Remembering Terry Burns.

Third Mind is a phenomenon that occurs when two artists work together.
According to a theory put forward by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, a
Third Mind emerges. When Dylan Jones wrote an afterword to his David Bowie
biography, in many ways an exceptional book, he was informed by David
Bowie’s cousin Kristina Amadeus’ revelations about the mental illness, or in her
opinion lack of it, in her and David Bowie’s family. I thought of Third Mind as
a verb rather than a noun. Dylan Jones and Kristina Amadeus had ‘Third
Minded’ Terry Burns, David Bowie’s half-brother, inventing a person who was
not Terry but someone who helped prove Kristina Amadeus’ theory that there
was no mental illness in David Bowie’s family, a theory that Dylan Jones was
so keen to support that he called it the Holy Grail of Bowie intel. This was not
the Terry that I knew. The Terry I knew heard medication resistant voices and
was a member of the South East London schizophrenic community, respected,
and a little bit feared. Coincidently while Kristina Amadeus was trying to
disprove the version of her, David Bowie’s, and Terry Burns’ family history
that their Aunt Pat had told to Peter and Leni Gillman, who published what she
had said about her relatives in their book ‘Alias David Bowie’, their Aunt Pat
had developed Alzheimer’s.

In the ‘David Bowie: Finding Fame’ broadcast in In the BBC documentary

February 2019 David Bowie said,
‘Insanity was something I was terribly fearful of. But then I felt I was the lucky
one because I was an artist and it would never happen to me as long as I could
sort of put those psychological excesses into my music, and into my work, then I
could always be throwing it off.’
I thought this was a helpful statement that might raise awareness of how art
can help people suffering from schizophrenia, but it was immediately
contradicted by his cousin Kristina Amadeus, despite the fact that three of her
family, including her mother, were hospitalised with a diagnosis of psychotic
illness.
Immediately after David Bowie’s statement Kristina Amadeus said, ‘One of
the porkies that David Bowie perpetuated for a very long time was that he came
from a family where insanity seemed to be the norm.’ She then goes on to try to
qualify her accusation by saying, ‘Yes Terry had his breakdown but I believe it
was a bad acid trip’.
From 1978Timothy White article.
“David spoke to me about insanity many times.” Michael Lippman, (a lawyer
who represented David Bowie, in the 1970’s when he was unhappy with his
contract with his manager, Tony Defries), says. “He believed there was a vein
of insanity running through his family and he didn’t want it to take over his life.
He’s afraid that somewhere inside of him that hereditary insanity is there. And
that is entirely possible.”
David Bowie, “My immediate family was my mother, father [a publicist for a
children’s home], stepbrother and a stepsister that I didn’t know very well,”
Bowie begins, warming to the subject. “She, my stepsister, went to Egypt and I
haven’t heard of her or from her since I was about 14.
“I know insanity happened frequently with my family. A lot of institutions kept
cropping up to claim various members, most of it coming out of bad
experiences, loneliness, in-built caution with other people. Three or four were
hospitalised. Some of them died; one of them who did was first found wandering
in the streets after being missing for some time. There were aunts like this and
my stepbrother Terry, who’s still in the hospital; been there about 14 years.
I tried to sort it out for myself to prevent it, I think if I hadn’t been a painter or
a musician, some of the adventures that I’ve undertaken would have gotten me
into a similar position. I think I would have repressed a lot of strange things I
thought about or saw in my mind. That’s generally what happened to my family,
my brother especially. It didn’t scare me until a lot later on. I became very
withdrawn towards the late years in school [in Bromley, London] -I left at 16.
During that time I spent all my free time indulging myself in what books I could
get, most of them recommended by my brother, in fact. So I started to create a
world in my mind that I could populate with my own figures and characters.
That became the roots of what happened later on.”

Now that their Aunt Pat, Pat Antoniou’s, who was the only one in David
Bowie’s family who looked out for Terry in his final years at Cane Hill, has
Alzheimer’s Kristina Amadeus may feel the time is right to contradict Pat
Antoniou’s account of Terry and David Bowie’s family that informed Peter and
Leni’s biography, ‘Alias David Bowie’.
I got to know Terry quite well in 1981 when we were both patients on Guy
ward in 1981 for six months. Terry told me that he did not take drugs, and even
if he was spiked he was still hearing voices 14 years after his breakdown. He
would laugh sometimes for no apparent reason then say ‘Sorry, it was just
something my voices told me’ There are a few things that Kristina Amadeus has
said recently in the media that don't add up. David Bowie often talked about
Terry in interviews.
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 disease i, 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. After
Una became pregnant with Kristina, and having seen the reaction to her sister
Peggy’s illegitimate child, Terry, she told her family she was married. But after
her partner left her, she broke down and spent several months in hospital.
‘After Una left hospital and returned to Southborough, her family were baffled
and disturbed. Once so meticulous about her appearance, she was now
dishevelled and unkempt. She was alarmingly volatile, sometimes hostile and
aggressive, sometimes dejected and withdrawn. She told her sisters that she
heard voices instructing her and Kristine where to go. At times she spoke in a
strange disjointed way so that her sisters could hardly understand her at all.’
Una returned to Guildford. Though she managed to work at a variety of jobs,
Una attacked Kristina with a knife, ‘locked her in cupboards, and, in the most
horrific incident of all, dangled her by the legs from the top of a building.
Complaints of Una’s behaviour reached the police and she was taken to court.
Kristina was questioned too but she was so distraught at seeing her mother in
the witness box that she burst into tears and refused to answer.
Soon afterwards, Una abandoned Kristina in a hotel. Kristina was taken into
care by the local welfare department and placed in a children’s home in
Bournemouth called Milton House. Una found her there and smuggled her out
in a suitcase, but the police tracked her down. On September 25 th, 1950, Una
was sent to Park Prewett, a towering Victorian mental hospital near
Basingstoke. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic and given a range of
treatment that included electro-convulsive therapy and doses of insulin. They
had little effect.
ECT and insulin have since been discredited as treatments for schizophrenia.
Following command voices and being a danger to oneself or others or both is a
defining symptom of schizophrenia. Yet Kristina Amadeus insists that Terry was
the first in her family to suffer from schizophrenia, claiming it was drug
induced.

