by Pat Gilbert
The cover art to the last two albums Bowie released before disappearing from public view: the contemplative Heathen and the more band-oriented Reality.
When Heathen was released in June 2002, many reviewers assumed it was a response to the tragic events in New York the previous September, but Bowie and Visconti took pains to explain that its interrogations of religion and what the future might bring dated to before the attacks. The sleeve, showing Bowie with deathly, fishlike eyes, was later revealed to be a coded reference to Christianity, the fish being the secret symbol of early Christians, as well as to Un Chien Andalou’s gruesome eyeball surgery. The sophisticated layering of the music and imagery was, Bowie stressed, essential for a record that by its very nature commanded high expectations. “Obviously a lot of crafting went into the new material,” he told MOJO’s Paul Du Noyer. “I was determined that Tony and I shouldn’t rest on previous reputations. Such a lot of the albums we did together are held up in fairly high esteem and we didn’t want to tarnish that.”
Heathen’s release coincided with Bowie’s curation of the annual Meltdown festival on London’s South Bank, with a handpicked bill of established acts featuring the Divine Comedy, Coldplay, Suede, Mercury Rev, and Supergrass, together with such cult delights as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and Daniel Johnston, and the London Sinfonietta performing Philip Glass’s orchestral versions of Low and “Heroes”. The final night of Meltdown starred Bowie himself, launching the Heathen tour with a group featuring Earl Slick, Dublin-born guitarist Gerry Leonard, Mark Plati, Gail Ann Dorsey, Mike Garson, Sterling Campbell, and backing vocalist and keyboard player Catherine Russell. With a who’s who of celebrity Bowie fans in attendance, from Bono and Brian Eno to Tracey Emin and Kylie Minogue, Bowie gave a masterful performance and dedicated the new album’s poignant “5:15 The Angels Have Gone” to the Who’s John Entwistle, who had died the previous day.
Heathen had been released by Columbia in conjunction with Bowie’s own ISO label, and a healthy marketing budget helped push it to No. 14 in the States and No. 3 in the UK. The “comfortable” arrangement the singer enjoyed with the company, which agreed to distribute his material when it was ready, had the unexpected consequence of a new Bowie album dropping just fifteen months later. Recorded in New York in the first half of 2003, Reality featured members of Bowie’s Heathen tour band in spirited rock mode, with Gerry Leonard’s heavily treated guitar textures the defining component of a record whose edgy sonic signature owed much to Scary Monsters. Visconti’s bass playing, which survived on several tracks from the initial demos he and Bowie had recorded, also added vital character, while Mike Garson’s distinctive piano playing was clearly evident on the jazzy, Sinatra-esque lament of “Bring Me the Disco King” and the gorgeously lachrymose deep soul of “The Loneliest Guy.”
The Bowie band warms up for A Reality Tour at the Chance nightclub, in Poughkeepsie, New York, August 19, 2003. From left: Earl Slick, Mike Garson, Bowie, Sterling Campbell, Gail Ann Dorsey, and Gerry Leonard (not shown: Mark Plati and Catherine Russell).
Thematically, Reality was just about that: how the events in the outside world are distorted through the prism of the media to create a reality that is entirely artificial and also how experience colors the way any individual sees the world. The point of view of the album changes with the characters in each song, from the unpleasant protagonist of “Fall Dog Bombs the Moon” and disabused romantic of “She’ll Drive the Big Car” to the regretful narrators of “Bring Me the Disco King” and “The Loneliest Guy.”
The A Reality tour—its name gamely suggesting the reality it presented was merely one of many—kicked off in Copenhagen on October 7, and with around 130 dates, it was set to be one of Bowie’s longest ever. The group rehearsed a total of fifty songs, from which around twenty-five were performed each night, juggling the singer’s millennial output with old favorites. In December 2003, however, there were early warning signs that Bowie, who had admitted the previous year that “touring gets harder at my age,” was feeling the strain of the punishing schedule. Five gigs at the start of the North American leg of the tour were canceled due to a bout of influenza and rescheduled for the following year. When the tour resumed, all seemed well until a date in Oslo on June 18, 2004, when Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown from the crowd. Bowie quipped, “Lucky you hit the bad one,” but it proved to be a portentous omen.
