After All

Since David Bowie died on the 10th of January 2016 there have
been tributes and speculation that might not have appeared in
his lifetime because he protected his privacy fiercely. There
have been new biographies and memoirs, praising and fondly
remembering him. But there have also been accusations in
online discussions. One recurring topic presented for
investigation is David Bowie’s relationship with Lori Mattix, a
young groupie who claims to have lost her virginity to the rock
star in 1973. Lori Mattix and her friend Sable Starr visited clubs
in Hollwood’s Sunset Strip, hoping to meet major rock stars.
She was underage at the time. David Bowie apparently realised
the error of his ways and did not have a long term relationship
with Lori Mattix. There seems to be no other such incident in
David Bowie’s past. The other topic discussed online is David
Bowie’s obsession with Nazism.
From a 1971 interview with his publicist Dai Davies,
‘One of the reasons, probably the main reason, that the Nazis
were trying to build up a race of supermen was to combat the
homo superior when he arrives and stop him taking over the
world. The whole Nazi thing was given the image of a mission
by their very effective publicity machine, and it really appealed
to the youth of an entire nation. The leader that’s going to take
this country over will have to be a lot more youth orientated
than Powell. It’s the youth that are feeling the boredom most,
they are crying out for leadership to such an extent that they
will even resort to following the words of some guitar hero’.

These ideas were from Louis Pauwels and Jaques Bergier’s

book 'The Morning of the Magicians', and David Bowie’s
interpretation of them is evident in David Bowie’s songs 'The
Supermen', 'Quicksand', and 'Oh You Pretty Things'.
David Bowie had combined his interest in UFO’s with Pauwels
and Bergier’s theories. His Ziggy Stardust LP was about an
alien who became a rock star. So that just when David Bowie
seems to be gullible and believing crackpot theories, really he
is just processing them and letting them inform his music, his
art. He sang about a dictator in his Diamond Dogs LP, in the
songs 'Big Brother', ' We Are The Dead' and '1984', and his
interest, and anxieties, about dictators and leaders seem to
have been realised.

From ‘Interview’ Magazine 1973

I wrote a song called “The Supermen” which was about the
Homo Superior race and through that I got interest in Nazism.
I’m overwhelmed at their methods—diabolical. I have no room
in my head to entertain their theory, the gross effects, the
terrible disregard for human life, especially for particular
races and religions. You knew Roman Catholics were next. The
Pope bought Hitler off. It was the whole thing about the Magic
Wine. Hitler wanted to develop an Aryan race. For what
reason? To fight Homo Superior. He was dreadfully afraid of
Homo Superior and his aims to develop a race of Aryan people
was a misrepresentation of that good feeling of Homo Superior.
Because if it was such a depressed era, spiritually and morally
that it came out all wrong. I’m sure Hitler could have gone the
other way. But mind you this is a mad planet, it’s doomed to
madness. We might have freaked the world so much, twisted it
off its axis, its practical and mental axis so much that the way
these new children could be influenced by their grandparents
might have ticked something off in their head that you may well
find that we have given birth to Homo Superior prematurely.

From ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine,

‘I fell for Ziggy too. It was quite easy to become night and day
with the character. I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went
totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I
was a messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got
hopelessly lost in the fantasy. I could have been Hitler in
England. Wouldn’t have been hard. Concerts alone got so
enormously frightening that even the papers were saying, ‘This
ain’t rock music, this is bloody Hitler! Something must be
done!’ And they were right. It was awesome. I’d be an excellent
dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.’
David Bowie later apologised for his comments, saying that it
coincided with his excessive cocaine use.
Oliver James, drawing heavily on Pete and Leni Gillman’s
biography ‘Alias David Bowie’ has made an assessment of
David Bowie’s life from a psychologist’s point of view. But
like the Gillman’s he did not meet Terry, let alone get to know
him. He is, like psychiatric staff sometimes do even when the
patient is alive, when the patients is uncommunicative or
unreliable, working from third hand information that can
change with each telling. Now that Aunt Pat has been
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s diseasei, there are fewer people
left to tell Terry’s story. Angie Bowie and Kristina Amadeus
remain to remember Terry and both have spoken about him in
Dylan Jones posthumous biography, ‘David Bowie A Life’.

In an article in The Times, ‘David Bowie Was Not a Lad Insane

After All’ 15th June 2018, Jack Malvern says,
‘Through his lyrics and album titles, David Bowie gave the
impression that he feared the madness in his mother’s family.
Biographers cited three instances of “schizophrenia” among
his aunts and his half-brother’s suicide as evidence that he was
disposed to mental illness. However, the theory has been
debunked by his cousin. Kristina Amadeus, whose mother Una
was Bowie’s maternal aunt, said that there was no evidence of
schizophrenia in any of his aunts and that biographers had
overplayed the role of his half-brother.
Again from Jack Malvern’s article.
‘Una, the most frequently cited example, had a “massive brain
injury” in 1929 when she was run over. Her mental condition
grew worse in 1946 when her husband, a bigamist, ran back to
his wife in Canada. Una was told a year earlier she had
schizophrenia but doctors did not know of her injury. “In those
days schizophrenia was a catch-all term,” Ms Amadeus said.’

