Stephen Stroud


DAVID ROBERT JONES (1947-1968)


Surely everybody knows the 'Paul is Dead' rumor that was started in the late Sixties by crazed Beatles fans who smoked too much heroin, but what you don't know is that David Bowie is subject to similar rumors, only these ones are all true! In fact the great David Bowie cover up is so extreme and outrageous you won't believe your eyes (unless of course you're still smoking that Sixties heroin, in which case you'll believe every word.) Let me explain...

The original David Robert Jones was a cheeky Cockney chap with funky teeth and kooky eyes, he dreamt of a career in cabaret, or mime when he'd had a couple of pints and was feeling pretentious. He made a couple of silly records then sadly walked under a London bus after one too many cherry brandy snifters in the Queen Vic on the Old Kent Road.

It was a great tragedy and would have certainly made the papers if his manager Ken Pitt hadn't have followed him out of the pub with mischief on his mind and upon finding a bloody and flattened David he dragged the body back to his flat around the corner before the police could arrive.

You see David Jones was his ticket to stardom, his own Tommy Steel, and his untimely death put pay to all Ken's hopes and dreams... "But what if he wasn't dead... the contract I just signed for him wouldn't have to be ripped up..." he plotted manically.

So Ken Pitt, with the help of a chloroform soaked rag and the promise of some 'killer grass man' lured an unsuspecting young man called 'Darren "Chopper" Yates' back to his flat which had now been turned into something of a Dr. Frankenstein style laboratory during the panic and amphetamine driven nights which followed young David Jones' death.

Now you may not know this, but Kenneth Pitt was a professional Plastic Surgeon before he got into showbiz and a keen amateur hypnotist in his spare time. So using the skills he possess he transformed the young Darren Yates into the spitting image of David Jones, contact lenses were glued onto his eyes, teeth were filed and stained, the poor lads larynx manipulated to mimic Jones' smokers voice, and lastly and most importantly he was brainwashed into believing he 'was' David Jones.

The only thing left to worry about was who was going to write the songs from now on, but Pitt wasn't overly worried, Jones wasn't much cop at songwriting the truth be known, he was just a cute bit of eye candy, but he was getting a 'name' in the business so Pitt couldn't afford the act to die. So for an extra bit of publicity for his 'new' star he renamed him David Bowie.

Ken often wondered if he could have just launched 'Bowie' without the grand deception, but reasoned to himself it would have been a waste of the publicity Jones had already got.

Pitt's next move was to gather together a team of illegal immigrant musicians from Japan who worked in the local Woolworths and bribing them with the threat of deportation worked them into the ground in a sweat shop type environment, making the poor Japanese boys write songs round the clock under fear of Pitt's shotgun and a call to the immigration people with plastic gloves.

It turned out that these boys churned out classic song after classic song driven by fear and isolation, explaining these recurring themes in Bowie's early albums.

With the new songwriting team in place, Pitt's manipulation and the brainwashed Darren 'Chopper' Yates the albums from 'Space Oddity' through to 'Hunky Dory' were a great success, but then the hypnotism started to wear off on poor Darren and he tried to make a run for it, Pitt shot him down in cold blood with a hunting rifle as the poor lad bolted for the door after becoming lucid for the first time in three years.

'Bowie' was on the cusp of stardom at this point and Pitt refused to let all his evil work go to waste, so out came the chloroform soaked rag again and a 'new' Bowie was created one night in the early part of 1972. Unfortunately, this one, a guy called 'Raymond Love' didn't have quite the right look even after endless plastic surgery, so Pitt had a masterstroke, he'd make 'Bowie' play a character on stage, with make up and costumes and crazy haircuts to hide the subtle difference in appearance.

While he was obviously quite mad, Pitt still his wits about him. Paranoid about people discovering his evil scheme, he distanced himself publicly from 'Bowie' or 'Jones 3' as Pitt called him privately, by staging his own sacking and replacing himself with a shyster business man called Tony Defries who was of course under the hypnotic influence of the crazed and evil genius.

Ziggy Stardust was launched and Pitt hit the jackpot, world tours, hit singles, album sales, merchandise all made him a huge profit. But lighting struck twice and yet again his dodgy hypnotism wore off and 'Jones 3' had to go. (Apparently his remains lie in the mighty concrete legs of the Stockport Viaduct). Unwilling to dump the Ziggy image which was making so much money he tried to clone the 'cat from Japan', but like his previous effort the look wasn't quite right, so rather than dump the image all together he created 'Aladdin Sane' with the help of 'Steve Fox' a poor mans Ziggy, but with more make up to hide the change. Steve had an unsightly birthmark on his forehead which proved difficult to remove so a great big glittery diamond lived there for the rest of his short life.

The Japanese boys in the sweat shop were still grinding out great work so nobody really noticed the difference.

