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The Age of Bowie INTRODUCTION: STRANGE FASCINATION
He is backing into a dark forbidding wardrobe and closing the door on himself at the end of the video to ‘Lazarus’, a tranquil story of life and death, told in reverse . . . The idea had been suggested to him by someone on the shoot. At first, he is not sure whether it is something he wants to do. Then he smiles and decides, yes. I’ll do that. ‘That will keep them guessing,’ he says, always a kidder. It will look like a final exit. The very end of a true story. Of the journey of a man whose alternate selves took him on a fantastic adventure through space, time and sexuality. Everybody knows him now, and he is going somewhere else.
He hides himself . . . Inside the cupboard, there’s a tomblike darkness. There is nothing much to do. He pulls off his wig with a sigh of relief, pleased to be momentarily relinquishing the burden of playing someone else. His mind starts to race as he stands there, in the dark, wondering about what in fact people might think, about the agitated way he moves backwards, the way his eyes are obscured in the video, and how he only sort of breathes. It feels like he’s fallen out of history. While I’m here waiting, he thinks, it’s a good job that there is a lot to think about. A lot to remember, if I haven’t forgotten. A lot of things that I’ve done. A lot of books I’ve read. A lot of places I’ve visited. The people I’ve known. The strangeness of the world. It makes my brain whirl. I could think about my life for a thousand years.
He patiently stands in the quiet dark and shuts his eyes. He imagines he is alone on a stage, and about to sing a song to an audience in front of him, anticipating his next move, his every move, reading so much into every gesture and word, into every thought, because some believe they can hear him think. He thinks about what he will sing, about what the opening line will be . . . he takes a deep breath . . . he opens his eyes and it seems to be darker inside than when he first climbed in . . . he hears a voice . . .
· · ·
It is 1970, I am thirteen, and at some point during the year I hear the name David Bowie spoken for the very first time. I come to realise that someone called David Bowie is alive. I knew nothing about him, but I began to notice that there was someone on the planet with that name. The name seemed very ordinary, but something about it meant it cut right through to where I was, and cut deep. The surname made an everyday David seem much sharper. Somehow you caught sight of your own reflection in the name, and something else, which you couldn’t yet make out.
When I heard him sing for the first time, not long after I had heard someone say his name – ‘here’s “The Supermen” by David Bowie, when all the world was very young’ – he had a voice that felt made up of unusual things, one that pierced straight to the heart of me. It was something that my brain was clearly missing. The sound of him put me on high alert, and I thought here was definitely someone I should get to know. I didn’t know much about anything at the time, and was at the very early stages of working out who I was and what on earth I was going to do with myself, but he really caught my attention.
I found him, and at the same time, he found me; he was, I was soon to understand as I discovered more about him, on an almost desperate, conquistadorial mission to find as many listeners and fans as he could, to fill in the blanks inside him he felt were blotting out his soul, which meant he needed to be found. To find some fans, and at the beginning just a few would be fine, he was devising new sorts of ways he could be found and once found never ignored.
During the 1999 commencement address he delivered at Berklee College of Music in Boston after receiving an honorary doctorate, he would say that as a musician he had been ‘on a crusade to change the kind of information that rock music contained’. He confided that growing up he adored John Coltrane, Harry Partch, Eric Dolphy, the Velvet Underground, John Cage and Sonny Stitt. ‘Unfortunately, I also loved Anthony Newley, Florence Foster Jenkins, Johnnie Ray, Julie London, Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Edith Piaf and Shirley Bassey,’ he went on, referring to that part of him that would consistently disrupt his enduring, probing curiosity for the obscure and transitional.
Music, he discovered, was a great game of ‘what if’. ‘What happens if you combined Brecht/Weill musical drama with rhythm and blues? What happens if you transplant the French chanson with the Philly sound? Will Little Richard lie comfortably with Schoenberg? Can you put haggis and snails on the same plate? Well, no, but some of these ideas worked out very well.’
