This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

They were a “routine beat group” with a “strange choice of material” and an “amateur-sounding vocalist who sings wrong notes and out of tune”. In 1965 the BBC’s conclusion on David Bowie and his band was clear: “Nothing to recommend it.”

The thudding rejection of Bowie after a three-song audition has been unearthed for a revealing documentary to be broadcast next week on BBC Two, telling the story of his faltering journey to superstardom.

David Bowie: Finding Fame is a story of repeated failure and rejection over a decade, said the filmmaker, Francis Whately. But that is fine. “It shows an icon in rude health, really, that we can make a whole film about someone’s lack of success.”

Whately has gathered film footage that was thought lost, previously unseen photographs and interviews with people who were Bowie’s friends, collaborators and lovers before he made it big.

Bowie had nine separate bands over 11 years. One incarnation was David Bowie and the Lower Third, although the guitarist Denis Taylor insists in the film: “We employed him, he didn’t employ us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Bowie singing with the Lower Third at the Marquee Club in London in 1966. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

The band, who lived and travelled around in an ambulance, had the opportunity to audition at the BBC and recorded three numbers: James Brown’s Out of Sight, Bowie’s That’s a Promise and, bizarrely, Chim Chim Cher-ee from Mary Poppins.

A researcher for the programme discovered the written verdicts of the BBC’s “talent selection group” when trawling the corporation’s archives at Caversham in Reading.

Comments included:

“I don’t think the group will get better with more rehearsal – what we heard will always be the product.”

“The treatment of Chim Chim Cher-ee kills the song completely. Instead of being bright and gay the song becomes a sad ballad. The singer is a cockney type but not outstanding enough.”

“There is no entertainment in anything they do. It’s just a group and very ordinary, too, backing a singer devoid of personality.”

Whately, who has made two previous Bowie documentaries, said the sheer variety of Bowie’s interests in the 1960s, including mime performances, was striking.

Bowie’s lover for a time, the late choreographer Lindsay Kemp, says in one of his final interviews – shown in the film - how bad Bowie was at mime.

“He did a piece called The Mask. David, I suppose, had seen Marcel Marceau along the line but he wasn’t Marcel Marceau. It was dreadful. I cringed, I really cringed.

“There are always people who will say, ‘He was very good in that miming, wasn’t he?’ No darling, it was a load of shit.”

Some of the film’s interviewees speak publicly about Bowie for the first time. They include his cousin Kristina Amadeus, who is keen to dispel a story that Bowie’s family had mental health issues.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Bowie c.1965. Photograph: BBC/CA/Staff (Redferns)/Getty

“One of the porkies that David perpetuated for a very long time was that he came from a family where insanity seemed to be the norm and it just wasn’t true,” she says. “Yes, Terry [his brother] had his breakdown, but I believe it was a bad acid trip.”

Whately said he was particularly pleased to discover footage previously believed to be lost of Bowie performing Jacques Brel’s My Death on the Russell Harty show.

Bowie’s performance as Ziggy Stardust singing Starman on Top of the Pops in 1972, when most of the audience at home seemed to think he was pointing at them personally, is considered a watershed in music history.

But Whately said it was first performed weeks earlier on the ITV teatime show Lift Off With Ayshea. All the programmes were wiped but the documentary has been given footage recorded on early computer tape which is still being restored.

“We will get it,” said Whately. “Whether we get it by Wednesday next week which is our deadline I do not know, it is in the lap of the gods.”

That footage is a Bowie holy grail, he said, but more exciting footage has yet to be found: of the singer rehearsing for the Starman performance at Haddon Hall, the sprawling Victorian villa he and his entourage lived in in Beckenham between 1969 and 1972.

Whately said Bowie went to Radio Rentals to hire equipment “to film himself so he could work out the moves for the Lift Off With Ayshea show … That’s the real holy grail.”

• David Bowie: Finding Fame is on BBC Two Saturday 9 February at 9pm