But perhaps the greatest innovation in pop-culture, as of 1966, was the fact that no subject matter – even going ga-ga – was taboo. Once Dylan forever sundered the shackles at Newport, ‘nothing is forbidden, everything is permissible’ became the whole of rock lore. And although not many expected to export English rock’s ever-tenuous hold on sanity as a sensibility, for a while there it proved surprisingly easy to sell to the States. (Even Monty Python, as eccentrically English as jellied eels, would find a mass audience across the pond.) Only when the English got angry at the status quo – with Punk – did the Americans recoil. By then, they had more than enough English rock music to keep them going for the next decade.
However, Punk’s unnerving presence also brought a necessary stock take as the labels – many of which had now given their accountant a set of keys – realized they had been subsidizing some fine cult acts for nigh on a decade and, forgetting the virtues of classic catalogue, instituted a cull that did for the likes of Richard & Linda Thompson, John Martyn, Roy Harper, Vincent Crane and Peter Green. For those who had always preferred the nooks and crannies of cultdom, the days of wine and poppies were numbered. Gone went the ostentatious fold-out sleeves, unlimited studio time and a carte blanche approach to session-musician costs, along with the once-assured interest of a voracious weekly music press. In Britain this still numbered four major papers: NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror, but with the notable exception of Melody Maker, they all embraced punk with such Year Zero fever that the chances of a Roy Harper feature by 1977 were about as great as a Margaret Thatcher interview.
It was into this ocean of indifference that some of the more challenging English artists of the earlier era were hurled, and it was a case of sink or swim. Two of its leading lights threw their talented wives overboard in the process. By 1980 Martyn had chosen to swim in his own pool of booze and recrimination, captured on his last Island album, Grace & Danger, leaving Beverley to experience her own nervous breakdown in the aftermath of their marriage, culminating in a spell in a mental ward in 1984. Meanwhile, Richard & Linda Thompson got their more successful friend Gerry Rafferty to subsidize an album they never released (the original Shoot Out the Lights39), and then re-recorded it when Linda was heavily pregnant and suffering from an intermittently chronic case of dysphonia. Not surprisingly, the resultant record was their last together, and it would be 1984 before Richard Thompson was back on a label that could actually provide tour support and promotion – Polydor.
Both Martyn and Thompson were among the fortunate few survivors from the maelstrom of madness that had maintained such a grip on English rock, and had produced such a remarkable outpouring of bittersweet inspiration, through the first half of the 1970s. Although neither of these shipwrecked survivors ended up deranged by their trips into the unknown, each was a little damaged (in Thompson’s case, his flight into a Sufi community in the mid-Seventies has clear parallels to Peter Green’s earlier soul-searching). For others less blessed, the road to recovery was still awaiting the next delivery of rocks and gravel.
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Indeed, throughout the early Eighties, strange things were happening in the land of rock, none stranger than the record Vincent Crane and Peter Green decided to make together in 1982. In a gesture of communal musical therapy, they agreed to make a blues album under the name Katmandu. It was in that autumn the musically gifted but perennially troubled pair found themselves jamming at ex-Mungo Jerry frontman Ray Dorset’s studio when an affluent Swiss entrepreneur turned up and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: ‘I’ll buy anything you guys do.’
Both of them had been easing themselves back into the fray since the end of 1979, neither with any marked degree of success (at least outside of Germany, where Green’s 1979 album, In the Skies, was a sensation of sorts). In Crane’s case, a 1982 Atomic Rooster reunion album (Headline News) that even featured Dave Gilmour on four tracks still proved something of a commercial turkey, and he soon returned to life as a self-medicating slum landlord. Green himself had played with a succession of increasingly unsympathetic combos, searching for that Munich vibe. But already the business aspects of showbiz were once again giving him the blues.
