Contemporary Authors

In Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie, French comics artist and graphic designer Néjib tells the story of the young musician’s formative years, living and working in a Victorian house in Beckenham, south-east London. Here, Néjib reveals his inspirations and influences, and why he decided to let Haddon Hall itself take the role of narrator.

In Haddon Hall, I wanted to capture the spirit of the time. It’s not purely a biographical work; rather, it’s a snapshot of David Bowie at the twilight of ’60s. I consider this to be the most pivotal period in his creative development. We know that it was between 1969 and 1970 that David Bowie became himself, and these years held a little magic of their own.

At first, I wanted to do it in black and white, and then little by little I was drawn towards Heinz Edelmann’s work (notably Yellow Submarine), as well as the work of other graphic artists from that time — Milton Glaser, for example.

I initially got stuck with my colour choices, and it was by looking at the work of these people that I saw the potential of a fairly limited palette. I tried using a dark blue line and saw that it could be interesting to work in that way. There was a lot of fumbling, but eventually I found a way to pay tribute to the musicians and graphic designers of the ’60s and ’70s.

When I was writing the first draft of the script, something didn’t add up. There was information I wanted to include but it came across too heavily on the page. At some point, I don’t know why, I thought it might be nice if the house became the narrator. The idea won me over right away; I think the story benefits from a loose sense of fantasy. I didn’t think too much about it, but it was a decision that unlocked the narration: when I wanted to say something, it was the house that said it. It also gave the story a narrative thread.

Néjib is a graphic designer and comics artist. He is the art director at Editions Casterman. Born in Tunisia, he now lives and works in Paris. His favourite David Bowie song is “Sound and Vision”.

Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie
An interview with author Néjib
By Simon Miller, Epoch Times

March 18, 2017 6:32 am
Last Updated: March 18, 2017 6:32 am

“Haddon Hall, When David Invented Bowie”, is a charming semi-fictional account of the late rock legend’s formative years. It is a graphic novel, a book of evocative swirling cartoons, in which Tunisian-born artist Néjib draws inspiration from the graphic designers of the late 1960s and 1970s to tell his tale.

The novel explores Bowie’s time in Haddon Hall, a rambling south London Victorian house that has now been demolished. In the late 1960s Bowie moved in with his then girlfriend and future wife Angie.

The book explains how they adored the house’s “discreet decrepitude”, the property becoming the base for the creative experimentation that resulted in “The Man who Sold the World” album and later the ideas for the Ziggy character.

The novel is written from the perspective of the house whose eccentric charms nurtured the creative processes and bore witness to the comings and goings of a range of key collaborators and influences including Marc Bolan, Tony Visconti and Syd Barrett.

Epoch Times caught up with Paris-based Néjib, who explained some of the inspiration for the book that was originally published in French in 2012, and has just recently been translated and published in English.

The Beginnings

Néjib was a teenager when he first discovered Bowie. His brother bought the “Ziggy Stardust” album and from that day he became a fan. As he grew up he became more of an admirer than a fan. “I mean a fan has no distance, he is blinded by his fetishism. Bowie for me is a great artist, but some of his work can be criticised,” he said.

The narrator in the book is the house, Haddon Hall, which appears as some kind of living and organic entity, whose dusty hallways are delighted to witness the birth of Bowie. Talking about this narrative device, Néjib said: “It shows that the story is a fiction, a fantasy. It brings something fantastic and strange to the story. It is also a way to say that this house is a step for Bowie: this moment I describe is a stage in his life; he is close to what he has to become.”

So much has been written about the years of Bowie’s various successful incarnations as a superstar, yet less so about these early years. For Néjib those formative times are of most interest.

“I am more interested by fragility and doubt than success and fame,” he explained. “I love the idea of the artist who is still ignoring what he will be, but the reader knows. It is also a period where Bowie is more close to us, more human in his interrogations and doubts.”

