The age of bowie, p.35
The Age of Bowie, page 35
Bolan had helped his relatively recent reappearance as pop star by featuring in his show some of the new punk groups that were as inspired by him as much as, if not more than, Bowie – including Generation X and Eddie and the Hot Rods on the show Bowie appeared on. There was also during the six-part run Showaddywaddy and the Bay City Rollers – Granada television producer Muriel Young has produced their similarly rickety series – and at the other end of some sort of spectrum, the one that Bolan spanned between 1967 and 1972, Hawkwind.
(I visited the set a couple of times, where Marc playfully teased me for being so nervous and tongue-tied in his presence. I played him new local Manchester group Buzzcocks, who he thought as undeniable pop expert were bubblegum punk, and also chatted briefly with him about Bowie. ‘He’s always getting the blues, man,’ Marc chuckled, as if this was something that never happened to him, and is what made the difference between the pair. Bolan’s reluctance to allow his real feelings to stray into and stain and steer his music perhaps contributed to it stagnating inside a dying fantasy.)
After witnessing Marc becoming a pop star first, Bowie then achieved what Bolan never could and became a pop star in America. The pressure of trying to break America, the logical next step after peaking so dramatically in Britain and most of the rest of the world, ended up breaking Marc. He became so distracted working out how to do it that he lost his grip on British stardom, failing to refresh his particular formula and extend it outwards and elsewhere in the way Bowie could. Bowie could even make critically and commercially successful music without using Tony Visconti, which mostly eluded Marc once the original glam momentum faded. Bowie could report metaphorically in his music on his mental and physical state and incorporate allegorical ways of reflecting the state of nations and other worlds in ways that Bolan couldn’t.
Bolan found it difficult to escape the glue of the boogie, the fuzzy halo of hair. The glitter was stuck to his face, like a mask that he couldn’t remove. He couldn’t absorb as much outside artistic and theatrical influence and process it as ingeniously and progressively as Bowie. In the end, he lacked the experimental and non-rock part of the aesthetic that could constantly reform and deform the obvious, crowd-pleasing part, which soon ceases to please the crowd if it doesn’t develop.
He tried to match Bowie’s conceptual ambition as his place in the British charts became less secure after 1973, tried to slip into other musical states as apparently effortlessly as Bowie could, the blue-, or grey-eyed soul and the unexpected, rarefied hybrids, but could only watch helplessly as Bowie conquered the might of America as the Seventies’ equivalent of the Jesus-beating Beatles. As Bowie crashed into the classic status of rock star casualty, somewhere between acting it out and suffering it for self-destructing real, he was somehow still producing albums as vivid and visible as Young Americans and Station to Station. Marc produced entertaining, often lovely, but increasingly insular anagrams of Electric Warrior and Slider.
Marc slumped, became bloated, his fine features distorting into a sadly non-elfin-like bulbousness, where the curls just looked like desperate question marks, while Bowie’s reaction to the dangers of fame and keeping it or losing it was to deflate into a more severe, romantically attractive hollow-eyed soul-bruised skin and bones. In the competition of most successfully cataclysmic rock and roll breakdown, without actually dying, Bowie won.
They had entered one of their occasional periods of being friends again. Coming together first of all in 1964 as finely drawn dancing mods with model poise mad for more prowling the streets of Soho and attending endless auditions, looking for the right door to walk through to find the golden star. Then in the late 1960s, as gentle guitar-strumming gurus of peace and love sprinkling moondust and cosmic vibes over their wide-eyed followers, separating after ‘The Prettiest Star’. At the time, Marc’s wife, June, considered Marc far too superior to be giving Bowie the gift of his guitar playing.
Both were now materialising in a post-chaos setting, and almost seemed set to collaborate on new music, writing something together about the madness they had been experiencing. On the Marc show, Bowie solemnly sings in the nowhere vacuum of a television studio his new song “Heroes”, which starbursts in sublime slow motion into the glare of a kiddies’ show like a psalm suddenly solemnly sung at a seven-year-old’s birthday party between pass the parcel and the birthday cake. They duet together, Bolan in singlet pouting like it’s still 1971, Bowie in dark glasses concentrating like he’s on the other side of time.
