A True English Eccentric
A True English Eccentric
In June 1987, in a spectacularly nondescript room in the Hilton Rotterdam, I met David Bowie. He was 40, but he still had the air of a cocky south London boy.
“Skeletally thin, tight black Levi’s, grey suede loafers, massive blond cockade and a mysterious bruise under his left eye” was how I described him in The Times. I didn’t, perhaps kindly, mention the appalling teeth, later fixed. There was a strong smell of cigarettes, which probably explained the brown-stained teeth. I remember very clearly the way he sat as he spoke, his legs spread, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He was matey but distant, as is the way with cocky south London boys.
By then, as I noted, he had already rung his most celebrated changes: Davy Jones, the not-quite star; Ziggy Stardust, the glam-rock alien; the angst-ridden androgynous superstar Aladdin Sane; and the haughty Mitteleuropean Thin White Duke. But he seemed when we met to have paused in the role of earnest rocker.
“I think I’m pretty straightforward,” he said. I knew he was playing with me, or perhaps he just believed what he said when he said it. “The ever-changing David Bowie and all that, it’s just an easy tag to put on me. I just like changing the staging every time I go out. I was quite poppy at the start, then I started getting quite arty. Now I think I’m somewhere between the two.”
In the days since his death, one theme has become clear — he was, indeed, the ever-changing David Bowie in two distinct senses. First, there were his own deliberate changes, which concluded with the change of which no one, at first, saw the significance: the musical Lazarus and the album Blackstar — “on the day of execution, on the day of execution”. In his last video, he writhes, blindfolded, on a hospital bed. This was, very consciously, a death foretold. “He wanted to manage his absence,” a friend of his said. And it was, in its way, consistent with the goals of the gifted generation of which he was part. “I hope I die before I get old,” the Who sang, and in 1977 Bowie said: “And who wants to drag their old, decaying frame around until they’re 90? Just to assert their ego? I don’t, certainly.”
Unlike his previous transformations, this last change had been the one we all must make. In death he became, courageously, one of us, or, as WH Auden wrote on the death of WB Yeats: “He became his admirers.”
Second, there were the changes wrought by others. The anguished reactions of his fans provided evidence of something I noticed in the Hilton Rotterdam. There was a neutrality, an openness, about him that sometimes became vulnerability. In spite of his colourful personas, Bowie provided a blank sheet on which people could write their own meanings and fantasies. Dozens of times last week, I heard surprisingly young fans say that Bowie taught them they could be whatever they wanted to be. And one of the most acute celebrity reactions came from Graham Coxon, of Blur. He said of a Bowie lyric: “It’s just something to do with the vagueness — you can interpret it to mean something personal.” (And the youth of the fans says something else. They absorbed the best of their parents’ music, the music of rock’s primal and golden age. This also means, sadly, that they, like the rest of us, must steel themselves for a long era of rock-god deaths.)
Bowie emerged, a decade late, from a very British pop- music revolution. The Stones and the Beatles had started up in the early 1960s, deriving their energy and content from America — 1950s rock and pop, blues, country — but adding the local ingredients of class and generational rebellion, softened, in the case of the Beatles, by cheeky lovableness. What all these new guitar bands said, and celebrated, was the fact that this generation was going to be utterly different from the last. This included being different from previous rockers. Tom Jones told me that the macho, hip-gyrating Elvis felt he had been superseded by these thin, pale stars from Liverpool and London. Jones, a kind of throwback, gave him hope.
Bowie came late to the party, only fully arriving in the 1970s. But he was, and was to remain, the quintessence, the climax, of British pop. Not only was he thinner and paler than any of them, he also went much further down the road they had built.
Implicit in the first wave had been a certain sexual ambivalence. Unlike the old hip-thrusters, these kids preened and strutted, they cared a little too much about their clothes and, within the male bonding of the guitar band, there was something a little, well, disconcerting. This almost became explicit with the near-dress that Mick Jagger wore at the Stones in the Park concert in 1969, but Bowie came right out and said it with a performance of Starman on Top of the Pops in 1972. Both in tight jumpsuits, Mick Ronson and Bowie pouted, flirted and cuddled their way through the song. This was, note, only five years after the legalisation of homosexual acts in the UK.
It all had to be shocking to work — and it was. Bowie was exuding a certain self-conscious decadence, a touch of prewar Berlin cabaret, a motif that was to stay with him for the rest of his career. (Look up the lyrics of that apparently harmless rocker The Jean Genie to see what I mean.) He was also toying with audience expectations. In this, he was fully self-conscious, calculating and a touch cold. He said to me in Rotterdam: “I’ve stopped writing with my audience [in mind]. I don’t think I ever wrote for them.” Like any decent artist, he knew, as Graham Greene put it, he had to have “a splinter of ice in the heart”.
There was an artiness about this, visual as well as musical. Bowie always had a superb eye, and he realised, as soon as he stopped being Davy Jones from Brixton, that he could use it. He may have been following developments in New York, where, in the 1960s, a visual artist, Andy Warhol, had created a rock band, the Velvet Underground, who abandoned the audience entirely in favour of a superbly musical, sneering nihilism. I once saw them in one of their incarnations and felt, exhilaratingly, that they did indeed despise us. The lead singer, Lou Reed, was to become Bowie’s American alter ego.
In fact, their relationship began with them almost writing the same song. Look up the lyrics of Bowie’s All the Young Dudes and Reed’s Oh! Sweet Nuthin’. Both are about the lonely, the wrecked or the dispossessed, and both defiantly celebrate deviance and social repudiation. It was the mood of the early 1970s, when the sunny mop-top world had given way to a politically apocalyptic darkness.
Bowie’s subsequent trajectory was, for all its changes, entirely consistent with his artistic insights at this moment. Like Tancredi in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, he saw that everything had to change in order to remain the same.
The themes that connected his chosen personas were distance and strangeness. Ziggy Stardust talked with aliens; Major Tom was an astronaut drifting wistfully to the stars; Aladdin Sane was, indeed, a lad insane; the Thin White Duke, the distillation of the style of the 1960s boys, was, according to your interpretation, “a mad aristocrat” or “an amoral zombie”; and finally, as an actor, he played Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, a full-blooded alien. This last was one of the few examples in which a rock star translated a persona, artistically intact, onto the big screen.