As a boy without then knowing who any of these people were – except Shirley Bassey, mostly for singing ‘Goldfinger’, contributing appreciable glamour to the provisional myth of James Bond – what first pulled me in was his potentially deranged blend of something warped and deeply thoughtful with a definite, kinky show-business flourish. The mixing and merging of the strange with the familiar, mortal grossness with the airy spirit, sounded like nothing else I’d heard – and ultimately ever would hear – because there were few others so drawn to both the offbeat and the ostentatious. It’s very rare for a performer to cross so easily from the experimental to the opulent and the embellished, infatuated with artifice and excess but possessing an inquisitive, militant spirit. Both ends of the spectrum, the freely chaotic or the defiantly melodic, the so-called good or bad taste, could make the mind spin through very interesting changes and make constant new discoveries.
To find Bowie as a teenager, and be found by him, was incredible, and, perhaps, inevitable. At that point, those of us becoming teenagers in the early 1970s needed something of our own, having been too young to catch the 1960s. We’d missed the Beatles, we’d missed the Stones – as something that belonged and spoke directly to us. Bowie wasn’t, though, that easy to find in the early 1970s, when music was not everywhere, all the time, instantly available with a swipe or a jab, where every day was yet to be packed with endlessly available event, product and entertainment.
Nothing was then easy to find when you were in your early teenage years hemmed in by parents, school and a solid set of very fixed expectations. There were few places to find the new, and what places there were tended to be hard to find, out of sight, needing some form of permission or disobedience to access. Difference was hidden; you had to work hard to get there.
I had heard Bowie in the background the year before I started to develop an insatiable interest in pop music, thinking of his hit song ‘Space Oddity’, but that had been one of those songs that just appeared, closely harnessed to the climax of the 1960s space race, and then disappeared, as though it wasn’t actually by anyone. It was conceived by committee especially for the occasion. Men landed on the moon, and occasionally as the astonishing footage was shown, you could hear the song, as though the man on the moon and the singer of the song was called Major Tom.
I first heard his name said across the airwaves on self-proclaimed ‘wonderful’ BBC Radio 1. This was the central place where you came across pop music at the time; one of the only places, especially when you were too young to go out to clubs and concerts. The one place to actually see pop was the weekly half-hour Top of the Pops, a family show where smuggled into its wholesome midst were stunning signs and sightings of the mysterious underground you heard tantalising rumours about at school, whispered through names of groups and seen on album sleeves that had a touch of witchcraft about them. Top of the Pops would feature dramatically deranged-looking rock musicians using lively, immediate pop songs to sing about lust, paranoia, fear, anger, rebellion, mystery, because if it was in the charts, it would be broadcast. That was the rule.
It didn’t matter how long the hair of the male lead singer, how outlandish and dubious the clothes, how obviously stoned-seeming the drummer, how subversive the lyrics, being a hit gave it a free pass directly into the home of millions of viewers courtesy of a relatively generous BBC policy.
Even the Who, demanding that you all f-f-f-fade away, a classic, unholy four-letter word teetering on the lippy tip of flailing singer Roger Daltrey’s tongue, had made it through onto what was essentially a souped-up variety show. A programme generally watched after a shared teatime in the same room by parents and their children, silently appraising a random parade of performances that meant very different things to the different generations in the empty spaces of their mind waiting to be filled, or emptied further.
These occasional insubordinate cameos by groups wearing the clothes and expressions of revolutionary spirits gave the whole procedure the edge of something that challenged the apparently secure nature of the relationship between child and adult, between teenager and the everlasting normal society they were expected to enter without a second thought. There was a general sense as these occasional surreal bombs exploded in the middle of ordinary British houses on ordinary British streets that it wasn’t really happening, and even if it was, it would all soon be over and normal service would be resumed.
Bowie, though, in 1970 was more in that distantly rumbling underground, his travels then limited to the smaller, dirtier venues and mundane local halls and clubs across the land, separated from any possible appearance on Top of the Pops. He was out there somewhere, but I could never find him. I would discover that once in the late 1960s after a late-night folk club performance in Stockport where I lived he missed the last train and had to sleep on the platform overnight. This meant we were to an extent sleeping together, under the same clouds, or sleeping only separated by a couple of miles. It took me forty years to learn that. At the time he might as well have been orbiting Saturn for all I knew.
