Anna Chen's Blog - Madam Miaow Says ...
Charles Shaar Murray on David Bowie's 60th birthday
EXCLUSIVE
David Bowie at Sixty
by Charles Shaar Murray
8th January 2007
"Pop stars are capable of growing old," a fresh-faced David Bowie announced in 1979, when he was barely past the threshhold of his thirties. "Mick Jagger at 50 will be marvellous -- a battered old roue -- I can just see him. An ageing rock star doesn't have to opt out of life. When I'm 50, I'll prove it."
Which he did. And when he's 60? Well, time takes a cigarette and puts it in your mouth, though Bowie has long withdrawn his once-substantial contribution to the profits of the makers of Marlboro and Gauloise. David Bowie -- also known as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and The Thin White Duke or, if you prefer, Bromley Dave and The Dame -- hits the six-oh on January 8, a birthdate he shares with Elvis Presley, a mere dozen years Bowie's senior. This notable milestone on life's highway finds him in enviable shape: universally admired, stupefyingly rich and married to one of the world's great beauties, the Somalian model Iman. He has not only been at the forefront of his chosen profession for three and a half decades, but he has effectively become a one-man genre who has comprehensively redefined its capabilities, rewritten its rulebook and reinvented its sexuality. "Come on and show me, say the bells of old Bowie,"The Clash once sang, and 'old Bowie' has been showing successive generations of pop stars how to do it ever since he announced that he was bisexual (his husband-and-father status notwithstanding) and then appeared on Top Of The Pops on 1972, a vision of unearthly beauty in skintight catsuit and flame-red spike-top hair, to fling his arm around his guitarist's shoulders, and announce that a starman was waiting in the sky.
The father of reinvention was born in Brixton under the unassuming name of David Jones, one of a generation of suburban British rockers born in the Forties and coming of pop-cultural age in the Fifties. Though he made his first major impact in the Seventies, the man who became David Bowie was less a Seventies person than a Sixties person who took a very long time to make it. He had his first hit record in 1969 with the iconic Space Oddity and failed to follow it up, but he had spent most of the decade cutting a succession of unsuccessful records with a variety of record companies, trying on style after style and finding that none of them fitted. He started out as a post-Stones white blueser before chancing his arm as a post-Who moddy-rocker, a post-Beatles Swinging London art-popper, a satin-suited MOR pop singer and a curly-haired post-Dylan folk-rocker. Along the way, he absorbed mime, dance and Buddhism, "pretend[ed] to understand Nietzche", tried his hand at bit-part acting and attempted to meld the standard rock influences of the time with a love for the pre-rock Anglicisms of Anthony Newley and George Formby. One moment he was performing mainstream pop songs at Continental pop festivals, the next he was using a spot on a rock tour as an opportunity to perform a mime protesting against the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
Bob Dylan was once asked at a press conference whether he considered himself a folk singer, and replied that he preferred to think of himself as a song-and-dance man. If Bowie had given the same reply, it wouldn't have been a joke.
It says much for Bowie's persistence and determination that he kept going through years of failure, and even more for his charm and charisma that major record companies of the time like EMI, Pye and Decca were prepared to keep staking him to yet another roll of the dice. His first great song, Space Oddity was an epic of alienation centred around the doomed astronaut Major Tom. With its cinerama production and massive orchestral arrangement, it lucked into national exposure when it was used as a theme for TV coverage of the moon landing. For the first time, Bowie had achieved a major success, but the accompanying album demonstrated that he didn't really know what to do with it. Soon, he was back on his home turf in Beckenham, running Arts Lab nights at a local pub venue.
If Space Oddity had been the curtain-raising pre-credits sequence, then the first sequence of the body of work for which Bowie is honoured today was The Man Who Sold The World. A dark, murky heavy-metal nightmarescape of madness, alienation and haunted childhood visions produced by his friend Tony Visconti and prominently featuring guitarist Mick Ronson, its cover depicted a soft-focus image of Bowie in a flowing dress and tresses. This David Bowie was a very different creature from the butterfly-minded jack-of-all-trades who'd waited in the wings while new arrivals like Pink Floyd and old friends like Marc Bolan had streaked past him.