Una had a breakdown long after the accident and heard

command voices instructing her and Kristina where to go
fifteen years later. The Gillmans document this in detail and
this was probably told to them by Aunt Pat.
From Jack Malvern’s article. ‘Bowie’s Aunt Nora was born
with her umbilical cord wound around her neck and probably
had cerebral palsy.’
Probably? Nora was diagnosed with manic depressive
psychosis, a psychotic disorder. She was hospitalised and
lobotomised.

‘Ms Amadeus said: ‘She was in Poland when war broke out
and returned to Britain in distress. ‘She was emaciated and had
lost her teeth, rambling of torture and screaming constantly.
We never found out what had happened to her husband.
Without consulting the rest of the family, her elderly mother,
unable to cope, had Nora lobotomised. In this day and age,
Nora would
have been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.’
Aunt Vivienne became depressed after marrying a US air force
officer and developing a sense of isolation as they moved from
base to base.’

Yet the Gillmans say that Aunt Vivienne had a schizophrenic

attack in 1957.
From Jack Malvern’s article, Ms Amadeus, whose account is
included in the paperback edition of Dylan Jones’s biography
David Bowie: A Life, said that while the family suffered
tragedy, it was down to bad luck. The suggestion of
schizophrenia came to light in 1986 when Peter and Leni
Gillman published their biography ‘Alias David Bowie’.’
In fact David Bowie talked about his brother’s illness a lot
earlier than 1986.

From an interview with David Bowie published in Playboy,

September 1976

PLAYBOY: Some psychiatrists would call your behavior

compulsive. Does the fact that there is insanity in your family
frighten you?
BOWIE: My brother Terry’s in an asylum right now. I’d like to
believe that the insanity is because our family is all genius, but
I’m afraid that’s not true. Some of them–a good many–are just
nobodies. I’m quite fond of the insanity, actually. It’s a nice
thing to throw out at parties, don’t you think? Everybody finds
empathy in a nutty family. Everybody says, “Oh, yes, my family
is quite mad.” Mine really is. No fucking about, boy. Most of
them are nutty–in, just out of or going into an institution. Or
dead.
PLAYBOY: What do they think of you?
BOWIE: I haven’t a clue. I haven’t spoken to any of them in
years. My father is dead. I think I talked to my mother a couple
of years ago. I don’t understand any of them. It’s not a question
of their understanding me anymore. The shoe’s on the other
foot.
Interview Magazine March 1973
SALVO: The Man Who Sold The World
BOWIE: There’s a track on that based on my brother, called
“All The Madmen.”
SALVO: I heard he was in the hospital.
BOWIE: Yeah—in fact I just phoned up my wife and it seems
he’s staying with us now. She wouldn’t tell me on the phone
because he was in the room. I’m not sure whether he kinda ran
away or what. He’s only 28, maybe 30. But, I mean there’s a
schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I’m
affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have
been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he
doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much. He’s just been
changed to a new one, but the old one, “Cain Hill,” he really
dug. He’d be happy to spend the rest of his life there—mainly
because most of the people are on the same wavelength as him.
And he’s not a freak, he’s a very straight person.
SALVO: Did he walk in on his own two feet?
BOWIE: My mother signed him in, which is very sad, but she’s
been in as well. She thought it did her good but it didn’t. We had
to take her on holiday, we put her out in Cyprus for a bit.

Terry told me that he was diagnosed with paranoid

schizophrenia in 1981. From Jack Malvern’s article.

‘They interviewed his aunt, Pat, who told them of her sisters’
insanity, but Ms Amadeus said her testimony was unreliable.
“There is no hereditary mental illness or history of suicide in
David’s maternal ancestry,” she said.’

‘‘Ms Amadeus claimed that Pat’s testimony was unreliable.