Fact and Fiction

While much of the content is factual, there’s a fine line, an artistic licence that naturally comes with the genre, Néjib explained. “It’s a fiction, a portrait of the artist before his explosion. Many facts are true but I have condensed all these facts and stories in one place. Like Bowie, I use the false, the fiction, to tell the truth – I try, at least.”

By this he means Bowie used masks, identities and theatre to express what he wanted to express about life, death and so on. Thus, Néjib weaves fact and fiction to tell his story.

For example, the moving narrative surrounding Bowie’s concern for his mentally ill brother Terry, who he rescues from an oppressive psychiatric hospital to stay with him at Haddon Hall, is true. As is his friendship with kindred spirit Marc Bolan, who soon went on to stardom himself with his band T.Rex.

On the other hand a trip with John Lennon to the docklands is fictional. Here a disillusioned Lennon discusses high art, meeting with “true artists” Stockhausen and Nabokov, and how he has wasted his genius on a lower form of art. But then “low art is for the proles” like the two of them, Lennon muses.

“The scene with Lennon is an invention,” said Néjib. “But the depression of Lennon is a real event. He was lost at the time, after the Beatles split, and there were many existential questions he hadn’t solved. I wanted to show something true: Lennon was the big brother, the guide for all that generation. That is the sense of this meeting.”

In one story in the book, Bowie goes to Malta to pick up an award then develops a long-term fear of flying thereafter due to the stormy flight. Néjib says that Bowie really did develop this fear on a bad flight, but we don’t know which one. He also actually went to Malta to receive a trophy for the song “Space Oddity”.

“It’s a good illustration of how I mix the stories and the facts to make fiction,” explained Néjib.

One of the revelations in the novel is the impact of Stanley Kubrick’s film “A Clockwork Orange”, a portrayal of stylish and violent youth sub-culture in a dystopian future. Viewing the film is something of a lightbulb moment for Bowie leading to a drastic stylistic makeover.

“The film was an important inspiration for the first style of Ziggy Stardust. Many photographs show Bowie and the Spiders (his backing band) dressed like the guys in the movie,” Néjib said, stressing how much this dark vision of society made an impression on Bowie: “It’s the moment when Bowie gave up the hippy vision of the world for a more pessimistic one,” he said.

The Medium

“Haddon Hall” is a stunningly illustrated volume that combines humour, pathos and fantasy in the story telling. Néjib extols the virtues of the cartoon medium. For him it is a unique way to recreate a period without the expensiveness of a film. He believes it is a great medium because, unlike cinema, it has very few constraints in building a visual world.

Another quality of the cartoon for Néjib is that “the drawing is a distance, a point of view in its self”.

“It doesn’t pretend to be objective. By the drawing, the reader is at once involved in a subjective way of telling a story.”

Néjib admires the great illustrators of the late 1960s and early 1970s such as: Saul Steinberg, Ronald Searle, William Steig and the artists of Push Pin Studios. The film “Yellow Submarine” had a great influence too.

“I tried to be close to the freshness and freedom of these drawings, and the pop sensibility of the colours. I think they describe very well that moment: the gap between the 60s and the 70s, the end of utopia, the end of that summer of love.”

Néjib would like to be seen as “a modest portraitist of a great artist”. He dedicates Haddon Hall “To the man who illuminated my life. R.I.P.”

Tunisian artist draws on real life and fantasy to tell David Bowie’s story
Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie is a graphic novel that tells the story of the creation of the songs for his seminal albums The Man Who Sold the World in 1970 and 1971’s Hunky Dory.

Kaleem Aftab
January 30, 2017
Updated: January 30, 2017 04:00 AM

Our infatuation with British rock legend David Bowie shows no sign of abating, a year after his death.

Next month, British publishers SelfMadeHero will release one of the more unusual tributes to the influential singer.

Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie is a graphic novel that tells the story of the creation of the songs for his seminal albums The Man Who Sold the World in 1970 and 1971’s Hunky Dory, as well as the subsequent creation of his Ziggy Stardust stage persona.