A young, naive teenager didn’t yet possess the understanding of how to break into that impenetrable-seeming underground. What clothes were necessary, how long should your hair be, did you need special words, a knowledge of arcane symbols? Pop music cliques then by their very nature contained a rarefied inner elite that seemed impossible to join.
Bowie wasn’t then getting much if any play on the radio. Except to a few loyal followers, he wasn’t that well known, despite having had the surprise top 10 song the year before, quickly forgotten in the way things were back then, because life seemed to be moving fast into the future and a few months could make the difference between having your hit and being forgotten.
His hit might even have cost him his few hard-core fans, as they were the sort of discriminating, or snobby, music lovers who viewed commercial hits as a sign of artistic worthlessness. The world then was clearly divided between the album and the single. Rock already had its own equivalent of the highbrow versus lowbrow battle. One side, it had been decided, had more value than the other. Albums were serious; singles were trivial. Those of us that slipped naturally between the two worlds were viewed at the time as extremely weak-minded. For those that did slip more easily between the two worlds, it seemed a very good way to locate the future.
Constructing an idea of the future – any future within reason, even if it had its own problems – was vital at the time, a pushing away from a disorientating war that your parents and their parents were still suffering from, the gloom, conflicts, monotony and general effects that were hard to escape. Mainstream society and culture was committed to maintaining itself as it was for its own security but coming under pressure.
An alternative future was slowly taking shape around life in the 1950s, so that the basic, dreary flatness of the nation was showing the first electric signs of the shapes, colours and attitudes about to dominate the world, and propel it into a very different age altogether. A storm of progress was brewing. This was pop culture beginning to make its way to the centre of everything, and introducing a global informality, a new world order of noise and image.
Rock music, a warning sign in the mid-Fifties, an invading force by the mid-Sixties, was helping the young escape the pressure from elsewhere, its exponents and fans relishing and celebrating not just the new possibilities of personal freedom and independent thinking. They were also keeping a vigilant eye on those freedoms and independence being interfered with by those who tended to be responsible for wars and miscellaneous national and international crack-ups. In the grander scheme of things, to transcend the effects of the war, incite a galvanising sense of optimism, it was needing something outrageous and difficult to believe, like the Americans flying to the moon, and walking on it, and beaming the evidence back to earth and the television sets that were themselves an invading force.
Rock and pop could supply equivalent capsule moments of adventure and wonder, with images that in their own way were as vividly of the moment as an astronaut planted in a moonscape. Sometimes the incongruous impact of pop could seem as strange to a young mind separated from wider, more poetic and artistic influences as the classic image Karlheinz Stockhausen had used when he described his 1955 work Gesang der Jünglinge (‘Song of the Youths’) mixing up human voice with electronics as being like ‘finding an apple on the moon’ – an ordinary thing being transplanted into an extraordinary place. (Oddly enough the moon landing itself in 1969 as shown on television had the quality of being an apple found on the moon. There were no apples. The astronauts were the apples. When Jethro Tull appeared on Top of the Pops, like frugal New Age farmers from Narnia, they were the apples, and Top of the Pops was the moon.)
The future arrived down on earth through music, which could then take you to another planet. Bowie symbolised the future first of all when you heard the sound of his voice, and then when you saw him, in a photograph, or, eventually, on the TV, his appearance sealed the deal. You could see it in his eyes; mixed in with his own sense of amusement, anxiety and engagement, there was something else, perhaps the weirdly attained wisdom of the ages, reflected straight back at you.
Your mind was rearranged, as it turned out it needed to be, even if it hadn’t been when you had only heard him. When I first saw him – and everyone remembers the first time they laid eyes on him performing, and what Bowie, at what period of time – I’m not sure it was something I actually explicitly thought or spoke out loud, but there was definitely a feeling of, in the middle of all the everyday gloom, tension and endless school routine . . . I could be like that. I could go there, or somewhere close. Not that I would dye my hair, brighten ...
