And there was a little old man, in scarlet and grey, chuckling away…
Forty years ago today, the Deram record label released David Bowie’s second 45 rpm 7″ single for the label, The Laughing Gnome/The Gospel According To Tony Day. Belgium had the honour of the very first DB picture sleeve single anywhere on the planet with the release(above), but the record did little to excite the record-buying public anywhere in the world in 1967.
A little over six years later in September 1973, while the music world was still reeling from the shock announcement of Ziggy‘s retirement a couple of months previously, Deram saw the chance to recoup on their original investment and had a #6 hit in the UK and massive world-wide sales with this particularly un-Ziggy novelty record.
This time, most of the territories were treated to a picture cover, excluding the UK as usual, which had only just enjoyed its second commercial picture sleeve with Life On Mars? a couple of months earlier…The first being Starman in April the previous year.
Original label of the 1967 UK issue of The Laughing Gnome, with that all-important
inverted DR 39798 matrix. It’s the right way up on the far more common 1973 re-issue.
In fact, many of us agree that Starman was the first UK picture sleeve, period. Unless you believe the unlikely tale regarding the Space Oddity promotional sleeve. Anyway, I digress.
Far from considering the chuckling chappy a skeleton in his closet, however, Bowie later expressed his gratitude for The Laughing Gnome‘s re-emergence, stating that he was relieved that the public got to see his lighter side after the darkness of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane.
Fred‘s brother has continued to show up over the years. In 1990 when Bowie announced a telephone poll for the upcoming Sound + Vision Tour, the UK’s NME magazine tried to hijack the vote with their JUST SAY GNOME campaign when they tried to persuade readers to vote for the song to be performed live. A weekly tally was kept by the publication and they even produced a limited edition JUST SAY GNOME T-shirt to mark the event.
Bowie later joked with the NME’s competitor, Melody Maker, that he had indeed been rehearsing the song in a Velvet Underground style, but that once he heard of the NME’s campaign he had to scrap plans to perform the song as he couldn’t be seen to be pandering to the press.
Apart from teasing audiences with snippets of the song over the years, viewers of the BBC’s Comic Relief show in March, 1999, were threatened with a four hour long performance by Bowie of a new composition for voice and recorder entitled Requiem For A Laughing Gnome. Viewers were encouraged to bring the surreal performance to an early end by donating more cash to the Red Nose Day charity!
Finally, despite his tongue-in-cheek tale to Melody Maker about the intention to play The Laughing Gnome live, I can confirm that David and the band truly did soundcheck the song at Wembley in November 2003 and it was on the proposed setlist for the Glasgow show a couple of days later right up until the band were actually onstage and playing…a late onstage change of mind by David robbed us of what would have been one of rock history’s more memorable moments.
These days, the song looks like being eclipsed by The Little Fat Man (With The Pug-Nosed Face) for the song most likely to be shouted by a heckler. But having said that, I feel we haven’t heard the last of the little old man in scarlet and grey just yet.