In fairness, maybe the industrial growl of the Black TieWhite Noise cassette she was holding wasn’t the easiest way to understand
Bowie, but the idea of being able to dismiss someone whose music was crucial to
the way my teenage hormones were interpreting the world was
incomprehensible. ‘Don’t really get the
whole David Bowie thing? But Bowie just
is; he’s everything,’ I could have replied, but didn’t, mainly because I was
too interested in doing other things with her than arguing.
It feels as though Bowie has always been a part of my
cultural landscape. I probably first
heard him through someone’s older brother, but I’d have been aware of who he
was. He was a name, a concept. Oh, yeah, David Bowie.
The late eighties and early nineties were not a great time
to be into music. In retrospect there
were pioneering albums like Soul2Soul, Massive Attack and Sceamdelica, but for
most early teenage boys the charts were dominated by rave-fail dross the
Shamen, baggy shoegazing landfill and endless Stock Aiken and Waterman pap
machines. On the horizon were Blur and
Suede, but with no internet the best we could really do was Bon Jovi whose
bombastic faux cowboy bravado already sounded false. Or we could go back in time. I’d already been muddling around with AC/DC,
Talking Heads and Madness, much to the confusion of my school friends, who
couldn’t understand my derision of Terrorvision, but then someone played me
David Bowie and my thirteen year old brain was immediately convinced that he
was all that pop music could be.
Being of little money and not much more savvy, I probably
asked my parents for ‘some David Bowie’ for an upcoming birthday. They dutifully obliged, buying me his latest
release, the aforementioned Black Tie White Noise. Neither they nor I would have realised that
Bowie was following the same rules as Bob Dylan, Neil Young and anyone else
trying to sustain an extended career in pop music, namely that the majority of
the eighties and early nineties output was either dreadful or wildly
experimental to try and avoid being bland beyond belief. Black Tie White Noise is, strangely, somehow
both.
‘Hmmm,’ I thought to myself, in my bedroom with my little
black tape deck, ‘this isn’t quite what I’d been expecting.’ But I persevered and from somewhere I
acquired a second hand copy of one the numerous Bowie compilations,
Changesbowie I think, and the hits of the seventies made it all make sense
again, somehow driving straight into a timeless teenage sense of uselessness
and triumph all bound up.
By the time I was fifteen I was wearing out a cassette of
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars whilst completing
the half-dozen paper rounds I did to earn money to buy music and comics. On I would stride, my walkman rolling with the sway of my hip
and in my head the grand scope of the coming apocalypse, bands who could change
the world all wrapped up in a furious rhythm and nonsensical lyrics distracted
from the suburban tedium of the free Solihull Journal. Even now, Rock and Roll Suicide makes me
think of one bright Sunday morning, shortly after I’d discovered beer, crossing
the road and blinking in the haze, thinking that it, if it could be about
anyone, then it could also be about me, there, stuck in that moment.
Bowie’s sudden return, almost as though from the dead,
earlier this year shouldn’t really have surprised anyone. Yes, there was something dignified in his
apparent retirement and there wasn’t any shock that a man who once solely
sustained himself on milk, red peppers and cocaine, eventually found his body
giving up and suffering an on-stage heart attack, but the ability to do the
unexpected has been Bowie’s stock-in-trade for his entire career. Indeed, nor is it a surprise that at a still
relatively youthful sixty-six Bowie would want to give up the career he had to
fight so hard to get started.
Indeed, Bowie wouldn’t be a pop star in the twenty-first
century. He’d have gone mad and blown
it. Or madder and blown it more
permanently, I should say given his occasional lapse into Nazi fuelled megalomania. Before the ego rocketed, though, he
floundered for years, going through different incarnations of himself and
novelty singles with various versions of his band until eventually scoring a
hit single with Space Oddity and then, promptly, messing up the subsequent
album. Even the magnificent Changes from
the, with hindsight, brilliant yet ignored album Hunky Dory failed to
chart in the UK. These days, Bowie’s
twitter feed and YouTube hype would have seen him implode with self-imposed
expectation. Instead, back when there
was privacy and memories weren’t supported by Wikipedia, through a Nietzsche
superman style self will and stomping tunes he rebirthed himself as an alien
rock-god. Two albums of phenomenal cultural
zeitgeist success and, bored already, Bowie killed off Ziggy and the Spiders,
live at the end of a documented concert, and transformed himself into a plastic
soul prince. Fame’s fame nearly broke
him, though, and he retreated into dystopian weariness to create the Berlin
trilogy of albums that defined music for the remainder of the twentieth century
(and somehow ended up being the soundtrack to last year euphoria fuelled
Olympics).
‘You obsess over misery,’ a girl once said to me. ‘It’s like you’re desperate for it all to end
badly.’ I think she probably meant
melancholy or being morose rather than misery.
I was rather depressed when I knew her, run down by a life that hadn’t
met the dreams of my youth, but, still, it’s a handy bit of dialogue to
borrow. I was going to write that Bowie
kind of obsesses over misery too, but I’ve just realised that he doesn’t. Bowie obsesses over chaos and disorder. Rebel-Rebel and Suffragette City may be
packed full of rock n roll exuberance, but the former is on a 1984 coming into
existence concept album. Cheery and ordered it ain’t.