In the midst of the affection and tears, this strangeness and distance were often remarked upon last week. “He just radiated a general queerness/otherness even a child could read,” said the film-maker Desiree Akhavan. “He frightened me a bit, actually,” said Marianne Faithfull.
Even when he danced as a schoolboy, his movements were described as “mesmerising — like someone from another planet”. The pose was supported by his slender and unearthly good looks and his eye for subtly deviant fashion design (influencing the likes of Jean-Paul Gaultier) that seemed simultaneously to invite and repel. In this, as in everything, he knew what he was doing. “Listen to me — don’t listen to me/Talk to me — don’t talk to me/Dance with me — don’t dance with me, no” ran his song Fashion.
This was all catnip for intellectuals. Bowie’s start happened just at the moment when the movement known as postmodernism was being defined. The seriousness and monomania of late modernism were to be replaced by playfulness and a multiplicity of meanings and stories. Buildings were to become colourful and strange combinations of past and present styles, poems and novels broke away from the strictures of the moderns, paintings abandoned abstraction, and rock — well, rock became Bowie.
At a Bowie symposium held at the University of Limerick in 2012, the first paper was entitled There Is No Authoritative Voice. There Are Only Multiple Readings. That’s just how postmodernists say hello, but it is also, obviously, a pretty accurate summary of the distance, strangeness and changeability, the vagueness noted by Coxon, of David Bowie.
But is this the whole story? I don’t think so, because, standing back a little, there is a thread that joins, or perhaps a light that shines through, the life. In Rotterdam, I met a cocky south London boy, and the strange thing is that, through it all, whenever I saw him down the decades, I still saw that same boy. For all his exotica and extravagance, he defaulted to that street-smart kid. Look at some of his last photographs. He is wearing a sharp suit and hat, and he seems to be saying “Hello, mate” while trying to figure out your angle or put one over on you. In his end was his beginning.
He was, in fact, a familiar and ancient British type, very gabby, very beady, a bit tricky, but always entertaining. Almost daily, I meet Bowie plumbers and Bowie lawyers, Bowie newsagents, Bowie doctors and Bowie cabbies. They were always there, it’s just that he put them on stage in a skintight jumpsuit.
I think he knew this in his later years, as he seemed to know everything about himself. It is, for example, startling but, on closer examination, consistent that he pleaded with the Scots not to vote for independence; he believed in Britain. It is even more bizarrely consistent that when he got together with Jagger to do a video for Dancing in the Street, they played it like a pair of bum-bumping old queens doing music hall. You see, the flirt in the jumpsuit is not so exotic, he’s just another incarnation of the screaming English queen.
I will be honest: I was never his biggest fan. Lou Reed was a greater, more uncompromising artist, and there have been quite a few greater songwriters in the past decades. But Bowie’s death has been, for me, a Princess Diana moment. I cared little for her until I covered her death and realised that what I felt was nothing compared with what she meant, in dying, to the people. So it is with Bowie. Postmortem, he has expanded in my imagination into something more than this or that song. He has become, like Yeats, his admirers, and his admirers are the people.
He was, I realise, Everyman written by a fantasist, a south London lad painted by a madman, a folk song sung by a deranged angel. Or perhaps he was simply a working-class hero, which, as John Lennon so truly sang, “is something to be”.
I first met David Bowie in London in 1968. We were both part of the vibrant underground arts scene of the time — the counterculture.
David was a vocalist and mime artist, I was a young writer and aspiring DJ. I first saw him perform with the short-lived mixed-mediagroup Feathers at Middle Earth, an all-night psychedelic music club in Covent Garden. Bathed in the colours of the liquid light shows, he was mixing monologue, mime and music, and was totally magnetic.
Marc Bolan was a good friend of mine at the time, and Marc, David and I began to hang out together with the producer Tony Visconti at Trident Studios, in Soho, where Marc was doing most of his recordings. David was lovely. He had a very “English” vibe about him, and was charming, polite, charismatic and intensely creative.
I invited him to play at one of my first DJ gigs, a Saturday-night university disco in east London. He brought with him a cassette containing the backing track for a new single he was working on called Space Oddity, which he slotted into a tiny portable speaker as he began his set. I was excited, but the mood soon changed. The students were not happy to have their dancing interrupted by this kooky acoustic alien. They booed him off the stage. I couldn’t believe it. I was incensed as I strode red-faced to the microphone and began to rant at the crowd: “This is David Bowie. Remember the name. He is going to be a massive star.”
Space Oddity was released as a single four months later.
Janice Long, broadcaster
I had a brief encounter with Ziggy back in 1972. I stood next to him in a lift in a Liverpool hotel. I was already a huge fan, and wrote his name all over my schoolbooks. I was lost for words. He was off to perform at the Stadium.
In the 1990s, the Cure’s Robert Smith and I were part of a crew doing everything we could to get a licence for a new radio station in London, XFM. Robert wanted to interview Bowie, but asked if I would be there, too. Robert and I met up in Fitzrovia and waited for David to turn up. We were both nervous fans with heads full of questions. David arrived grinning from ear to ear and carrying his own cafetiere and coffee. He talked and talked, and even when the interview was over, he stayed and chatted. He showed me his tattoos and I showed him mine. Whenever I saw him after that, he always took time to talk to me and, on one occasion, my son, Fred.
He was an absolute genius and, at the same time, very down to earth.
Paul McCartney
Very sad news to wake up to on this raining morning. David was a great star and I treasure the moments we had together. His music played a strong part in British musical history and I’m proud to think of the huge influence he has had on people all around the world.
Terry O’Neill, photographer
I first got rung up by David Bowie’s manager to take photos of Bowie with Marianne Faithfull — the manager told me Bowie was an unusual type of guy. I could tell that right away. It was his incredible visual style that caught my photographer’s eye. I knew I’d be in for one hell of a ride.
That was in 1973. By 1975, I had worked with David several times, including taking the now iconic leaping-dog image used to promote Diamond Dogs. We both happened to be in LA at the same time when I got a call from an old friend, Elizabeth Taylor. I had known Liz for about 10 years by then. She knew I had worked with Bowie and asked if I was able to arrange a meeting. She was starting work on a new film that was going to be shot in Russia, with George Cukor directing, and thought David might be right for one of the parts in it. I rang David, told him Elizabeth Taylor wanted to have lunch with him, and he agreed to a meeting.