What Bowie had learned was that the eclecticism of his tastes and interests, his inability to choose a defining idiom and work within it, his penchant for dilettantism and the mutability of his personality were not drawbacks but assets. From then on they would become his primary artistic tools. Bowie had style, but he did not have 'a style'. Rather: he had an approach, a sensibility, a gift both for process and the lack of process. Musical styles and idioms could be slipped on and off like so many jackets. Songs, and groups of songs, could be approached as playlets, and performed in character. Bowie didn't so much become a star as play one. The final pieces of the jigsaw which eventually became the breakthrough album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars arrived when he visited Andy Warhol's New York studio The Factory and observed how Warhol was turning street people into his 'superstars'.
Bowie thus developed two constructs, one overlaid onto the other. The first was the character of Ziggy, the doomed rock messiah from space whose story he told on the album and enacted on stage. The second was the character of 'David Bowie': an elegant, mysterious figure, irresistable in his otherness, revelling in his contradictions and almost wholly unlike the bit-player who'd roamed the Swinging London of the Sixties. The rock of the previous era had been built on the notion of 'authenticity': if not the African-American authenticity of the Real Blues And Soul Guys, then at least the emotional authenticity of Bowie's fellow ex-suburbanites who'd co-opted the voices of the Real Guys as the key to unlocking their own inner worlds. 'Mick Jagger' was a construct, after all: why couldn't Bowie not only build a constructed persona. but revel in the achievement of that construction? And, even beyond that, offer every kid who saw him the option of building constructs of their own, transcending the limitations of their personalities and circumstances and becoming whatever they wanted to be?
And he did, and they did, and they loved him for it. He was both lover and liberator. Despite the brief flowering of 'T. Rexstasy', Marc Bolan was soon left behind in Bowie's slipstream: his only true peers Bryan Ferry's Roxy Music, a band even more constructed than Bowie and -- musically at least -- rather more adventurous. Under the Bowie/Roxy influence, kids were soon "dressing in thoughts from the skies", dyeing their hair colours never found in nature and dressing like party animals from planets Captain Kirk would never have allowed the crew oof the Enterprise to visit.
And Bowie was off and running. Soon Ziggy mutated into Aladdin Sane, and by the summer of 1973 Bowie had ceremonially struck the tents of that particular circus with a 'farewell gig,' after which he dispersed the band and set off on a new five-year mission. Diamond Dogs was a glitter apocalypse which emerged from the ashes of a failed attempt to adapt George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four into a musical. Young Americans was an idiosyncratic white-soul album recorded in Philadelphia. Station To Station was a head-on collision between Eurocentric balladeering, heavy funk and guitar-driven hard rock. Low was a minimalist padded cell of an album which melded funk and rock with the new synthesised electronica emerging from Germany and brought Roxy Music's exiled sonic wizard Brian Eno into Bowie's orbit alongside producer Tony Visconti. Along the way, Bowie had starred in Nicolas Roeg's cult SF classic The Man Who Fell To Earth: his charatcerisation of doomed alien protagoinist Thomas Jerome Newton both feeding, and feeding on, the perceived Bowie persona. He also acquired a world-class cocaine habit which tool his weight down to 98lb, convinced him that a coterie of evil sorcerers were trying to kill him, and escalated his interest in the philosophies of Nietszche into publicly fantasising about becoming Britain's first fascist Prime Minister.
His re-entry into known human space was marked by the release of 'Heroes', his second collaboration with the team of Visconti and Eno. Leading off with its epic title track, it coincided with the mass-market surfacing of punk -- 'There's new wave, there's old wave and there's David Bowie,' trumpeted the ad copy -- and made much of punk's acknowledgement of Bowie as an on old fart who wasn't boring. How could he be, when half the pop kids in London had spiky dyed hair and catchy noms de punk? What was Johnny Rotten but the bastard son of Ziggy Stardust? And he straddled the Seventies and Eighties with one of his all-time high points, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), fuelled by the smash hit Ashes To Ashes, which even referred back to Space Oddity by reintroducing Major Tom. The cover artwork and the imagery of the Ashes video paid tribute to the outre stylings of the New Romantics, the successors to punk who'd coalesced around Bowie theme nights in West End clubs. Bowie fed off them just as they'd fed off him.
