On Bowie Read online

  Till the sun drips love on the seedy

  young knights

  Who press you on the ground while

  shaking in fright.

  The world is a prostituted sexual hell defined by random ultra-violence. The song ends plaintively and desperately:

  I guess we could cruise down one more time

  With you by my side it should be fine

  We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band

  Then jump in the river holding hands.

  The only possible connection in a desperate, ruined world, the sole remainder of love, is to take some drugs and carry out a suicide pact, like the German writer Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, who killed themselves on the shore of the Wannsee outside Berlin after drinking coffee they had brought to them from a nearby café. In a loveless world, love can only be saved through death.

  I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE ALLUSION TO les tricoteuses and make a little leap here, or at least take a small step. When I listen to Diamond Dogs and think about Bowie’s dystopian vision, I think of Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death (Dantons Tod). This extraordinary play is defined by a post-revolutionary sense of despair, inaction and pervasive nihilism. Just prior to his execution, the imprisoned Danton says,

  Everything is packed and swarming. The nothing has killed itself (das Nichts hat sich ermordert).

  Creation is its wound. We are its drops of blood, and the world the grave in which it rots.

  Such, I think, is Bowie’s dystopia defined by Enlightenment’s deadly dialectic. We declare that God is dead and turn ourselves into Gods only in order to kill better, to exterminate more effectively. We have become heathen. Danton goes on,

  The world is chaos. Nothingness is the world-god waiting yet to be born (das Nichts ist das zu gebärende Weltgott).

  Danton’s Death ends with Lucile – most Ophelialike – mounting the steps of the guillotine where the guards are sleeping. She shouts, “Long live the King! (Es lebe der König!)” It seems like a suicidal gesture and one imagines that she is swiftly dispatched, although Büchner leaves the audience to draw that inference. Yet, Paul Celan, in his justly famous “Meridian” speech, given when accepting the Büchner Prize in 1960, finds another meaning to Lucile’s words. He insists that “It is an act of freedom. It is a step.” If that step might appear to be a reactionary defence of the ancien régime, then Celan counters,

  But it is not. Allow me, who grew up on the writings of Peter Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, to insist: this is not homage to any monarchy, to any yesterday worth preserving.

  It is homage to the majesty of the absurd which bespeaks the presence of human beings.

  This, Ladies and Gentlemen, has no definitive name, but I believe that this is… poetry (die Dichtung).

  Fascinatingly, Celan places Lucile’s act under the aegis of Kropotkin’s anarchism of mutual aid and Landauer’s more heady mystical anarchism. Slightly further on, Celan adds what he calls a “topological” dimension to this thought. To take Lucile’s step is to see things “in a u-topian light”. Therefore, the act of freedom which is poetry is u-topian:

  We came into the nearness of the open and the free. And finally into the nearness of Utopia.

  Poetry is a step, an act of freedom taken in relation to a world defined by the majesty of the absurd, a human world. Thus, Büchner’s dystopia is the condition for utopia. My only real thought about Bowie is that his art is also such a step. It sets us free in relation to a civilisation that is petrified and dead. One does not fix up a house that is falling off a cliff. Bowie’s dystopia is utopian in equal measure.

  I think this thought casts a different light on Bowie’s vision of the world and world politics. Consider a track like the stunning “It’s No Game”, which appears in two versions (“Part 1” and “Part 2”) as bookends to Scary Monsters. Tony Visconti revealed that, amazingly, both versions have the same backing track, although at that point the similarities end. Where the second version is flat, direct and affectless, the first version features Bowie at his most powerfully histrionic, accompanied by a menacing voiceover in Japanese by Michi Hirota and an insane guitar part by Robert Fripp. The track finishes with Bowie screaming “shut up” over Fripp’s seemingly endless, repeating guitar riff.

  What Bowie describes is a Büchnerian world of terror. The first line, “Silhouettes and shadows watch the revolution”, describes the languor and disappointment of a post-revolutionary situation. In an allusion to Eddie Cochran’s posthumously released 1960 hit, there are no longer “three steps to heaven”. All that remains are “Big heads and drums – full speed and pagan”. “So, where’s the moral?” Bowie asks. “People have their fingers broken.” In the final verse of “Part 2”, Bowie concludes,

  Children round the world

  Put camel shit on the walls

  They’re making carpets on treadmills

  Or garbage sorting.