It was scheduled for 2pm on a Sunday, at Cukor’s home in Beverly Hills. The time came. Then 3pm, 4pm, 5pm. Still no Bowie. I was getting pretty upset, but Liz didn’t seem to mind at all. After all, she was notorious herself for being late. At about 6pm, up came David with his PA, the former Warhol superstar Cherry Vanilla. We had about 10 minutes of light left. Liz took over the session and orchestrated every shot.
I think that’s why David is laughing in some of the photos: here he was, with the biggest and most glamorous star in Hollywood. From when he started in small clubs in London to being there with Elizabeth Taylor was less than, what, seven, eight years – it was astonishing.
Derek Boshier, the British artist whose work Bowie collected, first met the singer in 1979, when he co-designed the sleeve for Lodger. He remained in touch with Bowie to the end
The generosity in him was amazing. Unless people knew him, they might not realise that. When I was in Paris for one of my first shows there, my French dealer said: “You’ve had some messages. I keep getting calls from someone called David Blowgee. He’s asking if he can come to the show and maybe meet up with you beforehand. And then he called again and asked if he could bring his wife. I’m getting quite annoyed with him.”
In the end, the dealer invited him to a party at his house. The man’s two young daughters were there, and, of course, they’d told all their friends: “David Bowie’s coming for dinner.” And their friends said things like, “Yeah? Well, we’ve got f****** de Gaulle over for breakfast tomorrow.” I told David the story when he arrived, and he said: “Bring the girls over.” He had all these photographs taken with his arms around them, which they took into school the next morning.
He liked to go to art school graduates’ final shows, and at one he went to in London, he came across this young photographer’s work and thought: “These are interesting.” He took down his contact details. About a week later, David’s PR said: “We’ve had an email from Italian Vogue — they want to do an article on you.” And David said: “OK. Tell them I’ll do it, but they have to use that photographer.” So this guy’s first job after leaving college is to photograph David Bowie for Italian Vogue.
Candice Temple, Sunday Times picture editor
It was a sunny summer day in Chelsea in 1995. I took a few deep breaths before ringing the bell. This was to be my first photographic shoot with a celebrity. And not just any celebrity.
Bowie had agreed to be photographed because, for his latest creative endeavour, he had entered the world of interior design. In collaboration with Laura Ashley, he had produced two wallpapers, one of them featuring a crouching minotaur. He later reportedly observed that this had been “a good working relationship — apart from the castration, that is. They erased the minotaur’s genitals.”
I was ushered into the chic townhouse, then Bowie entered the living room. He was immediately friendly, and my nerves abated. I introduced him to the snapper I had selected, the society photographer Fergus Greer. Bowie expressed an interest in German expressionist art of the 20th century. This threw me, as it is a subject at which I would still score nul points, but, happily, Fergus and Bowie ended up chatting away on this subject for much of the three-hour shoot. Bowie talked, too, about his interest in spirituality, his belief in reincarnation and how inspiring it was to be married to someone from a different culture — how much he had learnt from his wife, Iman. I had a bit of a struggle to get him to pose in different positions and alter his facial expressions.
When I left, Bowie kissed me on both cheeks. With all sincerity, I said: “Lovely to meet you.” Bowie looked right into my eyes and said, as if he meant it: “Lovely to meet you too.”
Johnnie Walker, Radio 2 presenter
I was determined that my then girlfriend (now wife), Tiggy, would meet her absolute hero after a Radio 2 concert at the Maida Vale Studios in 2002. We followed the BBC management posse David had agreed to meet. This did not include us. So I positioned myself right outside the office where the meeting was taking place. David had to walk into me as he left the room. Nervously, I introduced myself. “Johnnie Walker!” he exclaimed. “We’ve never met.” I asked if I might introduce him to Tiggy. In 1972, when she was barely into her teens, her life had changed completely after seeing him perform Starman on Top of the Pops. She quivered: “I don’t know what to say.” David replied, as if he too was in awe: “Nor do I.” In fact, they talked for several minutes about his set list. He sensed how hugely important he was in her life. He made her feel she was the only person in his world that mattered. Tiggy describes it as a spiritual experience, one of the greatest moments of her life.
1 Gender-bending
Make-up, out-there outfits and a shifting sexuality didn’t define early Bowie — they were simply props to promote his alien-like oddness. It was in celebrating being different, showing that standing out was better than blending in and providing an enviable focus for everyone who felt they didn’t fit that Bowie bonded with so many. To outsiders everywhere, Ziggy Stardust was a lifeline. When a catsuit-clad Bowie wrapped an arm around Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops in 1972, he encouraged kids to ignore what their parents said about being gay. When he claimed to be bisexual, he made an alien concept seem exciting. He spoke as much to women as to men, and his androgyny appealed to the undecided. By the 1980s, it was easy to spot those who had been touched by Bowie — Boy George, Annie Lennox and Ian Curtis among them. But it was Lady Gaga, decades later, who most ruthlessly mined Bowie’s appeal to outsiders to send a career supernova.
2 Making postmodernism cool and fun
Before Bowie, postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and meta-narratives were the titles of lectures to be avoided at university. But Bowie brought formerly dull, esoteric philosophical ideas such as “There are no truths, only interpretations” thrillingly to life when he became a rock star simply by saying he was one. In creating and living out the role of Ziggy Stardust, he overturned all ideas of musical authenticity, opening up a new world of subjectivity and relativism that he then explored with his constant reinventions. If he wanted to be a soul singer, he could be one (Young Americans). If he wanted to be a serious, pioneering electronic artist, he was (the Berlin trilogy). If he wanted to be a global pop star, naturally he could (Let’s Dance). His refusal to be part of any tradition — even the ones he invented — made him the ultimate postmodern artist, ironically creating a pop-star template since followed by Madonna, Lady Gaga (her again) and more.
