The Man Who Sold the World (42 page)

SOUND AND VISION #4: A New Career in a New Medium

T
he traditional set of skills required of a rock star—record making, live performance, posing for photographs—expanded with the advent of the music video. During the late seventies, videos moved beyond their original remit as a convenient means of promoting a new record to emerge as an independent branch of the entertainment industry. The next decade would introduce the phenomenon of the video artist, for whom musical or performance skills mattered less than the ability to convey an image and a lifestyle within a four-minute clip. In 1979, however, only the most modern and farsighted artists were coming to terms with the demands and potential of the format.

It seems obvious in retrospect that David Bowie would be a video pioneer: he believed in both art and entertainment, the twin poles of the director; he had the mime skills to accentuate and dramatize emotions; he knew how to advertise and brand himself; and he was schooled in the history of twentieth-century visual art. Video was an entirely fresh art form, one that could rediscover the techniques of surrealism and Dada as if they were newly minted.

There had been a brief flowering of rock promotional films in the late sixties, allowing the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to spare themselves the chore of touring the world's TV studios when they issued a new record. Both groups had hired visually inventive directors to produce films for songs such as “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “We Love You.” But few of their contemporaries and successors had taken up the challenge. When Bowie invited photographer Mick Rock to shoot cheap but striking clips for singles such as “John I'm Only Dancing” [63] and “The Jean Genie” [65] in 1972, what was radical was Rock's lack of pedigree as a film director, not the visual content. Later Bowie clips, for “Be My Wife” [138] and “Heroes” [149], were no more daring, paling alongside those prepared by (for example) Queen for “Bohemian Rhapsody” several years earlier.

Bowie's leap into the future came in 1979 with David Mallet's video for “Boys Keep Swinging” [171]. It began conventionally enough, with the singer miming an extravagant performance in a suit that his younger Mod self would have relished in 1965. But then Bowie appeared as a trio of drag queens, ranging from a vamp to an aged actress. One by one they took center stage, the first two routines ending as he angrily tore off his wig and smeared his lipstick across his face in a gesture
*
of total contempt. If his videos for “DJ” [169] and “Look Back in Anger” [170] were less iconoclastic, they still allowed him to explore intimations of significance that were not necessarily present in the songs themselves.

Bowie must have realized that he could now express himself more adventurously with visuals than on record. Nothing on
Lodger
, for example, matched the daring, Dada-inspired performances of “Boys Keep Swinging,” “TVC15” [129], and “The Man Who Sold the World” [26] that he staged for the US television show
Saturday Night Live
in December 1979. For “Boys Keep Swinging,” a cigarette-thin puppet was visually attached to his human head and literally kept swinging as Bowie manipulated the controls. He was carried forward to sing “The Man Who Sold the World” in a full-body manikin, its angular construction the offspring of the strange coupling of Dadaist Hugo Ball and new wave performance artists Devo. Bowie's handlers, Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias, had been plucked from the milieu at Fiorucci, the New York fashion store that (according to commentator Eve Babitz) gathered “the whole 20th century in one place.” Its Day-Glo, fluorescent colors and self-conscious hedonism resembled a decadent form of Pop Art that could only have arisen from fin-de-decade New York—achieving a gothic poignancy when AIDS began to ravage the community that gathered at its East Fifty-ninth Street location (Nomi becoming one of the first such casualties). Bowie carried that spirit into his 1980 videos for “Ashes to Ashes” [184], where he donned a Pierrot suit to be followed along a bleak English shore by London's equivalent of the Fiorucci kids and (of course) a giant bulldozer; and “Fashion” [185], a mock-performance clip featuring similar robotic moves to those pioneered by Nomi and Devo. By the time that he offered spirited, if ragged, renditions of “Life on Mars?” [52] and “Ashes to Ashes” on
The Tonight Show
in 1980, it was a surprise that he chose not to embellish the songs with anything more visually dramatic than the expression on his face as he reached for the high notes. (He would never perform “Life on Mars?” in its original key again, subtly lowering the pitch for his eighties tours—a decade of smoking and six years of cocaine having exacted their revenge on his throat.)

