David Bowie Ignored John Lennon for Hours When They First Hung Out
David Bowie and John Lennon met at a party in 1974. They both admired each other’s music and planned to see each other later. Bowie was nervous about spending time with Lennon, though, so he brought his producer, Tony Visconti, along. Visconti recalled the painfully awkward night, noting that Bowie ignored Lennon for hours.
David Bowie and John Lennon met at a party
Bowie and Lennon were both at a party when Elizabeth Taylor introduced them.
“When David Bowie arrived, she seized his arm and said, ‘David, do you know John?'” Lennon’s girlfriend, May Pang, wrote in her book Loving John. “‘No, but I’ve always wanted to meet him.’ Bowie flashed his bright smile at John. There was a look of genuine admiration in his eyes. John, who found Bowie’s music fascinating, was very cordial. David had great charm and was also very funny.”
Bowie recalled getting along with Lennon, but he also said he didn’t want to mention The Beatles, worrying that it would make him look “stupid.”
“So John was sort of [in Liverpool accent] ‘Oh, here comes another new one.’ And I was sort of, ‘It’s John Lennon! I don’t know what to say. Don’t mention the Beatles, you’ll look really stupid,'” Bowie recalled in his commencement speech at the Berklee College of Music. “And he said, ‘Hello, Dave.’ And I said, ‘I’ve got everything you’ve made — except the Beatles.'”
David Bowie ignored John Lennon when they first spent time together
Later, the two men met up in a hotel room, and Bowie brought Visconti along as a “buffer.”
“He was terrified of meeting John Lennon,” Visconti told The Guardian.
Bowie was so nervous that he refused to even acknowledge Lennon for the first several hours that they were together.
“About one in the morning I knocked on the door and for about the next two hours, John Lennon and David weren’t speaking to each other,” Visconti said. “Instead, David was sitting on the floor with an art pad and a charcoal and he was sketching things and he was completely ignoring Lennon.”
Eventually, Lennon broke the tension between them.
“So, after about two hours of that, he [John] finally said to David, ‘Rip that pad in half and give me a few sheets. I want to draw you.’ So David said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea’, and he finally opened up,” Visconti said. “So John started making caricatures of David, and David started doing the same of John and they kept swapping them and then they started laughing and that broke the ice.”
The two men eventually became good friends
After the initial awkwardness, Lennon and Bowie became good friends. Bowie said it would be difficult to discuss his legacy and music in general without mentioning Lennon.
“It’s impossible for me to talk about popular music without mentioning probably my greatest mentor, John Lennon,” he said. “I guess he defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.”
He said that they could talk for hours together.
“Also, uninvited, John would wax on endlessly about any topic under the sun and was over-endowed with opinions,” he said. “I immediately felt empathy with that. Whenever the two of us got together it started to resemble Beavis and Butthead on Crossfire.”