3 Crowdfunding
Never mind the pros and cons of Bowie Bonds, a financial scheme devised by the banker David Pullman and launched in 1997, which raised $55m for the artist and a decent interest rate for investors based on the future royalties of 25 existing Bowie albums. In the days before file-sharing took off, it wasn’t the pioneering of esoteric asset-backed securities that seemed so extraordinary for music fans, but the fact that Bowie was finding new ways to generate revenue from his back catalogue. The singer was no financial whizz, but in recognising and exploiting the power of his brand (he launched his own ISP in 1998 and an online bank in 2000), he was streets ahead of others. He foresaw the future of file-sharing (predicting in 2002 that “music itself will become like running water or electricity”) and the potential of the internet to form direct, valuable relationships with fans, which exploded with the spread of social media and the music-driven rise of crowdfunding.
4 Drums that don’t sound like drums
In the autumn of 1976 at the Château d’Hérouville, near Paris — with little thought for geographical accuracy or, indeed, what a drum kit should sound like — Bowie, his collaborator Brian Eno and the producer Tony Visconti cooked up what would come to be known as the Berlin sound, the extraordinary collision of pop, US funk and European electronica that defined his late-1970s output. Central to this was a drum kit played through an Eventide Harmonizer, with each delay slightly detuned to create the drummiest drums anyone had ever heard. This idea of sampling and aggressively filtering out the “top end” of a drum sound took off to such an extent that it has become a staple of hip-hop and techno, with its fancier variation — the filter sweep of the whole rhythm track — becoming the sine qua non of every DJ’s set. These days, drums that actually sound like drums are the exception.
5 The gig as performance event
When old people tell you how grim the 1970s were, they’re usually referring to the three-day week or the winter of discontent. But at the beginning of the decade, there was also the grimness of the average rock gig — two guitarists and a bassist dressed entirely in denim, standing in a line, heads down, staring at the floor, no eye contact with the crowd, only their long, unkempt, straggly hair visible as they “boogied” or possibly “choogled” endlessly on. Into this dull, dull world, Bowie brought theatre: characters and costumes (even costume changes!), make-up and mime moves, narrative arcs and dramatic set pieces. (“Oh my God! He’s giving his guitarist a blow job!”). Not everything worked — on the Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie regularly got stuck over the audience’s heads on a hydraulic cherry picker during Space Oddity — but for making artists realise that they had a duty to actually entertain the audience, we owe Bowie (yet another) debt of gratitude.
6 A dance masterpiece
He was the soundtrack of my life, the PM said last week, but Bowie songs also provided actual soundtracks for the dance pieces of Michael Clark. The great British punk choreographer created one of his most exhilarating works in 2009’s Come, Been and Gone. A hymn to the rock music of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Bowie, it has segments based on Aladdin Sane, Heroes and, in particular, the vibrant The Jean Genie. In the last of these, Clark’s scarlet-legged dancers are in a state of perpetual motion, and never has it been more obvious that Bowie’s driving, infectiously rhythmic music was born to be ballet.
7 Anti-publicity publicity
When Bowie returned after a decade’s hiatus with the political, satirical rock’n’roll album The Next Day, everyone wanted to know where he had been, what it all meant and why his comeback video for Where Are We Now? starred the singer’s face on a tiny doll. But he didn’t do interviews. The most he offered was a 42-word statement including words such as “trace”. His final album, Blackstar, which was released last week, came with even less, yet — even before his death — it was dissected and lauded almost as much as its predecessor. The lesson, in this saturated world of opinion and repeated quote, may be to say nothing at all, and thus allow fans, critics and experts to do your publicity for you.
8 Duncan Jones
Duncan Jones is Bowie’s son by his first wife, Angie. Once called Zowie, he was born in Bromley in 1971, later living with his father after his parents’ divorce — he was even Bowie’s best man when his dad married his second wife, Iman. So they’re close; and Bowie’s interests spill over into his director son’s work. First, in 2009, there was Moon — his great, subtle story of a starman (Sam Rockwell), waiting in the sky. Next was the classy sci-fi Source Code, which toyed with time, consciousness and love in the same innovative way as the best of his father’s back catalogue. This summer comes the hugely ambitious Labyrinth-on-a-budget Warcraft; with its already planned follow-up, Mute, ready to roll once that’s released. Where is Mute set? Berlin. A special talent with years of career ahead, he is — suitably, given his pedigree — arguably Britain’s most interesting director.
9 Lots of music, basically
Commenting on Bowie’s legacy three years ago, when The Next Day was released, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said: “He created something that otherwise could not have been.” That could make Bowie sound like a doorman, holding it ajar for others to pass through, when, let’s face it, he’d have been long gone, off in search of the next door. Six life-transforming albums: Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Heroes, Low, Scary Monsters. Countless musical and visual incarnations, liberties taken, never a hint, a whiff, of apology, of permission being sought. People heard that, saw that, and it spoke to them. “Oh no, love, you’re not alone,” he sang on Rock’n’Roll Suicide, and for the first time, they sensed he might be right. The door opened and they rushed through. Queen, Joy Division, a reborn Iggy Pop, Kate Bush, Siouxsie, John Lydon, Madonna, the Cure, Depeche Mode, Prince, Blur, Pulp, Pet Shop Boys, Radiohead, Suede, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, St Vincent. The list is endless. Come with me, he seemed to be saying. And they did.
10 The selfie requiem
The last person that the DavidBowieReal official Twitter account followed before the singer died was God (@TheTweetofGod). “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” goes the opening to Lazarus, his final single. The video for that song features Bowie on a hospital bed, and ends with him creeping into a closet. The video for Blackstar — the first song released from his final album of the same name — has a skeleton in a spacesuit. Goodbye, Major Tom? Another song on the album has him admitting: “I know something is very wrong.” On Dollar Days, he sings: “If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to/It’s nothing to me” — a reference to returning to his home country, or perhaps even the promise of heaven. There’s a rare Elvis Presley song called Black Star, which is all about death.
What extraordinary wit and poise this all adds up to, the most assured selfie requiem — similar to videoing your own eulogy, as is done in the cult 1990s thriller Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead. “His death was no different from his life — a work of art,” said his longtime friend Tony Visconti, and as surely as others have followed his music, a template for the most staggering final bow is set. The tricks possible with video, and the consequent speculation on social media, offer smart, intriguing ways to say goodbye — something the 69-year-old had been doing for more than a month, hiding in plain sight, probably grinning as he drifted further away.