  So, where’s the moral in all this camel shit? Pop stars, like the dreadful Bono, are meant to morph into slimmer versions of Salman Rushdie and mouth liberal platitudes about the state of the world and what we can do to put it right. But here Bowie gives the lie to such liberal complacency by exposing it to a simple, visceral critique. The inexpensive carpets that we use to furnish our home are made by those living in camel-shit huts. Rather than amuse ourselves by playing with some fraudulent political agenda, Bowie simply declares that “It’s no game.” Shit is serious.

  The next track on Scary Monsters, “Up the Hill Backwards”, begins, “The vacuum created by the arrival of freedom, and the possibilities it seems to offer.” Like Lucile’s cry at the end of Danton’s Death, this line sounds like Edmund Burke’s conservative critique of the French Revolution. But adapting Celan’s logic, this is no homage to any monarchy or any yesterday, apart from the majesty of the absurd, which is the world of human beings. Such is poetry in Celan’s sense – Bowie’s poetry.

  WE WERE YOUNG AND DUMB BACK THEN AT twelve, thirteen, and fourteen years old. But Bowie taught us both the deceptive nature of illusion and its irresistible power. We learned to live with illusion and learn from illusion rather than run away from it. To inhabit this space is also to live after the revolution, in the dis-illusion that follows a revolutionary sequence. For us, this was the fucked-up, disappointed solidarity of the early 1970s most powerfully expressed in “All the Young Dudes”, written by Bowie for Mott the Hoople. This song was like Kerouac’s On the Road for a beaten generation who knew they were going absolutely nowhere:

  My brother’s back at home with his

  Beatles and his Stones

  We never got it off on that revolution stuff

  … What a drag… too many snags.

  We followed Bowie from illusion to illusion. As he gradually ceased to be the huge mainstream pop star that he was in the Ziggy period, my interest in him only intensified.

  In February 1976, I stole a secondhand copy of Station to Station from David’s (no relation) Bookshop in Letchworth Garden City. I was nearly sixteen and felt that something was beginning to change in both Bowie and myself. The ten-minute and fourteen-second title track (Bowie’s longest) seemed to open a door on to a new landscape of musical possibilities. Importantly, whatever this was didn’t have a name. But it was no longer rock and roll. That’s why I liked it.

  Like so many of my generation, by this time I was listening to a weird cocktail that included Detroit rock and roll, like Iggy and the Stooges and the mighty MC5, combined with the proto-ambient sound spaces of Terry Riley and Fripp & Eno. At the same time, I was particularly obsessed with the flood of new music coming out of the erstwhile West Germany, especially bands like Neu!, Can, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh, Amon Düül II, as well as the strangely monumental French band, Magma.

  I remember walking into John Menzies newsagents in Letchworth late one afternoon in January 1977 and listening to Low with the girl who worked there, whom I fancied rather a lot without ever telling her. We listened to the whole album a
t the back of the shop. Although it sounded like it was recorded in outer space and we’d never heard drums sound quite like that and so far up in the mix, it made perfect sense to us. Even the ambient and instrumental side two. It was a cold winter and this was the chilliest modernism. I was ready for it. For reasons that I still don’t understand, I spent four months at the end of 1976 in complete solitude, apart from forced interactions with my mother and odd days and Saturday mornings working in a sheet-metal factory with my dad. So, when Bowie half sang the words, in “Sound and Vision”, “Drifting into my solitude,” it had a profound effect. I too had been low.