Unexpectedly, the resultant album was something of a return to form for both parties, even though it started with the most ramshackle version of ‘Dust My Broom’ this side of shanty-town. ‘Crane’s Train Boogie’ showed Vincent in his element, suffusing a trainwreck of blues with some Southern soul, while ‘Who’s That Knockin’’ almost suggested Green had dusted off his broom and was ready to reclaim the room. But what the album lacked was any new lyrical insights from Crane or Green. Those they left to the author of ‘In the Summertime’ and ‘Baby Jump’.
And, predictably once the jam sessions became something more real, the pressure proved too much for Green. His mood swings and day-long silences delayed everything, until the others wondered if an album would ever be completed. When the record was finally finished, at the end of January 1983, it then took a year to see the light of day as Mr Mungo Jerry tried to wheel and deal it into a Dorset-plus-band release, by which time Green had disappeared under the covers, not picking up the guitar again for twelve long years. He still wasn’t ready – perhaps because, as he candidly admitted during a rare visit from his old friend Mick Fleetwood, ‘I sort of overdid it, you know.’
Meanwhile, the classically trained Crane became a pianist for hire on one of the longest series of sessions in rock history, intended to produce the third album by one of the most successful acts of the early 1980s, Dexys Midnight Runners. The resultant album, Don’t Stand Me Down, took even longer than Katmandu (or Tusk, for that matter) as bandleader Kevin Rowland insisted on recording everything live in the studio, refusing to overdub the slightest mistake, and narrating seemingly extemporized (but actually scripted) chunks of dialogue over the tracks, one of which revamped the riff to Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London’. The album took eighteen months to complete, and it was not until September 1985 – a full three years since a very different Dexys topped the charts with ‘Come On Eileen’ – that it appeared. But when it did, the combination of musical styles and off-mike rapping put an end to Rowland’s own lucky streak.
For Crane, it was a last reminder of how things had changed, and not in a good way. He began to sink into another whirlpool of fear and self-loathing. And this time it claimed him for good. By 1988, as his good friend Paul Green ruefully recalls, ‘He was living from one moment of delusion to another.’ On Valentine’s Day 1989, he took 400 aspirin, convinced that he had let everyone down, especially his ex-wife Jean, and they would be better off without this irrepressible firebrand. He was just forty-six.
The other Vince to intersect our tale was also by this time waist-high in dark waters. Vince Taylor, the king of failed comebacks, had made the last of half-a-dozen attempted resurrections in 1979, before moving to Switzerland in the early Eighties, hoping to deal head-on with his depression and chronic alcoholism. By then, he had published a fanciful autobiography, appropriately called Alias Vince Taylor (1976), and received a nice-size royalty cheque for The Clash’s 1979 cover of ‘Brand New Cadillac’. But a protracted spell in a Montreux rehab clinic in 1987 failed to chase those rhythmic blues away, and by now his health was fast deteriorating. He died in August 1991, ostensibly of cancer, but essentially just worn out from too much living in too short a time.
*
Coincidentally – or not – it was only after Taylor disappeared from people’s radar that a certain David Bowie began to talk of him as the prototype for Ziggy Stardust. At the same time, Bowie began performing Ziggy’s signature song in concert for the first time in twelve years. Twenty years after his breakthrough LP, The Man Who Sold the World, the ex-pat rock star was promoting his past again, as he announced his first ‘golden oldies’ tour on the back of a three-CD boxed-set retrospective called Sound + Vision, pending the reissue of all his RCA albums on Rykodisc/EMI. The set-list of the 1990 shows – partly co
mpiled from the feedback of fans – confirmed what observers had long suspected: the years 1970–73 still held the strongest fascination for his worldwide audience. Nigh on half of each night’s show would be devoted to songs he once performed through Ziggy’s eyes.
It seemed there really was no escaping the shadow of Ziggy. Determined to debunk the notion that he had turned into an oldies act, Bowie told reporters that the tour would be his way of saying goodbye to the past, to ‘do these songs for the last time – just do them on this tour and never do them again’. But a disastrous second Tin Machine tour, and an even worse-selling album the following year, put paid to any idea that a large live audience would pay to see his latest metallic manifestation. They wanted Ziggy.