‘I think I’m pretty straightforward’ Bowie, photographed in 1976 (Michael Ochs Archives)
Everyman written by a fantasist, a south London lad painted by a madman, a folk song sung by a deranged angel — David Bowie was all of these
In June 1987, in a spectacularly nondescript room in the Hilton Rotterdam, I met David Bowie. He was 40, but he still had the air of a cocky south London boy.
“Skeletally thin, tight black Levi’s, grey suede loafers, massive blond cockade and a mysterious bruise under his left eye” was how I described him in The Times. I didn’t, perhaps kindly, mention the appalling teeth, later fixed. There was a strong smell of cigarettes, which probably explained the brown-stained teeth. I remember very clearly the way he sat as he spoke, his legs spread, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He was matey but distant, as is the way with cocky south London boys.
By then, as I noted, he had already rung his most celebrated changes: Davy Jones, the not-quite star; Ziggy Stardust, the glam-rock alien; the angst-ridden androgynous superstar Aladdin Sane; and the haughty Mitteleuropean Thin White Duke. But he seemed when we met to have paused in the role of earnest rocker.
“I think I’m pretty straightforward,” he said. I knew he was playing with me, or perhaps he just believed what he said when he said it. “The ever-changing David Bowie and all that, it’s just an easy tag to put on me. I just like changing the staging every time I go out. I was quite poppy at the start, then I started getting quite arty. Now I think I’m somewhere between the two.”
In the days since his death, one theme has become clear — he was, indeed, the ever-changing David Bowie in two distinct senses. First, there were his own deliberate changes, which concluded with the change of which no one, at first, saw the significance: the musical Lazarus and the album Blackstar — “on the day of execution, on the day of execution”. In his last video, he writhes, blindfolded, on a hospital bed. This was, very consciously, a death foretold. “He wanted to manage his absence,” a friend of his said. And it was, in its way, consistent with the goals of the gifted generation of which he was part. “I hope I die before I get old,” the Who sang, and in 1977 Bowie said: “And who wants to drag their old, decaying frame around until they’re 90? Just to assert their ego? I don’t, certainly.”
Unlike his previous transformations, this last change had been the one we all must make. In death he became, courageously, one of us, or, as WH Auden wrote on the death of WB Yeats: “He became his admirers.”
Second, there were the changes wrought by others. The anguished reactions of his fans provided evidence of something I noticed in the Hilton Rotterdam. There was a neutrality, an openness, about him that sometimes became vulnerability. In spite of his colourful personas, Bowie provided a blank sheet on which people could write their own meanings and fantasies. Dozens of times last week, I heard surprisingly young fans say that Bowie taught them they could be whatever they wanted to be. And one of the most acute celebrity reactions came from Graham Coxon, of Blur. He said of a Bowie lyric: “It’s just something to do with the vagueness — you can interpret it to mean something personal.” (And the youth of the fans says something else. They absorbed the best of their parents’ music, the music of rock’s primal and golden age. This also means, sadly, that they, like the rest of us, must steel themselves for a long era of rock-god deaths.)
Bowie emerged, a decade late, from a very British pop- music revolution. The Stones and the Beatles had started up in the early 1960s, deriving their energy and content from America — 1950s rock and pop, blues, country — but adding the local ingredients of class and generational rebellion, softened, in the case of the Beatles, by cheeky lovableness. What all these new guitar bands said, and celebrated, was the fact that this generation was going to be utterly different from the last. This included being different from previous rockers. Tom Jones told me that the macho, hip-gyrating Elvis felt he had been superseded by these thin, pale stars from Liverpool and London. Jones, a kind of throwback, gave him hope.
Bowie came late to the party, only fully arriving in the 1970s. But he was, and was to remain, the quintessence, the climax, of British pop. Not only was he thinner and paler than any of them, he also went much further down the road they had built.
Implicit in the first wave had been a certain sexual ambivalence. Unlike the old hip-thrusters, these kids preened and strutted, they cared a little too much about their clothes and, within the male bonding of the guitar band, there was something a little, well, disconcerting. This almost became explicit with the near-dress that Mick Jagger wore at the Stones in the Park concert in 1969, but Bowie came right out and said it with a performance of Starman on Top of the Pops in 1972. Both in tight jumpsuits, Mick Ronson and Bowie pouted, flirted and cuddled their way through the song. This was, note, only five years after the legalisation of homosexual acts in the UK.
It all had to be shocking to work — and it was. Bowie was exuding a certain self-conscious decadence, a touch of prewar Berlin cabaret, a motif that was to stay with him for the rest of his career. (Look up the lyrics of that apparently harmless rocker The Jean Genie to see what I mean.) He was also toying with audience expectations. In this, he was fully self-conscious, calculating and a touch cold. He said to me in Rotterdam: “I’ve stopped writing with my audience [in mind]. I don’t think I ever wrote for them.” Like any decent artist, he knew, as Graham Greene put it, he had to have “a splinter of ice in the heart”.
There was an artiness about this, visual as well as musical. Bowie always had a superb eye, and he realised, as soon as he stopped being Davy Jones from Brixton, that he could use it. He may have been following developments in New York, where, in the 1960s, a visual artist, Andy Warhol, had created a rock band, the Velvet Underground, who abandoned the audience entirely in favour of a superbly musical, sneering nihilism. I once saw them in one of their incarnations and felt, exhilaratingly, that they did indeed despise us. The lead singer, Lou Reed, was to become Bowie’s American alter ego.
In fact, their relationship began with them almost writing the same song. Look up the lyrics of Bowie’s All the Young Dudes and Reed’s Oh! Sweet Nuthin’. Both are about the lonely, the wrecked or the dispossessed, and both defiantly celebrate deviance and social repudiation. It was the mood of the early 1970s, when the sunny mop-top world had given way to a politically apocalyptic darkness.
Bowie’s subsequent trajectory was, for all its changes, entirely consistent with his artistic insights at this moment. Like Tancredi in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, he saw that everything had to change in order to remain the same.
The themes that connected his chosen personas were distance and strangeness. Ziggy Stardust talked with aliens; Major Tom was an astronaut drifting wistfully to the stars; Aladdin Sane was, indeed, a lad insane; the Thin White Duke, the distillation of the style of the 1960s boys, was, according to your interpretation, “a mad aristocrat” or “an amoral zombie”; and finally, as an actor, he played Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, a full-blooded alien. This last was one of the few examples in which a rock star translated a persona, artistically intact, onto the big screen.
