by Marc Spitz
Bowie had specific ideas about the visual composition of the piece. He’d base it on a red, black and white color scheme—the same striking combination that rock stars from Marilyn Manson, to the White Stripes, to My Chemical Romance and Green Day have used in the years since. The Nazi flag. The Coke bottle. Red, black and white was the scheme of icons both concentrated evil and the wholesomely universal. “David’s ideas were really strong and specific,” Arias says. “He knew that he wanted me to have the red hair and Klaus to have the black hair.”
Bowie ran through the vocals for the three tracks he would be performing. Singing there in his rumpled shirt and five o’clock shadow, it was still Bowie. He could turn it on just by opening his mouth. “David started singing, like, all of the material. It was, like, literally a concert for Klaus and I. We were, like, gagging a little bit, it was like we were being serenaded by Bowie. We played it cool, though.”
Both men were starting to get famous on their own. Arias was affiliated with the Italian fashion retail outlet Fiorucci. He worked in the mid-town store and modeled for various high-and low-end designers. Nomi’s act was hot and label interest was already there. This was a different level: a national television spot … with David Bowie. Inside, they were barely retaining their composure.
“I knew Laraine Newman, who was an original [Saturday Night Live] cast member,” Arias says. “We knew each other from the Groundlings improv group in L.A. [where many SNL cast members begin]. So I used to go to Saturday Night Live every weekend and sit there with her and watch them rehearse and watch the show. And I remember asking Laraine, at one point, ‘If David Bowie ever comes to this show, please, please, I gotta be here. I’ll do anything but I’ve gotta see this man in person.’”
Bowie’s performance on SNL even shocked his band. While they were not shocked to see a rumpled version of their leader during the week of rehearsal that led up to the live spot, he had not clued any of the musicians in on what he would be wearing—or doing—on Saturday night. “For ‘The Man Who Sold the World,’” Destri says, “I was totally unprepared for the plastic suit. All that week we’re rehearsing in jeans and sweatshirts … come show day he wouldn’t tell anyone what he was wearing. The whole band was shocked. We were totally thrown. We still knew our chord changes and our little bits. Then for the next song, he’s wearing a dress, with his hair parted. He looks like Katherine Hepburn.”
“TVC 15,” the piano-driven boogie woogie off 1976’s Station to Station, would be the second number revived, and Bowie had changed costumes. He now wore a full-length dress that appeared to be gunmetal blue. “It was a Chinese air hostess uniform,” Arias recalls. The collar was tightly buttoned. He wore what looked like thick pantyhose and matching shoes. A cold, utilitarian number, not feminine but certainly a dress. He kept his hands in the pockets as he sang the vocal melody line. Behind him, Nomi stood frozen while Arias casually read the newspaper. Bowie grabbed the microphone and the camera zoomed in on his face. By the end of the song, Nomi had dragged a hot-pink stuffed poodle across the stage on a leash. A television screen was embedded in the dog’s jaws, and it flashed the performance as they performed it.
“Boys Keep Swinging” was the third and final number performed on the episode and heralded another costume change. Bowie had replaced his Chinese airline hostess dress—in fact, he’d replaced his entire body—with a puppet’s torso. The head of David Bowie sang the song. A marionette’s torso and limbs danced under his giant Bowie head as though on strings.
“They pulled the mic over to a green screen and he puts a little puppet under his head,” Destri says. “He pulls the strings with the puppet and all you see is the puppet with David’s head going, and we’re off to the side just being the band, like, ‘Okay, let’s watch the head for our cues’!”
“It was all very Dada,” Arias says. “He was into this whole German expressionistic thing and very surreal. But it was fun; we just sat there having a good time. David was on the screen and we were standing there doing it and we could see him on the monitor and we were just doing this bit.”
More slow, stunned applause followed. People all over the world were discussing the performance in the hours and days immediately afterward. “It seemed like Manhattan was at a standstill that night,” Arias says. “You can ask people in New York what were they doing that day; everybody will say ‘I was home watching Saturday Night, watching Joey and Klaus with David Bowie.’”