  Punk changed all that, and by March 1977 I was wearing black bondage trousers, a Lewis leather jacket, and twelve-hole Dr Martens boots. I’d been playing off and on in crappy bands for a couple of years with names like the Social Class Five and Panik (with a k, just to be Germanic). When ‘Heroes’ was released just nine months after Low, in October 1977, it hit those of us who heard it with extraordinary force. Not so much the title track, which I now like much more than I did back then, but the thick, rich, layered, complex density of the production in tracks like “Beauty and the Beast” and especially “Blackout”. It also sounded black and was as funky as hell, driven on by Bowie’s best rhythm section of Dennis Davis, Georges Murray and Carlos Alomar. Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics floated above in the ether. I wore out two copies of ‘Heroes’ by imitating the bass parts on my Fender Jazz copy, and lost my third. I thought to myself and told anyone whose ear I could bend that this was how music should sound. I still think that’s true. The effects of the recording and production techniques in ‘Heroes’ can still be heard loud and clear in contemporary music – for example, the Arcade Fire’s stunning Reflektor from 2013, which features a one-line cameo from Bowie.

  The huge anticipation surrounding Lodger in May 1979 meant that the album had to be a disappointment, with too many obsessively reworked, repetitive loops turned into songs and an oddly thin sound. Some of those loops worked, like “Red Sails”, a worthy homage to Neu! “Repetition” is a song of great power about domestic violence that works because of its lack of direct moralising, delivered by Bowie in an affectless monotone. I remember sitting alone cross-legged on the floor of my mum’s flat gazing at the distorted accident-victim image of Bowie on the cover and trying to like the album more and find ways of forgiving slightly dumb tracks like “Yassassin”, the dreaded white reggae cover (for Bowie to sound even remotely like Sting was unbearable).

  Scary Monsters was a different story. By this time, after an embarrassing two-year spell at a local catering college (my school had closed and been turned into an unemployment-benefit office and the college was just next door – call me lazy) and having failed to become a rock star, I was on the dole and went to do some courses at Stevenage Further Education College (let’s just say that it wasn’t exactly Harvard). I didn’t have the money to buy albums, so I listened to a friend’s copy at the student union during lunchtimes. I was overwhelmed by the self-reflexive brilliance of “Ashes to Ashes” and “Teenage Wildlife”. Bowie looked at himself, knowing that everyone was looking at him. But I remember having the distinct feeling of a door being closed. Scary Monsters was acutely self-conscious of the instrumental role that Bowie had played at every stage in the development of punk and post-punk. It was kind of a meta-album. But there was something sad about it. Or maybe that sadness was mine. I had begun to discover another world of pleasure in words and was writing truly awful poetry. A year or so later, I went to university and things changed. I learned to pretend I didn’t love Bowie as much as I did.

  IN HIS BOOK THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD: DAVID BOWIE AND THE 1970s, Peter Doggett argues that Bowie was an anachronism in the upbeat, libertarian world of the 1960s, but by the 1970s his audience had caught up with him and his picture of a world defined by fragmentation, decay and disappointment. Having killed Ziggy, Bowie moved relentlessly from illusion to illusion, following an artistic pattern of inhabitation, imitation, perfection and destruction. It’s a little like Gustav Metzger’s idea of auto-destructive art, and Bowie is perhaps a more persuasive example than Metzger’s erstwhile student Pete Townshend, when The Who used to auto-destructively smash up all their equipment at the end of a show. This fourfold pattern is perhaps clearest in the inhabitation of American soul and R&B in Young Americans. A perfect imitation of a genre also leads to its subtle elevation and then Bowie gets bored, destroys it and moves on. Station to Station is informed by clear traces of Young Americans, but is already shedding its skin and looking forward to Low.

  The point is that during the 1970s, especially from 1974 onwards, Bowie was able to mobilise an artistic discipline that is terrifying in its intensity, daring and risk. It is the very opposite of rock-star complacency. It is as if Bowie, almost ascetically, almost eremitically, disciplined himself into becoming a nothing, a mobile and massively creative nothing that could assume new faces, generate new illusions and create new forms. This is weird and rare. Perhaps it is unique in the history of popular music.

  After having made thirteen solo albums between 1969 and 1980 – excluding live recordings, compilations, plus all that he did for Lou Reed on Transformer (Reed’s best-selling and best solo album), for Iggy Pop on the monumental The Idiot and Lust for Life, for Mott the Hoople, and even for plucky little Lulu – Bowie effectively disappears in 1980. As Doggett insists, Bowie reappears in 1983 as the kind of blond, suntanned, smooth, chatty entertainer he had so fiercely ridiculed in the 1970s. I remember going to see him at the Milton Keynes Bowl in July 1983 when his band included Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick. Tickets cost a fortune and I felt absolutely flat throughout. I just remember being annoyed because I lost my glasses and couldn’t read the copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time that I had brought along with me. That’s about it.

