Bowie: A Biography (56 page)

Much better is the cameo that Bowie shot for John Landis’s 1984 release
Into the Night
, in which Jeff Goldblum plays Ed Okin, an insomniac who somehow gets tangled up in a bloody jewel-smuggling fray involving Michelle Pfeiffer in a red “Beat It”–video jacket. As this is a Landis movie, Bowie is not the only cameo and ends up wrestling to the death with another rock legend, Carl Perkins, in a gore-spattered luxury hotel room. As a fifties rock enthusiast, Bowie must have felt a real teenage thrill getting his on-screen ass throttled by a bona fide rockabilly super-cat. His short, funny turn as Colin Morris, of her Majesty’s secret service, makes one wonder why he was never cast as a Bond villain in all these years.

There were tragedies of the nonprofessional variety as well in ’84. David’s half brother, Terry, then forty-seven, was in serious decline after years spent in and out of mental health facilities. He’d met his wife, Olga, as a fellow patient at the Cane Hill asylum, but life outside the facility was never easy, and after several years of conflicts, often fueled by Terry’s penchant for self-medication with alcohol, she had recently filed for divorce. Terry fell into deep depression after the breakup of his marriage and was readmitted to Cane Hill, where he reportedly attempted to kill himself by jumping out a second-story window. David visited Terry in the hospital infrequently, but when he did he’d bring gifts, like a cassette recorder, cigarettes and some of his favorite books. On January 16, 1985, one week after David’s thirty-eighth birthday, Terry checked himself out of the hospital and walked down to the train tracks in the Littlehampton section of London. He calmly placed his neck on the cold steel tracks and waited for the train to come. All suicide is by definition selfish, but suicide by train is especially so, as it makes a victim of not only the deceased but also the train conductor. It is essentially the act of someone consumed by self-hatred (given the violence it wreaks on the body following the prolonged suspense and dread of first laying oneself across the tracks) and a kind of anger that can no longer be contained inside and is therefore inflicted upon an innocent. Unfortunately, in a country like England, where there are strict gun-control laws, it’s also a popular method of ensuring death
(only 10 percent of all attempted train suicides survive). Millions of Bowie fans and tabloid readers were shaken by Terry Burns’s demise, and some went as far as publicly blaming David Bowie for being a negligent brother, while Terry, ill since David’s childhood, clearly needed the kind of constant professional care that nobody would have been able to provide.

Of all people, it’s Angie who provided an explanation for David’s absence. “David really loved him,” Angie says. “I think there is also the regret or the guilt that taking the time and trouble, private care as opposed to the national health care, could have cured him. I think David knew exactly what had to be done and I don’t think he felt he had the time or that he could take the time off from working as hard as he worked at his career to be able to support it. So in the end, Terry was just packed off to a national health mental institute and that didn’t solve anything. Sometimes people just throw their hands up.”

Bowie did not attend Terry’s funeral, opting to send a basket of pink and yellow roses and chrysanthemums instead. The card was inscribed with a brief message: “You’ve seen more things than we could imagine but all these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain. God bless you—David.”

“When all the stories in the press appeared about David not attending Terry’s funeral, I don’t think it was a case of David didn’t want to go,” Angie later said. “I don’t think he didn’t want to do something about it. He just looked at the problem and realized the magnitude of it. It was so enormous that to have got involved he really would have been working on a voluntary basis taking care of someone who had already been abused by the system from an age when David was too young to have been able to do anything about it.”

Bowie did not tour in support of
Tonight
but, invited by organizer Bob Geldof, he did perform alongside dozens of New Wave favorites and his superstar peers the following July at the London end of the twin Live Aid concerts at Wembley Stadium in London and RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. The international broadcast of the event, on MTV, featured the world premiere of the music video for a hastily recorded duet of Martha and the Vandellas’ Motown classic “Dancing in the Street” with his old (probably platonic) friend Mick Jagger. Like the chart-topping single of the previous December, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” (on
which Bowie did not sing but provided a recorded message of goodwill for the extended twelve-inch version), “Dancing in the Streets” would benefit Ethiopian hunger relief. Morally, it’s impossible to impeach the single, but musically, it accomplishes something nearly impossible: it somehow ruins a Teflon Motown classic. Van Halen’s 1982 version (and even Shalamar’s “Dancing in the
Sheets”)
is far superior. But again, it’s for charity, and the old friends certainly sound like they’re having fun in the studio.

