Where the Halling Valley River Lies - Carl Halling (lightest ebook reader txt) 📗

so David’s devotion to Glam became total.
Even David’s mother was charmed by Bowie, when, towards the end of the interview, after Harty had made a joke about his dainty strap-on platform shoes, he referred to the chat show host as “silly”, before flashing an impossibly innocent smile:
“Aww, he’s sweet,” said Miss Ann, who was also enchanted by the wit of Elton John when he appeared on Harty's show a short while later. But when she caught sight of the cover of the first New York Dolls album, which David had latterly ordered by post through his usual outlet, she told him that apart from the hardest hard core pornography, she couldn’t imagine anything quite so repulsive to the eye.
Yet, Bowie’s sphinx-like charisma was so potent that even some of the most unreconstructed of macho men were drawn, irresistibly, to his art, which combined the most seductive melodies with complex, deeply literate lyrics.
For the cult of androgyny was a powerful force in Britain in 1973, having been earlier incubated by both Mod and Hippie culture, and musical acts as diverse as the Stones, the Kinks, Alice Cooper, the Stooges and T. Rex.
Furthermore, it was reinforced in the cinema by several movies featuring angelically beautiful men.
And yet, you still put yourself in danger if you chose to parade around like a Glam Rock star in the mean streets of London or any other major British city in the early 1970s; and therefore few did.
But David fantasised about fame and adulation as never before throughout the Glam era, and he built an image based on his idol Bowie, spiking his hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point.
And there will surely be those students of human psychology who will wonder precisely what effect the gender revolution exerted on young men such as David who came to manhood at a time many of the foremost male heroes of the culture resembled beautiful women.
And they did so of course in direct defiance of strict Biblical commands concerning sexual appearance.
Yet David had initially resisted the seductions of Glam, while continuing to see the hirsute macho men of Hard and Heavy Rock as his role models.
But in time, the exquisites of Glam came to represent something quite deliciously taboo to him. And he sought to emulate them, resenting his adolescent stubble, which he smothered with concealer along with unsightly acne spots, and which he would soon enhance with subtle application of rouge.
And quite understandably perhaps, he didn't entirely fit in in his blue collar surroundings, unlike his brother who wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes.
As to David, he came into his own in La Ribera, and it was towards the end of the summer of ’73 that he finally started being noticed in a big way by the local youth, most of whom were from either Murcia or Madrid. He’d croon for crowds of La Riberan boys and girls, who’d make requests for their favourites:
“Oye, David, canta la de Gilbert O’Sulliban!”
“Conoces Cat Estebens?”
“Canta como Sinatra!”
An ever-evolving group forged an incredible closeness that summer that lasted for a full four years, and oh what magical summers they were for both Dany and David. They’d never forget them, nor be able to fully recapture the purity of the joy they knew in the still so innocent Spain of the immediate pre-Franco years.