“We were all thrilled to see Joey and Klaus on SNL with him,” Magnuson says. “Being ‘annointed by Bowie’ was something every teenager obsessed with glam rock in the early seventies dreamed of.” Nomi and Arias wondered when it was all over if they were indeed part of Bowie’s performing company. Would there be more pieces like this? At the after-party, at One Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, the two camps mingled and there was talk of developing this act. Bowie seemed enthusiastic about the prospect. But ultimately, he’d forge ahead into the new wave alone, having primed himself for the early eighties right there in front of millions, using Arias and Nomi as his New York City mechanisms. “I think that’s his genius,” Arias says today. “He works with people and then he gets touched and all of a sudden it triggers something in him and he moves on.”
It would be almost fifteen years before Bowie appeared solo on SNL again (with Tin Machine in 1991, doing an excellent cover of Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something”), primarily because his debut appearance was so hard to top. Klaus Nomi passed away only four years later, becoming one of the first icons of the New York New Wave scene to die of AIDS. Arias saw Bowie a few times after that, but only very briefly. A quick hello backstage at an Iggy Pop show, a warm moment at a fashion show.
“That night, Bowie opened the gate to the eighties,” says Destri. “He sniffed out the new wave and fashioned an eighties thing.”
22.
ALTHOUGH HE WOULD END the decade no more a musical leader than he’d been in the sixties, for a while, about four years, Bowie’s eighties reign was glorious. He began the decade by instructing his angry kid brothers, the primarily English punks, on how to reinvent themselves, essentially functioning as the Rosetta stone for post-punk and New Wave. Would Johnny Rotten have been able to survive the flameout of the Sex Pistols had it not been for Bowie destroying Ziggy Stardust and saying, with all the conviction required, “I am a soul singer now. This is the new me”? Lydon has that very conviction when he appears, with Keith Levine, on Tom Snyder’s late-night Tomorrow Show in 1980 to promote his post-Pistols band Public Image Limited. Bowie’s notion of a self-invented rock star, “not me but an idea from me,” which both Ziggy and the Thin White Duke were, allowed someone equally savvy like Lydon to call his new group, well, not a “group” at all, but a corporation.
“We ain’t no band,” Lydon tells the perplexed and hostile Snyder while bumming a cigarette. “We’re a company simple. Nothing to do with rock and roll doo-dah.”
“Okay,” Snyder replies, wishing, perhaps, he was anywhere else.
“Companies can mess about with musical instruments. There’s no limits,” Lydon says, later adding, “History does not matter. Your program is called Tomorrow.”
But Lydon knew his history well. Post-Bowie, the reinvention of a band’s entire identity now had a precedent. One can still detect the Pistols in Public Image Limited’s 1978 debut single “Public Image,” with its slashing guitar and caterwauled vocals, but not so in ’79’s second PIL album Metal Box, issued in its vinyl version in a tin canister and available today on CD as Second Edition. Gone are the Ramones and Nuggets–indebted guitars. When they come in, via stone-faced Keith Levene, on tracks like “Death Disco” and “Albatross,” they seem instead lifted from eccentric Jamaican producer Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark Studio sessions. Jah Wobble’s bass is dubby and doomy, and Lydon’s vocals, often buried in the mix, now seem genuinely and not ironically disturbed. It’s as close to Low as a major artist had come.
Then there were the New Rom
antics. Once a sexually, racially and intellectually integrated movement, punk had, on both sides of the Atlantic, become a haven for violent and often racist young men by 1980. Even enlightened alternatives, sister movements to the more emotionally revealing post-punk, such as the Coventry-based 2 Tone movement, led by the Specials, the Selecter, Madness and the Beat, attracted skinheads and National Front members to the clubs. First-wave UK punks who sensed that rock steady was not a good fit for them kept an eye open for something else, and their answer, too, was David Bowie.