At the end of a song that goes nowhere but a giggling end, Marc, overwhelmed by the situation, trips over a wire, and falls off the stage. There was no time for another run-through, so the ragged conclusion is broadcast as it happened, two misfit brothers making a little mess. Bolan’s the younger by nine months, but on this showing Bowie looks both older, as in more in control, but also younger, as in fresher, with more life in him. The show ends with the toothiest of Bowie smiles, watching as Bolan falls to the floor of the studio.
Bolan dies nine days later in a car crash in south London returning in the early hours from a West End party thrown by Rod Stewart, so this televised laughter as they shared the same microphone was how their friendship ended in TV reality. Bolan loved cars as erotic, exotic objects of desire and speed, and featured them in his songs, but he never learnt to drive, fearing the worst possible outcome between his soft flesh and the car’s lethal metal.
His girlfriend Gloria Jones was driving the purple Mini that crashed into a tree on a dangerous curve as they drove home to East Sheen. She survived with little injury; he was crushed. His death kept the death of internationally famous opera artist and ultimate diva – La Divina, the divine – Maria Callas off the front pages of the UK papers.
The funeral is a few days later, attended by Rod Stewart, Alvin Stardust, Steve Harley, members of punk pioneers the Damned and Eurovision Song Contest winners Brotherhood of Man, Tony Visconti and his wife Mary Hopkin, Bolan’s ex-wife June keeping a low profile, and hundreds of fans in satin scarves, T-shirts and ‘Marc is God’ badges comforting each other. Keith Moon, Elton John and Cliff Richard send flowers. Marc’s record company sent a huge white swan made of carnations, which gives the particularly bleak funeral a whimsical lift of fantasy.
Bowie arrives in shock ensconced in the secure star limbo of long limo, wearing dark glasses and grey fedora, sweeping into the ceremony and out again in a man who fell to earth circus blur of tabloid-chased fame. While he was in London for the funeral, he goes to Brixton to look at his first home, but he doesn’t take a look inside.
The final Marc show was broadcast eight days after the funeral. The credits featured Marc Bolan and David Bowie as hosts.
Both were morbidly scared of and fascinated by death. If one of the races between the pair with their intense fan’s awareness of the nature of myth and immortality was who would have the tragic early rock and roll death, in a car or plane crash, in drug overdose meltdown, producing the eternally young corpse, joining the most elite and stupid of clubs, Bolan won, and lost.
127.
He is celebrating Christmas, because he believes; after all he has a mother who once helped him believe and a young son. He is appearing on the latest edition of Bing Crosby’s annual Christmas show Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, looking as though he has just wandered along a corridor, or stepped out of a limo, after singing with Marc, for his duet with Bing, over the other side of pop history. It’s actually four days later, 11 September, in Elstree north of London, and there’s a little flashback element as other guests on this English-themed Christmas special include Ron Moody, born the same day, and Twiggy, of the Pin Ups cover.
Bowie is apparently initially reluctant to take part because he does not like the song he is asked to sing with Bing, ‘Little Drummer Boy’, eventually persuaded when the show’s writers hastily conceive of a sweet little counterpoint entitled ‘Peace on Earth’. After an hour’s rehearsal, Bing and Bowie are ready.
Maybe he consulted Oblique Strategies, and got a card that said Emphasise differences, or Courage!, or Remember . . . those quiet evenings, or Go to an extreme, Move back to a more comfortable place, or Listen to the quiet voice. It was a chance to promote “Heroes”, and Bowie never got too big for his promotional duties.
Bing is his mother’s favourite; Bing certainly resembles his neat, orderly, weirdly brittle father. David looks on his Sunday best behaviour; as if as he said the cocaine years were like a journey into space, and after the dangerous adventures on different worlds were over he returned to earth, and got out of the spaceship feeling and looking fairly healthy, even if his sense of time had been damaged, and a few years either added to or knocked off his expected lifespan.