In Prague five days later, the singer left the stage after nine songs with excruciating chest pains. He returned to sing two more songs then brought the show to a halt. Then, after performing a full set at the Hurricane Festival at Scheeßel in Germany on June 25, Bowie was rushed to hospital and underwent heart surgery the following day. The rest of the tour was canceled, effectively putting Bowie’s career on ice for the next ten years. Although he subsequently appeared in public as a guest of other artists such as Arcade Fire and David Gilmour and made cameo appearances in films and on TV, Bowie would never tour again. There would be no new album, either, until he sensationally re-emerged in 2013—with what would be his penultimate record.
January 8, 2013, was a relatively slow news day, dominated by a report that a US drone attack had killed eight people in Pakistan. Music websites noted that Elvis Presley would have turned seventy-eight had he not died in 1977 and also that it was David Bowie’s sixty-sixth birthday. But since Bowie had shunned the public’s gaze since introducing a show by British comedian Ricky Gervais at Madison Square Garden in May 2007, few saw much significance in the anniversary. Then news broke that the singer had posted a brand-new song on his website, together with a video. The rush to hear the track with which Bowie had broken his seven-year silence—also dropped into iTunes without any warning for fans to purchase—was accelerated by news that it was a taster for an album. The song, titled “Where Are We Now?,” was a wistful, stunningly beautiful piece in which Bowie appeared to be recalling his late 1970s sojourn in Berlin, with references to the Dschungel nightclub, Potsdamer Platz railway station, and the KaDeWe department store. Its elegiac air was lent added poignancy by the video, directed by New Yorker Tony Oursler, which showed Bowie and a female companion as puppets with distorted faces, and Bowie as himself wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend Song of Norway—the film musical that in 1969 Hermione Farthingale traveled overseas to work on, breaking his heart when she fell in love with an actor on the set. Bowie declined to do any promotion for the release, the task falling to Tony Visconti, who produced the material. “When ‘Where Are We Now?’ came out, I knew that people were almost going to have a heart attack,” Visconti told writer Keith Cameron. “That was exciting. I don’t think we’ll reproduce that feeling again.”
Bowie, backed by guitarist Earl Slick and keyboard wizard Mike Garson, at the 112th and final show on the Reality tour at the Hurricane Festival in Scheessel, Germany, June 26, 2004.
A ticket for the second of two Reality shows at Wembley Arena, London, November 26, 2003.
Bowie had started working on what would become The Next Day in 2011, after emailing members of his A Reality tour band asking whether they were available for recording sessions in New York. Bowie was determined to keep the project secret so the album could take shape without any pressure from his record label or the media. “The first thing he did is hand out NDAs [Non-Disclosure Agreements] to people,” Zachary Alford said in the BBC documentary The Last Five Years. “That had never happened before.” The first sessions for the album took place at Human World Wide studios with Sterling Campbell on drums, Visconti on bass, Gerry Leonard on guitar, and Bowie on keyboards. After just twenty-four hours, concerns that news of Bowie’s presence in the studio had leaked out meant the operation transferred to the Magic Shop in SoHo, where work continued for a week. Then, according to Visconti, “we heard nothing for four months.” Recording eventually resumed in summer 2012 with contributions from other musicians, including Alford, Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, David Torn, and saxophonist Steve Elson. Over the next few months, Bowie and V
isconti did further work on the tapes, the singer taking his time “so he could finish every song to perfection,” said Visconti.