His video making seems to have renewed Bowie's faith in the power of the visual, which had been jolted by his experience with
Just a Gigolo
. As he completed work on the
Scary Monsters
album in New York, he took what was arguably his bravest artistic decision of a risk-filled decade, accepting the lead role in a nonmusical play,
The Elephant Man
. As a teenager, Bowie had read about the plight of John Merrick in Frank Edwards's book
Strange People
, and had watched the initial production of the play on Broadway. The role required him to become a man trapped in the misshapen ghastliness of his own body, but without (unlike John Hurt in David Lynch's contemporaneous movie based on the same story) the aid of appropriate makeup and costume. Here, at last, Bowie was able to reveal how much he had learned from Lindsay Kemp. Onstage, through subtle movements that betrayed the intensity of his plight, he became one of the twisted, distorted figures he had admired in the work of Egon Schiele, his voice a half-blocked caricature of a “normal” man, the enormity of his character's ordeal conveyed all the more dramatically for his conscious lack of theatricality. This was one of Bowie's finest performances—musical or otherwise—of the long seventies, and tellingly, perhaps, also the only one to which he contributed not an ounce of irony. He was simply himself, not the reflected shadow of his own past, and simultaneously
not
himself, but John Merrick. He could finally justify the title he had awarded himself in 1971: the Actor.

AFTERWORD

 

I

It was the Actor who learned, on December 8, 1980, that his friend John Lennon had been murdered, a mile and a half from where Bowie had just left the stage of the Booth Theater. The killer, who had attended an earlier performance of
The Elephant Man
, later admitted that he had considered Bowie as a target, before opting to kill the emblematic figure of the sixties, rather than the seventies.

Security at the theatre was strengthened, and Bowie was able to fulfill his commitment to
The Elephant Man
, though he declined the offer to extend his run beyond early January. Then he flew home to Switzerland, the manic tumult of New York City having lost its charm. Lennon's death encouraged him into seclusion, removing any temptation to stage the world tour he had vaguely promised for 1981. And there was another equally compelling justification for retirement. As mentioned earlier, Bowie's 1975 settlement with Tony Defries ensured that his ex-manager would receive (in perpetuity) 16 percent of Bowie's income from all his recording projects and acting engagements until September 30, 1982, and 5 percent of his earnings from concert appearances. The 16 percent share also applied to any songs that Bowie wrote before that deadline. So there was a clear incentive for him to refrain from composing or recording a hasty successor to
Scary Monsters
until his obligations were at an end.

Yet Bowie was incapable of absolute silence. The same drive that had impelled him toward work as a defense against madness was now focused on protecting him from his addictive urges. He recorded a theme song for the film
Cat People
, and was persuaded to collaborate with the rock band Queen on a recording session that produced a chart-topping single, “Under Pressure.” Even when trying to avoid boosting Defries's earnings, he could not escape the commercial power of his self-created mythology. His fame also won him roles in the films
The Hunger
and
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
, which helped to erase memories of his unfortunate part in
Just a Gigolo
.

None of this activity threatened to harm his reputation, or widen his horizons. His most adventurous work during this strange interlude was also, in financial terms, the least rewarding. In September 1981, he transferred the skills he had acquired during
The Elephant Man
to British television, delivering a strikingly low-key performance as the star of the BBC's staging of Bertolt Brecht's musical drama
Baal
. The four Brecht/Weill songs from the drama were released as a single; like “Alabama Song” [218], they suggested that the post-
“Heroes”
Bowie was never more himself than when articulating other people's themes. His performances displayed staggering vocal control and extravagant theatricality, an almost arrogant self-confidence and sure-footedness, and total artistic certainty. These qualities would prove elusive in the decade ahead.

 

II

In March 1960, the performance artist Gustav Metzger issued a manifesto proclaiming the necessity of creating “Auto-Destructive Art.” It was, he declared, the only valid response to a world in which the superpowers stockpiled nuclear weapons, the population of the West wallowed in consumerism, the Third World starved, and society exerted a “disintegrative effect” on its citizens. Metzger defined auto-destruction as “art which contains in itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction within a period of time not to exceed twenty years.”

Auto-destruction entered the world of rock music via Pete Townshend of the Who, who studied under Metzger at Ealing College of Art and borrowed his teacher's rhetoric to justify destroying his guitar as the climax to the band's performances. By the late seventies, however, rock appeared to be enacting its own process of auto-destruction, true to Metzger's twenty-year deadline. The apparently seamless tradition of what would later be called “classic rock” was splintering under the pressure of cocaine-fueled decadence and the incursion of new musical genres (notably punk, disco, and the first stirrings of hip-hop). In truth, there had been disruptive and transgressive elements at work throughout the history of rock: what had fragmented was rock culture's sense of certainty and identity, the “great man” theory of its history that imagined the music progressing endlessly from Elvis Presley through Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones to (in one common reading of the rock narrative) Bruce Springsteen and perhaps Bob Marley.