It’s not Ziggy with Bing, the great combination of white bread and offbeat the legend claims. It’s two singers from either end of the history of recorded music meeting in the middle of time to compare and contrast a form of singing that isn’t that far apart, ultimately, in terms of technically mastering timing, phrasing, vocal understanding, the role of the microphone, which Bing was the first to use as a musical instrument. It is Crosby that first exploits the miracle of magnetic tape in order to record his radio show, and free him of the fixed nature of presenting it live.
The Nazis had developed the use of audio tape recording to broadcast their propaganda across different time zones. After the war, the victorious Americans discovered the technology, and it was introduced in America first of all on Crosby’s show. It’s the very beginnings of the kind of fluid, time-shifting sound recording that Bowie, with Visconti, Fripp, Eno and co., had just been exploiting and extending. They had been doing this within 500 yards of the Berlin headquarters of the Nazis where the magical idea of tape as a way to supervise and rearrange time, and flexibly insert it into media, and to control the masses, first appeared.
Bowie gracefully acknowledges the master, the mentor of Elvis, who set the whole notion of amplified singing in motion, paying tribute to Bing’s role as innovator, master of artifice and populariser of jazz, as much as clichéd, cardigan-wearing, golfing family entertainer – he’s a combination of the inventive and the accessible Bowie deeply respects. Somewhere in the middle of this unorthodox collaboration the subtext is that the power of entertainment is a curious thing. It is a truly surreal event, because of its looping historical resonance as much as the generational oddity of the coupling.
Introducing David’s guest spot, Bing soothes a dumbstruck Twiggy about what she is now going to hear. His introduction dissolves into Bowie singing an echoing, aching “Heroes”, which at the time still sounded more apprehensive and doomed gothic romance suited to Bing’s make-believe castle, and the imaginary snowy ruins on the outside, than chiming anthem of universal togetherness. Bing understands, though, introducing it with real appreciation of its gravity and its ambiguous tenderness, even if he didn’t write or even listen to the words he spoke; on the other hand, inside, he really does understand that a baton has been handed on between generations of recording artists. He had only a month to live; Bowie as the great predictor of death. Bing’s intro falters a little, he forgets a word or two, but just about gets across what he wants to say: ‘Loneliness, just as painful, just as beautiful as they ever were. Whether you’re a novelist, a poet or even a songwriter, it’s all in the way you say it . . .’
The still, understated and beautiful Bowie mimes in a pre-recorded sense, cut out of expressionistic black, direct into camera, what might be his greatest song – or ‘song’ – when it was just another sonic and lyrical experiment that had not yet uncoiled and insinuated itself into the popular imagination and which might yet go nowhere. Simultaneously, he is shown in neat grey two-piece earnestly miming in a Marcel Marceau sense the meaning of the song, the lovers against the wall, Bowie and Romy, fighting for love, and freedom. He acts out the love story, even a passionate kiss, like some European street entertainer hoping for a few coins to be dropped into his hat. Still with the sad clown in his heart, he marks out the wall with his hands in the way the classic mime artist describes a box they are trapped inside, as if to say, the wall is not really there.
128.
He is releasing the “Heroes” album a week before young East Berliners at a rock concert in Alexanderplatz are chanting ‘Down with the Wall’, something that will not happen for another ten years.
129.
He is leaving Berlin, and leaving the walled-in Berliners a hymn, which is a sign of his rebirth, and becomes a part of the city’s own rebirth, and which doesn’t exactly eventually knock the Wall down, but imagined a world where it was not needed, and needs to be sung when it is, and comes to symbolise the significant end of a divided city.
