"What we did with Feathers," Hermione Farthingale recalled, "were quite dark folk songs, like "Life Is A Circus" and "Love Song", and then David sang some Jacques Brel songs that he was very taken with at the time, like "Amsterdam", which is about hookers - you know, it's all gutsy stuff. And there was some sort of voice-over, I can't remember what it was, but David did a sort of dance movement thing to that." This was possibly a piece called "The Seagull" which, according to Hutch, involved David and Hermione dancing together to a tape of spoken narration and ethereal seaside sound effects. "It was a mixed-media, experimental kind of thing that we did in very small places to maybe thirteen people," explained Hermione. "We were just three mates trying out some things." Regarding her own musical ability, Hermione modestly added: "I wasn't a singer. I never pretended to be for a second. But I played the guitar and sang at home like everybody else did then. And because I was with David, and he was living with me, and we played and sang things, he wanted me to sing with him." In 1993, David himself said of Hermione: "She played a little bit of bedsitting-room guitar, that kind of folk guitar that every girl that looked beautiful could play."

Although Hermione would later appear in the Love You Till Tuesday film, Feathers were effectively defunct after their Brighton show on December 7th. Hermione won a role as a dancer in the film Song Of Norway which began shooting the same month, and the trio's gigging days were done. Over Christmas David played two solo dates at the Magician's Workshop in Falmouth, Cornwall, at the invitation of an acquaintance called Gerry Gill. He spent Christmas at Gill's house near Redruth, playing his two twenty-minute spots on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, but was paid only expenses.

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On January 22nd 1969 David recorded his fabled Lyons Maid ice-cream commercial, and four days later shooting began on Love You Till Tuesday. By this time two major and not unrelated developments had occurred: David's relationship with Hermione was coming to an end, and he had written a new song called "Space Oddity".

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On completion of the film Hermione left the group for good, bound once more for Norway and further filming, and David and Hutch continued as a duo. In the short term, however, David embarked on six solo dates, performing his mime pieces Jetsun And The Eagle and The Mask as first support on a Tyrannosaurus Rex tour beginning in Birmingham on February 15th. Tony Visconti would later opine that this was a gesture of back-handed generosity on Bolan's part: "David was open to friendship but Marc was quite cruel about David's as yet unproven musical career," Visconti told David Buckley. "I think it was with great sadistic delight that Marc hired David to open for Tyrannosaurus Rex, not as a musical act, but as a mime."

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"I had no idea, from seeing him on the tour, that he had any musical aspirations at all," recalled Bolan's other support act, the sitar player Vytas Serelis. "I do remember thinking what an old woman he was, because he used to take hours to get his make-up on. He'd go on in a draggy costume with tights and everything, and do this fairly conventional Marcel Marceau-type act." John Peel, who compered the tour, recorded in Disc & Music Echo that "David Bowie performs two of his mime things. It has been good to see the appreciation for what he does." Bowie would later credit Peel with persuading him to drop his mime act and concentrate on music.

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When David and John Hutchinson reconvened in early March as "David Bowie & Hutch", the mime and poetry were dropped and the pair concentrated instead on a more sophisticated folk sound based on their twin acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies. At the same time, now his Virgin Soldiers haircut had grown back sufficiently, David restyled himself with the straggly bubble-perm he continued to wear into 1970 ("not my greatest hairstyle," he ruefully observed twenty years later). With the arrival of the new look, many observed a new manner, as David began cultivating the fey, softly-spoken and effeminate persona which, with a few refinements, would remain his public image well into the 1970s.

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All these developments came to a head on March 11th when David and Hutch played a Guildford Festival gig, not in Guildford itself but at the University of Surrey's London premises on Battersea Park Road. Kenneth Pitt described the performance as "a revelation", as a newly relaxed and confident Bowie carried the audience through the set with a stream of witty remarks and easy charm. Hutch later recalled that "The Battersea date was the first time I began to understand what David was doing. He never worked like that before and had never used such chat." To the Gillmans he added, "It was a sort of gay patter, with me as a quiet straight man...I didn't know what to do except play guitar and sing, but it seemed to work." However, the financial rewards were insufficient for Hutch, and by early May he had left David's side to return to his family in Scarborough and resume his former job as a draughtsman. "We could have become another Simon and Garfunkel," he later said. "That was another chance I missed."

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Before Hutch's departure, he and David recorded a tape of acoustic demos which would prove instrumental in securing a new recording contract. By late June David was back in the studio, beginning work on his second album.