Aunt Pat

I have written this about Terry, as their cousin, Kristina Amadeus, has been on television in
the recently reshown BBC documentary about David Bowie, ‘Finding Fame’, and the internet
claiming that Terry was not mentally ill, and that in fact that there has been no mental illness
in the family, even though her mother and two of her aunts spent time in the old asylums.
In 1981 Terry and I were patients on the same ward, Guy ward, at Cane Hill hospital. We
were in the same small dormitory for over three months. He immediately opened up to me
about his marriage breaking up, and the suicidal thoughts he had because of this. After I
reassured him, he told me, and a couple of the other patients on the ward, about his
breakdown and religious vision. As he suffered from paranoia, he was reluctant to talk to me
after that, but then changed his mind, which is significant. He was able to make life decisions.
Though it impaired him, he was not at the mercy of his illness. He made it clear that he was
not going to answer questions about his half-brother but, instead, he would occasionally offer
information. For a while we were friends.
Terry spoke to me about his symptoms, he told me how he heard voices and how the
medication made no difference. He was medication resistant but prescribed antipsychotic
drugs because he had a reputation for violence. But it became clear after a while that his
violence was alcohol related. He heard voices but did not act on their commands. He would
occasionally laugh at the comments his voices made but he would apologise and explain
when this happened. ‘I’m sorry, I was laughing at something my voices said’, he would say.
His and my friend, Trevor Chamberlain heard the voice of the Devil taunting him, and would
occasionally interrupt conversations with the interjection, ‘Get thee behind me Satan’. People
who suffer from schizophrenia do not always speak in ‘word salad’. I never heard Terry or
Trevor speak in such a way. They could hold rational conversations and make informed
decisions. They found their own coping strategies.

Kristina Amadeus’ accusations coincide with her, David Bowie, and Terry’s Aunt Pat’s onset
of Alzheimer’s. She has never contradicted the information Aunt Pat gave journalists and
Bowie biographers Peter and Leni Gillman before she became ill. I did some research, and it
seems that Kristina Amadeus, though she kept in touch with David Bowie, never saw Terry
as an adult, so had not known him when he was ill. I felt obliged to set the record straight,
because journalist and biographer Dylan Jones has been saying that Kristina Amadeus’
statements are the ‘Holy Grail of Bowie intel’. They are not, and her statements should not
remain unchallenged, not just because they could potentially discredit my work, but because
she is misrepresenting Terry. Kristina Amadeus said during ‘Finding Fame,‘ ‘Yes Terry had
his breakdown but I believe it was a bad acid trip’.
But even if Terry was spiked with LSD in the Bromel club, in early 1967, the night David
Bowie claimed to have been with him when he had a religious vision, it does not account for
the fact that Terry was hearing voices over ten years later. There is a lack of research in this
area, but it is likely that if someone becomes mentally ill after taking LSD once after being
spiked, because Terry told me he did not use drugs, they will have a predisposition to mental
illness, because they would be schizophreniform.

David Bowie gave three accounts of Terry’s breakdown and vision, as he witnessed it, to the
media. From the NME 27th March 1993. David Bowie talking to Brett Anderson about his
then new LP ‘Black Tie White Noise’.
“Jump They Say’ is semi-based on my impression of my step-brother, and probably, for the
first time, trying to write about how I felt about him committing suicide. . . .There’s also a
personal reason why I cover Cream’s ‘I Feel Free‘ on the album. One of the times I actually
went out with my step-brother, I took him to see a Cream concert in Bromley, and about
halfway through – and I’d like to think it was during ‘I Feel Free’ – he started feeling very,
very bad… He used to see visions a lot. And I remember I had to take him out of the club
because it was really starting to affect him – he was swaying… He’d never heard anything so
loud; he was ten years older then me and he’d never been to a rock club, because jazz was
his thing when he was young. He turned me on to Eric Dolphy…’’
 “Anyway, we got out into the street and he collapsed on the ground and he said the ground
was opening up and there was fire and stuff pouring out the pavement, and I could almost see
it for him, because he was explaining it so articulately. So the two songs are close together
on the album for very personal reasons.’’
He refers to Terry as his step-brother when he was half-brother. They had the same mother. If
Terry had been his father’s son by a previous relationship, he would have been his step-
brother.

