The almost visual textures of this sequence of compositions were indebted to the innovations of the German band NEU!, although their debut album extended the range and impact of ambient sound to include the jarring assault of a pneumatic drill (on the track “Negativland”). In particular, “Leb Wohl” (from NEU! ’75) anticipated both the mood and the construction of “Moss Garden.” The list of instruments utilized by Bowie and Eno on Low and “Heroes” also bears comparison with NEU!’s work, as if the two British musicians had set themselves the task of assembling an album using the German band’s tools.
[157] NEUKÖLN
(Bowie/Eno)
Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP
* * *
From Kyoto, Bowie’s conceptual camera cut to a district of Berlin where, Bowie explained later, “the Turks are shackled in bad conditions. They’re very much an isolated community. It’s very sad.” In keeping with the shift from garden to city sprawl, this piece treated Eno’s synthesized canvas, with its rain and church bells, more harshly. Sustained guitar feedback created a gently acerbic tone, before the picture was filled out with keyboards and saxophone. The latter was perhaps Bowie’s most telling contribution to any of his instrumental collaborations with Eno: using pure emotion to fill the holes left in his rusty technique, he expressed the frustration of the Turkish immigrants with some deliberately harsh flurries of sound, before sounding the retreat with two elongated howls of despair.
[158] THE SECRET LIFE OF ARABIA
(Bowie/Eno/Alomar)
Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP
* * *
In an uncanny prediction of what awaited him on his next album project, Bowie turned imaginary tourist on this conceptually flawed and creatively hollow piece, which provided a bathetic climax to the “Heroes” LP. It also provided a template for the New Romantic movement of the early eighties, which took its inspiration from the surface appearance of Bowie’s work rather than its content. The vocals were mannered to the point of distraction; it was certainly difficult to find a rational explanation for his decision to tackle the word Arabia with a Cockney accent worthy of Dick Van Dyke. Likewise the combination of Bo Diddley’s signature R&B rhythm and “ethnic” instrumentation was curious rather than enlightening. The most exhilarating element of this evocation of Hollywood desert-movie clichés was the hand clapping, and even that was produced artificially—in keeping with the entirely fantastic, but never uplifting, nature of the song.
“HEROES” LP
Having neglected to promote Low (the title extending its influence from Bowie’s mental state to his public profile), he compensated with an energetic round of publicity interviews when its successor appeared just nine months later. Yet he was far from the egomaniac who had boasted a couple of years earlier that he was incapable of giving a poor performance. Indeed, his comments seemed designed to undercut any expectations about his music, which he described as “just a collection of stuff that I and Eno and Fripp had put together. . . . I could have used any of the songs as the title, because there’s no concept to the album.”
To prove that the public always distrusts modesty, “Heroes” marked a definite step downward in terms of raw commercial appeal. Low had benefited from following not only Station to Station but the first Bowie “hits” compilation, ChangesOneBowie. “Heroes” had to follow Low, with which he had signaled that he had no intention of being either a Ziggy Stardust clone or a disco icon. Sales of those two albums were remarkably consistent in Britain, a testament to the loyalty of Bowie’s fans. But in America, “Heroes” ended a run of eight Top 20 LPs, to become his worst-selling collection of new material since (ironically) the highly commercial Hunky Dory. Stranger still, the title track—acclaimed for at least three decades as one of Bowie’s greatest songs and performances—failed to touch the mainstream pop audience, peaking at No. 22 in Britain and entirely escaping the US Hot 100 chart. Bowie had effectively destroyed his chances on Top 40 radio in the States when “TVC15” [129] didn’t reproduce the dance-floor groove of “Golden Years” [127]. A succession of major British hits (“Sound and Vision” [136], “Boys Keep Swinging” [171], “Ashes to Ashes” [184], “Fashion” [185]) passed American radio by. ( It took a collaboration with Queen for Bowie to make a brief return to the US Top 30, after which “Let’s Dance” eradicated the radio producers’ misgivings.) Even at its most accessible, this album assembled a barrage of sonic elements that were acutely confrontational. As the New Musical Express’s Angus MacKinnon noted insightfully, its verbal content was equally abrasive: “instamatic lyric overflow, sense and sentence overcut at every opportunity . . . At first it’s impossible to keep up with the phenomenally fast event horizon.”
