Listen To Rare Recording Of 16 Year Old David Bowie

The new 2022 documentary Moonage Daydream by Brett Morgen sheds light on David Bowie’s unfathomable brilliance in music. With that, let’s take a delve at when Bowie first started – with a sixteen-year-old future star making a demo tape for submission.

Bowie, then still a teenager, and his debut band, The Konrads, recorded the song “I Never Dreamed” at a modest south London studio. When the song was submitted to Decca, a local record company, it was turned down.

Former Konrads drummer David Hadfield recently came upon the lost recording in a bread basket during a relocation. While the auction company had estimated the demo would fetch around £10,000, it instead sold for an eye-popping £39,360 thanks to “a bidding frenzy” among Bowie aficionados.

“David had no inclination to become a singer at this point, his heart and mind were focused on becoming a world-class saxophone player,” Hadfield said in an interview. “Our agent, Eric Easton, who also managed the Rolling Stones, asked us to do a demo so he could try and get us an audition at Decca.”

He added: “I also decided that David was the best person to sing it and give the right interpretation. So, this became the very first recording of David Jones [Bowie] singing 55 years ago. There is no other recording of the demo featuring David as lead in existence.”

You can listen to “I Never Dreamed” below.