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 underwent lobotomy..
‘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.
 From ‘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. ‘’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.’’
David Bowie had made the claim about suicide in the American documentary
‘VH1 Legends’,
‘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.’
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. But even if he was given these drugs, did it
take ten years before Terry had a psychotic breakdown, and why was he still
hearing voices15 years later? 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 Terry hit her husband she stood by him, 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, in
America, 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 media
stereotype, when the connection with creativity is a more rewarding and
realistic area to study, and to raise awareness of, but it also 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: ‘Interview’ magazine, 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.’
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 his
first saxophone, I got him started.’ were his exact words.’
Quote from George Tremlett’s ‘On the Brink’,
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, 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 Angie Bowie paints a slightly different picture in words in her book
‘Backstage Passes’.
The problem was that Terry was David’s great hero, and his periodic
banishment from the household hurt and bewildered David, driving a wedge
between him and his mother and also, I think, teaching him a cols and
destructive lesson. If your best-loved ones disappear on you, maybe you’d
better not love in the first place. And watching his revered big brother turn into
a raving psychotic right there in front of him – a metamorphosis especially
extreme when Terry came back spooked from Aden, a war zone, and began
drinking heavily – couldn’t have been reassuring at all.
But Terry was a scary drunk, yet the schizophrenia gets the blame for David
Bowie’s anxiety about Terry. According to research schizophrenic patients are
no more likely to be dangerous unless drink or street drugs are involved. When
high profile offender suffering from schizophrenias are convicted, often it turns
out that they have also been using drink, drugs or both. Though David Bowie
feared for his sanity, because his family had a history of mental illness, Angie
Bowie explains that his mental problems, his psychosis and paranoia were drug
induced.

Six months is hardly a brief stay. But David Bowie shared a room with Terry
at Stansfield Road. Though Terry was left behind when he was 15 he re-joined
the family at Clarence Road. Terry then spent six months at Plaistow Grove
before commencing his National Service in 1955.
David Bowie said that he was worried that Terry would not take the medication
he was prescribed but in 1981 Terry was spending the days unmonitored at Cane
Hill on Guy ward, without a schizophrenic breakdown episode but still hearing
voices, though he was prescribed Haloperidol, which he took. ‘I don’t think
these drugs do anything’ Terry told me. He was able to cope with the voices,
only referring to them when they said something that he found amusing. His
problems were alcohol related. He was unaware of the dangers of mixing
antipsychotic drugs with alcohol. 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.’
Kristina Amadeus 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), psychosis
specifically caused by excessive cocaine and amphetamine use, 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 creative 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.
David Bowie, describing the themes of his songs in a BBC interview from the
year 2000.
"It's all despondency, despair, fear, isolation, abandonment,"
The following songs specifically deal with or mention mental illness. ‘The
Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ ‘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’, ‘Sweet Thing’,
Young Americans’, ‘Jump’, ‘I’m Deranged’.
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 aggrieving 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.’
It may be that Kristina Amadeus favours denial rather than admitting that there
is a history of psychotic illness in her family, and that she will avoid bullying.
But children will find out about the illness in her family.
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 his past had been misrepresented, so I am 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.’’
As I have said David Bowie talked about Terry’s schizophrenia in the 1970s.
The Gillman’s book was an investigation, not a revelation.
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.’
David Bowie on his half-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 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 from ‘VH1 Legends’,
‘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.’
From an unpublished interview from 1971,
What is David Bowie?
‘What is David Bowie? David Bowie is the image, David Jones is me. But
David Bowie is not a false person; I mean I am, also, David Bowie. I am
schizoid. I’m as schizoid as my brother, except that I’m in the music business
where I can get away with a lot more than my brother could get away with in
the job that he had. I mean he was put into an institution for being like me. This
is the fantastic quality of this business. Our level of standards of living is totally
insane and absurd—to the civilian [laughs at the word] world. This army, it’s a
pop army of madmen. The whole thing’s a symbolic army. I’m sure this is true,
especially in England as we don’t have any more National Service, especially
’cause of this big virile blues kick that we’ve got going. Ah, it does feel like an
army; I get a bit scared at times.’
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. From ‘Alias David Bowie’.
‘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 Amadeus 3rd 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. 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 Gillmans 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. 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.

Anyone who was present at Cane Hill hospital when Terry was a patient on Guy
Ward in 1981 would recognise my work as genuine, but sadly as time goes on,
witnesses are harder to find which is why I have obtained copies of some of my
hospital documents from 1981, including case notes, which I obtained under the
freedom of information act, which, when cross referenced with Peter and Leni
Gillman’s book, ‘Alias David Bowie’, pages 272-273 confirm that I was in the
same hospital at the same time as Terry Burns, David Bowie’s half-brother, the
focus and subject of much of my work.
Could it be that, on seeing how her relatives diagnosed with schizophrenia
were treated that Kristina Amadeus fears for her relatives? I can understand why
someone would be fiercely protective, but Kristina Amadeus seems to be in
well-meaning denial. Could it be that schizophrenia is more prevalent in the
family not less than is commonly believed? More research is needed before we
can truthfully answer that, and at the moment research is low on the list of
priorities. In their rush to be the first to re-write history these journalists show
scant regard for the schizophrenic patients who have already made a
considerable contribution to the arts.
i
ii