After releasing Space Oddity, his first single released in 1969 a few days before the Apollo Moon landing, the singer moved into Haddon Hall, a sprawling Victorian house in the suburbs of London with his then girlfriend, Angie Barnett.

It is from this set up that Tunisian-born author and artist Néjib tells his story about creativity, metamorphosis and music.

He first heard Bowie’s music on the few Italian television stations whose signals strayed into Tunisia in the early 1980s. He remembers being fascinated by the video for China Girl.

In 1986, at the age of 10, Néjib moved to France where his infatuation with the singer grew after his brother brought home a copy of Bowie’s 1972 album, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

“From that time on, I bought every Bowie record and I saw him live many times,” he says.

The inspiration to write a graphic novel about Bowie came while reading a biography of the singer. What piqued Néjib’s interest was the author’s assertion that “it’s almost impossible to write a biography on Bowie because Bowie is very much a character created by David Jones”, a reference to Bowie’s real name.

What made Jones become Bowie is the focus of the book. Within this uncharted territory, Néjib saw an opportunity to take creative licence and interpret unknown events alluded to in Bowie’s music. He could, effectively, create a fantasy world based around a few truths.

“I read a lot of things and mostly re-listened to the lyrics and the mood of his albums from the period,” he says.

“And I incorporated the things I knew about Bowie: the illness of his brother, the lack of communication with his brother, and the fact that Angie Bowie, although not talented musically, was very important to supporting the team and bringing fantasy and some extravaganza to the group.”

He also incorporates musical contemporaries, including: Marc Bolan of T-Rex, whom Bowie toured with at the beginning of his career; Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett (a key influence on Bowie, who covered his song, See Emily Play, on his 1973 album Pin Ups); and John Lennon, who warns Bowie of the downside of fame. “I imagined that he might have met Lennon and what the conversation would have been like, as for me, Lennon was the big brother of this generation,” says Néjib.

The Beatles, and their psychedelic influence upon Bowie’s music, is also reflected in the book’s artwork, which is a kaleidoscope of colour and bold outlines. Néjib admits to being inspired by the 1968 Beatles film Yellow Submarine, as well as the work of Romanian animator Saul Steinberg and American cartoonist William Steig.

A graduate of Arts-Déco in Paris, Néjib wrote his graphic novel before Bowie’s death. The text is infused with the purity of Bowie and his sense of being an outsider.

Half-French and half-Tunisian, it is a feeling Néjib knows all too well.

“I’ve always been fascinated by these artists, the kind of artist that are strangers everywhere they go,” he says. “Bowie never wanted to be blocked into a space – if he ever grew too comfortable he would reinvent himself, he would always go into another space. Bowie made the idea of transformation and metamorphosis positive.”

Haddon Hall was the sprawling Victorian villa in Beckenham, south London, where David Bowie lived with his wife Angie and an assortment of musicians from 1969 until 1972. The couple rented a ground-floor flat for £7 a week – the Spiders from Mars were, I think, sequestered around an upstairs landing – and in one of its cavernous rooms, their ceilings painted silver, Angie cut David’s hair and stitched the first Ziggy outfit.

If you’ve ever wondered about this semi-mythical place, long since demolished to make way for another block of flats, I recommend the swirling dreamscape that is Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie. Its author, the Tunisian-born French cartoonist Nejib, puts Bowie’s lost house centre stage, David and Angie having fallen instantly in love with its discreet decrepitude, its towers and mouldings and preposterously long corridors. In his hands, it doesn’t only bear witness to Bowie’s self-creation. It is also his doting narrator, a shiver of delight passing along its roof beams when the couple tell the estate agent they would indeed like to move in.