The album was released in March 2013, preceded by another single, “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” a wry comment on celebrity culture set against an undulating, enchanting art-rock backing strongly redolent of Bowie’s late-’70s work. The idea that The Next Day might share a musical commonality with the Berlin Trilogy and Scary Monsters was further insinuated by its cover, created by Jonathan Barnbrook, which took the Masayoshi Sukita portrait of Bowie used on the cover of “Heroes” and defaced it with a white square bearing the album’s title. This notion of echoing the past while firmly existing in the present was borne out by tracks such as “Valentine’s Day,” a mellifluous rocker seemingly describing a high-school shooting, and the unsettling bass and synthesizer pulse of “Love Is Lost,” which may or may not allude to Bowie’s first brush with fame in 1969. “I’d Rather Be High” is written from the perspective of a conscientious objector serving as a soldier in the North African desert in World War II, a story resonating powerfully with contemporary events in the Middle East. Starved of new Bowie product for almost a decade, reviewers were overwhelmingly ecstatic at The Next Day’s superlative lyrical quality and reassuring sonic familiarity, and with the help of positive notices, the record immediately claimed the No. 1 spot in the UK and reached No. 2 in the States.
Bowie makes what had become by now an increasingly rare public appearance alongside his son, director Duncan Jones, at the Tribeca Film Festival, April 30, 2009.
A promotional poster for the record-breaking David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Yet Bowie himself remained elusive, a fleeting shadowy figure newly shrouded in mystique as a sixty-something Howard Hughes of rock. There would, the world was informed through Visconti, be no live dates to promote the album, though the producer was subsequently asked by Bowie’s management to soften his statement intimating the singer would never play live again. The fact of the matter was that Bowie was itching to get on with recording a follow-up to The Next Day but realized that it would be better to wait until he had more fully developed song ideas. Visconti didn’t have to wait long until he got the call: in June 2014, Bowie contacted the producer and arranged a two-day session to “fool around with a few concepts.” When they finished, there were five new songs sketched out. To Visconti’s surprise, Bowie also brought in a batch of demos that he’d made at home, something he’d never done before. One of these was “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” destined for a release that November as part of a separate project that Bowie and Visconti had become involved with.
Bowie’s last two studio albums: the surprise return The Next Day from 2013, and the majestic Blackstar, released two days before his death in 2016.
For several years, Bowie had been fascinated with the work of Maria Schneider, a classically trained composer who led her own big-band jazz orchestra based in Greenwich Village. Schneider was an early adopter of crowdfunding, using the method to fund her Grammy-winning 2004 album Concert in the Garden, as big bands were particularly expensive to record. Bowie called Schneider and asked her to collaborate with him on “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” and another new song, “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime).” “Sue” ended up as a mind-blowing, avant-garde, big-band-jazz mash-up that was included, as the opening track, on Nothing Has Changed, a three-CD compilation surveying Bowie’s whole career from 1964’s “Liza Jane” to The Next Day—the first time such an ambitious retrospective had been attempted. The soulful saxophone solo on the track had been played by the jazz orchestra’s Donny McCaslin, whose own progressive jazz combo Schneider urged Bowie to check out. Bowie snuck virtually unnoticed into one of their gigs at the 55 Bar on Christopher Street in the autumn of 2014 and told them, with characteristic charm, that he’d be honored if they would guest on his next album. “He did his research on us,” bassist Tim Lefebvre told writer Danny Eccleston, “Watched YouTubes of us. He’d brought [drummer] Mark Guiliana’s Beat Music, which I’m also on. Usually it’s the other way around—you research the guy who hired you.”
In December 2014, Bowie contacted Visconti to say he’d written several more songs, and in January they booked into the Magic Shop to begin crafting the material with McCaslin’s group, a process that continued in short bursts for the next three months. “Their approach to the music was so refreshing, I looked forward every day to the studio. Nothing was done recalling the past. There was one part where we were overdubbing just for the guitar tone. I had to inform [guitarist] Ben Monder how Mick Ronson would have done it and he looked at me blankly. It was interesting teaching a jazz guy how to play rock!”