She said: Peter Gillman’s thesis that David’s work was based
on his fears of inherited madness isn’t correct. There is no
inherited schizophrenia in the Burns family. There is no
hereditary mental illness or history of suicide in David’s
maternal ancestry, and no stories or records of it in my
grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations.’’
In fact Aunt Pat is probably the most reliable source of
information. According to Terry, David Bowie told his mother
that he would never speak to her again if she went to the press.
The Daily Mirror offered Terry a thousand pounds for his story
in 1979 but his mother said that she would never speak to him
again if he did.
Kristina Amadeus, in the afterword, in Dylan Jones book
‘David Bowie A Life’, claims that Terry ‘returned from his
National Service in 1958 with stories of success in the boxing
ring and also of mind altering drugs given to him by superiors
in Malta and Tripoli. But in her letter of the third of October
2016 to Michael Balter she says ‘Yes, there has been great
tragedy in our family, but having been the family genealogist
for over four decades, I’ve found no indication of mental illness
or suicide in my grandparents, or great grandparent’s
generations. My sweet and brilliant cousin Terry was the first
and only one, and his may have derived from hallucinogens
secretly tested on servicemen during that era.’
But according to the Gillmans, Kristina left Bromley for Dorset
in 1955, and emigrated to America in early 1958. She would
not see David for 14 years. Terry did not return from the Air
Force until November 1958.
So Kristina skips a generation to claim there is no indication of
mental illness in her family yet her mother and two of her aunts
spent time in psychiatric hospitals. I can find no record of such
tests and suspect Terry would have mentioned them, as drugs
was one of the subjects we talked about. He told me he did not
use drugs, except when he stole Noctec (chloral hydrate)
capsules from his wife, and that she didn’t half get angry when
he did.
I never talked with Aunt Pat but I saw her visit Terry. She was
the only one who helped Terry, you don’t have to talk to
someone to see kindness it was obvious that they were very
fond of each other. Even after he hit her husband she stood by
Terry, that says a lot about how much she cared for Terry and
it is sad remembering her fussing over him. I did not stay and
gawp, visits are special so I made my excuses and left the
dormitory.

From alias David Bowie, page 473, describing David Bowie’s

family’s reaction to Terry’s suicide attempt in 1982. ‘She (Pat)
telephoned the Sun and turned all her anger on David. She
complained he was ‘callous and uncaring’ and added that it
was ‘time his fans knew the other side of David Bowie – and
time he faced up to his responsibilities’.
Pat’s public intervention caused consternation in the family.
Kristina’s view, which she voiced after talking to David and
Peggy, was that nothing could be done for Terry; ‘pouring
money in’, she said, would not help. She also believed that Pat
was using Terry to ‘get back’ at Peggy.’

Kristina Amadeus had left the country before Terry returned

from National Service, and even after she was reunited with
David Bowie, in 1972, it seems unlikely that she visited Terry
Her opinion was informed by David Bowie and Peggy, perhaps
in turn informed by staff at Cane Hill when Peggy visited Terry
in 1981.
It was not David Bowie who hardly knew Terry, but more
likely Kristina had not seen him since they were children.

And Terry was capable of changing, as I have explained in my

dramatized narrative, ‘Terry’. Terry would have been helped
by a psychologist or by attending group therapy. He was at ease
in company and had no trouble speaking his mind. He was
coherent, articulate, practical and down to earth. But there was
only one psychologist in the hospital and she was working with
patients on Salter ward, the secure ward. Terry attended a one
off discussion on Guy ward, with Dr Patel, who was trying to
encourage some of the patients to work in the industrial therapy
department. Though Terry was against the idea, and had in fact
tried to organise a patients’ strike, because of the low pay, he
responded well to the discussion and found work in the hospital
shop after the meeting. There were group therapy sessions on
Salter ward that patients from other parts of the hospital could
attend, if referred, but it was stopped after a patient became
disruptive on the ward on safety grounds.
Kristina was speaking from a position of favour, granted access
to David Bowie while the rest of his family were excluded from
his circle. After visiting Terry at Mayday hospital in 1982, who
had jumped out of a window at Cane Hill, David Bowie never
had contact with Terry again.

From Tony Zaneeta’s biography ‘Stardust’, describing David

Bowie’s 1983 Serious Moonlight tour.
‘Instructions were issued to people in David’s past to refuse all
interviews. Anyone who did not comply was told he would
never again be spoken to by David.
It was clear that David and Coco (Corinne Schwarb) were a
team, with Coco there to make sure that David never met the
world head on. The few who really got to know him sensed that
he always harboured the fear that someone might betray him.
The music business had bruised him professionally, financially,
and emotionally. He was wary, and was never going to be hurt
again.’
But he also felt betrayed when his visit to Terry was reported
in the press the previous year.
From David Buckley’s biography, ‘Strange Fascination’, p 428
‘However huge superstardom brings with it alienation and
callousness by its very nature: the 1983 version of Bowie
systematically denied and rewrote his past. During the course
of the Serious Moonlight tour Bowie and/or Coco made assure
that figure’s from David’s past, some of them former friends
who had done great favours to Bowie, were kept away from the
tour. Ava Cherry, Paul Rivens who played with the teenage
Bowie, Michael Lippman and Angie Bowie were either refused
entry, struck off guest lists or, in the case of Angie Bowie,
actually served with a restraining order not to come near the
show.
From The Gillman’s Alias David Bowie, p 418
‘The key to the power Corinne (Coco) established lay in her
control of access to David, permitting only the favoured few to
reach him. Tony Visconti came to know how effective that could
be. ‘I have been trying to phone David for three or four
months,’ he said in 1985. ‘I know for a fact that Coco decides
that she doesn’t want David to be bothered. He doesn’t know
you’re phoning him up.’
So it may well be that Corinne Schwarb was blocking
communications from Terry and Aunt Pat. Especially as Aunt
Pat had already been to the papers concerning Terry.
From Jack Malvern’s article.
‘This leaves Terry Burns, the result of Bowie’s mother Peggy’s
fling with a Frenchman. Terry had symptoms of schizophrenia
and in 1967 had a nervous breakdown, when Bowie was 20.
He killed himself in 1984.’
1985 actually.
Ms Amadeus said Bowie was aware of his half-brother’s
condition but not until adulthood. “There were no bogeys of
inherited insanity to frighten David. Being ten years older than
him, Terry had left home by the time David’s memories began,
and his visits were infrequent... David hardly knew Terry until
he and Angie had him stay with them briefly. David’s interest
was philosophical, re: identity, not insanity.”
From the afterword of the updated paperback edition of Dylan
Jones’ book. Kristina Amadeus, ‘Terry left home when David
was eight, and David himself has said he has no childhood
memories before he was ten.’ p.516
The problem with Amadeus and Jones’ rewriting of history is
that it not only discredits those who suffer from schizophrenia,
pandering to the gutter press stereotype, when the connection
with creativity is a more rewarding and realistic area to study,
and to raise awareness of, it ignores Terry’s supportive attitude,
and undermines his creative input.