As such, by 1997 Bowie was again reconciled to serving him up in bite-size pieces on his largest-scale tour in a decade. As a preview of sorts for another reclamation of the past, he even arranged a fiftieth birthday pay-per-view TV bash at Madison Square Gardens on 9 January, with a number of musical guests from the trendier parts of the big country invited, none save Lou Reed with any obvious connection to his own illustrious history. The set-list took the cream of a choice crop (‘The Man Who Sold the World’, ‘Quicksand’, ‘Moonage Daydream’, ‘Queen Bitch’, ‘All the Young Dudes’, ‘Jean Genie’), but blended in with much that was of a recent vintage and which no amount of laying down could salvage.
The most unexpected guests were the mighty Sonic Youth, New York’s finest, who were asked to back Bowie on a song from his latest release, ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’, even though they had all pretty much stopped listening to his records by the time the band was formed in 1980. If the reasoning behind their employment as backing band was lost on the four youthful members, they were even more nonplussed when during rehearsals Bowie called out, ‘Schizophrenia’. It was a request – one of their cherished own, from their seminal Sister album – and an appropriate one, at that. The decade-old lyric had evidently struck a chord with the still-attentive Englishman:
I went away to see an old friend of mine
His sister came over, she was out of her mind
She said Jesus had a twin, who knew nothing about sin,
She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I’m in.
Slowly but surely Bowie was readying himself to slay some old ghosts. The day before his cable TV birthday bash, the BBC broadcast a nine-song studio session he had recorded during the Garden rehearsals, and six of the songs were from those golden years: ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, ‘Supermen’, ‘Andy Warhol’, ‘Lady Stardust’, ‘White Light / White Heat’, ‘Quicksand’ and ‘Aladdin Sane’. He was playing mind games with his fans again, just as he had on his previous tour, in 1995, when a giant mobile hung over the stage, which read ‘Ouvrez le chien’, the repeated refrain at the end of ‘All the Madmen’ – though the song stayed wholly absent from the shows.
He may have been willing to belatedly acknowledge the importance of Ziggy and his crazed cousin Aladdin Sane, but he remained more ambivalent about those paeans to his real brother, Terry. Perhaps he was still recoiling from the family feud he had reignited back in 1993, when he released ‘Jump They Say’ as the first single from his first ‘comeback’ album of the 1990s, Black Tie / White Noise. The song, which by his own admission was ‘semi-based on my impression of my stepbrother’ [sic], was another case of him playing the ‘mad brother’ card. This time, though, Terry was no longer around to hear the result – he had killed himself in January 1985, throwing himself under a train after absconding from Cane Hill for the second time in a month with the clear intention of taking his own life. He was one year older than Vincent Crane.
Terry’s aunt Pat, who had already painted an unsparing portrait of Bowie’s treatment of his half-brother in the Gilmans’ 1986 biography, was still around, however, and had evidently not mellowed with age. She was of the publicly expressed opinion that ‘he is using [Terry’s] tragic death to put his record in the charts and I find that not only macabre but pathetic. The picture of David [on the sleeve] upset me terribly. There is a real resemblance. David looks just like Terry did when he became schizophrenic.’
The controversy, splashed across the Sun, reopened wounds Bowie had done his level best to cover over, eight years earlier, when the Gilmans’ own serialized articles was splashed across the Sunday Times. Appearing just three months after Terry’s death, they described in detail the two brothers’ growing estrangement. The Gilmans were duly informed that Bowie ‘objected strenuously to the suggestion that there was any link between the content of his work and the traumas that have afflicted his family and, especially, his half-brother, Terry’, before setting his record company on to the Gilmans, claiming copyright infringement for daring to quote song lyrics in context – always the last refuge of the artist exposed. But the Gilmans’ book, published the following year, provided more compelling testimony of how Bowie had continued to pay lip-service to his guilt right up to the early Eighties, telling one reporter during the time he was acting in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence: ‘I have a step-brother [sic] I don’t see any more. It was my fault we grew apart . . . but somehow there’s no going back.’ It was a long way from Manhattan to Cane Hill, after all.
