by Pat Gilbert
For the sleeve artwork, Bowie called upon Edward Bell, an illustrator well known for his work in Vogue and Tatler, who was invited along to a photo session by Aladdin Sane cover photographer Brian Duffy, for which Bowie had dressed in his Pierrot costume. Bell took his own shots of the singer, taking off his makeup and outfit. “He had too much makeup on, but it looked good when it was smudged,” Bell later recalled. “But what was so good was that he didn’t just stand there. He saw the angle. Which was very much of its time: decadent glamour.”
Bowie at the Blitz Club in London with Princess Julia in 1979, and the cover art to the following year’s “Ashes to Ashes” single—the landmark promo video for which features several members of the Blitz scene.
Album and sleeve done, Bowie headed to New Romantic haven the Blitz club in Covent Garden, evolved from a weekly “Bowie Night,” to cast extras—including Steve Strange—for the video for “Ashes to Ashes.” The shoot was directed by David Mallet, who the previous year had filmed the camp promo for “Boys Keep Swinging.” With a budget over $500,000, “Ashes to Ashes” was at the time the most expensive music video ever made and remains one of the most memorable. The scenes of the singer, dressed in his Pierrot costume designed by Natasha Korniloff and leading a parade of Blitz regulars like the head of a bizarre cult, proved an apt metaphor for Scary Monsters’ impact. At a stroke, Bowie had reasserted himself as a beacon of modernity and as one of music’s indefatigable visionaries. In September 1980, “Ashes to Ashes” hit No. 1 in the UK, with Scary Monsters soon after reaching the same position. In the States, the album made No. 12, his best showing since Low.
As with Lodger, Bowie showed no immediate interest in touring to support the album—the pressure to do so relieved by the international acclaim for the videos for “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fashion”—and by the time of its release had returned to his second love: acting. Film was never far from Bowie’s orbit, and, indeed, while he was in London, he’d visited the set of Breaking Glass (named for his song) to watch Hazel O’Connor at work, the New Wave chanteuse having worked on the soundtrack with Visconti. This time, however, it wasn’t a movie role that lured him but a part in a stage production of Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man. Bowie first saw the play in New York in December 1979 but thought no more of it until two months later when he was approached by its twenty-nine-year-old director, Jack Hofsiss, to star in a recast version of the show. Hofsiss had been greatly impressed by Bowie’s performance in The Man Who Fell to Earth and sensed that the role of John Merrick, the grotesquely deformed character of the title who is rescued from a Victorian circus freak show by the surgeon Frederick Treves, shared much in common with Thomas Newton’s misunderstood, persecuted alien. No formal offer was made to the singer until May, when Hofsiss gave Bowie just twenty-four hours to decide whether he would take the part, which entailed a month of rehearsals, preliminary appearances in Denver and Chicago, and a final three-month run that autumn at the Booth Theatre in New York. Exhilarated by the challenge of starring in a Broadway production and put on the spot, Bowie agreed and began his preparation by visiting the London Hospital, where Merrick’s skeleton and personal effects were kept.
Although the national press was dissuaded from reviewing Bowie’s debut as Merrick in Denver, the local notices were ecstatic. Bowie was keenly aware that a significant proportion of the audience was there to see him, rather than the play, which added to the pressure. “If I hadn’t been successful in the first 15 or 20 minutes, then they’d have got up and started leaving, because it’s not the kind of part you can fuck about with, frankly,” he told NME’s Angus MacKinnon a few weeks later. “You’ve got to be credible.” Bowie’s raw talent as an actor was mercilessly tested as, unlike John Hurt in David Lynch’s 1981 film version, who was hidden behind grotesque prosthetics, Bowie had to express the cruel eccentricities of Merrick’s condition by contorting his face and body, initially clothed only in a loin cloth.
Bowie onstage during a rehearsal for The Elephant Man’s Broadway run, September 17, 1980.
