The reason David Bowie was rejected by The Beatles' record label

11 September 2025, 11:39

David Bowie's early attempts at fame didn't get very far.

David Bowie was one of the most important musicians in the history of the 20th century (and beyond).

He was also incredibly successful on a commercial level, with over 20 top ten albums and nine topping the charts.

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But in his early days, Bowie really struggled to break through.

At the newly-launching David Bowie Centre at V&A Storehouse at London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the man's meticulously kept archives reveal every doomed band and failed attempt to achieve the superstardom that would later seem inevitable.

That means you can see the hand-drawn mod-inspired bullseye logo for his short-lived band "Dave and the Bowman" and other juvenilia.

Even after Bowie joined forces with experienced talent manager Kenneth Pitt, he still had to deal with plenty of setbacks and rejection.

David Bowie - Love You til Teusday

That included a remarkable letter from none other than Apple Records, the label founded by The Beatles in 1968.

In a letter to Pitt's management company dated July 15, 1968, Apple A&R boss Peter Asher outlines why they're not interested in signing David Bowie.

"Dear Sir," the letter reads. "As we told you on the phone, Apple Records is not interested in signing David Bowie.

"The reason is that we don't feel he is what we're looking for at the moment. Thank you for your time."

So the letter wasn't all that constructive in its criticism, but in the long term it didn't do Bowie much harm at all. In fact, the time to grow and reconsider his direction likely did him the world of good.

Bowie had been signed to Decca subsidiary Deram for his first album David Bowie, before moving to Mercury affiliate Philips Records for his second album, also called David Bowie but sometimes re-titled after its most well-known song 'Space Oddity'.

Bowie went to number five in the UK charts with the original release of 'Space Oddity', but it proved to be something of a false dawn.

The Man Who Sold The World, release on Mercury proper, didn't make much of an impact on its initial release, and it wasn't till Bowie's move to RCA for Hunky Dory that the fame train really got rolling.

David Bowie – Space Oddity (Official Video)

Over at Apple Records, it's not really clear that they did find what they were looking for, even if it wasn't the young David Bowie.

Apart from The Beatles, the label had success with the likes of Badfinger and Mary Hopkin, while it also boasted releases from Billy Preston, Jackie Lomax, Ravi Shankar, and Ronnie Spector, as well as James Taylor's self-titled debut album.

Apple Records fizzled out and its last release was Ringo Starr's 1975 album Blast From Your Past, around the time David Bowie was conquering all with his Young Americans LP.

The label was revived in the mid-1990s for The Beatles' Anthology project and has since focused on Beatles compilations and other music from its archives.

The David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts will open on September 13, 2025 at the Park's V&A East Storehouse and feature over 90,000 items – including 70,000 photographs, prints, negatives, slides and contact sheets, many of which have never been seen by the public.