This continued all throughout the Seventies. When Aladdin Sane woke up in a panic he was swiftly garotted with a cheesewire, he was then replaced by a very thin chap called 'Robert Wilson' cocaine abuse explained the change in appearance to the press and a new soul image was wheeled out to explain the different voice. When Robert decided to leg it (one of Pitt's badger traps caught him on his way out of a hotel room) 'Stuart Stark' was brainwashed into 'The Thin White Duke'.

Stuart Stark whilst looking the part, was unbeknown to Pitt a Neo-Nazi in his past life and this became apparent when his extreme right wing views cropped up subliminally in various interviews in 1976.

Of course this wouldn't do at all and when Stark returned from the latest Cameron Crowe interview he was shot on the spot by Pitt and a new model was duly wheeled in.

'Alan "Rusty" Brown' was the longest serving 'Bowie' yet and survived from 1977 through to 1982.

By this time the Japanese boys had developed a taste for avent garde and the new material reflected the change. Pitt wasn't happy, but as he wasn't a songwriter he had to go with whatever the guys in the sweatshop threw at him.

(If you play the Berlin trilogy backwards on a record player the sweatshops cries for help can be clearly heard... "Pitt Mad Get Jap Out" is the chorus from Joe The Lion reversed. "Plastic Men, Different Cock Boy" is an obvious nod to the schemes of Pitt on the backwards coda of 'DJ' in 1979).

By 1982 Pitt had become fed up with the 'arty bollocks' the Jap boys had been writing, also he had cottoned on to their backwards messages in the records so he murdered them all in cold blood (Dog Food and Rottweilers were involved) and he arrogantly assumed he could write the music from now on "Can't be that hard" he reasoned. Cocaine played a large part in this latest madness.

The Bowie of the Eighties was a stripper and sometime gigolo called 'Quintin "Love-Fist" Leslie' who because of a low intellect succumbed to the hypnotism better than the others. Of course the new Pitt material was terrible, so terrible in fact he made more money than ever before, but of course he didn't understand why. Pitt's greatest moment in his twisted mind was the "incredible" and "spectacular" Glass Spider cabaret show, Tommy Steele would have been proud.

Around the dawning of the Nineties, Pitt had tired of plastic surgery and developed a keen interest in cybernetics and artificial intelligence, the moronic gigolo Quintin Leslie was shot in the head and dumped into the Thames while a new cyborg Bowie was being tested. The only real catch to this was that the cyborg needed a constant companion to work certain remote controls discreetly and another for voice projection, when an interview was needed. Also the mechanical bowels of the creature needed fine tuning as metallic flatulence filled the air constantly in the early days of the prototype.

Pitt also created two new models 'Coco 2' and 'Iman 1' to chaperone the new model wherever he went.

After a crisis of confidence he brought back the sweatshop style writing studio, but could only manage to capture some middle aged pub rockers for the time being. He wanted something low key to kick off the cyborg experiment in case it backfired. 'Tin Machine' was of course a wise crack about the robot Bowie's metallic skeleton, but while the critics hated the music, nobody suspected a thing. "Game on" thought Pitt.

'Bowie-bot' then went on a Pit influenced cabaret tour called 'Sound + Vision'. Shamelessly crowd pleasing and eerily upbeat the robot freaked out the hard core fans. People commented on how Bowie never seemed to age, but Pitt leaked plastic surgery rumors through the newspapers to keep the blood hounds of the press at bay.

The Bot wasn't perfect by any means and was in the habit of dangerous malfunctions for no apparent reason. Most of these incidents were swiftly covered up by Pitt and his growing army of Bots and when in Britain the I.R.A. usually got the blame for the explosion.

The Bowie you know and love today is the sixth cyborg 'bot' since 1989. Bowie-6 is an advanced model and rumor has it that the cyborg has actually evolved past the point of Pitt's control. About to embark on a world tour called 'Reality' Pitt has finally flipped and is all set to reveal to the world the extent of his evil genius before his creation turns on him.

Will the cyborg make an undisguised appearance on the premier night of the 'Reality' tour? (the name suggests so).

Will Pitt ever get his comeuppance?

Will the cyborg's AI take over and unleash a new wave of electro-dance-rock on the unsuspecting world?

Remember Bowie fans you heard it all here first. Although I doubt I will be allowed to live long enough to enjoy my 'scoop'. In fact I think the machines are at the door...

Also you might be interested to know that Elvis Presley shot JFK... the moon landing was actually just a commercial for Moon-Pies which went wrong... Aliens live amongst us and run a fried chicken franchise and The Matrix is actually a documentary which never should have leaked out.

Anyway, back to my X-Files marathon...


Stephen Stroud.

July 7th 2003.
www.stephenstroud.com

BW MB Profile...



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