“I think Bowie’s influence on that generation of British pop kids was immense,” Jon Savage says. New Romantic restored Wildean wit, sensitivity and flamboyance to the pop aesthetic, with ruffles, velvet, elaborate jewelry, costume and quips becoming the norm. Ziggy-style theatricality was also favored, as was, of course, a smart sexual ambiguity. In early 1980, as Bowie finished work on his new studio album, Scary Monsters, at the Power Station in midtown Manhattan, London nightlife was becoming as Bowie-mad as it had been nearly a full decade earlier, at the apex of glitter rock. It was a full-on Bowie revival, the first of its kind, really, as the artist’s output did not really lend itself to nostalgia. But for the transitioning punks, the hits of ’72, ’73 and ’74, the “Starman”s and “Jean Genie”s and “Rebel Rebel”s, were the perfect tonic for the troops.
Steve Strange, one of the leading lights of the New Romantic scene thanks to his tenure in the electropop band Visage and his cofounding of the popular “Bowie Nights” at London club Billy’s and, later, the larger Blitz, grew up in Wales. During the Ziggy era, he was not only a superfan but a self-created Bowie doppelgänger, courting trouble from his teachers and local bullies.
“I was so into the music I wanted to copy him,” Strange says today. “I copied his hairstyle, which got me banned from school. I was a straight-A student until around this time.” After school in 1976, Strange took up an offer from then–Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock to come down to London and stay at his apartment. He decided this was his way out. “After school you were either going to be very athletic and take up rugby and become a rugby player or you’d have to do what your father and your grandfather did before and go down the mines,” Strange recalls. In London he fell in with the Pistols-following “Bromley Contingent,” which included Siouxsie Sioux, Generation X’s Tony James and Billy Idol, and future Pistols bassist and junkie death icon Sid Vicious, among others. Strange worked for Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, selling and modeling clothes at Seditionaries, the shop he’d opened with Vivienne West-wood. He also made paste-up posters for Pistols gigs and roadied on the Anarchy tour. A record collector, by punk’s flame-out, he’d amassed an impressive collection of hard-to-find “new” music, browsing in local bins along each tour stop. A local scenester named Rusty Egan, also bored with punk, had been doing the same, and one night while sitting around the stereo in a friend’s flat, they determined that the “new” music sounded excellent when mixed in with the glitter “oldies.” “We’d play Nina Hagen, Bauhaus, early Eno, Kraftwerk. We thought, ‘What if we had a club and between this new futuristic music we would mix in favorite Bowie tracks and glam-period?’” Strange had been ensconced in the punk scene long enough to know that just about every punk, from the Clash’s Mick Jones (a great Mott the Hoople fan) to the cantankerous Lydon (a massive Alice Cooper fan) could not resist a good glitter-age number.
They booked a “Bowie Night” at a local bar on Dean Street in Soho. The venue used to be a social club known as the Gargoyle, where Noel Coward sipped cocktails with Tallulah Bankhead, but it had gone seedy. This was Billy’s bar. “The working girls would come into the club and they mixed in with all these freaks,” Strange says. “They’d come in just for a shot to keep warm on a cold night.” They’d pass out flyers and soon the club became so popular that Strange would have to work the door, where he got a reputation for imperiousness. He’d often hold a mirror up to a particularly tacky or obnoxious would-be partier and ask, “Would you let you in?”
“I’d become known as a real bastard on the door,” he says. Strange’s rope policy was Wildean in its embrace of well-contemplated hedonism and invention, not just crass bids for attention or acceptance. “Basically the philosophy on the flyer was ‘Let your creativity flow.’ Don’t disappear into a pastiche wallpaper. But I was not talking about being ludicrous. One guy turned up in a bloody wetsuit. I said, ‘No no no.’ Most probably he thought this was real creativity and I thought, ‘What a fucking arsehole.’ We moved from Billy’s after about three months and decided it must be time to move to a bigger venue.”
The Blitz Club was a wine bar decorated with images of the Nazi Blitzkrieg, and each Tuesday, it would be filled to capacity with Bowie nuts, with another hundred of them patiently waiting in line outside, determined to breach Steve Strange’s phalanx of ’tude, to which even rock ’n’ roll legends were not immune. Often they’d have live bands, and future legends like Depeche Mode played some of their earliest gigs there. Visiting performers like Divine, Nona Hendryx of Labelle and David Byrne made it past Strange and his mirror. When a drunken Mick Jagger and his entourage were turned away, however, it made the red-top tabloids the following day, and by the subsequent Tuesday, the Blitz was even more impenetrable. One celebrity guest, however, could still reduce the impossibly fierce and fire-code-wary Strange to the likes of a cloying Olive Garden hostess. A few weeks after the Jagger debacle, which was picked up by the tabloids, Bowie turned up unannounced and requested entry.