Even later in ‘73, the minesweeper HMS Thamesis set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was David’s first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR, and he was just seventeen years old.
He struck up a friendship with the most unlikely pair of bosom buddies he ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. .
One half was Micky, aged about 23, and rumoured to be a permanent year long resident of HMS Thamesis. The other was just as much of a lad as Mick even though he boasted the patrician manner of a City of London stockbroker or merchant banker.
Mick took David under his wing with a certain intimidating affection:
“We’ll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you yet,” he once promised him, even though both men knew he'd never be anything other than the most useless mariner in the civilised world. And there was one occasion when, during some kind of conference being held below deck, he was asked by an officer what he thought of minesweeping, and he replied:
“It’s a gas!”
On another, after the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre, and every hand was in their respective allotted position, he was found wandering about on deck in a daze, and when asked what he thought he was doing, he casually told them:
“Just taking a stroll…”
And it was incidents like these that made him the object of much good-humoured banter onboard the Thamesis, where he served as a kind of latter-day Billy Budd. Although without a tithe of the young foretopman’s seamanship.
Its crew spent its final night in a club in the southern port of Portsmouth , though it might just as easily have been Plymouth.
The main event was a hyperactive drag artiste who tried desperately to keep them entertained with cabaret style numbers sung in a high woman’s voice, and bawdy jokes told in a deep manly baritone, but he was way out of his depth and the Thamesis salts subjected him to a savage barrage of heckling for his pains.
At one point - perhaps in the hope of seeing a friendly face – he turned towards David, and excitedly trilled:
"Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?"
“Skin!” the sailors bellowed back, as in “a nice bit of skin”, which may have referred to David’s appearance.
A little while later, the tar with the beard who’d been seated next to David all night asked him to hold the mike for him while he performed Rossini’s “William Tell Overture “on his facial cheeks. And he ended up passing out on the table in front of him after having collapsed face down with an almighty CRASH!
But he wasn’t the only one to suffer such an undignified fate that bacchanalian night.
And speaking of bacchanals…as soon as he was back onshore, David resumed his growing passion for all that was louche, bizarre and decadent in music, art and culture.
However, increasingly from ‘74 onwards, he turned away from what he now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, his devotion started to centre on the more refined corruption of the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1890-1930, and especially its leading cities, in terms of their being beacons of revolutionary art, and of luxury and dissolution. They included the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Époque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and most of all, Weimar Republic Berlin.
At some point in ‘74, he started using hair oil or brilliantine to slick his hair back in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as his idol had done. And to build up a new retro-style wardrobe.
This went on to include a Gatsby style tab collar, which he wore either with striped collegiate tie, or cravat or neck scarf. Over this, he might wear a short-sleeved Fair Isle sweater, a navy blue blazer from Meakers, and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir. His grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly typically flopped over a pair of two-tone correspondent shoes.
There were those artists in the Rock and Roll vanguard who appeared to share his love affair with the languid cafe and cabaret culture of the continent's immediate past. Among these were established acts, such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, and newer stars such as Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, Bill Nelson of Be Bop Deluxe and Ron and Russell Mael from L.A band Sparks. Some of Roxy’s followers even went so far as to sport the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures indeed in mid-seventies London.
As for David, he wore his bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of shoulder-length hair and flared denim jeans. And in 1975, he even went so far as to attend a concert at West London's Queen's Park football stadium in striped boating blazer and white trousers like some refugee from a Cambridge punting party.
While all the while he was surrounded by hirsute Rock fiends, including his professor friend Jim, who felt moved to enquire of him:
“You’re just taking the mickey, aren’t you…”
But he was deadly serious. And even though the headliners were his one-time favourites Yes, whose "Relayer" album he'd bought the previous year, his passion for Progressive Rock was a thing of the past.
And he'd moved on since '71…towards a far deeper love of darkness and loss of innocence.
But there was nothing even remotely dark about the time he fell in love with Marianne, a Dutch girl while sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in Gower Street, Central London. Although she didn't look Dutch; in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Mediterranean in appearance.
It was probably she who approached David, because he'd have never made the first move, and in all the time he knew her, he didn't have the guts to tell her how he felt. So, once they'd completed their final paper, he allowed her to walk away from him forever with a casual "I might see you around", or some other cliché of that kind.
For about a week, he took the train into London and spent the days wandering around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One time he could have sworn he saw her staring coolly back at him from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing. But he was powerless to act, and simply stood there as the train drew away from the station.
In time, his infatuation faded, but certain songs – such as "I Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by Bloodstone – would continue to recall for him those few weeks in the summer of '74 which he spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman of whom he knew quite literally nothing.
It wouldn’t be long before he’d forsaken his twenties style image; nor started to wonder whether Marianne had been slightly repelled by the vast expanse of white forehead that had been revealed by his slicked back hair, slicked back with hair oil or brilliantine.
Once he stopped styling his hair like Valentino, his romantic appeal started to swell by degrees…but this didn’t return Marianne to him. She was lost to him forever, and whether he ever fully recovered from her loss is open to debate. The chances are…he never did.

In July, David’s father decided that a week-long yachting course in the little village of Lymington on the south coast of England might help him develop some sorely needed moral fibre.
He was to reside for this period in a guest house owned by one Mrs Edith Drummond-Smith, whom David came