The age of bowie, p.41
The Age of Bowie, page 41
In a 1958 article, an early example of pop criticism, a stage before Nik Cohn, MacInnes was talking about how English pop singers – Tommy Steele and Lonnie Donegan – were gradually capturing a place in the pop market. Nearly thirty years later, this has led to David Bowie, with his own assured place in the pop market, reaching number 2 in the charts with a song for a film based on MacInnes’s novel that had a few premonitions about the intense difference teenagers allowed to make their own choices would make to the world.
Written and performed with a group of musicians Thomas Dolby was using at the time, and produced by Alan Winstanley and Clive Langer with something of the melancholy tone they and Elvis Costello brought to Robert Wyatt’s version of ‘Shipbuilding’, it is a tribute to the sort of emotional, uncomplicated pop music Bowie never got round to writing. He seemed set up to do so in the late 1960s; the 1970s, and all that, and his own hyperactive mind, got in the way. It’s also an exercise in writing the perfect love song to be played over the end credits of a film and extend the fantasy for a few more wonderful minutes. A love song about a love song, about the power of film, where the singer dreams of a love song that can fly over mountains, sail over heartaches and laugh at the oceans. Bowie’s still being clever, but also unashamedly comforting as well because not to be would mean it was a failed experiment.
He isn’t faithful to the idea that the film is set in the 1950s but makes a mid-1980s-sounding music because when you heard music in the 1950s, you wouldn’t think, that’s 1950s music. It would simply be music from the present; the here and now MacInnes was very interested in portraying. Bowie captures the rough, splendid essence of the 1950s as he remembers or dreams it; where all the songs seemed about love, where the smooth brass of jazz still lingered in mainstream pop, where animated doo-wop was a perfect embodiment of the strange and the invigorating, where teenagers were new heroes in new, self-invented clothes escaping a dismal past and heading into the unknown. It’s all filtered through his knowledge of what was about to happen, and the skill he has picked up at being able to express memory through melody.
The unnamed nineteen-year-old protagonist in MacInnes’s novel introducing us to the alluring new subcultural world of London’s youth would be about the same age as his extremely non-conformist half-brother Terry was when he was introducing Bowie to lesser-known sights and sounds, helping him enter new worlds and deep layers of history that might yet control and prevent madness.
Terry had been a patient for years at the notorious Cane Hill psychiatric hospital built on a hilltop near Croydon almost cruelly overlooking London, with its own ballroom, water tower and chapel – to create ‘normal Sundays’. It was a home at times to over two thousand inmates. He was still stuck there by the 1980s, as the widespread use of these brutal Victorian-built complexes for the treatment of the mentally ill was coming to an end. He would be one of the last to experience such an enclosed, unforgiving regime in the name of healing – or hiding away – before those like him were tipped into the outside, often to fend for themselves.
A dismal, monumental place of suffering and endurance, it seemed long abandoned even before it was over a century since it first opened in 1883, finally shutting down completely in 2008. It is now a community of regimented Barratt homes known as Cane Hill Park. The asylum’s motto was ‘Aversos Campano Animos’ – ‘I bring relief to troubled minds’.
Forty-seven-year-old Terry, who resembled his half-brother enough for it to be noticeable to those that knew they were related, died in January 1985, a few days after Bowie’s thirty-eighth birthday, completing a violent act of suicide he had rehearsed a few times. He scaled a high wall in the middle of a raging storm that led to a staff shortage, allowing him to escape the asylum unnoticed. He made his lost way to isolated Coulsdon South Station, and laid down on the tracks in front of a speeding express train that was running a few minutes late.
Bowie didn’t attend the funeral, explaining he was worried his presence might cause an inappropriate tabloid scene – the tabloids were on the case, sensing a problem that might crack the infuriatingly impenetrable Bowie wide open, accusing him of indifferent treatment, leaving his half-brother to rot while he gallivanted as safe, secure and rich rock star. Bowie sent flowers, adopting a line from the end of Blade Runner: ‘All these moments will be lost, like tears that vanish in the rain’.