David Bowie told a television audience about his childhood

memories of home life when interviewed by Michael
Parkinson.
’My mother was really, she didn’t realise what she was
starting, but she would always say at breakfast, ‘oh, I could
have been a singer you know, and then she’d sing and there
was this thing on the radio, ‘Two Way Family Favourites’, I
remember on a Sunday, when I was about six, and every
Sunday without fail, this thing by Ernest Lough was sung and
it was ‘Oh For the Wings of a Dove’

From David Bowie: Sex is Again the Unmentionable Word,

May 1990
CHILDHOOD DREAMS: I had a plan from when I was eight.
My father brought home all these American records, 45s with
no centers. And he said, “Go on, you can take your pick.” I said,
“I’ll just take a few out.” There was this one by Little Richard,
and that was it. I was sold. When I heard that, I thought, God, I
want to do that. Actually, my ambition at eight or nine years old
was to be one of Little Richard’s sax players, and that’s when I
got my first saxophone, a Selmer. It was a strange Bakelite
material—that creamy plastic with all the gold keys on it. I had
to get a job as a butcher’s delivery boy to start paying for it.At
no point did I ever doubt I would be as near as anybody could
be to England’s Elvis Presley. Even from eight or nine years
old, I thought, Well, I’ll be the greatest rock star in England. I
just made up my mind.
Then from the Gillman’s Alias David Bowie.
‘Upon his return to South London , with Bromley a comfortable
three mile bus ride from Forest Hill, he began to see David
regularly again.. . .Terry helped David discover a new world
beyond the drab confines of the suburbs. He took David to jazz
clubs in the West End, buying him Coca-Colas while he drank
beer. He introduced David to the writings of the beat authors
like Jack Kerouac, with whose lonely existential journey
through life he naturally empathised; David enjoyed reading
them too. ‘I thought the world of David’ Terry said later, ‘and
he thought the world of me.’
Quote from Ken Pitt’s David Bowie The Pitt Report, published
in 1983.
‘In 1961, when he was fourteen, David entered the fourth year
at school and there is no evidence of it being particularly
eventful. In retrospect we can see that the year was notable for
the beginning of Terry’s influence in his life. Terry was still
living with Pat and Tony Antoniou (Aunt Pat), but the three
moved to a house at West Ealing, where David and George
sometimes rehearsed. Terry was often ill and the nature of his
illness was such that it probably heightened his awareness of
what was going on around him. He got deeply into music and
discovered the London clubs that catered for his tastes. He
liked not only jazz, but singers like Frankie Laine and Johnnie
Ray. Already possessed of a high intelligence quotient, he read
voraciously and absorbed knowledge that was passed on to his
half-brother, who was an eager listener. Writers and their
books that became favourites of David’s were introduced to
him by Terry, who also took him to concerts.

David Bowie, ‘Terry introduced me to the outside things….. he

gave me the best serviceable education I could have wished
for’.

Terry told me that he got David Bowie his first saxophone. ‘I

got him started’ were his exact words.’
Quote from George Tremlett,
Over the next four or five years, when on RAF leave or later
working for amalgamated press, Terry acquired a different
status in David Bowie’s life. Maturing between the ages of 18
and 23, he was the older brother, who would turn up to take the
young teenager up to Soho, to see the latest movies, to hang
around jazz clubs or catch a concert by a leading musician. ‘It
was Terry, Terry, Terry all the time’, said Pitt, who heard
Bowie relive those years. Terry would pay the fares, buy the
drinks and eye the prostitutes standing in the doorways.
‘‘Yes it was Terry who started everything for me. Terry was
into all the Beat writers, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,
Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlingetti, William Burroughs and
John Clellon Holmes, and he’d come back home to Bromley
with the latest paperbacks tucked in his pocket.’
‘He was into everything, reading up the early drug writers,
Buddhism poetry, rock and jazz, especially the saxophone
players John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy…. His mind was open
to anything….He was rebelling in his own way.’