During the run in Chicago, it became apparent to the other players that their leading man was no ordinary jobbing actor. The crowds of fans waiting to see Bowie arrive at and leave the theater presented the producers with numerous security issues, and at one point the singer was obliged to travel to and from the venue in a garbage truck. His digs also had to be changed to a secret location, unknown even to the rest of the cast, whom he rewarded for their support and loyalty with generous weekly gifts. By the time The Elephant Man reached New York in September, Bowie had mastered the role, and the play became a box-office sensation. Bowie was not just selling millions of records but was now the toast of Broadway too. The opening night was attended by an impressive array of characters who’d observed his singular journey from cracked pop star to stage sensation, including Andy Warhol, Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Taylor, and Charlie Chaplin’s widow, Oona. Also observing his triumphant Broadway debut were his mother and old manager Ken Pitt, both of whom he’d flown over from London.
Bowie was relishing life as a working stage actor and used his downtime in New York to renew his love affair with the city and catch up with old friends, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, whom he’d last encountered at the nadir of his cocaine and amphetamine dependency. On December 8, 1980, after returning to his apartment after a performance, Bowie was stunned to learn that Lennon had been shot dead by Beatles fan Mark Chapman just a mile and a half away. Profoundly shaken and devastated at the loss of his friend, Bowie nevertheless refused an offer by Hofsiss to reduce his time on stage for the remaining performances, though security at the theater was significantly increased. It subsequently transpired that Chapman had seen The Elephant Man and photographed Bowie at the stage door, considering him a possible alternative target. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when the show completed its run in early January 1981, Bowie turned down the offer to continue in the role and left New York for his home in Switzerland, where he took a six-month break from work. He used the time to reconnect with Zowie (now known as Duncan) and hired an ex–Navy Seal to look after the family’s security arrangements. Justifiably paranoid, he also moved several times, fearing for his safety. Plans to tour Scary Monsters in 1981 were shelved for good, denying fans the opportunity to see Bowie play live for a third consecutive year.
A moody portrait of Bowie taken at the New York opening of The Elephant Man, September 28, 1980.
Bowie’s return to the recording studio came, not for the last time in the 1980s, via an approach from a film production company rather than a record label. Scary Monsters had fulfilled the RCA contract that Tony Defries had brokered ten years earlier, closing one of the most fertile chapters in any artist-label relationship of the rock era (just one more new EP was to appear on the RCA imprint, the Baal EP). While Bowie was waiting for the term of the contract to expire, in early summer 1981, Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, asked him to contribute vocals to the title song of his latest film, Cat People, whose score had been written by electro disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder. Bowie recorded his dark, smoldering vocal, arguably one of the finest of his career, at Mountain Studios, where he discovered Freddie Mercury and the rest of Queen hard at work on the album that would become Hot Space.
Bowie and co-star Nastassja Kinski at a screening of Cat People, April 1982.
After adding a backing vocal part to the track “Cool Cat,” which was never used, Bowie joined the group for a jam session that had transformed a Roger Taylor song called “Feel Like” into a new number, “Under Pressure.” The catchy bassline was arrived at by accident. During dinner, John Deacon had forgotten what he’d played, and when Bowie reminded him by humming the riff, he added a different accent and note. The track was cooked up quickly, but while Bowie was accustomed to such spontaneous collaborations, Queen wasn’t, and Brian May in particular wasn’t overly impressed with the band accommodating such a strong outside influence. “I think ‘Under Press
ure’ is one of the best things we ever did,” Taylor told Mark Blake, author of the Queen biography Is This the Real Life?. “I got on well with David and so did Freddie. But five egos in the studio could be a bit much.” Arguments continued over the mixing, which took place in New York without Bowie, but the result was deemed so powerful—and such a commercial no-brainer—that EMI pushed to release it as a single in October 1981, when it topped the UK chart, giving Bowie his third UK No. 1 and Queen its second.
The simple but effective cover art to Bowie’s worldwide hit collaboration with Queen, “Under Pressure.”
