pushing to turn musical ambition into a professional career.

Liza Jane is therefore more than a rare collector’s item. It is the first commercially released document in the recording career that eventually became the extraordinary story of David Bowie.

Article origin

This article was researched and compiled for the David Bowie Collaborations & Creative Circle Archive at DavidBowieWorld.com, documenting The King Bees and their place at the beginning of David Bowie’s professional recording history.

© DavidBowieWorld.com — David Bowie Collaborations & Creative Circle Archive.

---

← Back to David Bowie Collaborators