Rock stars adopt such grandiose personas that it can be difficult to imagine them as average teenagers, loitering and hanging out, testing the waters of their character, style, and interests. Even stranger is the idea of two future icons—who took relatively separate professional paths—spending time together as childhood friends. Some early relationships, such as those between Paul McCartney and John Lennon, were integral to the band’s musical legacy.
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Other childhood friendships were more happenstance, like the one between Peter Frampton and David Bowie. The pair met when Frampton was around 11 or 12 years old as classmates in an art class taught by Frampton’s father. In a 2019 appearance on The Howard Stern Show, the “Do You Feel Like I Do” singer talked about how much he revered the young Bowie, who was still going by David Jones.
“I wanted to be him,” Frampton said. Bowie, who was three years older than Frampton, taught his younger classmate Buddy Holly songs. In exchange, Frampton taught him the latest Cliff Richard number. “He was my buddy,” Frampton remembered.
Peter Frampton Said He Wasn’t Surprised by David Bowie’s 1972 Transformation
When Peter Frampton first met David Jones in his father’s art class in the early 1960s, the latter classmate was a far cry from the larger-than-life Starman he would later become. And indeed, the person who became David Bowie underwent several other metamorphoses after that, too. Speaking to Howard Stern in 2019, Bowie’s childhood friend and fellow rock icon Peter Frampton said he was never taken aback by Bowie’s many artistic and creative reinventions—not even his alien persona, Ziggy Stardust.
Frampton said that Bowie wasn’t quite as flashy with his eccentricism in school. But there were still clues that he would go on to become someone out of the ordinary. The “I’m In You” singer recalled his father coming home from school one day and talking to Frampton’s mother. He imitated his dad saying, “Darling, I tell you. There’s the strangest thing with Jones [David Bowie]. On Friday, I could have sworn he had eyebrows.” That Monday, Bowie had arrived with his eyebrows shaved clean off.
Years later, Frampton would undergo a transformation himself—though not necessarily one he wanted. His popularity waned in the final years of the 1970s, and by the 80s, Frampton was struggling to remain relevant. Bowie called on his childhood friend for an international stadium tour: the “Glass Spider Tour” of 1987. The tour reintroduced the world to Frampton as a serious guitarist, not a pretty-boy one-hit wonder.
“He gave me the biggest gift,” Frampton later told Dan Rather, “of taking me around the world in stadiums…and reintroducing me as the musician, the guitar player. And for that, I will never stop thanking him.”
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