At the time of this interview Terry had recently been re-committed to Cane Hill, his condition having worsened after his own marriage breakdown, and he became prone to bouts of violence which merely brought heavier medication to dull the raging inside. Finally, in the summer of 1982, a near fatal cry for help brought Bowie to visit him in Mayday Hospital, where Terry lay recuperating from his first serious suicide attempt. Four weeks earlier he had thrown himself from a second-storey window (the ostensible inspiration for 1993’s ‘Jump They Say’). After this visit, Terry became convinced that his brother would finally orchestrate the means necessary to get him out of Cane Hill. He did not, and, in fact, from then on all contact ceased. Even Terry’s next cry for help in December 1984 – when he test-ran throwing himself in front of a train, but pulled back at the last second – did not bring his brother running. It just brought him five more days in a locked ward and a further dose of deadening drugs.
At his wits’ end, Terry finally ended it all three weeks later, this time seeing through his premeditated act. But even this did not prompt his brother to come and say one last goodbye. Bowie avoided the funeral. Instead, he sent a basket of flowers, with a strangely impersonal note that read: ‘You’ve seen more things than we [sic] could imagine but all these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain. God bless you – David.’ Wisely, he said no more until that ill-advised 1993 track, though it is surely no coincidence that throughout the 1987 Glass Spiders tour he regularly included, for the first and last time, ‘All the Madmen’.
*
Not that Bowie was the only London-born brother still at war with his elder sibling after years of internecine strife. Ray Davies’ relationship with his brother David had always been fraught, but the 1980s had been a particularly difficult decade as The Kinks made album after album that proved the good times really had gone. Ray’s decision to disband The Kinks in 1995 (one he kept from his brother for quite some time) proved the last straw for the ever-supportive Dave, who had already begun to sketch out his own personal account of the band’s history, Kink. Published in February 1996, Kink was a rollicking read that suggested Ray was not the only brother with ‘issues’. According to its editor, the publisher had been obliged to heavily prune the finished text, removing a great deal of stuff about alien angels at David’s side. But he couldn’t stop the former Kink from telling interviewers of how, on the road in 1982, he ‘began hearing these strange voices [in my head] . . . two of them said they had always been my spiritual guides and two others were entities that were not of this earth’.
If Ray, in his own autobiography X-Ray, published eighteen months earlier, had paid minimal lip-service to the vital role David had played in keeping The Kinks together in the years before angels came to his aid
, at least he had learned to recognize the value of what he himself had wrought in the cultural inferno of the Sixties and early Seventies. (The 400-page ‘unauthorized autobiography’ ended in 1973.) For the first time, this most difficult of interviewees wrote in his own words about his mental problems, albeit using two distinct voices.
Creating another of his alter egos – a young novice social historian who is sent by dystopian powers-that-be to interview a retired rock star called R. D. – X-Ray is told partially in the first person, and partly through the eyes of this ingénue – proof, were it needed, that Ray still had yet to resolve the source of these inner monologues – Max or him. He also re-analysed his recorded work with a surprisingly judicious ear for what still stood up. Although he devoted just two pages to his 1971 cult classic – making no mention of the Muswell Hillbillies play he claimed in 1979 he had been working on – the fact that twelve of X-Ray’s twenty chapters took their titles from lines on the album spoke volumes.
And as if to reaffirm the continuing relevance of all those songs castigating urban renewal, the loss of traditions and the scrapping of all things old, he took his autobiography on the road – spending eighteen months in 1995–96 performing for the first time as Ray Davies – The Storyteller – not as frontman to The Kinks. The shows, which would invariably include ‘20th Century Man’, ‘Days’, ‘Victoria’ and ‘Village Green’, drew almost exclusively from the 1967–71 heyday of the band, reminding enthralled attendees of the sheer quantity of great songs the man had penned in that half-a-decade of inspiration, attendant upon the realization, ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’.
All the Madmen Page 32