Angie Bowie quote, from Dylan Jones’ David Bowie A Life

‘’Terry and his half-brother were very close as well. I had
Terry at Haddon Hall for a while, as I brought him from Cane
Hill to live with us for six months. Why not? Why should he be
at Cane Hill when he could be at home with us? They gave him
drugs which they said were going to manage him as best as
possible, and David felt so guilty. I said don’t feel guilty, get
Terry to come and spend some time with him and it will change
everything. And it did. A lot of his music afterwards, where he
deals with insanity and madness, his understanding of why it is
so cutting edge and why one is so much always on that edge, I
think has a lot to do with the fact that he had a chance to spend
time with Terry and talk to him. And the worst part of it was
that Terry started to feel so much better, that of course he did
not want to continue taking his medication any more. It’s a
good thing on one hand, but not a good thing on the other.’
Angie Bowie goes on to say,
‘He never had any alarming episodes when he was with us; I
never saw his schizophrenia. He was wonderful. But of course
that’s another bad thing. When you haven’t seen a person
having a fit, or being restrained, or maybe accidently hitting
someone who tried to help them . . . I’ve always felt that I was
making out that it was less than it was. And I knew that was
wrong. I was always trying to stop myself. David was better
than I was with that. He said, ‘Angie, we’re fighting a losing
battle because we can’t watch him twenty four hours a day.’
We couldn’t do that; he was a grown-up. It’s embarrassing,
you can’t do that to someone. You can only suggest it. You can’t
put the same constraints on him like an institution would.’ii
But patients don’t want to take medication when they feel
better. They feel better because they are better, the doctors
prescribe antipsychotics to patients while they are young for
behavioural and preventative reasons. Besides, by 1981 Terry
was spending the days unmonitored at Cane Hill on Guy ward,
without a psychotic episode. His only problems were alcohol
related.
In her book ‘The Myth of the Chemical Cure’ Joanna Moncrieff
says. ‘Preventative treatment has been criticised on ethical
grounds because, even if it works, it involves treating people
who will never develop psychosis in order to prevent some
cases.’iii

Kristina accuses the Gillman’s of saying that schizophrenia

informs all of David Bowie’s work. Madness is certainly a
theme, (All the Madmen, Aladdin Sane et al.), and drug
induced psychosis informs his work, (Diamond Dogs Young
Americans and Station to Station), specifically cocaine, speed,
and ‘apparently a lot of elephant tranquilizer’, according to
David Bowie in interviews.
 Kristina Amadeus, ‘That glorious innovation, relentless
creativity and genius were David’s own.’
David Bowie was exceptionally creative but he admitted that
his art could be a coping strategy if he became psychiatrically
ill, and when he was psychotic he worked through it, and used
it as recovery therapy. And he was a self-confessed magpie for
other people’s ideas. He had support from Mick Ronson, Tony
Visconti, and Brian Eno. Nile Rogers helped him find the
commercial sound that finally made his fortune. There was
supporting cast of hundreds, probably thousands for the
spectacular and exceptional career of the man who may be
remembered, arguably, as the greatest and the most influential
rock star.
Songs with madness as a theme.
"It's all despondency, despair, fear, isolation, abandonment,"
says Bowie. BBC interview 2002, The following songs
specifically deal with or mention mental illness. ‘Unwashed
And Slightly Dazed’, ‘All The Madmen’, ‘Width of a Circle’,
‘The Bewlay Brothers’, ‘Aladdin Sane’, ‘Sweet Thing’,
‘Cracked Actor’, ‘Scream Like a Baby’, ‘Shadow Man’.