The eternal outsider of the seventies, David Bowie escaped inclusion in this tradition, not least because his continual shifts of style and sound evaded easy categorization. In the aftermath of punk, when nothing was less fashionable than to admit a debt to the monoliths of the previous era, Bowie was one of the few veterans who could be acknowledged without loss of face. His mark was unmistakable on the gloomy art rock of Siouxsie & the Banshees, Joy Division, and the Cure; on the synthetic landscapes of the New Romantics; on the continual reinvention and sexual ambiguity that fueled the stardom of Madonna and Prince. So prevalent, indeed, was his influence in the music of the early eighties that his own creative absence was barely noticeable.

He would soon reappear in spectacular style, not as an innovator but as an institution. Bowie celebrated the expiration of his contractual obligations in late 1982 by beginning work on his first new album in three years. His choice of producer was significant: Tony Visconti, his collaborator on a series of sonically challenging records, was sidelined in favor of Nile Rodgers, writer/guitarist for the New York band Chic. Rodgers's trademarks were a sparse, slippery disco groove and a dazzling surface sheen. Both qualities were in evidence on
Let's Dance
, an impeccably crafted and effortlessly commercial record that duly became the best-selling album of Bowie's career. Throughout, his vocals were subtle and transparent, seeming to be devoid of artifice. So too was the epic world tour that followed, in which the once deathly cocaine addict of the mid-seventies was miraculously transformed into a paragon of vitality and well-being, the gleam of his refashioned teeth rivaled only by the bleached glow of his hair. Though his repertoire mixed new hits with old, and was ecstatically received, there was no hint in this revamped Bowie of the tortured, ambivalent artist of old. It was as if he had exiled his questing, experimental spirit as an uncomfortable relic of an age that he preferred to forget. The Bowie of
Let's Dance
(and the clumsily titled Serious Moonlight Tour) questioned nothing, risked nothing, stood for nothing. He had finally become the all-round entertainer of Kenneth Pitt's dreams, his cabaret aspirations of 1968 expanded to fill the stadia of 1983.

Once again, Bowie was in perfect tune with the times: the mid-eighties was the era of Armani rock, when the mavericks of yesteryear refashioned themselves as show ponies for the world's most celebrated designers, and the rhetoric of rock rebellion became the sanitized language of mass entertainment. If Bowie retained enough dignity to sidestep the constant round of Prince's Trust concerts inhabited by the likes of Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, and Mark Knopfler, he was still offering merely the palest shadow of his former iconoclasm. More worryingly, he had shed any sense of artistic integrity. As the decade unfolded, each creative misfire seemed to corrode his former glory. In 1969, some Beatles fans had chosen to believe that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1966, and an imposter had been substituted in his place. Albums as bereft of inspiration as
Tonight
(except for “Loving the Alien,” perhaps) and
Never Let Me Down
suggested that the real Bowie had been stuffed into a closet after the completion of
Baal
and supplanted by a stray replicant from the 1982 movie
Blade Runner
. The faux Bowie fumbled with the familiar symbolism of the genuine model, thereby concocting the preposterous Glass Spider Tour (a triumph of effects over effectiveness) instead of the Spiders from Mars, and a succession of haircuts and costumes that alluded to the uncanny strangeness of the seventies Bowie without any of its mystery.

In commercial terms, Bowie had never been more successful or, arguably, more influential, as critic Nicholas Pegg noted: “The cutting-edge ensemble choreography which soon became
de rigeur
among stadium superstars like Prince, Madonna and Jacksons Michael and Janet (not to mention the relentless parade of synchro-dancing boy bands), owes a tremendous debt to
Glass Spider
.” But having deposited his checks, and basked in the knowledge that he was finally achieving the monetary security that had evaded him throughout the seventies, Bowie was left curiously unsatisfied. The result was Tin Machine, a much-maligned attempt to sublimate his identity within a four-piece hard rock band, and rekindle a sense of personal connection with his music. Tin Machine's two studio records inspired some of the most effective vocal performances of his career, but his commitment to them was undermined when they were overshadowed by another blatant exercise in milking nostalgia for money: the 1990 Sound + Vision Tour. Explained at the time as a last opportunity to hear Bowie performing his greatest hits (a promise that predictably was not kept), this mammoth venture in stadium rock seemed to denote that he would no longer pretend to be an innovator or an explorer: like the Rolling Stones, he would sell the memory of his rebellious youth until he or his audience ceased to care or breathe.