“This black limousine circled for about an hour, a limo with blacked-out windows,” Strange says. “I’d seen it in an hour go around at least three times, and in this hour the queue had gotten bigger and bigger, then a lady came up and said, ‘I need a private word.’” This was, of course, Coco Schwab. “She was a bit abrupt and a bit rude. She said to me, ‘I have David Bowie in the back of the limo and we’d like it if he could be entertained. David really liked what he’s read about you and the club.’ I was like, fucking hell, David Bowie has finally come!”
Bowie was there on a mission. As Strange visited him in a makeshift private section to the side of the dance floor, Bowie, as he had at the Mudd Club with Klaus Nomi, made his proposal. “He said, ‘This club is what London’s been missing for a long time. I just love what you’re doing. I would like you to pick and style four people for the music video to my new song “Ashes to Ashes.”’ I couldn’t believe it.” It was well after midnight and Strange was instructed to be at the Hilton Hotel by six AM with his extras and costumes ready to go. “Since it was the Hilton, I figured we’d be flown to some exotic location to do this video. Little did we know he sort of shut off Southend beach.”
“The beach was my idea,” the “Ashes to Ashes” clip’s codirector David Mallet says today of the famous location for what remains one of music video’s most genuinely odd and innovative high points. “It was in Hastings in Sussex, a location I’d known since I was a little boy. One of the very rare places you can get right down to the water and there’s a cliff towering over you.”
While on location on that blustery morning, Bowie spied an abandoned bulldozer on the beach and its owners were located and the machinery quickly employed. The bulldozer follows Bowie, in Pierrot clown costume, as he leads Strange and his mates, dressed in black ecclesiastical robes, along the shoreline. “My robe kept catching in the bulldozer,” Strange recalls. “That’s why I kept doing that move where I pull my arm down. So I wouldn’t be crushed. Bowie liked the move and used it later in his video for ‘Fashion’!”
The song, the first single off Scary Monsters, was a bit of a Bowie revival itself. While musically it’s synth driven and New Wave–ish, lyrically it reintroduces Major Tom, the hero of “Space Oddity.” “Do you remember a guy that’s been / In such an early song?” Bowie sings, in a clear, earnest falsetto. He could easily be singing to Steve Strange’s generation.
They, of course, not only remembered but still lived for Major Tom. The Face m
agazine, founded by Nick Logan in the spring of 1980, fast became the monthly of record as far as fashion, art and style went for London’s youth culture. For the editorial staff and readers, many of them grown-up Ziggy kids as well, Bowie was not only untouchable but a template for all the profile subjects and models included in this new culture bible, from Duran Duran to Boy George to Echo and the Bunnymen. Even its stylists and photographers were all Bowie-mad early on. “There would not be a Face without Bowie,” says Jon Savage. “And The Face was essential. Avant-garde. I mean, I don’t know what the phrase is now … What is the phrase now when marketers want to get the kind of future thinkers and the elite group? It was those kind of people. Trendsetters would buy it.”
That Bowie was still actually breaking new ground justified all this adoration and made looking back at the early seventies, for the time being, anyway, less of a slippery slope than it would soon become. The video for “Ashes to Ashes” was completed over the course of three days. When it debuted on television, with MTV still a year shy of launching, the clip was like nothing anyone had ever seen, and the single became Bowie’s first UK number one since “Fame” a half decade earlier. The Scary Monsters album was well received too. Released in late summer of 1980, it opens and closes with “It’s No Game” (Parts 1 and 2). A sucking sound, like an airplane’s windows being unlocked midflight, is heard. An agitated woman (singer Michi Hirota, who can be seen on the sleeve of Sparks’ landmark Kimono My House album) begins a series of non sequiturs in Japanese (“… he’s literally tearing out his intestines …”) and Bowie screams about being insulted by fascists. It’s improbably thrilling where in lesser hands it would be some pretentious trash.