As well as enjoying each other’s professional company when they joined forces to write and record the song ‘Fame’, the duo’s middle finger to middle management, the two icons of rock music were also friends off stage too.
For Bowie, Lennon was still an icon. Their introduction would come in equally glamorous fashion as Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor made the connection.
Lennon’s personal life was in a precarious moment around the time that he first met Bowie in 1974, a period in which he found himself lost in a spiral of personal issues which ultimately led to his estrangement from Yoko Ono, and is often described as Lennon’s ‘Lost Weekend’.
Bowie, too, was in the middle of a hedonistic spree which would ultimately lead to his own personal issues. They connected instantly.
“The seductive thing about John was his sense of humour,” Bowie told Berklee College when discussing the facets of pop music in 1999. “Surrealistically enough, we were first introduced in about 1974 by Elizabeth Taylor. Miss Taylor had been trying to get me to make a movie with her.
“We were in LA, and one night she had a party to which both John and I had been invited,” Bowie continued. “I think we were polite with each other, in that kind of older-younger way. Although there were only a few years between us, in rock and roll that’s a generation."
“Towards the end of the ’70s, a group of us went off to Hong Kong on a holiday and John was in, sort of, house-husband mode and wanted to show Sean the world,” recalled Bowie, noting the change of lifestyle for Lennon.
“During one of our expeditions on the back streets a kid comes running up to him and says, ‘Are you John Lennon?’ And he said, ‘No but I wish I had his money.’ Which I promptly stole for myself. -imitating a fan- ‘Are you David Bowie?’ No, but I wish I had his money. It’s brilliant.
It was a technique that the singer heartedly employed throughout his life.
“I was back in New York a couple of months later in Soho, downtown, and a voice pipes up in my ear, ‘Are you David Bowie?’ And I said, ‘No, but I wish I had his money.’
“You lying bastard. You wish you had my money.’ It was John Lennon.”
It was the kind of jovial tone that the pair always shared with one another. (Farout)
