DAVID BOWIE - TEN YEARS GONE (Part 1)

DAVID BOWIE

1947-2016

“I pour out what has already been fed in. 

I merely reflect what is going on around me.”

– David Bowie, July 1973.

David Bowie was the most charismatic and influential popular musician of his generation, a cultural polymath and stylistic trailblazer whose artistic breadth also took in theatre, film, video, fashion, mime, fine art and prose writing. Though hugely admired by vast numbers of fans throughout the world, he often seemed uncomfortable with mainstream recognition and throughout his long career made a habit of stepping back to experiment with genres of music and cultural expression unlikely to find commercial acceptance. By refusing to rest on his laurels and – apart from a misstep in the eighties when he courted the mass market to excess – recording a series of peerless albums at various times in his life, he maintained a consistent level of critical acclaim enjoyed by very few of his contemporaries.

        Born David Robert Jones in Brixton in 1947, Bowie paid his dues in a number of groups and guises until his breakthrough in 1969 with the hit single ‘Space Oddity’, perfectly timed to coincide with the American moon landing that same year. The song’s theme of alienation and impending doom would be a recurrent motif of Bowie’s work, alongside a sense of otherworldliness on the part of its creator, as if David Bowie really was from another planet, an alien being on a higher astral plane than mere mortals, someone who simply knew more than the rest of us.

        The new decade brought a change in his business affairs with Bowie, perhaps frustrated by his lack of progress after two early albums, abandoning his dependable but old school manager Kenneth Pitt in favour of the more flamboyant but slightly Machiavellian Tony De Fries. Together they founded a company called Mainman and staffed it with colourful, sexually ambivalent characters whose loyalty to David was never in doubt but whose profligacy would later come back to haunt him. De Fries encouraged his new client to behave like a superstar before he actually was one – “Never, ever, open a door yourself” – thus creating an illusion around Bowie that he was happy to go along with so long as it advanced his career. It turned out to be a Faustian pact but for the time being everyone involved was delighted with the new arrangement and, if nothing else, the Mainman crew certainly enlivened the London rock scene.

        Nevertheless, Bowie’s rise to stardom was not immediate. Though acclaimed by critics, his 1971 albums The Man The Who Sold The World, the cover of which saw him in a ‘man’s dress’, and Hunky Dory sold respectably if not spectacularly. The title song of the former was covered by artists as disparate as Lulu and Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana while the latter contained songs, among them ‘Changes’ and ‘Life On Mars?’, that would remain in his concert repertoire for decades. 

        Bowie’s singing voice was a rich baritone but he could extend his range upwards to tenor and even occasional falsetto. An instinctive rather than virtuoso musician, he played saxophone, guitar and keyboards but his greatest skill was as a songwriter and finding the right collaborators to help realise his compositions. During the making of The Man The Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory he recruited a key early ally in guitarist Mick Ronson who joined his stage group shortly before Bowie renamed them The Spiders From Mars, its leader now restyled as Ziggy Stardust, the ensemble designed to perform his 1972 album named after them. “The two records [the other was Roxy Music’s eponymous debut] torched flower-power for good,” wrote Bowie biographer and critic David Buckley, “replacing it with a confused agenda of post-modern irony and theatricality that became the roots of British art rock.”

The album saw lift-off with Bowie as Ziggy, presenting himself in concert as flamboyantly androgynous, his spiked hair carrot red, his clothes garish and colourful, outré and revealing, his whole demeanour screaming ‘star’ from the highest pinnacle. Crowds flocked to his concerts as he ushered in glam rock yet always maintained a rather aloof presence above the genre’s less cerebral acts like Slade, Sweet and his friend Marc Bolan’s T. Rex. Bowie’s elaborate costumes, many of them Japanese styled, were all part of the same package, in hindsight a work of art in itself. Consciously or not, everything he did from this point onwards became part of his art and his life as an artist. Amongst his greatest early achievements, therefore, was what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror.

        Crucially, he represented the outsider, positioning himself on the side of those ill-suited for conventional society. His lyrics, often elliptical, spoke to misfits and loners, the timid and the disconnected, enabling them to cast off inhibitions while paving the way for a less macho style of rock performer and performance. A skilled interviewee, he was quick to realise that absolute truth was of less significance than the effect his words might carry. When he did speak to the press he often made headlines, not least in January 1972 when, during an interview with my Melody Maker colleague Michael Watts, he announced that he was gay or, at the very least, bisexual. No one at the time pointed out that he was married with a son [1] yet, in Watt’s opinion, this statement “changed the lifestyles of a generation and kick-started the LGBT movement. He was certainly aware of the impact it would make.” 

        Similarly, on a musical level he positioned himself outside the tried and tested blues rock formula typified by The Rolling Stones or more supercharged contemporaries like Led Zeppelin. While songs such as ‘The Jean Genie’, ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Rebel Rebel’ – the latter the best Rolling Stones-style song they never recorded – were all full-tilt rockers, others reflected a more ethereal quality, the otherwordly ‘Starman’ borrowing Harold Arlen’s octave climb from ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ to startling effect. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ itself, of course, was assumed to be autobiographical.