The music essayed on the album was unlike anything Bowie had created before—cosmic free jazz of a deeply expressive kind, incorporating elements of hip hop and electronica, given a singular purpose by lyrics that came from a dark, strange, ostensibly unfathomable place. On “Blackstar,” the title track of the album (represented as ★), Bowie incanted an Eastern-flavored melody over a two-step beat, murmuring about “the day of execution” before the song transforms into a more hymnal-sounding Bowie epic, as he declares, “Somebody took his place and bravely cried: I’m a blackstar!” The sessions also yielded remakes of “Sue” and “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” which, shorn of their big-band arrangements, enabled McCaslin’s players to scale even grander heights of sonic discombobulation. The mournful groove of the album-closing “I Can’t Give Everything Away” echoed the harmonica riff of Low’s “A New Career in a New Town,” a rare nod to Bowie’s past that added to Blackstar’s ominous, disquieting atmosphere. But of the album’s seven tracks, it was the plaintive “Lazarus” that packed the greatest emotional punch, beginning with the perturbing couplet, “Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.”
What fans didn’t know when “Lazarus” was made available as a download in the week prior to Christmas 2015 was that Bowie was sending the world a message—he was dying. On January 7, 2016, a video for the single, shot by Swedish director Johan Renck, was released, showing Bowie lying in a hospital bed, blindfolded with a bandage that had a button sewn atop each eye. For the last eighteen months, Bowie had been fighting liver cancer, and in the week the video was filmed, he’d been told he had only days to live. Renck remembers Bowie singing along with the words to the song as he was filmed, giving one last passionate performance for the public. Renck had also made an eleven-minute film to accompany “Blackstar,” loaded with the haunting, heart-wrenching image of the body of a dead astronaut—Major Tom—whose bones are taken away to become relics. Blackstar was released on the singer’s sixty-ninth birthday—January 8—and on January 10, news broke to a shocked and unsuspecting world that Bowie had died at home in his New York apartment.
Tributes flowed in to a man who, over four decades, had been instrumental in transforming rock music into an extraordinary art form, approaching each of his twenty-six studio albums as blank canvases on which to paint something vital, new, and original, while also sculpting himself into myriad fascinating characters, from Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane to Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke, and the bleach-blond matinee idol of Let’s Dance. He had achieved something truly great—he’d changed the language of sound. His parallel career as an actor meant that, in Bowie’s hands, music was always something inherently theatrical and audio-visual, forever designed to challenge audiences rather than simply entertain them. Visconti’s response to Bowie’s death was, perhaps unsurprisingly, deeply personal, moving, and insightful. “He always did what he wanted to do,” the producer wrote. “And he wanted to do it his way and the best way. His death was no different from his life—a work of art.… He was an extraordinary man, full of love and life. He will always be with us. For now, it’s appropriate to cry.”
But Bowie’s gifts to the world of the arts didn’t end with Blackstar. On December 7, 2015, just a month before he passed away, Bowie
had attended the opening night at the New York Theatre Workshop production of Lazarus, a play he’d devised with the Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. The work, written by Bowie and Irish playwright Enda Walsh, was a loose sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth and used fifteen songs from Bowie’s back catalog together with three new compositions. While Rolling Stone called it “theatre at its finest,” Bowie biographer Paul Trynka concluded that “at its best, it’s staggering beautiful” and found it “frequently profound.” One trusts that before his death, Bowie read these critical bouquets for his play, which was revived to similar acclaim in London in the winter of 2016/17.
In 2002, he’d remarked of his career, “I had really wanted to write musicals more than anything else.” And so, in his final days, arguably the greatest rock star that ever lived happily and masterfully fulfilled his teenage dream.
The original cast recording of Lazarus, Bowie’s stage collaboration with Enda Walsh and Ivo van Hove.
Jason Lindner, Mark Guiliana, Donny McCaslin, and Tim Lefebvre—co-winners, with Bowie, of the Grammy Award for “Best Alternative Music Album” for Blackstar.
Flowers pile up in front of a memorial to Bowie in Brixton, London, on the day after his death in January 2016.
Sources
BOOKS
Bowie, Angela, with Patrick Carr. Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side With David Bowie, Cooper Square, 2000.