  We mustn’t forget that there have been awful moments to be a Bowie fan. There have been some illusions I really could have done without. Not so much Let’s Dance (1983), which has several fine moments (I had been an assiduous student in producer Nile Rodgers’s school of funk for many years), but the slow and seemingly irreversible decline that was palpable on Tonight (1984), apart from “Loving the Alien”, and the truly execrable Never Let Me Down (1987). Bowie had somehow become convinced that covering and killing songs that he had co-written with Iggy, like “Neighborhood Threat”, was a good idea. It was really horrible and heartbreaking.

  But wait, things got even worse. Bowie had the terrific idea of forming an honest, go-ahead rock band called Tin Machine with a huge drum sound. Now, there are some good moments on the two Tin Machine albums, like the wonderful pastiche of Warholian indifference “I Can’t Read”, which has the great line, “Money goes to money heaven / Bodies go to body hell.” But does one track redeem the tub-thumping, macho rockiness of Tin Machine? No way.

  THE 1990S WERE A DIFFERENT STORY. EACH OF the four solo albums Bowie released during that decade had its specific virtues, as well as one or two vices. I couldn’t make up my mind about Black Tie White Noise (1993), although I listened to it a lot, and loved the happy, clappy abandon of the newly married Bowie on tracks like “Miracle Goodnight” and “Don’t Let Me Down and Down”. I was living in Frankfurt when Earthling was released in 1997 and was (I am ashamed to admit) still trying to go out clubbing during the heyday of the introduction of London drum and bass into Germany, though I could never figure out how to dance to it. I therefore had serious qualms about the drum and bass experiments of Earthling, despite loving the harmonic complexity of tracks like “Looking for Satellites”. The heavily retrospective and slightly claustrophobic Hours… from 1999, which was widely marketed as a kind of Summa of Bowie’s work that claimed to revisit each key moment in his development (it didn’t), was a disappointment for me, although “Survive” and “Thursday’s Child” are really quite wonderful songs.

  But then I remember listening to 1.Outside over and over and over again on a tiny cassette player in my girlfriend�
��s kitchen in Stockholm in the winter of 1995 and smiling to myself saying, “Yes, this is it. This is it.” I danced my legs down to the knees in that kitchen during those weeks, miming songs like a total fool, especially “No Control” and “The Motel”.

  Some years passed. Then, in June 2002, I was absolutely astonished and delighted at the appearance of Heathen, whose title track alone is breathtaking in its musical directness, subtlety and economy. Here was a different Bowie: reflective, deep, sombre, but still witty. The media declared it a post-9/11 Bowie. I was more sceptical. Heathen was quickly followed by Reality in 2003. These albums form a kind of pair, released in speedy succession, to the detriment of Reality, a really underrated album and the better of the two in my opinion. I remember driving around the Essex countryside in my Vauxhall Corsa listening to “New Killer Star” and “She’ll Drive the Big Car”. Bowie had also rediscovered the art of the ballad in this period on tracks like “Sunday”, “5:15 The Angels Have Gone”, and “The Loneliest Guy”. A sublimely healthy-looking Bowie, with amazing, lovely white teeth – a real tribute to his New York orthodontist – kept appearing on British talk shows and seemed completely in control, expertly deflecting unwelcome questions with wit…

  … And then nothing. Radio silence. I moved to New York City, Bowie’s adopted home. Maybe I would bump into him in the street. In 2004, there were stories of a heart attack in Germany, followed by rumours of illness, of lung cancer, of emphysema, all sorts of maladies. Late one night in Manhattan a few years back, I found myself in the apartment directly beneath Bowie’s while visiting a friend. I kept looking at the ceiling nervously, feeling like a sad middle-aged stalker. I even forced the host to play the whole of Ziggy Stardust, although very quietly, just in case he was trying to sleep. I had the weirdest dreams when I got home to bed.