Bowie said at the time he sang the sonorous ‘Absolute Beginners’ that he wished he could be in this kind of love with someone, but there is definitely some love, and real loss, making it into the song. He’s singing a song for Terry, who helped give Bowie his beginning.
Bowie is entering an alternative zone based on those turbulent late 1950s, imagining another world where Terry was fine, life was ‘normal’. London was as open as it was petty and small-minded. A time and place where Davie Jones wasn’t so savaged by anxiety that he too was living on the edge of reality, always on the verge of toppling into what was still called madness even in the early 1980s when Terry was still locked away, because there was no other solution.
He’s singing a dream of the kind of less tense, less distressed music he might have made if he didn’t have the shadow of Terry always there, the constant fear of losing control, of having to make a choice between staying with all the madmen or perishing with the sad men roaming free; this love song–loving Bowie was always there, among all the shadows keen on ruling, and ruining, his psyche, which is why there was always a big-hearted pop element lurking in even his more dark, savage songs. Here it takes over.
It is a sophisticated reading of the innocence of discovering love, film, music, life, travel, and there’s just a hint around the edges of where all that romantic innocence can end up. It took Bowie eight years to make a more direct comment on suicide, of somebody, if not Terry, on one of those songs often described during this officially fallow period as ‘his best’ since ‘Ashes to Ashes’, or ‘Absolute Beginners’, a ‘return to form’ – ‘Jump They Say’, from Black Tie White Noise. This single was another way in for many to David Bowie, their first contact, with an MTV-friendly Mark Romanek–directed video playing with various Bowie selves and shadows, and a vivid, abstracted solo by his playful, adventurous, equally as sly and restless experimental trumpet-playing namesake Lester Bowie.
Bowie, like Bowie, knew how to use the past to make a future. D. Bowie is using L. Bowie, a one-man history of jazz trumpet, to create a memory of his own way in to jazz, via Terry, in an early 1960s London where jazz music was making its way into rock through the likes of Georgie Fame, Jon Hiseman and Graham Bond, and changing British music.
There was some mostly tabloid disquiet that it had taken David Bowie so long to make any sort of artistic reference to the suicide of his half-brother. Speaking as someone who took over twenty years to make any direct reference in my writing to my father’s suicide, first of all, eight years is not a long time at all. Secondly, the event, the change in your life, will always be in the work you do immediately afterwards, however much, coldly or not, cowardly or not, you push it away and do not seem to acknowledge it. Not long after Terry’s death there is ‘Absolute Beginners’ – and his songs for Labyrinth – which suggests there was an emotional reaction, if not as cataclysmic or dramatically self-conscious as some might have expected. He always keeps his distance, and issues reactions to moments in his life he might use as material a few steps removed from the obvious.
Twenty years after MacInnes was discovering the early aspirational workings of the teenage mind, some examples of the teenager, now inventing themselves a long way beyond London, had crashed hard against their own cravings to distance themselves from stale mainstream culture. The innocent good times have been twisted into nihilism. The absolute beginners had become the absolutely wasted.
The soundtrack to Uli Edel’s raw, unsettling 1981 Christiane F. reflects the years in and around Bowie’s Berlin, as if this is one sunken, broken place where the music belongs, where the ruins aren’t romantic, they’re crash sites, deathtraps and graveyards. Once Bowie’s music started to be used in movies and television, it gained extra new life; each song could start to change its identity depending where and when it ended up, at what dramatic point, in the past, present and future. Time is shifted and shuffled, brand-new associations are made, Bowie keeps changing shape. Bowie now begins to seep and flow far and wide in this way; in how others use him and respond to him.
In Christiane F. music from the late 1970s is used as the soundtrack to a film set in the mid-1970s, the desperate true story, unsentimentally told, of a young West Berlin teenager living in drab social housing infatuated, or infected, by the songs and appearance of Bowie. She plunges into a surreal nightmare of heroin addiction and prostitution at a time when the city was at its most sordid and depressing. The history has it that Berlin is where Bowie went to find an escape from his own addiction; the musical representation of his withdrawal and deliverance is used as a backdrop to a complete personal collapse, and a disappearance under the surface of a city of spirits and ruins that can damn you as well as save you.