A lot of what follows will be familiar to Bowie fans, major and minor. Here, just as you’d expect, is our hero making friends with Marc Bolan, falling out with Tony Visconti, and being patronised half to death by John Lennon (even as he boasts of having had dinner with Stockhausen and Nabokov, Lennon can’t help droning on about his and Bowie’s shared “prole” backgrounds). Syd Barrett also has a walk-on part. But it’s not all rock’n’roll. The undemonstrative Bowie parents appear, stiff figures who seem to belong not just to another generation, but to another century; and so does his much-loved half-brother, Terry, who had schizophrenia. Terry also finds sanctuary at the hall for a time, Bowie having liberated him from Cane Hill, a south London psychiatric hospital that began its life as a Victorian asylum. (The gothic can be sinister as well as welcoming.)

What a dazzling book this is. Nejib is wonderfully alive to the influences on Bowie in this crucial period, from the final illness of his father, John, to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (leaving the cinema after seeing it, the still struggling Bowie suddenly sees what he should be: a rock star “who’s all destruction and the future”). Even the weather plays its part, British rain being, according to Nejib, the single greatest spur to the creativity of its people.

But it’s his narrative economy that I really admire, his deft handling of flashbacks, the series of satirical “intermezzos” with which he punctuates his text. As for his drawings, there’s nothing sepia here. Resisting the temptation to deploy a palette that resembles the colours of faded Polaroids, he runs instead with an energetic brightness: garish shades that reflect not only the velveteen decadence of glam, but the (hold-your-breath) sense that something quite astonishing is about to happen.

Franco-Tunisian cartoonist Néjib’s slice-of-life graphic biography about a formative time in David Bowie’s early career will occupy a unique slot in what is sure to be a flood of Bowie-related releases this year. The title comes from the massive old house just outside London that David and Angie Bowie moved into in late 1969, where he could reevaluate the then-short career that “so far was nothing but a string of flops.” That, at least is the opinion of Haddon Hall itself, cast as the querulous interpreter and historian of the momentous events that followed in its sprawling, hippie- and musician-packed warren of rooms. Bowie gathers collaborators like Tony Visconti and starts searching for ideas on how to transform from just another long-haired folk songwriter into a mind-blowing, shape-shifting, glam dystopic avatar. While the breezy yet sharp and highly colorful art is certainly evocative, the narrative’s fuzzy way with details both demands too much of the reader and ultimately fails to answer why David invented Bowie.

It’s hard not to use a word like “groovy” when it comes to describing Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie. There’s the setting: a crumbling estate in swinging London, where David Bowie, his wife Angie, and assorted others are living and creating in the late ‘60s. There’s the loose, freewheeling quality to both the lettering and drawings, which use simple outlines and pops of color. And there’s the sly humor, which comes through in both the dialogue and breaks from the main story (which show us how to be a music snob, how to be a fashionista, etc.)

One of the joys of this book is seeing the time period come to life. People like producer Tony Visconti, T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, original Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett, and dissatisfied Beatle John Lennon pass through these pages. They worry about their music, experiment with sexual identities, and try to fend off feelings of creative envy. And, if they’re Bowie, they develop their most iconic persona (Ziggy Stardust) while dealing with poignant family issues (the hospitalization of his schizophrenic brother Terry).

This book is a delight. I learned plenty about Bowie despite having already read a biography, but Haddon Hall doesn’t feel educational. It shows in its not-too-serious way that creativity can be a grind, and that none of us — not even David Bowie — was born a fully formed artist.

In 1969, after his single “Space Oddity,” managed to garner a decent amount of attention, David Bowie with his wife Angie moved into a massive house in London along with a slew of other hippies, that went under the name Haddon Hall. The house is the setting for the quirky yet inventively creative book by graphic designer/comic artist Nejib. The hardcover comic tells the story of Bowie putting together his band and struggling for a creative identity and the inspiration to become a rock star.

The author certainly takes some liberties with the David Bowie timeline throughout, but it takes little away from this fantastically told narrative about rock royalty. The comic style borrows heavily from graphic designers of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s giving the book an authentic look.

Alongside Bowie, his wife, Angie, and his band mates (Mick Ronson, Mick Woodmansey and Tony Visconti), there is a parallel storyline here about longtime Bowie friend and musical competition Marc Bolan.

An impressively creative and entertaining way to tell the story of one of rock’s great ones.