Live: David Bowie and the Lower Third, Marquee Club, London

David Bowie and the Lower Third performed at London’s Marquee Club for the second time on Friday 5 November 1965.

They were the support act on a bill headlined by the Summer Set.

Around this time Bowie became one of the ‘Marquee Artists’, with which the club became booking agents for a number of acts.

I got friendly with the owners; for me there were no rules at the door so I used to creep in and watch what was happening. The Marquee, The Scene, Eel Pie Island in Twickenham, they were all a circuit. At the time – sixteen years old, for me – when I was frequently in those places it was during the era of the first batch of mods. There were two batches of mods in England, the first lot being in 1962-63. The initial crop called themselves modernists, which reduced itself down to the mods. That excessively peacocky. These weren’t the anorak (quilted, gabardine raincoats) mods that turned up later on motor scooters. The scooter thing wasn’t quite as big with the early mods at that time; it was still trains.