        By the end of 1972 Bowie’s only rival as the UK’s biggest solo rock star was Elton John, and though America’s ingrained conservatism at first resisted Bowie’s theatrics, the US fell the following year. He even found time to revive the careers of Lou Reed, producing his Transformer LP containing ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, Reed’s only UK Top Ten hit, and Mott The Hoople, to whom he gifted ‘All The Young Dudes’, their biggest ever hit. Iggy Pop, too, benefited from Bowie’s patronage and became a close friend. 

        Bowie was at the peak of his early fame in 1973, the year his next LP, Aladdin Sane, attracted advance orders of 100,000 in the UK. In many ways it was Ziggy Part II, its striking cover of Bowie with a blue thunderbolt etched across his face solidifying his surreal image. Evidently distrustful of flying, he toured the world by land and sea with an extravagant entourage, crossing the Atlantic and Pacific by ocean liner and Russia, from Vladivostok to Moscow, by rail, but his biggest UK concert to date, which originated London’s Earls Court as a rock venue, was a disaster, the blame attached to his management for skimping on amplification, presentation and security. It was an omen of things to come. 

        In July 1973, just as it seemed as if Bowie would eclipse all before him, he abandoned the persona of Ziggy Stardust completely, memorably making the announcement from the stage at Hammersmith Odeon, shocking fans and, so word had it, even his own group, and returned to the drawing board. It would not be the only time that Bowie would abruptly spring an unexpected surprise, a career strategy he maintained until the very end.

        The patchy covers album Pin Ups (1973) was a holding manoeuvre but with Diamond Dogs (1974), and perhaps more importantly its concurrent stage show, Bowie invented rock theatre, a style of presentation that paid no lip service whatsoever to conventional rock concerts and instead relied purely on dramatic effect and elaborate stage props. “The one-and-a-half-hour, 20-song show is a completely rehearsed and choreographed routine where every step and nuance has been perfected down to the last detail,” I wrote in Melody Maker after seeing a concert in Toronto. “There isn’t one iota of spontaneity about the whole show. It is straight off a musical stage – a piece of theatre, complete with extravagant mechanical sets, dancers and a band that stands reservedly to stage right and never even receives so much as a cursory acknowledgement, like an orchestra in a theatre pit.” Kate Bush and Madonna took notes.

        The following year Bowie embraced blue-eyed soul with Young Americans, its funked-up US No. 1 hit single ‘Fame’ a collaboration with his new friend John Lennon that savaged his relationship with manager Tony De Fries. “By crossing over into disco/soul music he helped pave the way for the greater commercial success later in the decade of the Bee Gees,” wrote Buckley. “The Bowie model of white, blue-eyed soul would be hugely influential for the likes of ABC, Spandau Ballet and Simply Red as the eighties unwound, and British soul boys and girls everywhere have this pioneering album to thank.”

        He then stepped back from music to appear in Nicolas Roeg’s sci-fi film The Man Who Who Fell To Earth. It was astute casting, Bowie’s starring role as an extra-terrestrial sent to earth to save his own planet serving only to ramp up the impression of Bowie as a creature from beyond the stratosphere. As his career progressed he would accept roles in several more films, often as anomalous or quirky characters. 

        Bowie was reaching another plateau and it was around this time that I made his acquaintance, socially at music industry events in New York, where I was stationed as Melody Maker’s US correspondent, and professionally during a lengthy interview in a hotel room in Detroit in 1976. “In his blue tracksuit he looks astonishingly healthy and although he could add a few pounds in weight his brain is as trim as his figure,” I wrote in MM. “His hair, blond at the front and red at the back, has been groomed by his personal hairdresser, and is swept up in a quiff. His classic, Aryan features alternate between expressions of genuine warmth and cold contempt whenever he senses troubled waters. His left eye is still strangely immobile, a legacy from the childhood injury he received, and it adds an incongruous touch to his rather aristocratic bearing. Even if David Bowie never opened his mouth, he would have found some niche in life purely on the strength of his looks.”

        It was during this interview that Bowie told me he was broke, clearly an exaggeration, and – as with the “I’m gay” admission in 1972 – designed to capture a headline. I didn’t mind. Obtaining good quotes was part and parcel of being a good reporter, though later in the same interview David denied ever being gay in the first place. “That was just a lie,” he said. “They gave me that image so I stuck to it pretty well for a few years. I never adopted that stance. It was given to me. I’ve never done a bisexual action in my life, onstage, record or anywhere else.”

        I suppose I was part of the conspiracy though anyone who had the good fortune to spend time with David Bowie will tell you that he could be the most gracious of men, well-mannered, well-spoken and utterly charming. Far and away the best-looking rock star in the world, women adored him. Most would have been willing to leap into bed with him at a moment’s notice, and Bowie wasn’t one to let such opportunities slip by. An avid book reader who took the acquisition of arcane knowledge very seriously, he could converse in an interesting way on all manner of subjects which probably explains why of all the rock stars I interviewed between 1970 and 1977 he was one of only two – the other was Pete Townshend – who asked me questions as the conversation proceeded. 