Before the singer had cooked up “Under Pressure,” he’d already committed to his next major project, which was the lead part in a BBC dramatization of German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s first work, Baal. Written in 1918, Brecht’s story centers around the life of a drunken, womanizing poet who leaves destruction and death in his wake without troubling his conscience—until it’s too late. The director, Alan Clarke, had achieved notoriety two years earlier for Scum, the violent teenage prison drama, of which Bowie was a big admirer. Clarke and producer Louis Marks had flown to Switzerland to court the singer but were unaware until they met him of his vast knowledge of early twentieth-century German theater and art. The job entailed a month of rehearsals in West London, followed by a week-long shoot in August. Bowie signed up, and dressed in filthy rags with his teeth made to look rotten, he led the cast through the shoot with the utmost professionalism and dedication.
The Baal EP, for which Bowie returned to Berlin to record in September 1981. It would be his last collaboration with producer Tony Visconti for two decades.
For authenticity’s sake, Bowie wanted to record the music for Baal in Berlin, where he decamped in September with Visconti and the play’s musical director, Dominic Muldowney. The lease of his apartment on Hauptstrasse had expired earlier in the year, so the three men booked into the Berlin Trilogy’s storied bunkhouse, the Schlosshotel Gerhus. Working at the larger Hansa studio by the Wall, Bowie assembled a group that included a seventy-five-year-old musician who had worked with Brecht in the late 1920s, further adding to the atmospheric charge of Muldowney’s dark, disquieting arrangements. At night, Bowie gave Muldowney a guided tour of the city’s sleazy underbelly of drag clubs and dive bars, as well as taking him to the Dschungel, the discotheque housed in the historic Femina-Palast ballroom dating from the 1920s. The EP of Baal material was released to coincide with the broadcast of play in March 1982, an event that perplexed some Bowie fans—especially those arriving in the wake of “Ashes to Ashes”—who were dismayed to see their dapper hero with decayed teeth, a beard, shabby clothes, a battered banjo, and few redeeming moral features. The critics, however, praised the singer’s performance, though they were less complimentary about the play and production as a whole.
After completing the Baal EP, Bowie had begun a prolonged holiday and was occasionally spotted socializing in London nightspots. One evening, at the club Gossips, members of the Glaswegian punk band the Exploited were tickled when Bowie made a beeline for their table. “He recognised us and came over to talk,” guitarist “Big” John Duncan told the author. “He wasn’t being David Bowie, he was just this ordinary guy. He knew everything about us, he was a fan. I thought that was amazing! The only embarrassing thing was our bass player followed him about all night.”
Bowie and costar Catherine Deneuve on the set of The Hunger.
A film still and French promotional poster for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (known as Furyo in several European markets). The film was widely regarded as Bowie’s best screen performance since The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Bowie’s next ventures were, tellingly, film acting roles, further indication that he was still wary of returning to his music career after the trauma of Lennon’s death. The first part was in The Hunger, a modern-day vampire movie directed by Tony Scott, starring Bowie and French film icon Catherine Deneuve as blood-thirsty, undead lovers. The voltage between the two principals didn’t quite crackle as Scott had intended, however, and the film received lukewarm reviews. The second role was more intriguing and attracted far greater public interest. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence was based on Laurens van der Post’s recollections of his incarceration in a World War II Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and was directed by Nagisa Oshima, whose In the Realm of the Senses had caused a sensation in 1976 for its real onscreen sex scenes and its denouement where the female lead severs her lover’s penis and carries it around inside her.
Bowie couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with Oshima, and directly after The Hunger wrapped, he arranged to take a holiday in the South Pacific to be already in situ when filming began on the beautiful island of Rarotonga in September. Oshima was interested in using actors from outside the world of film, and having cast Bowie in the role of the tormented British officer Jack Celliers, he enlisted Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto as camp commandant Captain Yonoi and comedian Takeshi Kitano as Sergeant Hara. Meanwhile, veteran screen star Tom Conti took the role of van der Post’s character, Lt. Col. John Lawrence. Bowie and Sakamoto proved to be judicious choices: the plot demanded an undercurrent of homoeroticism between the two officers, and the musician-actors, similarly androgynous and exotic, managed to convey the unspoken sexual tensions perfectly. Though not without moments of melodrama, Celliers was arguably Bowie’s second-greatest screen performance after The Man Who Fell to Earth and brought him generous praise from the critics.