Kristina Amadeus,
‘To publish this kind of assumption is irresponsible to say the
least, and extremely hurtful to me and other family
members. Does she not remember that he has
agrieving teenage daughter? And a new grandson who will
have to deal with potential bullying from peers? If it is
true that Ms Jones and David were ‘good friends over
decades’ (although he never mentioned her as a friend to
me) and that David loaned her his home in Mustique as a quiet
place to write, then I find it truly disgusting that she would
repay his kindness with such a callous conjecture just to hype
her poorly written and badly researched book.’
Dylan Jones says that Ms Amadeus’s research went against the
accepted narrative of Bowie’s life. “This is the first time I have
come across a conflicting report [against the story first told in
Alias David Bowie],” he said. “Kristina was incensed by the
way that his past had been
misrepresented, so I’m inclined to believe her.’’
Jones said that Terry’s schizophrenia was “beyond doubt” and
could suggest an inherited condition, but said that the
revelations about Bowie’s aunts meant that the weight of
evidence
was much lighter. He said that he now found it more likely that
Bowie’s remarks about inherited madness were ‘not informed
by genuine fear so much as a desire to play up to an exotic
image at a time when he was releasing his third album, The
Man Who Sold the World, in 1971.’It’s certainly true that
Bowie used the possibility that he had a slightly complicated
and perhaps exotic genetic disorder to beguile journalists and
he certainly used it in his music.’’
But if there is a hereditary or sociological chance that a child
or future child could suffer from schizophrenia, surely it is
better to prepare a coping strategy, as David Bowie did in case
they become ill. David Bowie believed his art would help him.
In an interview with Radio 1 in 1993 David Bowie said,
‘One puts oneself through such psychological damage in
trying to avoid the threat of insanity. You start to approach the
very thing you are scared of. It had tragically afflicted
particularly my mother’s side of the family. There seemed to be
any number of people who had various mental problems and
varying states of sanity. There were far too many suicides for
my liking, and that was something I was terribly fearful of . . .
I felt I was the lucky one because I was an artist and it would
never happen to me. As long as I could put these psychological
excesses into my music, and into my work, I could always be
throwing it off.’
 ‘If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now,’ Bowie remarked in
another interview, ‘I’d either be in the nuthouse or in prison.’
Seven years after Terry died David Bowie said,
‘I often wonder how Terry’s life would have changed if he
were, by nature, artistic, if it would have released some of the
demons.’

David Bowie on his step brother Terry Burns interviewed by

Courtney Pine;
‘My brother introduced me to jazz really. I remember the first
two albums that were big favourites of his and he passed them
on to me. One was by the MJQ and the album was ‘Fontessa’
which was an Atlantic album, I think it was their first one for
Atlantic and the second one was by a band that really, pretty
much unknown the George Redman Group, they were part of
the West Coast cool jazz. . . . .do do do do (sings tune) . . . was
a track called ’Babette’ on that album, it was called ’Moods in
Jazz’ and the baritone player was Bob Gordon who was pretty
well known at the time. Actually you can still get that album
now because I lost my copy, I had to get it again, there’s a label
called V.S.O.P.’
From George Tremlett’s biography ‘On the Brink’;
From an American documentary;
‘I guess that the dark cloud over that side of the family is there
was an awful lot of mental instability among all of them and
tragically two or three of her siblings committed suicide. It
seemed to be something that I would hear constantly in my life
growing up how so-and-so has left us now. I guess most of us
have battled with reality and something else all of our lives.’
From an interview published in the New Musical Express
‘When I was a teenager I took him (Terry) to see Cream. It had
really moved him and he’d never really seen rock bands before,
that wasn’t really his life. And I remember we were walking
home and it was though he was having a vision and he saw the
roads opening up and fire in the cracks in the roads and he
went down on to his all fours and was trying to hold the road
saying he was being sucked off into the skies from the earth and
it, I had never seen anybody in that kind of metaphysical
change before and it scared me an awful lot, I think that. . . .
and then of course he went into hospital.’
Again an American documentary,
‘I think that Terry probably gave me the greatest education,
serviceable education I could ever have had. I mean he just
introduced me to the outside things. The first real major event
for me was when he passed Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ on
to me which really changed my life, and he would, also
introduced me to people like John Coltrane which is way above
my head, but I saw the magic, I caught the enthusiasm for it
because of his enthusiasm. I wanted to be kind of like him.’
From the 1977 Capitol Radio interview, ‘My brother was one
of the bigger influences on my life in as much as he taught me
that I didn’t have to listen to the choice of books that were
recommended at school and that I could actually go to a library
and choose my own and sort of introduced me to authors I
wouldn’t have read probably, the Jack Kerouacs, the
Ginsbergs, and EE Cummings and stuff’.
In 1970 when Jackie magazine asked David Bowie who had
influenced him the most he replied,
‘My brother, Terry. He's seven years older than I am I'm 22
now, he's 29. He was very keen on jazz when I was at a very
impressionable age, and that led me into it. I idolised John
Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and learned to play the clarinet and
tenor saxophone when I was 12. When I first came into the
business six years ago it was as a jazz musician. Terry was very
Bohemian and introduced me to the writers that meant a lot to
him like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. And all this led me
into song writing.’