So dazzling was the assault upon the senses, in fact, that it was easy to overlook a crucial difference between this album and its predecessor. On Low, Bowie for once made no attempt to intervene a fictional self (or even an artistic one) between singer and audience. The songs could be interpreted as overtly autobiographical, and Bowie has said nothing since to deflect that interpretation. With “Heroes,” however, he reverted to a method that had protected him from intense scrutiny on the Diamond Dogs album: using vocals of astonishing physical commitment to voice lyrics that were oblique and often (through the use of the cut-up technique) deliberately evasive. Throughout Low, Bowie had rarely been more honest, or sung with less attempt to convey his emotional extremes; here, the positions were exactly reversed.
THE ART OF EXPRESSIONISM
The covers of The Idiot and “Heroes” were, quite consciously, posed—posed in such a way as to expose the artificiality of portraits that appeared spontaneous or natural. The Scottish performance artist Bruce McLean, who in 1972 staged a retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery, “just for one day,” set out in the early seventies to mimic, exploit, and subvert “the pose.” With a group of friends, he formed Nice Style, “the world’s first pose band,” as a satirical commentary on the pretensions of rock stars (and performance artists). Nice Style could have performed alongside the Moodies, the defiantly kitsch “mythic, cartoon-like ambassadors of a pure pop sensibility” who emerged at the same time from the arty Chelsea milieu that also spawned Roxy Music. Allowed an art school background, Bowie might have fitted alongside either ensemble: instead, as he recalled, “I was just a hack painter who wanted to find a new medium to work in, frankly. And rock’n’roll looked like a very good vehicle.”
For many years, after his disillusioning apprenticeship as an advertising visualizer, Bowie sacrificed his pretensions toward being an artist.* It was only when he stopped performing in 1975 that he allowed himself to dabble in art as well as the occult. By the end of that year, he had become quite the polymath, proudly declaring that he had been writing, painting, creating lithographs, printing silk screens. “I’m doing lots of sculptures as well,” he added, “sort of polythene and essential, functional things around the house. Some 15-foot* things.” He was convinced that a major gallery—perhaps the Metropolitan Museum of Art, why not?—was about to stage an exhibition of his work, something for which he had another twenty years to wait.
Transplanted to Berlin in 1976, he explored the local art scene and the city’s museums. He was already an aficionado of German expressionist cinema; now he searched out expressionist canvases wherever he could find them. He was particularly struck by the work of Erich Heckel, one of four architecture students in Dresden who, in 1905, formed a group called Die Brücke (“the bridge”). Heckel’s early work has been lauded for its “ecstatic expressiveness”: it included the portrait (Roquairol) that was mimicked on the cover of The Idiot. In the metropolitan paintings of George Grosz, Bowie found all the decadent turmoil of Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War I, the artist’s explanations for his apocalyptic visions being strangely reminiscent of Bowie’s account of America on the verge of catastrophe in 1972.
One painter above all entranced Bowie, to the extent that he intended to p
ortray him in a biopic that was being planned (but never filmed) by director Clive Donner. Egon Schiele had died from influenza in 1918, at the age of twenty-eight, three days after his wife (and four after he had painted her on her deathbed). In that brief life span, he had already declared that “everything is dead while it lives,” and he filled his canvases with bodies that appeared to be broken and decaying while they were still functionally alive. His subjects were pictured in contorted poses—their torsos twisted, or crouched uncomfortably just above the floor. (Bowie’s pose on the cover of “Heroes” was a generic blend of Schiele and Heckel iconography.) Art critic Erwin Mitsch noted that in his late self-portraits—one of which, from 1913, resembles Bowie at his most razor-edged and skeletal—“Mime and theatrical gesture have been exaggerated to abnormal tensions which are no longer subject to the will and cannot be controlled by it.” No wonder Bowie was attracted by the challenge of portraying him on-screen. He knew the pull of what Mitsch called “an uncompromising disregard for himself, and a fanatic search for truth, unchecked by any other consideration.” Thwarted by the collapse of the film project, and as yet uncertain of his ability to match Schiele’s efforts in oils, he preserved his vision of the artist’s work, and on Broadway in 1980 he found a way to combine it with his own.