I think we forget how much of a mess the seventies
were. Political terrorism in Western
Europe, opposite ends of the left-right spectrum blowing each other up in
capital cities, the rest of the world joining us in Armageddon fear as East and
West kept their finger on the launch button, the oil crisis, monetary
implosion, the three day week, intense industrial unrest, the mourning of the
sixties social revolution’s death when everyone needed to grow up and get a job
but there weren’t any left. Bowie’s
music thrilled off the back of all this, dragging us wailing and singing into
the glorious disastrous end. The world
was checking out, but its finale would be a wonderful extravaganza of light and
music.
Christ, when all that stopped no wonder he didn’t know how
to tackle decades which weren’t supposed to exist.
Then it all went a bit wrong, didn’t it? Let’s Dance’s unashamed pop may be unjustly
scorned, but what followed, stadium filling chart fluster, ill-advised MickJagger collaborations, the garage rock boredom of Tin Machine, forays into drum
and bass (Battle of Britain is a good, if not great, single, but no-one needs to
listen to the whole of Earthling) and then finally, the light shines on old age
and a respectability as a narrator of life and times with aging albums.
He found some sort of centre, but, maybe, as the
twenty-first century has marched on that centre has rocked. Maybe we’re not out of the apocalypse woods
yet. The Next Day may, sort of, suggest
that Bowie thinks he’s only entering his second phase, but that judgement needs
more hindsight than the hysteria that’s gathering around it now, still, really,
who’d have it any other way? Fuck
it. If it’s going to fail, better to do
so in splendour than never to even try, right?
‘I have an idea for a novel,’ I remember telling a fellow
Bowie fan, aged fifteen, on the way home from school. ‘Well a vague idea. I want to write something
based around Ziggy Stardust, but a more literal interpretation of the
songs. Five Years. Moonage Daydream. Lady Stardust. All woven together. The end of the world. A teenage boy and girl, no-one’s too sure
which is which. Guitars. Aliens.
Sex. Death.’
‘That’s my idea,’ he shouted indignantly and, truthfully, I
wasn’t even surprised.
Bowie’s Ziggy albums speak to the excited teenage in all of
us. If you let it, the rest of his work follows
you through your life. Just remember to
skip Never Let Me Down.
A couple of years later, I saw the girl again at a party,
one of those teenage parties where the air of someone’s parents’ lounge is
fogged with cigarette smoke drifting back in through the open windows and the
last drizzle from upturned cans of beer trails onto the carpet already muddied
by the overturned pot plant. All far
from true chaos yet also a long way from politely sitting around the dinner
table with red wine - the sort of party I’ve become used to these days. The music was always more important when
you’re young. It was grunge’s last days,
Britpop’s peak and the coming of ubiquitous house-techno-rock fusion, so I was
mildly surprised to note that someone had put Bowie on. As Starman reached its arms around the
shoulder possible allusion to casual sex with inter-galactic visitors zenith,
the girl from my bedroom turned to me and said: ‘Oh, maybe I do get it after
all.’ But by then it was already far too
late.
Six not necessarily obvious Bowie songs for you to enjoy:
1) All the Young Dudes. Seriously at one point
Bowie had so much creativity oozing out of him he gave this song to Mott and
the Hopple. Mott and the fricking Hopple
for God’s sake. Best bit? The way he layers up the images of
devastation around him and his voice kind hits a squealing desperation.
2)
Somebody Up There Likes Me. Young Americans is one of my favourite Bowie
albums – this squawling mania is a perfect example of its brilliance. Best bit?
The way the whole song builds into a huge crescendo and you just know he
doesn’t even believe it himself
3)
Always Crashing In The same Car. ‘Heroes?’ is the most famous Berlin single,
but I love the melancholy of this, about Bowie dinking his rented Mercedes in a
German car-park. Best bit? The way it all sounds so terrible and yet,
hell, it could be a lot worse couldn’t it?
There’s a surprisingly, underlying cheer there too.
4)
Modern Love. For pure pop this is near on perfect. Best bit?
Right at beginning: ‘I know when to go out, I know when to stay
in.’ No, David, you definitely
didn’t. (Truly dreadful video, mind).
5)
Absolute Beginners. Not all of the eighties and nineties were bad
for Bowie, this genius song is one of my all time favourites but it’s hidden
away on a soundtrack; sublime. Best bit? The whole futility of the age of despair
laced through the whole song, even the soaring vocal. Bo-bah-doom, indeed. (And a surprisingly good video, for the eighties,
where private-eye Bowie seems to be perused by a strange cat lady as he tries
to buy some fags, and then a giant typewriter turns up. Awesome.)
6)
Everyone Says Hi, many fans dislike Bowie’s
later life phase wishing he was still their teenage idol. This, however, I think, is both charmingly
optimistic for life whilst realising the doom and gloom which are always on the
edge of everything we do. Best bit? It’s mawkishness. Which is also its worst bit, but everyone’s
allowed some weary sentimentality sometimes, aren’t they? Especially when the tune as well synched to
your emotions as this is.
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