 David Bowie told a similar story in a 1993 interview for Radio 1 and for an interview in the
VH1 Legends documentary series broadcast on American television. In the Radio 1 interview
David Bowie mentions the Bromel club in Bromley where he and Terry saw Cream play.
Their family home in Plaistow Grove was not far from the Bromel Club and had had played
there three or four times in September 1963 in a band called ’The Hooker Brothers’ with
George Underwood and Viv Prince. Cream played at The Bromel Club in late 1966 and on
the 22nd of February early 1967.

‘I did in fact take him to a Cream concert at the Bromel Club, which would have been, I
guess, 1967 or something like that, and I was very disturbed because the music was affecting
him adversely. His particular illness was somewhere between schizophrenia and manic
depressiveness and I know he was getting to a pretty tranced out state watching Cream,
because I don’t think he had ever been to something that loud in his life. I remember having
to take him home because it was really affecting him.’
‘He’d never really seen rock bands before, that wasn’t really his life, and I remember
walking home and it was as though he was having a vision, and he saw the roads opening up,
fire in the cracks in the road, and he went down on his all fours trying to hold the road ,
saying he was being sucked off into the skies from the earth, and it, I’d never seen anyone in
this kind of metaphysical change before, and it scared me an awful lot, and then he went into
hospital and he stayed there for the rest of his life.’
But Terry was not in hospital for the rest of his life. And still no mention of the voice of God,
a vision of Satan or as Peter and Leni Gillman describe, via Aunt Pat, a vision of Jesus.

The account in Peter and Leni Gillman’s book ‘Alias David Bowie’ is considerably different
yet occurs at the same time as David Bowie’s account which is early in 1967.

Early in 1967, at about the time David was finishing the Deram album, Terry returned to
Ealing and called at Pat’s. The door was opened by strangers who told him they had bought
the house the previous November, and that Pat and her husband Tony had gone away. That
afternoon Terry went to see his mother in Bromley. A neighbour was there, but Peggy asked
him in and made him a cup of tea. Terry asked her what had happened to Pat.
‘She’s in Australia,’ Peggy replied.
The blood drained from Terry’s face so that he appeared, Peggy later said, ‘as white as a
sheet’. Peggy told him that Pat and Tony had emigrated Australia, where they hoped to go
into business with Tony’s brother, running a garage and taxi service. Although Pat later
explained that she had not been able to tell Terry herself as she did not know where he was,
to Terry it appeared the latest in a series of rejections he had suffered. Abruptly, he walked
out of Plaistow Grove.
On leaving the house, Terry crossed the bridge over the main railway line at the end of
Plaistow Grove and kept on until he found himself at Chislehurst Caves The caves comprise
of a network of chalk caverns that were a local attraction that also housed pop concerts:
David Bowie had played there with the Kon-rads and the Mannish Boys. Terry stopped and
looked at the locked and deserted entrance to the caves and at the bare trees alongside.
Suddenly, as he later described, he heard someone call his name.
‘I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Terry, Terry,’ and I looked up and there was this great light
and this beautiful figure of Christ looking down at me, and he said to me, ‘Terry, I’ve chosen
you to go out into the world and do some work for me.’ He said, ‘I’ve picked you out.’ And
the light on his face was so intense that I fell to the ground. I was on my stomach resting on
my hands looking down and when I looked around me there was this big burning, a big ring
of fire all around me, and the heat was intense, it was terrible. And then it all disappeared.’
The Gillmans describe, ‘The moment when schizophrenics suffer their first full attack’ as
‘one of utter terror.’ They go on to say, ‘It is the moment when their minds renounce the
struggle and escape into another world. But they find no comfort there. They see burning
light, feel blazing heat, and hear voices telling them to do their will. They see God or Christ,
or Satan and devils. It is a simultaneous vison of Heaven and Hell.’

But explaining schizophrenia in their influential book ‘Psychological Medicine’, first

published in 1943, Desmond Curran and Eric Guttmann say, ‘In rare cases of religious-
ecstatic excitement the beginning is sometimes marked by one overwhelming vision of Christ
or God in his Glory.’ From what Terry told me the onset of his illness was marked by a
vision of the Devil, followed by the voice of God. Terry did not preach Christianity, but I got
the impression that he accepted the existence of God and the Devil. The onset of
schizophrenia for many patients is marked by the usual defining symptom which is hearing
voices. A religious epiphany is fairly uncommon.
Continuing from ‘Alias David Bowie’.
When his vision had receded, Terry picked himself up and continued blindly walking until he
reached the countryside beyond Orpington. There he collapsed beneath a hedge and fell
asleep. He spent the next eight days living rough, begging or stealing food from farms and
sleeping in outhouses or under trees. Finally he stumbled into a greengrocer’s and asked for
an orange. Seeing Terry’s dishevelled and bewildered state, the greengrocer phoned the
police.
The police took Terry to Plaistow Grove, where Peggy railed at him for coming back ion
such a state. Terry shouted back at Peggy and there was a furious row. David was at home
and witnessed the whole episode.