In the midst of the affection and tears, this strangeness and distance were often remarked upon last week. “He just radiated a general queerness/otherness even a child could read,” said the film-maker Desiree Akhavan. “He frightened me a bit, actually,” said Marianne Faithfull.
Even when he danced as a schoolboy, his movements were described as “mesmerising — like someone from another planet”. The pose was supported by his slender and unearthly good looks and his eye for subtly deviant fashion design (influencing the likes of Jean-Paul Gaultier) that seemed simultaneously to invite and repel. In this, as in everything, he knew what he was doing. “Listen to me — don’t listen to me/Talk to me — don’t talk to me/Dance with me — don’t dance with me, no” ran his song Fashion.
This was all catnip for intellectuals. Bowie’s start happened just at the moment when the movement known as postmodernism was being defined. The seriousness and monomania of late modernism were to be replaced by playfulness and a multiplicity of meanings and stories. Buildings were to become colourful and strange combinations of past and present styles, poems and novels broke away from the strictures of the moderns, paintings abandoned abstraction, and rock — well, rock became Bowie.
At a Bowie symposium held at the University of Limerick in 2012, the first paper was entitled There Is No Authoritative Voice. There Are Only Multiple Readings. That’s just how postmodernists say hello, but it is also, obviously, a pretty accurate summary of the distance, strangeness and changeability, the vagueness noted by Coxon, of David Bowie.
But is this the whole story? I don’t think so, because, standing back a little, there is a thread that joins, or perhaps a light that shines through, the life. In Rotterdam, I met a cocky south London boy, and the strange thing is that, through it all, whenever I saw him down the decades, I still saw that same boy. For all his exotica and extravagance, he defaulted to that street-smart kid. Look at some of his last photographs. He is wearing a sharp suit and hat, and he seems to be saying “Hello, mate” while trying to figure out your angle or put one over on you. In his end was his beginning.
He was, in fact, a familiar and ancient British type, very gabby, very beady, a bit tricky, but always entertaining. Almost daily, I meet Bowie plumbers and Bowie lawyers, Bowie newsagents, Bowie doctors and Bowie cabbies. They were always there, it’s just that he put them on stage in a skintight jumpsuit.
I think he knew this in his later years, as he seemed to know everything about himself. It is, for example, startling but, on closer examination, consistent that he pleaded with the Scots not to vote for independence; he believed in Britain. It is even more bizarrely consistent that when he got together with Jagger to do a video for Dancing in the Street, they played it like a pair of bum-bumping old queens doing music hall. You see, the flirt in the jumpsuit is not so exotic, he’s just another incarnation of the screaming English queen.
I will be honest: I was never his biggest fan. Lou Reed was a greater, more uncompromising artist, and there have been quite a few greater songwriters in the past decades. But Bowie’s death has been, for me, a Princess Diana moment. I cared little for her until I covered her death and realised that what I felt was nothing compared with what she meant, in dying, to the people. So it is with Bowie. Postmortem, he has expanded in my imagination into something more than this or that song. He has become, like Yeats, his admirers, and his admirers are the people.
He was, I realise, Everyman written by a fantasist, a south London lad painted by a madman, a folk song sung by a deranged angel. Or perhaps he was simply a working-class hero, which, as John Lennon so truly sang, “is something to be”.
I Met David Bowie
Bob Harris, Radio 2 DJI first met David Bowie in London in 1968. We were both part of the vibrant underground arts scene of the time — the counterculture.
David was a vocalist and mime artist, I was a young writer and aspiring DJ. I first saw him perform with the short-lived mixed-mediagroup Feathers at Middle Earth, an all-night psychedelic music club in Covent Garden. Bathed in the colours of the liquid light shows, he was mixing monologue, mime and music, and was totally magnetic.
Marc Bolan was a good friend of mine at the time, and Marc, David and I began to hang out together with the producer Tony Visconti at Trident Studios, in Soho, where Marc was doing most of his recordings. David was lovely. He had a very “English” vibe about him, and was charming, polite, charismatic and intensely creative.
I invited him to play at one of my first DJ gigs, a Saturday-night university disco in east London. He brought with him a cassette containing the backing track for a new single he was working on called Space Oddity, which he slotted into a tiny portable speaker as he began his set. I was excited, but the mood soon changed. The students were not happy to have their dancing interrupted by this kooky acoustic alien. They booed him off the stage. I couldn’t believe it. I was incensed as I strode red-faced to the microphone and began to rant at the crowd: “This is David Bowie. Remember the name. He is going to be a massive star.”
Space Oddity was released as a single four months later.
Janice Long, broadcaster
I had a brief encounter with Ziggy back in 1972. I stood next to him in a lift in a Liverpool hotel. I was already a huge fan, and wrote his name all over my schoolbooks. I was lost for words. He was off to perform at the Stadium.
In the 1990s, the Cure’s Robert Smith and I were part of a crew doing everything we could to get a licence for a new radio station in London, XFM. Robert wanted to interview Bowie, but asked if I would be there, too. Robert and I met up in Fitzrovia and waited for David to turn up. We were both nervous fans with heads full of questions. David arrived grinning from ear to ear and carrying his own cafetiere and coffee. He talked and talked, and even when the interview was over, he stayed and chatted. He showed me his tattoos and I showed him mine. Whenever I saw him after that, he always took time to talk to me and, on one occasion, my son, Fred.
He was an absolute genius and, at the same time, very down to earth.
Paul McCartney
Very sad news to wake up to on this raining morning. David was a great star and I treasure the moments we had together. His music played a strong part in British musical history and I’m proud to think of the huge influence he has had on people all around the world.
Terry O’Neill, photographer
I first got rung up by David Bowie’s manager to take photos of Bowie with Marianne Faithfull — the manager told me Bowie was an unusual type of guy. I could tell that right away. It was his incredible visual style that caught my photographer’s eye. I knew I’d be in for one hell of a ride.
That was in 1973. By 1975, I had worked with David several times, including taking the now iconic leaping-dog image used to promote Diamond Dogs. We both happened to be in LA at the same time when I got a call from an old friend, Elizabeth Taylor. I had known Liz for about 10 years by then. She knew I had worked with Bowie and asked if I was able to arrange a meeting. She was starting work on a new film that was going to be shot in Russia, with George Cukor directing, and thought David might be right for one of the parts in it. I rang David, told him Elizabeth Taylor wanted to have lunch with him, and he agreed to a meeting.