Christiane, innocent at the beginning, crashes vein first into lowest-depths depravity. Bowie is featured throughout as a kind of dream fix running parallel to the heroin; the two ways of making a dismal, violent life more interesting or palatable. His other-worldly image is scattered Che Guevara-like around the streets and subways of Berlin, somewhere between Big Brother and big brother. He’s watching you. He’s looking out for you.
He’s embedded in the texture of the film, and he’s being marketed outside it. The whole idea of Bowie is becoming something else; the Aladdin Sane flash, one of his most resonant veils, is already living a life of its own, becoming a signpost for a whole different way of thinking and remembering.
It’s after the delicious rush of seeing Bowie live that Christiane first sniffs some heroin, ‘just out of curiosity’. After this tumble down the rabbit hole, it’s Alice in hell. This is the other side that Iggy went looking for during his Berlin period, the vice-ridden metropolis, human bodies jerking like lightning through the apocalyptic disco-rock night, downtown in the city of nightly neon ecstasy, while Bowie searched on two wheels for art, history and the route to a clearer mind, and conducted a rejuvenating undercover love affair with another shadow of his own being, another existential mirror he could check his own reflection in.
In the film, a gang of unruly teenagers run riot through a shopping centre to the sound of ‘“Heroes”’, which is part of the story of the song itself as it travels upwards and onwards through different levels of perception and reception. You can place it in so many different settings, and it will shine with new meaning. It is made to exist in other places, and generate new responses; every second there is a suggestion of a new direction you can take into and from the song. It comes alive in the other Berlin of Christiane F. and adds new incidental atmosphere and feeling to the living essence of Bowie, and predicts how ‘“Heroes”’ can flow into so many other surroundings and grow in power.
The combination of concert footage and a cameo from a larger-than-life Bowie and the ruthless documentary style coverage of heroin-taking made Christiane F. a cult film, and one of the most successful German films of all time. The savage reality of taking heroin to elevate or escape wretched existence is given a treatment mixing and merging the roughly glamorising with rancid, horrific desolation.
The real Christiane Felscherinow, who survived the carnage portrayed in the film, remembered going to see the film in 1981, having been told Bowie and entourage would be at the showing as well. She takes a lot of cocaine to deal with meeting him, shaking when the car pulls up with him inside to take her to see it. A friend she brings along for support collapses as soon as she sees Bowie, although Christiane is surprised at how weak and insignificant he actually looks – ‘like my father’ – compared to the aloof, apart, pop star image.
In July 1981, Bowie records ‘Under Pressure’ with Queen, who had made pumped-up rip-roaring success out of the sort of framed, distancing theatricality that had once made critics suspicious about Bowie, and to some extent still did. Their mock metal could seem as mouthy but eccentric as Bowie’s on The Man Who Sold the World. Together the two acts who love acting-up construct a song that doesn’t relinquish the theatre and the posing, but instils it with a form of nebulous dynamic protest that assures the combination of camps doesn’t sink under too toothy melodrama.
It’s a luxury enhancement of the discophonic direction Bowie took on Young Americans filtered through the distressed spiritual nature of the Berlin years, with Queen playing the role of his band with ravishing studio-chiselled elegance, and Bowie playing the role of guest star with exhilarated panache.
Queen haters who were Bowie lovers were torn at the time, as the man who had just been Low and Lodger should not be singing with someone who for musical snobs, or realists, of the time was a corny pop music equivalent of Bruce Forsyth. But as Low as he’d gone, or perhaps because he’s gone so Low, Bowie was never put off by the thought of some impeccable song and dance. Any chance to put on a show, with no fear of appearing trivial. Such a fear could hold you back, and separate you from the emotions of people.