Terry’s Aunt Pat is the probable source for Terry’s description of his vision in Chislehurst,
that he had after leaving his family’s house in Plaistow Grove, Bromley. Terry told me that
he heard the voice of God telling him he had chosen him for a mission, but that he did not tell
him what the mission was. Terry told me also that he saw the ground open up in flames but
also that he saw the Devil, a detail neither David Bowie or his Aunt Pat mentioned. Terry was
quite clear about seeing the Devil. I asked Terry if the Devil said anything to which Terry
replied, ‘Wasn’t it bad enough seeing the Devil, without him saying anything?’ Then he told
me about hearing the voice of God but did not say whether it was before or after his vision of
the Devil.
But why did Terry say he saw Jesus and not the Devil as he told me? Terry told me that he
had his own code regarding women. The morning after he was readmitted to Cane Hill in
1981, another patient had made an obscene remark to Terry. Terry reacted by punching him.
But at the inevitable meeting with his female doctor, Dr Smedburg, Terry told me that he
could not bring himself to repeat the remark because he respected her. ‘I could not say that to
her’, he told me, explaining that there were some women he respected and some that he did
not.
It may well have been that, because Terry obviously respected his Aunt Pat, he did not want
to upset or frighten her with talk of the Devil.

George Tremlett, in his second David Bowie biography, ‘Living On The Brink’, is dismissive
of Aunt Pat’s input to Peter and Leni Gillman’s book, ‘Alias David Bowie’, saying that he
‘would not wish to rely on her as a source, doubting whether anyone outside his immediate
family would ever understand the pain that enveloped him (David Bowie) as a child when
one relative after another required psychiatric treatment.’ In the introduction to ‘Alias
David Bowie’ Peter and Leni Gillman say that in 1986 David Bowie, after he read a series of
three Sunday Times articles they had written about him and his family’s history of mental
illness that were published in 1985, complained to the British newspaper Today about
biographers who ’drag out long-lost aunts to supply all the details, aunts that I have had
absolutely no contact with for maybe twenty years – who have no knowledge of me- and
absolutely unbelievable, blatant lies are told . . .’
Paul Trynka in his biography of David Bowie, ‘Starman’, describes Aunt Pat as, ‘the aunt
who had publicly accused David of callousness to his half-brother, prolonging the feuds that
had blighted the Burns family for half a century.’
George Tremlett was probably taking sides with David Bowie because having once known
David Bowie, and having been his first biographer he was hardly likely to take Aunt Pat’s
side in a family quarrel that had been ongoing for some while. My guess is that by trying to
discredit her he was attempting to remain in favour with David Bowie knowing that he
disliked Peter and Leni Gillman’s book.

It seems obvious that rock journalists would take David Bowie’s side in the dispute between
him and his Aunt Pat. After all David Bowie is considered to be the greatest and most
influential rock star. But Aunt Pat was well aware of what was happening in David Bowie’s
immediate family. It was Aunt Pat who looked after Terry long before he became a patient,
letting Terry stay with her and her husband when David Bowie’s immediate family rejected
him. Aunt Pat stood by Terry throughout his illness, visiting him when he was in Cane Hill
until the end. Very few patients in the old asylums received that sort of devotion from a
relative. Most were abandoned. If anyone had seen Aunt Pat fussing over Terry when he was
in hospital, and how contented he was in her presence, they would not have been so
dismissive. But David Bowie fiercely protected his privacy and was angry because he felt it
had been invaded.
You only had to take one look at Aunt Pat to see that she was kind-hearted, and one look at
Peggy Jones to see that she was a formidable woman, and that a hard life had taught her not
to suffer fools gladly.