The video, again helmed by David Mallet and shot the same day as the session on the London dockyards, is the camp-off that Bowie had refrained from having with Freddie Mercury four years earlier, full of eye rolls, mugging and Bowie and Jagger trying to out-boogie each other. “It’s a literal video,” says Mallet. “They’re literally dancing in the streets. It’s got its strange bits though. It’s basically what you can do in five or six hours. I think they brought a suit for each other to wear but that was it. We literally made it up as we went along. I think it captured the chemistry between the two people.”

For his live spot at Wembley, Bowie had to throw a band together. He turned to Thomas Dolby, the professorial, somewhat Eno-like electronic pop star who was then scoring big MTV hits with “Hyperactive!” and of course “She Blinded Me with Science.” “He kept changing his mind about what he wanted to do,” Dolby says. “He started off wanting to promote his current single, which at the time was ‘Loving the Alien,’ and then as he got more focused on the event, he realized it was not about promoting your single, you needed to transcend all that and just do a classic performance that would make everybody smile.”

A quarter-century on, there has yet to be a rock ’n’ roll concert event that captured the global consciousness in the same way that Live Aid did, especially in England. For days, it was the common topic of discussion, uniting all classes and races. “There was a very strong sense of occasion about it, yeah. Like nothing I’ve experienced since,” Dolby says. “It’s a little bit hard in the States to understand this. Britain is a very small island and we generally have a maximum of six topics at a time. Not like us, where there’s multifarious info and culture. On the tip of everyone’s tongues here you can strike up a convo with any stranger in the grocery shop. Flopping was not an option.” The pressure to pull off a memorable
performance was enormous even for veterans like Bowie, Elton John, Queen, the then estranged Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Who and Paul McCartney, especially when performing directly after energized younger acts like Simple Minds, Madonna and U2.

Bowie and Dolby flew into the venue in a helicopter while Queen was performing their now-legendary set before the sold-out crowd. Dolby could see them on the Jumbotron as the helicopter descended. Bowie could only grit his teeth. “I’d seen things like the
Cracked Actor
documentary,” Dolby says. “That’s what I was expecting before I met him, and in fact all through rehearsal he was the ultimate English gentleman, gracious and demure, tan and healthy, polite to everybody, complimentary. He was anything but the cracked actor. But he was not too fond of flying, as you know, and the only way to get him to Wembley for the performance was in a helicopter, and I think it was his first-ever helicopter flight. Meeting up with him there, he was visibly quaking, wearing this big homburg hat pulled down over his eyes, and he was chain-smoking and very abrupt with the pilot. He became the cracked actor for the ten minutes that it took to get us into Wembley. Got out of the helicopter and into this motor cade weaving through the backstreets of Wembley and was absolutely loving it and I was terrified. Screeched to a halt inside Wembley Stadium, two hundred photographers inside, ‘Oh, I love this bit.’ A few minutes later we were onstage.” While some of his peers, including Zeppelin and Dylan (backed by Keith Richards and Ron Wood), failed to live up to their legends, it was widely noted that Bowie’s set, along with now-legendary performances from Queen in London and U2 in Philadelphia, were among the monumental festival’s high points.

Bowie remained in London following Live Aid to complete work on his second major film role in a decade. Like
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Labyrinth
was of the science fiction/fantasy genre. The difference between the two could not have exemplified the difference between art Bowie and commerce Bowie any better. Whereas Nicholas Roeg’s film is sexual, cynical, paranoid and misanthropic,
Labyrinth
, written by Terry Jones of
Monty Python
, executive produced by George Lucas and directed by Jim Henson, is a sub-Spielberg, cloying and condescending Muppet-fuck. It costars cherubic future Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly
as a young girl who wishes her annoying infant brother would be taken away by goblins. “Goblin king, goblin king, wherever you are, take this child away from me,” she pleads. When the boy actually
is
goblin abducted, Connelly must venture into the maze of hedges to rescue him from Jareth, the goblin king, played gamely by Bowie. The offended, militant queens who blanched at his “just kidding, folks” comments in
Rolling Stone
circa
Let’s Dance
were quite possibly appeased by the fact that Jareth could not look or sound gayer. “Sara, go back to your room. Play with your toys and your costumes,” he sasses as the crystal he holds turns into a snake. There’s also a vaguely creepy sexual tension between Bowie and Connelly during their dance sequence. “I think he’s got a lot of real chemistry with her,” a fellow rock critic once told me, and I tend to agree. Of all Bowie’s costars, from Candy Clark to Catherine Deneuve, Michelle Pfeiffer and later Rosanna Arquette (in the astoundingly bad
The Linguini Incident)
, it may be the fourteen-year-old Connelly whom he generates the most intensity with. “I was just this side of getting it,” Connelly said of the shoot. “Getting who David Bowie was. He was really sweet. I liked him very much.”