It was scheduled for 2pm on a Sunday, at Cukor’s home in Beverly Hills. The time came. Then 3pm, 4pm, 5pm. Still no Bowie. I was getting pretty upset, but Liz didn’t seem to mind at all. After all, she was notorious herself for being late. At about 6pm, up came David with his PA, the former Warhol superstar Cherry Vanilla. We had about 10 minutes of light left. Liz took over the session and orchestrated every shot.
I think that’s why David is laughing in some of the photos: here he was, with the biggest and most glamorous star in Hollywood. From when he started in small clubs in London to being there with Elizabeth Taylor was less than, what, seven, eight years – it was astonishing.
Derek Boshier, the British artist whose work Bowie collected, first met the singer in 1979, when he co-designed the sleeve for Lodger. He remained in touch with Bowie to the end
The generosity in him was amazing. Unless people knew him, they might not realise that. When I was in Paris for one of my first shows there, my French dealer said: “You’ve had some messages. I keep getting calls from someone called David Blowgee. He’s asking if he can come to the show and maybe meet up with you beforehand. And then he called again and asked if he could bring his wife. I’m getting quite annoyed with him.”
In the end, the dealer invited him to a party at his house. The man’s two young daughters were there, and, of course, they’d told all their friends: “David Bowie’s coming for dinner.” And their friends said things like, “Yeah? Well, we’ve got f****** de Gaulle over for breakfast tomorrow.” I told David the story when he arrived, and he said: “Bring the girls over.” He had all these photographs taken with his arms around them, which they took into school the next morning.
He liked to go to art school graduates’ final shows, and at one he went to in London, he came across this young photographer’s work and thought: “These are interesting.” He took down his contact details. About a week later, David’s PR said: “We’ve had an email from Italian Vogue — they want to do an article on you.” And David said: “OK. Tell them I’ll do it, but they have to use that photographer.” So this guy’s first job after leaving college is to photograph David Bowie for Italian Vogue.
Candice Temple, Sunday Times picture editor
It was a sunny summer day in Chelsea in 1995. I took a few deep breaths before ringing the bell. This was to be my first photographic shoot with a celebrity. And not just any celebrity.
Bowie had agreed to be photographed because, for his latest creative endeavour, he had entered the world of interior design. In collaboration with Laura Ashley, he had produced two wallpapers, one of them featuring a crouching minotaur. He later reportedly observed that this had been “a good working relationship — apart from the castration, that is. They erased the minotaur’s genitals.”
I was ushered into the chic townhouse, then Bowie entered the living room. He was immediately friendly, and my nerves abated. I introduced him to the snapper I had selected, the society photographer Fergus Greer. Bowie expressed an interest in German expressionist art of the 20th century. This threw me, as it is a subject at which I would still score nul points, but, happily, Fergus and Bowie ended up chatting away on this subject for much of the three-hour shoot. Bowie talked, too, about his interest in spirituality, his belief in reincarnation and how inspiring it was to be married to someone from a different culture — how much he had learnt from his wife, Iman. I had a bit of a struggle to get him to pose in different positions and alter his facial expressions.
When I left, Bowie kissed me on both cheeks. With all sincerity, I said: “Lovely to meet you.” Bowie looked right into my eyes and said, as if he meant it: “Lovely to meet you too.”
Johnnie Walker, Radio 2 presenter
I was determined that my then girlfriend (now wife), Tiggy, would meet her absolute hero after a Radio 2 concert at the Maida Vale Studios in 2002. We followed the BBC management posse David had agreed to meet. This did not include us. So I positioned myself right outside the office where the meeting was taking place. David had to walk into me as he left the room. Nervously, I introduced myself. “Johnnie Walker!” he exclaimed. “We’ve never met.” I asked if I might introduce him to Tiggy. In 1972, when she was barely into her teens, her life had changed completely after seeing him perform Starman on Top of the Pops. She quivered: “I don’t know what to say.” David replied, as if he too was in awe: “Nor do I.” In fact, they talked for several minutes about his set list. He sensed how hugely important he was in her life. He made her feel she was the only person in his world that mattered. Tiggy describes it as a spiritual experience, one of the greatest moments of her life.
10 reasons to raise a glass to Bowie
From the drummiest drums to event gigs and a cool film-maker son, via Lady Gaga and Kanye West: what the Starman left behind
Make-up, out-there outfits and a shifting sexuality didn’t define early Bowie — they were simply props to promote his alien-like oddness. It was in celebrating being different, showing that standing out was better than blending in and providing an enviable focus for everyone who felt they didn’t fit that Bowie bonded with so many. To outsiders everywhere, Ziggy Stardust was a lifeline. When a catsuit-clad Bowie wrapped an arm around Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops in 1972, he encouraged kids to ignore what their parents said about being gay. When he claimed to be bisexual, he made an alien concept seem exciting. He spoke as much to women as to men, and his androgyny appealed to the undecided. By the 1980s, it was easy to spot those who had been touched by Bowie — Boy George, Annie Lennox and Ian Curtis among them. But it was Lady Gaga, decades later, who most ruthlessly mined Bowie’s appeal to outsiders to send a career supernova.
2 Making postmodernism cool and fun
Before Bowie, postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and meta-narratives were the titles of lectures to be avoided at university. But Bowie brought formerly dull, esoteric philosophical ideas such as “There are no truths, only interpretations” thrillingly to life when he became a rock star simply by saying he was one. In creating and living out the role of Ziggy Stardust, he overturned all ideas of musical authenticity, opening up a new world of subjectivity and relativism that he then explored with his constant reinventions. If he wanted to be a soul singer, he could be one (Young Americans). If he wanted to be a serious, pioneering electronic artist, he was (the Berlin trilogy). If he wanted to be a global pop star, naturally he could (Let’s Dance). His refusal to be part of any tradition — even the ones he invented — made him the ultimate postmodern artist, ironically creating a pop-star template since followed by Madonna, Lady Gaga (her again) and more.