After his father died, it was Aunt Pat who noticed that David Bowie was starting to neglect
his mother, who was becoming increasingly unable to cope with Terry who was staying with
her. Aunt Pat also noticed that David Bowie had appropriated a Fiat 500 car that his father
had left to Peggy. Pat visited David Bowie at Haddon and told him to return the car and to
look after his mother. David Bowie retaliated by telling Aunt Pat that she had never liked
him. However, he agreed to return the car. Aunt Pat’s fears were well founded. Peggy Jones
became unable to cope with Terry after her husband died and from being a day patient at
Farnborough hospitals psychiatric department, he was admitted to Cane Hill as a full-time
patient.
David Bowie would become increasingly estranged from his mother as his career became
more successful, and by July 1975, after complaining to her sister Pat and niece Kristina
about her son David’s neglect, Peggy Jones felt compelled to telephone the New Musical
Express to make her complaints about David Bowie public. Rock journalist Charles Shaar
Murray visited her, and then put her case in an NME article. David Bowie then had more
contact with his mother, but it was not until Aunt Pat had complained to press when Terry
had jumped from a second story window at Cane Hill in 1982 that he made his only journey
to see Terry in his last ten years, at Mayday hospital in Croydon.
It was Aunt Pat who managed to talk to Angie Bowie about Terry’s financial problems after
he left Cane Hill to live with his wife in Church Road in Beckenham, in 1971, and who
persuaded her to contribute £200 to the couple which they spent on carpets for their flat. She
visited Peggy Jones when she had a flat in Albermarle Road in Beckenham, describing it as a
shrine to her nephew. Peggy Jones had decorated the flat with photographs of her son and
with his LPs and presentation discs. Aunt Pat was eventually to become estranged from her
sister Peggy Jones, they sat on opposite sides of the chapel at Terry’s funeral in 1985, but for
many years they were in touch with each other.

In 1993 Aunt Pat gave an outraged interview to The Sun newspaper in response to the

lyrics and cover artwork for ‘Jump They Say’, which they published on the 31 st of March that
year.
‘Now he is using (Burns’) tragic death to put his record in the charts, and I find that not only
macabre but pathetic. The picture of David upset me terribly. There is a real resemblance.
David looks just like Terry did when he became schizophrenic.’

But why did David Bowie tell a different version of events with no mention of a religious
vision involving God, Christ, or the Devil? David Bowie said that Terry had many visions.
But Terry only described one vision to me and that was when he saw the Devil. Though
David Bowie was present at the Jones family Plaistow Grove home when Terry was brought
back by the police, he did not witness the vision Terry had at the entrance to Chislehurst
Caves where he is said to have had a vision of Christ. The vision David Bowie describes took
place on the way back to Plaistow Grove from the Bromel Club.
David Bowie could have been describing a second vision, one that did not escalate into a
religious visitation because he was there to reassure Terry and bring him home. The vision at
Chislehurst was triggered by events in his family, the second by loud rock music. Though
Terry is associated with turning David Bowie on to jazz music, he also liked pop music and
ballads sung by Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis. Like many he appreciated a good song
with a good melody. I once played Terry a cassette of ‘My Life In the Bush of Ghosts’ by
David Byrne and Brian Eno. Terry was appalled and I had to turn it off. The second track on
the record, called ‘Mea Culpa’, has two sinister voices speaking concurrently, rather like the
schizophrenic experience of hearing voices. The non-schizophrenic musicians were trying to
explore of their unconscious minds while a patient suffering from schizophrenia is trying to
evade its intrusion. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a fine LP, but it could also be used to
illustrate how conventional music might sound to someone suffering from psychosis, which
may well be why Terry did not like it. David Bowie had worked with Brian Eno. After that
partnership had ended, he recorded his Scary Monsters LP. When Terry heard ‘Ashes to
Ashes’ from that LP he told me that his brother could sing as well as Frank Sinatra and did
not need all those gimmicks.

I want to show that Terry’s influence on David Bowie’s writing was more than just giving
him books and records. That his breakdown and vision influenced David Bowie’s writing in
songs like ‘Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud’, ‘Unwashed and Slightly Dazed’, The Width of a
Circle’ and All the Madmen’. Those songs led up to The Bewlay Brothers, which then lead to
his epic songs ‘Sweet Thing’, and ‘Station to Station’, which David Bowie wrote while
suffering from drug induced psychosis. Just Leona Delcourt’s psychosis influenced Andre
Breton, and the mainly schizophrenic Prinzhorn artists’ influenced Andre Breton and the
Surrealists, and Carl Solomon influenced Allen Ginsberg, Terry Burns influenced David
Bowie, by being a conduit to the world of the unconscious mind.