One evening while filming on Rarotonga, Bowie jammed a set of old R & B standards with Sakamoto (who would provide the movie’s haunting score), an event that reflected Bowie’s renewed interest in the music of his youth. Awaiting Oshima’s arrival on the island, he had amused himself by playing homemade mixtapes featuring artists such as James Brown, Johnny Otis, Elmore James, Albert King, and other R & B favorites. What struck him was the simplicity, optimism, and purity of the music. After the film wrapped in October, he returned to New York, where he re-immersed himself in the city’s music scene and hung out backstage with the Who and the Clash at their Shea Stadium shows. It was around this time that he bumped into Chic’s guitarist Nile Rodgers, who would become the key figure on his next album. There are various stories about how the pair met, but it was either in the bar at the Carlyle Hotel or at the Continental nightclub (with Billy Idol in attendance) that the two men fell into conversation, enthusing about their love of old R & B.
Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards in London in 1981, shortly before they collaborated with Bowie on Let’s Dance.
Rodgers, with bassist Bernard Edwards, had reshaped the sound of disco in the late 1970s with Chic’s “Good Times” and “Le Freak,” as well as with their production work with Sister Sledge and Diana Ross. But in the last year or so, Rodgers seemed to have lost his magic touch and was seeking a new way forward. It struck Bowie that Rodgers’s clean, classic, dance-orientated production style might be combined with an old-fashioned R & B aesthetic to create a new kind of pop music—economical, slick, and punchy. The singer invited the guitarist to his new home in Lausanne, Switzerland, to sketch out some ideas for a new album. One song was called simply “Let’s Dance,” which Bowie performed to a bemused Rodgers on a twelve-string acoustic guitar with only six strings on it.
Rodgers later realized that during their Swiss sojourn, Bowie was quietly “programming” the guitarist, playing him records, such as the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” and Duane Eddy’s “Peter Gunn” theme, with a view to using elements of them on the new record. Bowie also played him Iggy Pop’s “China Girl” from The Idiot, which the singer believed could be retooled into a huge dancefloor smash. He also wanted to have another stab at “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)”—a minor hit in its original form when it was released on MCA earlier that year to coincide with the film’s release—and to cover the group Metro’s 1977 Bowie-inspired synth-pop hit “Criminal World.”
Sessions began at New York’s Power Station in December 1982,
with Rodgers pulling together a group including bassist Carmine Rojas and drummer Omar Hakim (whose father had played trumpet with Duke Ellington and Count Basie), as well as Chic’s drummer Tony Thompson and keyboardist Rob Sabino. Rodgers’s appointment as Bowie’s co-producer meant that Visconti, whom Bowie had originally asked to make the record, was left out in the cold; so too were Carlos Alomar, who turned down what he considered an “embarrassing” fee to perform on the album, George Murray, and Dennis Davis. The insulting offer may have been Bowie’s way of letting Alomar down gently, as for several months, he’d had another guitarist in mind for the job, a twenty-eight-year-old Texan named Stevie Ray Vaughan, whose group Double Trouble had wowed the Montreux Jazz Festival earlier in the year, with Bowie looking on from the wings. Vaughan’s natural style was tough blues rock, which Bowie felt could add a piquant flavor to his re-imagined, modern R & B sound. “Stevie was fantastic,” Rodgers told Bowie biographer David Buckley, author of Strange Fascination. “That is why I believe David Bowie is an absolute genius, because he was able to see the great fusion of styles between my background, his background and Stevie Ray. David had a feeling, a premonition, that this would work.”