The script is full of Zen koans like “The way forward is the way back.” And yet for all its vulgarity, its easy to see why
Labyrinth
remains a cult hit on video and a favorite among the kids of Bowie’s boomer and Generation X fans. It’s just scary enough to amuse older children, and their mothers and fathers (or fathers and fathers and mothers and mothers) can revel in the high camp. “I’d be forced to suspend you headfirst in the bog of eternal stench,” Bowie says, threatening Connelly’s dwarfish Muppet pal Hoggle; the bog gives off a delicious stench indeed, and the execrable soundtrack was clearly recorded there. “Chilly Down,” in which Bowie semi-raps, is not exactly “The Rainbow Connection.” “Underground,” the film’s ostensible main theme song, returns Bowie to his soul-singer mode without any of the passion that he knew in ’75. The sensational pipes of Chaka Khan, who provides backup vocals, as she did on every single song released in 1986, are wasted. Upon its release in the summer of ’86
Labyrinth
failed to connect, raking in just twelve million dollars theatrically. “It was a flop at the box office because it’s not a particularly good film,” says John Scalzi, film critic and author of
The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies
. “I think it’s pretty clear that Bowie wasn’t brought
in to hide himself in the role of the goblin king, he was brought in so that the goblin king could
be
like David Bowie. They didn’t hire him to be an actor, they hired him to be a star.”

A brief reunion with Iggy Pop on their third collaboration,
Blah Blah Blah
, resulted in some strong songs—and a minor hit with Iggy’s cover of the old Johnny O’Keefe rockabilly hit “Real Wild Child”—but Iggy’s real creative foil on that record was Steve Jones, the former Sex Pistols guitarist.

David Bowie turned forty on January 8, 1987. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 1998, the year after he turned fifty, Bowie explains that the big four-inch was much more troubling. By fifty, he’d released two more very strong albums, 1995’s
Outside
and 1997’s
Earthling;
fallen in love with Web-based technology and new finance; and seemed to have regained his creative footing and interests. At forty, he’d lost nearly all of it. The artist who prided himself on being hands-on, controlling (he’d occasionally hum guitar solos to his revolving ax men) and perpetually inspired began showing up to photo shoots and allowing himself to be draped in whatever horrible, shoulder-padded and garishly patterned frocks the stylists deemed worthy. Photos of Bowie during this period certainly show him in a lot of animal print. In the video for “Day-In Day-Out,” the first single off
Never Let Me Down
, his 1987 follow-up to
Tonight
and the
Labyrinth
soundtrack, Bowie is skating. There’s a good little bit of metaphor. Like
Tonight
and
Labyrinth, Never Let Me Down
is not a terrible album, it’s just another slothful one, the third strike in a row. The hum and the groove of “Day-In Day-Out” starts out promising, but midway through, the canned quality of the backing vocals (which ruin “New York’s in Love” as well) grows wearying, and people like Hall and Oates and even Robbie (“C’est la Vie”) Nevil or Go West were doing the high-tech blue-eyed soul thing much better circa ’86 and ’87. Iggy and Steve Jones (with Bowie) do the Sunset Strip trash-guitar rock thing better on
Blah Blah Blah
than Bowie does here as well (“’87 and Cry”). “Time Will Crawl,” with its nightmare lyrics about nuclear meltdown (inspired by the Chernobyl power plant disaster in April of 1986), is one of the few genuine high points where Bowie sounds like he actually gives a toss for what’s coming out of his mouth and how. The only thing that keeps it from joining the Bowie best-of is the tinny production, something Bowie publicly regrets. He told the
Daily Mail
in
June of ’08 (where the track was included in a CD of his all-time favorites), “There are a host of songs that I’ve recorded over the years that for one reason or another I’ve often wanted to re-record some time in the future. This track from
Never Let Me Down
is one of those.” Electronic percussion clangs and towers of cheap synth echo all over “Beat of Your Drum,” as if Bowie was watching
Miami Vice
with Swiss subtitles as he composed the thing. “I like the smell of your flesh. I’d like to beat on your drum,” Bowie sings. This passes for lust from a man who once wrote, “This mellow thighed chick just put my spine out of place”?