Some people do not believe in unconscious thought concurrent with conscious thought, that
there is only ‘here and now’, but the schizophrenic is suffering from the intrusion of
hallucinations during waking hours and they originate from the patients brain. Antipsychotic
drugs block receptors in the brain, not always efficiently, so that the hallucinations are
presumably meant to be contained in part of the brain not yet fully understood. So, there is
more evidence for than against. At best the unconscious deniers have to accept that more than
one ‘here and now’ consciousness can exist simultaneously in one person. ‘There’s someone
in my head but it’s not me’ to quote Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, probably inspired by Syd
Barrett’s psychotic illness.

There is a good reason for David Bowie to be inspired by Terry’s experience of psychosis.
David Bowie tried LSD a few times but was worried in case it might trigger the onset of a
mental illness like the one Terry was suffering from. Not only that, but David Bowie’s
childhood friend and, for a while fellow musician George Underwood spent time in Cane Hill
hospital in 1966, when he was 19 years old. His psychosis was so profound he suspected he
may have been spiked with LSD.
The music inspired by the powerful hallucinogenic drug LSD was having a profound effect
on rock music. But David Bowie found another way to access the unconscious mind, using
Terry as a conduit. If Terry told David Bowie that he had seen the Devil in a vision, then it is
easy to see the influence of Terry’s experience in the song ‘The Width of a Circle’. Like
‘Unwashed and Slightly Dazed’ it tells the story of a wanderer.
George Underwood’s father had him transferred from Cane Hill to Ticehurst House where he
was given electric shock treatment. After a couple of months, he was discharged. One of the
first things he did was tell David Bowie about his experiences in the psychiatric hospitals.
George Underwood believes that his experiences may have informed the song ‘All the
Madmen’. Though the song is believed to be about Terry, he did not undergo electric shock
therapy like the protagonist in the song. Terry told me this when four of us at Cane Hill were
discussing and comparing our treatment in an informal patient’s discussion in the Guy ward
dormitory. The song may be a composite, including some of George Underwood’s and
Terry’s experiences.

Neither David Bowie or his Aunt Pat’s description of Terry’s vision mentions the Devil, but a
David Bowie song does allude to a vision of a demonic creature. In his epic song ‘The Width
of a Circle’ David Bowie describes how he meets monster a who ‘Struck the ground and a
cavern appeared, And I smelt the burning pit of fear.’ that turns out to be a mirror image of
himself, He concludes the song bey describing himself as a ‘spitting sentry, horned and
tailed’. The confrontation, though fearful, is also, in part, a gay fantasy set to a heavy metal
soundtrack. It is as though David Bowie knew about Terry’s vision of the Devil, and adapted
it for his song saying what if what he saw was a reflection of himself. After all a
schizophrenic vision is the externalisation of what exists in the patient’s unconscious mind.
Terry was however far from gay. He talked to me about women, his wife, his female
psychiatrist, the woman who ran the hospital shop, also called Pat, French prostitutes, and his
varying degrees of respect for women. For Terry, marriage was the dream, the prostitutes in
Soho and Pigalle merely existed in his life because even when he was young he doubted that
his illness would allow him to have a long term relationship. Terry was an attractive young
man who did not need to go to prostitutes. In fact when he worked as a barman in Falmouth
he was regarded as something of a lady-killer. On the same LP that contains the songs All
The Madmen, a direct description of Terry, and ‘The Width of a Circle’, David Bowie sings,
in his song ‘She Shook Me Cold’, ‘I was very smart, I broke then hearts of many young
virgins,’. He could have been describing the young Terry. It is possible that David Bowie’s
famous promiscuity was informed by Terry’s activities, that it was learnt behaviour.

David Bowie’s highly paid job, at least in the 1970s and early 1980s, involved making LPs
that were not only the best rock and pop records of the year, but also touring to promote those
LPs and maintaining an almost supernaturally talented presence backed by the best musicians
available. If his later LPs were not quite so exceptional, they still had their moments, and by
then David Bowie had a substantial back catalogue to draw on when he played live. While his
half-brother Terry Burns was reduced to singing fragments of pop songs in the hospital shop
and corridors of Cane Hill asylum while begging for beer money.
I don’t blame David Bowie for this situation, but it does question a society that makes
impossible demands on its entertainers, demands that meant David Bowie was obliged to
exclude his family from his life while he did his best to fulfil those demands.
David Bowie and Aunt Pat confronted each other at Peggy Jones funeral, in 2001. According
to Bowie’s former manager Ken Pitt, David Bowie “walked straight over, threw his arms
around her. He was absolutely wonderful.”