There is a pattern and history of dysfunctionality in David

Bowie’s family going back to his grandmother.
David Bowie, VH 1 Legends documentary, 1998 ‘It’s been
really well recorded that my family is pretty rampantly, what’s
the word, I think I’m not so sure how much of it is madness. I
think there’s an awful lot of spiritual mutilation goes on in my
family.’
David Bowie’s grandparents were strict parents, Kristina
remembers her grandmother as ‘a very cruel woman – she took
her anger out on everyone around her.’
From Alias David Bowie, ‘At times, the family has wondered
to what extent Margaret Burns herself was responsible for the
misfortunes it suffered. By now, it could be said, she was
displaying many of the signs of schizophrenic personality.
True, she never crossed the divide into full mental illness, and
thus did not enter the world that or schizophrenics is only
tenuously related to reality. But she found it hard to express
affection or emotion, disliked physical contact with others, had
feelings of envy and alienation, had become isolated and
remote, and showed increasing hostility and violence to others.
But did this mean, her descendants wondered, that her children
had somehow acquired their illness rom her? ‘It can’t be a
coincidence,’ said Kristina.
What has made Kristina change her mind? Did grief inspire her
letters to Michael Balter, did Dylan Jones read those letters
online and encourage Kristina to make the statement in his
updated biography? But there is also a history of creativity and
entertainment.
Their father taught Nora (her name had been shortened from
Honoria) to play the clarinet, Vivienne the dulcimer, Jimmy the
drums, Peggy, Una and Pat all learned to sing, and the family
gathered for musical evenings, in the Victorian manner,
around the living-room fire.

On David Bowie’s fathers side, John Jones nightclubs and the

Viennese Nightingale. John Jones was left £3,000 and inherited
it when he came of age. He invested £2,000 in a revue called
11.30 Saturday Night which flopped after three weeks one at
Dudley, Croydon and Chelsea respectively. He then invested
the rest of the money in a piano bar in Charlotte Street, in the
West End of London. He called the club the Boop-a-doop, it
closed within a year costing John Jones the rest of his money.
He then got a job as a clerk at Dr Banardo’s, the charity for
destitute children.

In 2016 Kristina Amadeus also contributed letters to Michael

Balter’s website.
Excerpts from update from Kristina 3 October 2016
Nanny (as she signed it) accused Peggy of behaving like a
common prostitute by having yet another pregnancy with yet
another man (her first child being Terence Guy Adair Burns 5
Nov 1937) and once again not taking responsibility. She
said Jim, that Peggy’s father, was ‘brought down’ that Myra
Ann was given away without any warning. The only sentence
from that letter of which I have clear memory was: “you’re no
better than a common prostitute, you’re like a cat in heat, and
not worth the parings from under my fingernails.”
‘In the nineties, Auntie Peg lived with me in Cornwall until she
needed residential nursing care,’

Kristina Amadeus quote about Aunt Pat.

I had warned Gillman that Pat was not to be relied upon
because of her obsession with Terry and her dislike of Peggy
and David, but he quoted her anyway. And then misquoted me
in a particularly egregious way so as to make it seem that in
part Terry’s death was in part David’s fault.
But from the Gillmans’ Alias David Bowie, p 418, ‘At times
David has joked about his propensity for cutting swathes with
his past. ‘We call them his purges,’ says Kristina.
Kristina was hostile towards her, possibly to stay in David
Bowie’s good books. She was a bully towards David Bowie as
a child and may be being manipulative now.iv Gillman’s quote.
‘Soon after Una left Stansfield Road. Her illness was
worsening, and Kristina’s jealousy of David was becoming
more acute. She punched David to make him cry, and the first
time he stood up, she screamed with laughter and pushed him
down.’ ’I intended to be the only one who walked,’’ she says.’
The Gillman’s also tell how, when David was seven Kristina
was jealous of his skill at extracting new possessions from his
parents. ‘’Every time I went there David would say, ‘look at my
new gramophone’ or ‘look at my new something or other’. . .He
used to infuriate because we would go somewhere together and
I’d see something I liked and I’d say, ‘Can I have that?’ and
they’d say, ‘No pipe down.’ David would stand there and say.
‘That’s so nice, may I touch it if I’m very careful?’ and they’d
let him touch it, and end up giving it to him.’
As before Kristina gave vent to her feelings by punching David.
She also told him if his guinea pigs were held up by their tales,
their eyes would fall out. This time she was in no doubt that her
feelings had been conveyed. ‘He cried bitterly. He was very
naïve and trusting as a child.’’
She presents as someone who as a child may have learnt to be
manipulative at an early age.v But her concern for the wellbeing
of Davis Bowie’s daughter and grandson may be based in fear
of the stigma and stereotype associated with schizophrenia. The
family experienced local gossip when Peggy had illegitimate
children and her brother Jimmy Burns, left Southborough and
joined the army leaving his scholarship place at Skinners’
public school in Tunbridge Wells, and the local cricket club
behind because of he could not stand the banter about Peggy.
Perhaps this is why Kristina is keen to undermine the Gillman’s
book.
Terry never knew his father but was brought up by his mother
and a step father, John Jones, who doted on his son but was
psychologically cold towards him. His son grew up to be David
Bowie. From Peter and Leni Gillman’s out of print Alias David
Bowie.
‘John Jones was born in the grimy Yorkshire town of Doncaster
in 1912. His childhood was lonely without affection, for both
his parents- his father was a prosperous boot and shoe dealer,
his mother the foreman in a woollen mill - died when he was
young. He was brought up by a relative who sent him to endure
the rigours of a public school education at Skipton, fifty miles
away. He emerged a withdrawn and emotionally stunted young
man who found it hard to display his feelings. But beneath his
impassive exterior, he was laying plans that would shape his
life and that of his son David. For John Jones wanted to break
into show business.’
John Jones may not have learnt how to be a parent from
experience. He may have been bullied at school and seen a
career in show business as an escape route.
A pattern emerges. David Bowie divorced Angie Bowie,
imposing a ten year gagging order as a condition of her
settlement payment. Angie Bowie is still estranged from her
son. Despite David Bowie’s extraordinary success, even at the
top of the tree, dysfunctionality continues.
In her memoir, ’Psychedelic Suburbia’, Mary Finnegan
describes a party at Haddon Hall where he said goodbye to her,
leaving her behind as he moved to London, first Maida Vale
then Chelsea. He also left his family and other friends behind.
There was drug abuse among some of those left behind. I found
a copy of the Arts Lab newsletter on the pavement in
Beckenham. It had been renamed Junk. The edition I found had
a pale blue cover with a drawing of flowers growing out of a
lavatory bowl, the times of the late night busses, news of other
arts labs and an anonymous essay. I met Neil Holmes at
Waddon Rehabilitation Centre. I attended from Guy ward, at
Cane Hill, where I was on the same ward as Terry. Perhaps they
knew each other through David Bowie. David Bowie had given
Neil his white saxophone, and some LP records.
At Waddon Neil was talking to another client, who asked him
why he was there. He said he had a drug problem and then
started to complain about a specific drug and how dangerous it
was to inject it. I met him again in Bromley, he had been
wrongly accused, and was like Terry, threatening suicide, I
reassured him as well, telling him that the police were bluffing,
and through another friend learnt that I was right. Neil was the
singer with a band from Penge called Appendix Part 1.