Sometimes with Bowie, it’s Bassey with Roland Kirk, for the sake of the ‘what if’. This time it’s Bassey with Presley, and it’s no less a glorious ‘what if’. The pair of them inspire each other to new heights of pure performance, which is all the song might be about – the competition to excel that Bowie always loved, never afraid of setting himself up with the best at what they do, so he can absorb some of their powers, even steal them, or just enjoy watching and learning from them at close quarters. Bowie had a much more sophisticated and flexible reading of the ultimate nature of musical integrity than the rock critics of the day, and knew exactly how he could reach people without sacrificing artistic substance. He had his own ideas where the boundaries of artistic taste were – pretty much anything but country – and resisted anyone patrolling them.
The music materialises under those studio circumstances emerging from improvisation and sticking together scraps of existing ideas that make it difficult to know who came up with what, but Bowie has something that he wants to say, and he’s the one bringing the ‘pressure’ into the song. Or, it was Mercury who was feeling the pressure, or maybe it was all to do with the general sense of having to finish a song. But once you have that word, and the one that’s put in front of it, the song can become a classic, spinning round and round the pressure, feeling tense, feeling relieved, feeling high, feeling higher. The pressure becomes a kind of prayer. Hearing the first notes appear in the middle of an innocuous daytime programme drifting along in the background will always put me on high alert, as though I am being watched, especially if I am late delivering a piece of work or a book.
Who knows whether the words are tossed together by consummate professionals as a way of getting into and through the song, with no real intention behind them other than giving Mercury and Bowie something to get their considerable teeth into, the perfect balance of syllable and attack, of rhyme and rhythm, or whether there is a real call to arms, a way of facing up to the darkening prospect of the Reagan and Thatcher years and a collapse of the counterculture that the clairvoyant Bowie can see coming in the way he saw the tensions of the 1970s coming. After the relative outburst of freedom, and then the kaleidoscope collapse, what next?
It’s an example of the sort of energy from a combination of energies that can be generated in a studio context without any particular direction, which ends up working because the protagonists are at the height of their powers, and each and every one of their instincts for where the song should go and what it needs to achieve are perfectly in tune. It could end up as nonsense, as an awkward mix of styles and manners, but in this case the result is totally in focus, and the bass line is the perfect expression of this focus, the fluid, confident sound of an amazing temporary compatibility between minds, of a connection between the rapturous and the ominous.
The song is a fulfilment of that gift Bowie had for sounding joyous and uplifting while issuing a series of warnings about imminent collapse and disarray; taking pop and making it truly sing with a vague but transcendent, indecisive but precise power that can be interpreted in so many different ways, depending on the wishes, needs, experience, location, age and sensibility of the listener. It can also change meaning over time; make sense of different tensions and events that happened long after it was written, because it wasn’t written about anything categorical.
Even if you’re passionately in favour of Freddie Mercury and his combination of hard corn and euphoria, you would not have expected to see him make a move from ‘Under Pressure’ to Brecht, with Christiane F. and Bing Crosby along the route from one to the other. He is never caught between, or in, so many different worlds. No one travels like Bowie.
At the end of 1982, Bowie’s duet with Bing on ‘Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy’ is climbing to number 3 in the UK charts, coming up short behind Renée and Renato’s ‘Save Your Love’, but having more enduring appeal. A few months before, Bowie is appearing as Baal in a BBC production of an Alan Clarke adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s subversive comedy The Life and Times of a Man Called Baal, written when he was twenty in 1918 and which he changed in the 1920s, as always seeking to increase the relevance of a work as time passed. It is early Brecht, when his life was hectic and full of furious imaginings. Having experienced indirectly fighting in the trenches of a world war and fighting on the streets, it was written when he was especially distrustful of all forms of idealism.
Clarke, at home with the traditional and the avant-garde, had directed British classics such as Kes and Cathy Come Home, and was a committed populariser of Brecht’s work. He originally had his eye on Steven Berkoff to play Baal, but Bowie’s reputation since his performance as The Elephant Man brought him to Clarke’s attention. It was a perfect match, especially with Bowie’s fascination for German expressionism, which Brecht was marking the end of. Bowie identified with how Brecht was interested in provoking an audience into new decision-making, a desire for further knowledge, and action. Bowie would also have been sympathetic to Brecht saying, not long after he had written his first version of Baal, ‘But I keep realising that the essence of art is simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity, and the essence of its form is coolness.’