 

III

Tin Machine stopped working in February 1992. Two months later, Bowie appeared alongside Mick Ronson at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in London, closing his performance not with “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide,” as Ziggy Stardust would have done, but with an impromptu recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Religion had been absent from Bowie's work since “Word on a Wing” [128]: orthodox Christianity did not form part of his public image. So his recitation was perhaps the single most shocking moment of his career: utterly sincere, totally in keeping with the ethos of the occasion, completely at odds with the totemic clichés of the classic rock tradition. Sadly, none of that defiant individualism was apparent on the album that followed:
Black Tie/White Noise
reunited Bowie with Nile Rodgers, with predictably slick and unfulfilling results.

After ten years that had brought him unimaginable wealth but little artistic satisfaction, he was offered the glimmer of inspiration from an unlikely source. Hanif Kureishi invited Bowie to provide the soundtrack for a BBC-TV adaptation of his novel
The Buddha of Suburbia
, which was rooted in the South London culture from which Bowie had emerged and the mercurial London milieu he had helped to create. Bowie duly delivered an assortment of incidental music and a title song that brilliantly combined his own past with Kureishi's themes, evoking the full span of his seventies work. His commitment to the TV series ended there, but Bowie returned to the studio three months later to rework and extend several of his incidental pieces, emerging after less than a week with a completed album. Erroneously packaged as a soundtrack record for
The Buddha of Suburbia
, it mixed cut-up “sound poetry” with explorations of ambient sound reminiscent of his late-seventies work, as if the mere sight of a rough cut of Kureishi's film had been sufficient
*
to remind Bowie of why he had once been a creative icon.

That flash of insight shocked Bowie out of the torpor that had surrounded him for a decade. In spring 1994, he embarked on a complex and deliberately uncommercial recording project intended to fuel a series of albums. His choice of collaborator was Brian Eno, with whom he had last worked on
Lodger
. Eno's Oblique Strategies cards guided the creation of many hours of music, and Bowie employed a cut-up computer program for lyrical inspiration, ensuring that the methodology that had shaped their seventies liaisons was suitably revised for a new era of technology. Bowie emerged with
1.Outside: The Diary of Nathan Adler
, the first (and last) installment of what he described as “a non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle.”

Issued after
Low
and
“Heroes
,
”
in some fantasy late-seventies landscape that enabled access to mid-nineties computers and samplers,
1.Outside
would have consolidated Bowie's reputation as rock's most fearless exponent of the avant-garde as a means of mass communication. Instead, like his four subsequent albums,
1.Outside
entranced his (remarkably large) core of followers without touching or influencing anyone beyond the faithful. So it was that some of his most adventurous (
1.Outside
and the 1997 rock/dance crossover
Earthling
) and proficient (
“hours . . . ,”
Heathen
, and
Reality
, issued between 1999 and 2003) records remain unheard by all but a small fraction of the global audience who had relished his seventies and early-eighties output. Ironically, Bowie did complete an album that might have reached out to that wider audience, but his record company refused to release it.
Toy
was scheduled to appear in 2001, but Virgin/EMI entangled Bowie in what he described as “unbelievably complicated scheduling negotiations,” and the record was lost. Several songs dripped onto the market as B-sides and bonus tracks, but it was only in spring 2011 that the entire record leaked onto Internet fan forums. Eleven of its fourteen tracks had been written or (in the case of “Liza Jane,” [A1]) first recorded by Bowie between 1964 and 1971. He approached them now in the guise of a kindly uncle left in control of an unruly pack of children. He deliberately adopted a low, husky delivery for the entire record, not because his upper register had vanished (as the subsequent
Heathen
and
Reality
proved) but perhaps to designate both his distance from the past and also his mature acceptance of his bewildering array of youthful incarnations. It was a dignified, elegantly constructed album, from a man who had survived the process of selling himself to the world, and lived to tell the tale.