But whatever the reason, the question remains, is schizophrenia

genetic or triggered by events or both? The has not been enough
research to say for sure how the illness effects people, how it
can be triggered and if it is entirely hereditary. From The Royal
College of Psychiatry website.
What causes schizophrenia?
We don’t yet know for sure. It is probably a combination of
several different things, which will be different for different
people.
It then goes on to say that there is an increase in possibility of
having schizophrenia if someone in the family has the illness.
It seems to be generally accepted that to be diagnosed with
schizophrenia you have to have two of the following
symptoms. There is no physical test.
From the NHS website.
Schizophrenia can usually be diagnosed if you've experienced
one or more of the following symptoms most of the time for a
month: delusions, hallucinations, hearing voices, incoherent
speech, or negative symptoms, such as a flattening of emotions.
Your symptoms have had a significant impact on your ability to
work, study or perform daily tasks all other possible causes,
such as recreational drug use or bipolar disorder, have been
ruled out .
Terry suffered from hallucinations and hearing voices, the
visual hallucinations were episodic, the voices permanent. He
told me that he was ‘too ill to read’, which I took to mean he
could not concentrate. In daily life he was apathetic, spending
a lot of time lying on his bed, except when he went to the
hospital shop and then to the town to buy beer which he tried
to do every day. He told me that it was a ‘point of pride’ that
he had at least one drink a day.It seems a better strategy to
prepare for the possibility of developing the illness than being
in denial. David Bowie did, he said he thought this art would
help and when he suffered from drug induced psychosis he was
able to work through the illness and his recovery. Doctors in
Germany and later at the Maudsley hospital in London
experimented giving mescaline to artists to simulate the
symptoms of schizophrenia and studied their work made under
the influence. So in that sense David Bowie may have been a
pioneer.

Whatever the truth about the family and the history of mental
illness, and I believe that I have enough knowledge of
psychiatry and David Bowies music to present as accurate
account as is possible more research is needed to help sufferers
of schizophrenia.
I can understand why someone would be fiercely protective of
their relatives but Kristina Amadeus seems to be in well-
meaning denial. The mental health service is in crisis, any
endorsement of arts therapy would help patients struggling in
the community, often in isolation, squalor, and harassed by
locals who believe the gutter press stereotype that unfairly
describes patients as some sort of threat, when they are no
more likely to offend than anyone else except when drink and
or street drugs are involved. In fact patients are more likely to
be victims than offenders. Day resources have been shut down
where previously patient’s needs could be identified before
they escalate into an incident. David Bowie showed the world
that he could overcome his drug induced psychosis by
channelling his creativity into his work. Those suffering from
schizophrenia can do similar to a certain extent, as artists like
Arthur Wallis and Thomas did in pre medication and physical
treatment days, treatments that those who suffered from
mental illness in David Bowie’s family had to endure. No-one
is saying that arts therapy is a cure, but it has shown that it can
help for over a hundred years while other therapies have been
discredited, as I explain in my booklet, Art and Schizophrenia.