3 Crowdfunding
Never mind the pros and cons of Bowie Bonds, a financial scheme devised by the banker David Pullman and launched in 1997, which raised $55m for the artist and a decent interest rate for investors based on the future royalties of 25 existing Bowie albums. In the days before file-sharing took off, it wasn’t the pioneering of esoteric asset-backed securities that seemed so extraordinary for music fans, but the fact that Bowie was finding new ways to generate revenue from his back catalogue. The singer was no financial whizz, but in recognising and exploiting the power of his brand (he launched his own ISP in 1998 and an online bank in 2000), he was streets ahead of others. He foresaw the future of file-sharing (predicting in 2002 that “music itself will become like running water or electricity”) and the potential of the internet to form direct, valuable relationships with fans, which exploded with the spread of social media and the music-driven rise of crowdfunding.
4 Drums that don’t sound like drums
In the autumn of 1976 at the Château d’Hérouville, near Paris — with little thought for geographical accuracy or, indeed, what a drum kit should sound like — Bowie, his collaborator Brian Eno and the producer Tony Visconti cooked up what would come to be known as the Berlin sound, the extraordinary collision of pop, US funk and European electronica that defined his late-1970s output. Central to this was a drum kit played through an Eventide Harmonizer, with each delay slightly detuned to create the drummiest drums anyone had ever heard. This idea of sampling and aggressively filtering out the “top end” of a drum sound took off to such an extent that it has become a staple of hip-hop and techno, with its fancier variation — the filter sweep of the whole rhythm track — becoming the sine qua non of every DJ’s set. These days, drums that actually sound like drums are the exception.
5 The gig as performance event
When old people tell you how grim the 1970s were, they’re usually referring to the three-day week or the winter of discontent. But at the beginning of the decade, there was also the grimness of the average rock gig — two guitarists and a bassist dressed entirely in denim, standing in a line, heads down, staring at the floor, no eye contact with the crowd, only their long, unkempt, straggly hair visible as they “boogied” or possibly “choogled” endlessly on. Into this dull, dull world, Bowie brought theatre: characters and costumes (even costume changes!), make-up and mime moves, narrative arcs and dramatic set pieces. (“Oh my God! He’s giving his guitarist a blow job!”). Not everything worked — on the Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie regularly got stuck over the audience’s heads on a hydraulic cherry picker during Space Oddity — but for making artists realise that they had a duty to actually entertain the audience, we owe Bowie (yet another) debt of gratitude.
6 A dance masterpiece
He was the soundtrack of my life, the PM said last week, but Bowie songs also provided actual soundtracks for the dance pieces of Michael Clark. The great British punk choreographer created one of his most exhilarating works in 2009’s Come, Been and Gone. A hymn to the rock music of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Bowie, it has segments based on Aladdin Sane, Heroes and, in particular, the vibrant The Jean Genie. In the last of these, Clark’s scarlet-legged dancers are in a state of perpetual motion, and never has it been more obvious that Bowie’s driving, infectiously rhythmic music was born to be ballet.
7 Anti-publicity publicity
When Bowie returned after a decade’s hiatus with the political, satirical rock’n’roll album The Next Day, everyone wanted to know where he had been, what it all meant and why his comeback video for Where Are We Now? starred the singer’s face on a tiny doll. But he didn’t do interviews. The most he offered was a 42-word statement including words such as “trace”. His final album, Blackstar, which was released last week, came with even less, yet — even before his death — it was dissected and lauded almost as much as its predecessor. The lesson, in this saturated world of opinion and repeated quote, may be to say nothing at all, and thus allow fans, critics and experts to do your publicity for you.
8 Duncan Jones
Duncan Jones is Bowie’s son by his first wife, Angie. Once called Zowie, he was born in Bromley in 1971, later living with his father after his parents’ divorce — he was even Bowie’s best man when his dad married his second wife, Iman. So they’re close; and Bowie’s interests spill over into his director son’s work. First, in 2009, there was Moon — his great, subtle story of a starman (Sam Rockwell), waiting in the sky. Next was the classy sci-fi Source Code, which toyed with time, consciousness and love in the same innovative way as the best of his father’s back catalogue. This summer comes the hugely ambitious Labyrinth-on-a-budget Warcraft; with its already planned follow-up, Mute, ready to roll once that’s released. Where is Mute set? Berlin. A special talent with years of career ahead, he is — suitably, given his pedigree — arguably Britain’s most interesting director.
9 Lots of music, basically
Commenting on Bowie’s legacy three years ago, when The Next Day was released, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said: “He created something that otherwise could not have been.” That could make Bowie sound like a doorman, holding it ajar for others to pass through, when, let’s face it, he’d have been long gone, off in search of the next door. Six life-transforming albums: Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Heroes, Low, Scary Monsters. Countless musical and visual incarnations, liberties taken, never a hint, a whiff, of apology, of permission being sought. People heard that, saw that, and it spoke to them. “Oh no, love, you’re not alone,” he sang on Rock’n’Roll Suicide, and for the first time, they sensed he might be right. The door opened and they rushed through. Queen, Joy Division, a reborn Iggy Pop, Kate Bush, Siouxsie, John Lydon, Madonna, the Cure, Depeche Mode, Prince, Blur, Pulp, Pet Shop Boys, Radiohead, Suede, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, St Vincent. The list is endless. Come with me, he seemed to be saying. And they did.
10 The selfie requiem
The last person that the DavidBowieReal official Twitter account followed before the singer died was God (@TheTweetofGod). “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” goes the opening to Lazarus, his final single. The video for that song features Bowie on a hospital bed, and ends with him creeping into a closet. The video for Blackstar — the first song released from his final album of the same name — has a skeleton in a spacesuit. Goodbye, Major Tom? Another song on the album has him admitting: “I know something is very wrong.” On Dollar Days, he sings: “If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to/It’s nothing to me” — a reference to returning to his home country, or perhaps even the promise of heaven. There’s a rare Elvis Presley song called Black Star, which is all about death.
What extraordinary wit and poise this all adds up to, the most assured selfie requiem — similar to videoing your own eulogy, as is done in the cult 1990s thriller Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead. “His death was no different from his life — a work of art,” said his longtime friend Tony Visconti, and as surely as others have followed his music, a template for the most staggering final bow is set. The tricks possible with video, and the consequent speculation on social media, offer smart, intriguing ways to say goodbye — something the 69-year-old had been doing for more than a month, hiding in plain sight, probably grinning as he drifted further away.
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