It was a small but significant irony that the Eighties, the decade whose pop seemed most sedulously constructed in his image -- or, more accurately, in his various images -- was both the one in which he scored his biggest hit album, Let's Dance, and the one in which he seemed most thoroughly adrift. Even leaving aside blatant Bowie wannabes like Gary Numan, The Human League's Philip Oakey and the whole Duran/Spandau contingent, two of the decade's biggest stars, Prince and Madonna, had memorised key pages from the Bowie how-to manual: a teasing emphasis on transgressive sexuality and a frenetic turnover of musical and sartorial styles. In the meantime, Bowie himself adopted a new and more conservative persona. Produced by Chic honcho Nile Rodgers, Let's Dance started out as a Bowiesque take on classic brassy R&B and became a dancefloor magnet which sold 4m copies: easily Bowie's biggest hit to date. The former Nietzchean aristo rentboy from space now reappeared as a sort of alternative Prince Charles: a dashing English gentleman about the arts, clad in immaculate suits beautifully draped from his coathanger shoulders. The effect was only slightly spoiled by the fact that he appeared to be wearing a large lemon meringue on his head.
The ultimate charismatic outsider was now a quintessential corporate rocker. For the first time since Ziggy had first reared his lovely head, Bowie now seemed to have lost the plot. His next couple of albums, Tonight and Never Let Me Down, were career nadirs, the latter accompanied by a grotesquely overblown stadium trek - the Glass Spider Tour - which attracted overwhelming derision. Bowie decompressed by sinking into am avant-blues hard rock band, Tin Machine, which fared little better.
The past fiteen years have been much kinder to Bowie. Since his reunion with Nile Rodgers on his 'wedding album' Black Tie White Noise, his albums continue to be well-received, and his tours are staggeringly successful. Ever since he extricated himself from the calamitous financial quicksand of the Ziggy era -- his then manager took 50%, and all the expenses came out of Bowie's half -- he has become one of rock's slickest businessmen: his flotation of 'Bowie bonds', redeemable against his royalties was a capitalist masterstroke, as was the launching of BowieBanc. He has also stayed ahead of the technological wave as a pioneer of digital pop marketing, with his own internet service provider, thereby enabling true fans to pay bills with a Bowie credit card and send emails with a bowie.net address.
Back in 1972, Bowie told an interviewer, "We have created a new kind of person ... a child who will be so exposed to the media that he will be lost to his parents by the time he is 12."Like JG Ballard and William Gibson, Bowie has proved that he was no mere space fantasist, but a genuine futurist thinker who is as plugged into the zeitgeist now as he was then.
Nowadays, Bowie is a 'heritage' artist -- thumbnail definition: someone, like The Rolling Stones, whose next tour will sell out almost effortlessly and instantly even if their next album moves but sluggishly. Once a feverish innovator who couldn't wait to discard dead skins and old masks, he can now recline, safe and secure, on the cushion of one of the greatest back-catalogues in pop: who else this side of Paul McCartney or the Stones has more genuinely great self-penned songs to choose from whenever it's time to write a set-list? So much of the pop and rock made during the last 35 years carries Bowie's thumbprint that he is a charter member of a small but select group who shortlist for the title of Most Influential Living Musician, alongside Dylan, McCartney, Stevie Wonder and -- if we throw heavy rock into the mix -- Jimmy Page. Who else's influence was apparent in both punk and soul, on Madonna and Jarvis Cocker; on Oasis and Phillip Glass alike? Who else has duetted with Bing Crosby and dabbled in drum-and-bass, recorded with both Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Pet Shop Boys, produced both Lou Reed and Lulu?
He still does the odd screen-acting turn, contributing cameos as Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's the Last Temptation Of Christ and Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's the Prestige. A lifelong hobby artist, he still knocks out the odd painting -- invited to contribute to an exhibition of nudes, he produced a black canvas with the word 'nipples' raised in Braille. His appearance on Extras, singing the faux-extemporised, "Chubby little loser. National joke" to Ricky Gervais is already legendary. And even a recent onstage heart attack did little more than slow him down a bit.
If Bowie has stood for anything during his long and bizarre career, it is as a testament to the power of the imagination. More than a quarter of a century ago, Jon Savage wrote, "David Bowie has entered British life as the model for every kid who says, 'I wish I was ...'. He's the creation of that need, and as long as it remains, so will he. Will it be for ever?"
Forever is, as they say, a long time. Let's just say that, as long as successive generations of pop stars continue to walk in Bowie's footprints, it will.
Charles Shaar Murray
6th January 2007
For more articles by Charles Shaar Murray, click on Rock's Back Pages
Back to News pg5 archiveArticle (c) Charles Shaar Murray 2007