“Seen any good bands recently, Chris?” he might ask. “Read any good books? Seen any good movies? Visited a new gallery?” An unapologetic culture vulture, it was his way of absorbing information that might come in useful at a later date, regardless of the source. If he was obliged to submit to an interview, he figured he might as well derive more from it than a page or two in a magazine or newspaper, hopefully with his picture on the cover.

He probably learned how to grab headlines from John Lennon, who learned it the hard way when he implied The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. When I asked David if Lennon played a big role in the writing of ‘Fame’ he was dismissive. “No, not really,” he replied frankly. “I think he appreciates that. It was more the influence of having him in the studio that helped. There’s always a lot of adrenalin flowing when John is around, but his chief addition to it all was the high-pitched singing of ‘Fame’. The riff came from Carlos [Alomar], and the melody and most of the lyrics came from me, but it wouldn’t have happened if John hadn’t been there. He was the energy, and that’s why he’s got a credit for writing it; he was the inspiration.”

My interview with Bowie took place during the Station To Station tour, a series of concerts built around the album of the same name that merged black funk with the emerging European electronic school. I share the widely held view that it is his best ever. He appeared on stage as the title track’s Thin White Duke character, in black pants, black waistcoat and white shirt, with bright white strip lighting illuminating the stage. The only hint of colour was the blue packet of Gitanes in his vest pocket from which he plucked cigarettes to smoke between songs. Smoking was cool then. Amazingly, the show was preceded by a screening of the 1929 surrealist short film Un Chien Andalou by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, in which a woman’s eye is slashed by a razor blade; not really the sort of thing US fans would expect at a rock show. I read later that Madonna, aged 17, was at the concert I saw, her first ever rock show. 

        Station To Station is as timeless as it is flawless; yet the thrillingly successful world arena tour that followed would presage Bowie’s second retreat from the commercial sphere. Destabilised by the financially calamitous fall out with De Fries – following Lennon’s advice he would henceforth largely manage his own business affairs in tandem with lawyers and discrete, no-nonsense personal assistant Corinne ‘Coco’ Schwab – and an enervating cocaine habit, he wisely relocated to Berlin to work with producer/auteur Brian Eno on a trilogy of introverted experimental albums, thus maintaining his reputation as a genuine innovator and simultaneously avoiding the need to compete with punk rock. Although many tracks on these now highly acclaimed records were doom-laden instrumentals and perversely uncommercial, the Berlin period produced the stirring majesty of ‘Heroes’, a meditation on the futility of the Berlin Wall that is arguably the finest song he ever wrote and certainly the most popular.

        After emerging from his German retreat for another arena tour, Scary Monsters And Super Creeps (1980) saw Bowie move to more conventional ground, its most affecting track ‘Ashes To Ashes’ a revision of the Major Tom saga from ‘Space Oddity’. By this time videos – short films to promote singles – had arrived and few benefited more from this development than Bowie whose acting experience gave him the jump on less imaginative fellow travellers. The video for ‘Ashes To Ashes’, with Bowie in Pierrot costume, not only lit the touch paper beneath the New Romantic movement but ushered in an era when he consistently led the field in this new art form. As if to prove the point, his next move, again unexpected, was to appear on stage – bravely and with distinction – in Chicago and on Broadway in New York as the severely deformed John Merrick in The Elephant Man, a role that required him to contort his frame throughout the play’s duration.

        By this time, I had left Melody Maker and was working in the press office at RCA Records in London, a job that required me to represent Bowie to the media, hardly onerous as by now he was living permanently in New York. I took a couple of journalists to Chicago to watch The Elephant Man, one of whom, Angus McKinnon from New Musical Express, defied the instructions of Bowie’s “people” and succeeded in interviewing him for considerably longer than the allotted hour, much to their annoyance. He also took along his own photographer, the soon-to-be-celebrated Anton Corbijn. The following week – the week that Scary Monsters was released – NME had a Corbijn picture of Bowie on the cover and five pages of McKinnon’s interview inside. Unlike his advisors, Bowie was already familiar with Corbijn’s work and, as I suspected, knew far better than them how to achieve maximum coverage.

        I watched Bowie on stage in The Elephant Man for three straight nights as he contorted his body for the role and spoke with a strange, high-pitched accent in imitation of the real John Merrick. I came away hugely impressed, as did all the theatre critics who reviewed the play when it transferred to New York for a further three months. 

        This experience confirmed in my mind that David Bowie was a true polymath and I am thankful for the slight relationship I had with him at this time. Unfortunately, I had no further dealings with him as he left RCA for EMI soon afterwards. 

[Part Two Tomorrow] 

[1] In March 1970 Bowie married Angela Barnett, a Cypriot American model and fashion designer, who in May of 1971 gave birth to a son they named Zowie. In the fullness of time he would alter his name to Duncan Jones. Angie and Bowie separated in the mid-seventies and were divorced in 1980.

The framed photograph at the top of this post was taken in 1973 by my friend Barrie Wentzell, Melody Maker’s staff photographer from 1965 until 1975. It hangs on the wall at the base of the stairs that lead up to my office in our home.