[159] MADMAN
(Bowie/Bolan)
[160] SLEEPING NEXT TO YOU
(Bowie/Bolan)
Recorded by David Bowie and Marc Bolan, September 1977; unreleased
* * *
Marc Bolan’s status as Britain’s leading pop idol did not survive the arrival of Ziggy Stardust, a creature altogether more enigmatic and alluring. By 1973, Bolan’s popularity was undeniably waning: effectively a one-hit sensation in the United States, he achieved his final Top 10 success in the UK that summer. Though his self-confidence rarely wavered, his cloak of stardom quickly wore thin, although he retained a loyal following of committed fans. In a 1974 article tellingly titled “Bolan: Is He on the Wane?,” the first glam-rock superstar was finally prepared to admit that Bowie was his “only rival,” having previously dismissed him as a camp (in both senses of the word) follower.
Bowie and Bolan sat up for several days in Bowie’s New York hotel room in the summer of 1974, endlessly rerunning a print of A Clockwork Orange (“it reminded us of our childhoods,” Bolan claimed). High on cocaine, they concocted gargantuan plans for a joint album and a movie project, about which Bolan crowed: “David will write the screenplay, I will write the music. We’ll both have small roles, and we’ll both direct it.” Bowie could invent schemes like this at any moment of the day; his vaults must be full of improvised film treatments, as he continually announced that he had just written “several” or “twenty” screenplays. Sadly, Bolan took the drug-fueled proposals to heart, and wasted more of his diminishing supply of credibility by boasting about them to the British media, long after Bowie had forgotten the conversation. Bolan was still hyping the movie collaboration three years later (under another emblematic headline, “Boastful Bolan”): “I hope it’s going to be out in a year. All I can tell you is that it’s about a future society and reflects our own feelings. We’re also bringing out an album, doing a side each. What a combination it’s going to be. The two greatest musical influences of the Seventies joined together!”
As before, this meant more to Bolan than to Bowie, although the two men did meet up in the spring of 1977 during Bowie’s UK tour with Iggy Pop, and kicked around some musical ideas. At that point Bowie also agreed to take part in the final program of Bolan’s TV series, Marc!, a low-budget affair scheduled for late-afternoon children’s viewing. The series allowed punk music a rare showcase on British television, but otherwise merely emphasized how far Bolan’s status had declined since the days of “T.Rexstasy” six years earlier.
Before the filming, Bowie and Bolan worked up some fragments from their earlier jam session, in the style of Bowie’s collaborations with Iggy Pop. An album of such experiments might have been an interesting project, though the tapes of work in progress demonstrated how much Bolan’s desperate desire to be the center of attention was starting to rile his old friend/rival. Their joint TV performance lasted just seventy seconds, before Bolan slipped offstage as he was about to sing, Bowie chortled at his misfortune, and technicians declared that they were out of time. As, sadly, Bolan was: he died in a car accident a week later, before the show was broadcast.
[161] PEACE ON EARTH/LITTLE DRUMMER BOY
(Grossman/Fraser/Kohan; Davis/Onorati/Simeone)
Recorded by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, September 1977; single A-side
* * *
In the world of light entertainment, before rock’s unilateral declaration of independence from the rituals of show business, it was commonplace for pop stars to guest on television programs alongside more middle-of-the-road performers. The David Bowie who adored Sinatra and Garland, Anthony Newley and Sammy Davis Jr., did not balk at the invitation to appear on Bing Crosby’s 1977 Christmas TV special—especially when allowed the opportunity to perform “Heroes” [149] for Crosby’s audience. In keeping with the festive spirit of the show, Bowie also agreed to join the aged Crosby (who would die less than five weeks later) in a duet, on what he informed Crosby was his son’s favorite seasonal song, “Little Drummer Boy.”