• • •
If you want albums that summed up a new world of meaning in rock in 1977, and how far things had come since 1974, then there was Television’s Marquee Moon, Wire’s Pink Flag, Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, The Clash, Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, Suicide, Talking Heads: 77, Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life and The Idiot, Ian Dury’s New Boots and Panties!!, The Damned’s Damned Damned Damned, Richard Hell & the Voidoid’s Blank Generation. Fleetwood Mac with Rumours and Pink Floyd with Animals carried on as normal; Bob Marley and Culture were occupied in their own battleground, Peter Gabriel and Peter Hammill were in worlds of their own, Brian Eno was still imagining the future with Before and After Science, but it was two Bowie albums, Low and “Heroes”, which proved that he alone of anyone who had made it in the mainstream in the early 1970s could keep his up-to-date and up-to-speed wits in a new contemporary setting, and cast himself forward, sounding further out than most at the time, into a future, where music would be called post-rock, and then actually be post-rock, and then actually be in the past, present and future at the same time. Singles of the year were by the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, the Ramones, Elvis Costello, the Stranglers, X-Ray Spex, the Adverts, Talking Heads, Alternative TV – but Bowie was among them with “Heroes”. If you weren’t partial to the new world, the singles of the year were by Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, Aerosmith and Al Stewart. The chart number 1s were cut off from this change, filled with David Soul, Abba, Brotherhood of Man, Kenny Rogers, Manhattan Transfer, finishing off with Paul McCartney’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’. There was enough Bowie momentum, and enough glamour about the look of the album and the content of the songs, and the presumption he was still inhabiting a science-fiction character, despite the dubious transformations on show, for Low to make it to number 2 in the UK album charts, stopping just short therefore of being perhaps the most experimental pop album ever to make number 1. Despite the myth that it was the most uncommercial of Bowie records, because of the extremist sonic and emotional outlook, it reached higher than “Heroes” later that year, and even in America for all its un-American tone, it stopped just one short of the top 10, whereas “Heroes” failed to enter the top 30. The single didn’t even make the top 100, and stalled at 24 in the UK. To some at the time, it seemed weary and forlorn, and somehow out of focus. It would take time to grow on the world.
1978
‘I don’t have stylistic loyalty. That’s why people perceive me changing all the time.’
130.
He is narrating a wonderful performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s symphony for children, Peter and the Wolf, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by their internationally famous Hungarian music director, Eugene Ormandy, a favourite interpreter of Bartok, Shostakovich and Sibelius who had started working with the orchestra in 1936, the year Prokofiev wrote his unexpected masterpiece. Each character in the story is represented by a different instrument – flute for bird, oboe for duck, clarinet for cat, French horns for the wolf, a curt bassoon for Peter’s grandfather. The blast of the hunter’s shotguns is played by the kettle drums. Hero Peter gets jaunty strings.
What began as a whimsical, unstuffy way to attract children to classical music had become a classic that attracted many notable performers to narrate – Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Basil Rathbone, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sharon Stone, the classical world enjoying the association with a star from outside their world, the star enjoying a little touch of class. Winnie the Pooh – his voice, Sterling Holloway – even did it.
Ormandy had no idea who Bowie was, and was a little worried when he discovered he was a rock singer with a strange, difficult reputation. They never met – Bowie recording his voice in New York in 1977 and it was added to the previously recorded performance – but it became one of Bowie’s strangest, loveliest collaborations.
RCA were clearly looking for a certain aloof, measured English voice, because they asked Alec Guinness and Peter Ustinov who turned them down, before it was pointed out that they had an artist signed to their label already who was English and spoke English as though he were acting it out.
‘What happens when a world-famous maestro teams up with a pop-rock dynamo?’ trumpeted the promotional material, but what the orchestra and conductor got was not the gaunt, vampiric rock star failing to pronounce the easiest word that they might have seen on The Dick Cavett Show, but a relaxed, obliging, almost anonymous actor who dearly wanted to do it as a present for his six-year-old son. As much as any of his records or films it proves what he often said about what he did which sometimes seemed a distraction – that he was acting, and each thing he did was another part.
He delivers a powerfully beguiling and good-hearted performance, relishing working with such a significant orchestra and Ormandy’s rich, romantic conception of sound, to the extent it might be the very best version to hear, and perhaps takes the form of a disguised follow-up to the moods of David Bowie and Hunky Dory.