In fact, Bowie hated that song, and agreed to participate only when the show’s musical directors hastily concocted an appropriate refrain for him to offer as a counterpoint: “Peace on Earth” (not to be confused with the Christmas song of the same name, earlier recorded by Dean Martin). The televised performance was preceded by some excruciatingly staged dialogue, in which Crosby pretended to be a visiting Yank in a British home, and Bowie turned up expecting to be greeted by friends, rather than a vaguely familiar American. “You’re the guy who sings, right?” he said in his best London-styled accent. Their duet was very much in Crosby’s style, not Bowie’s; it suggested that all conceptions of Bowie as a tortured rock auteur needed to be treated with a degree of skepticism.
Another project from 1977 reinforced that impression. The Philadelphia Orchestra recorded Peter and the Wolf, Prokofiev’s eerily charming children’s suite, in 1975, and then waited two years to secure a narrator. Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness politely turned them down, but Bowie agreed to the task—intended, so his publicist claimed, as a Christmas present for his son. Having recently met Bing Crosby with a cockney accent, Bowie now read Prokofiev’s script in an altogether more cultured and rootless tone, reading slowly, enunciating clearly and sometimes teetering on the verge of patronizing his preteen audience. But if his rendition lacked the gravitas of those by trained actors, such as Ralph Richardson, Peter Ustinov, and Sean Connery, it was perfectly respectable—another landmark in the career of an all-round family entertainer, in fact.
SOUND AND VISION #3: Just a Gigolo
During the period when Bowie was passing himself off as a crooner and narrator, strenuous efforts were being made by actor Dennis Hopper to secure the film rights to William S. Burroughs’s autobiographical novel Junky. Hopper was scheduled to direct, and was apparently keen to offer Bowie a leading role, but he was unable to secure sufficient funding. Numerous other movie projects were also under Bowie’s consideration during this period, among them a self-penned screenplay about Hermann Goering’s role in the Nazi Party (“Friends remember him being particularly interested in anything to do with Hitler,” one observer noted); the biopic about the expressionist painter Egon Schiele, which had the unpromising working title of Wally; and Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg, another examination of the extremes of German culture. Bergman’s was the only film brought to fruition, though without any involvement from Bowie, who had instead secured a leading role in a film set in his adopted home city of Berlin.
Just a Gigolo was directed by David Hemmings, an iconic actor best remembered today for his roles in a series of major late-1960s productions: Blow-Up, Camelot, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and
Barbarella. His directing experience was restricted to two low-budget British features, but Bowie was still prepared to risk signing up for his latest movie. The crucial factor in his decision was the fact that he would be appearing alongside one of his idols from the golden age of cinema, Marlene Dietrich, or so he supposed. Dietrich refused to travel to Germany, and insisted on shooting her sequences in Paris, so the two actors never met.
In retrospect, Bowie admitted that he had been unimpressed by the script, which required him to play a World War I veteran who haplessly becomes a member of a militarist cabal, but decided to trust that Hemmings’s charm might translate itself into a watchable piece of cinema. He was mistaken: by 1980, Bowie was saying, “The film was a cack, a real cack. Everybody who was involved in that film—when they meet each other now, they look away!” His initial feelings of anger at having been duped so easily were replaced by embarrassment and ultimately acceptance: Just a Gigolo had not, as some reviewers advised, ended his film career, so he could afford to be merciful.
For his part, Hemmings believed that the editing of the initial German release had gone awry, and that the longer English-language version would save his reputation. The English cut did at least allow Bowie’s voice to be heard: in the original, his lines were overdubbed by a German actor with a much more authoritative tone. On-screen, he played as if he were in a drawing room comedy, while his fellow thespians believed they were acting out a historical drama. But Bowie remained unsurpassed in the seventies for any director requiring a portrayal of someone who couldn’t quite connect.
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