Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Their frolic in Moscow lasted just seven hours before they caught the train out but they had not seen the end of Soviet bureaucracy, for on the way to Helsinki, the border guards chose to strip-search both David and Iggy. Both of them were unperturbed by the experience, which was blown up into a manufactured furore about David having disappeared. ‘I don’t know if it was a publicity stunt or not – but it was a great one if it was,’ says Kent. The next publicity stunt was not so easily explained, namely David’s quote at a press conference in Stockholm on 24 April that did not surface until 2 May, when the Station to Station tour – also known as the Isolar tour – hit the UK and David greeted his fans at Victoria station. Photographs across the media a few days later, including one by Andrew Kent, were printed with David’s arm outstretched in what looked like a Nazi salute. In conjunction with his remarks at the Stockholm conference one week earlier – ‘I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism’ – a media firestorm soon blew up.

  Bowie qualified his Stockholm remarks to Jean Rook in the Daily Express a couple of days later. ‘If I said it – and I’ve a terrible feeling I did say something like it to a Stockholm journalist – I’m astounded anyone could believe it … I’m not sinister. I don’t stand up in cars waving to people because I think I’m Hitler.’

  Rook found him sincere – there was a schoolboyish earnestness about his demeanour that enhanced his horror at being so misunderstood. Yet this was a mealy-mouthed politician’s defence; one he would repeat in later months, when he declared himself upset or hurt that anyone considered him racist. Few people did, certainly none of David’s friends. ‘There was no trace of that,’ says Ava Cherry. ‘I’m Jewish and I never [suspected] anti-Semitic reasons. If I’d thought that I would have quit,’ says Andrew Kent. Movie footage of David’s arrival later revealed his so-called Heil Hitler salute as nothing of the kind. But there were enough quotes sitting on journalists’ tape recorders to demonstrate that, while not a racist, David was happy to flirt with fascistic imagery in search of a newspaper headline.

  Without doubt, during that sweltering summer of 1976, Bowie’s fascist chic chimed with sentiments voiced by some of his rivals. Bromley contingent figurehead Siouxsie Sioux sneered that there were ‘too many Jews for my liking’ in one of the Banshees’ earliest songs, ‘Love in a Void’, and in August Eric Clapton ranted that Britain should ‘get the wogs out, get the coons out’. Most of Britain’s youth would, rightly, suspect Bowie of cheap opportunism rather than racism, but that summer Bowie’s credibility as a champion of the outsider took its first severe dent.

  Yet by the time the tour wound up in Paris on 18 May, celebrated by a party where David spent most of his time canoodling with Romy Haag, those concerns were mostly forgotten, as David turned his attentions to working with his friend Iggy. Up to his stay in Paris, David had intended to work in Munich with his new friend, but a change of plans was prompted by staff at the Château D’Hérouville, the residential recording studio where David had recorded Pin Ups. Commercial manager Pierre Calamel and studio manager Laurent Thibault, the new regime at the studio, astutely calculated that Bowie might need a refuge from the French fans crowding around the Plaza Athenée hotel, and invited him back to the eighteenth-century Château, set in the rolling countryside of the Oise valley, an hour’s drive out of Paris. Enticed by Calamel’s offer of ‘some peace – and some French cheese’, Bowie arrived that afternoon, wearing a flat cap, accompanied by Iggy, and deployed his natural gentlemanly charm, inhaling deeply to take in the distinctive smell of the grand old building and announcing to Iggy, ‘This is a great rock ‘n’ roll studio.’

  After a long lie-in – although David woke up in the night and was found wandering the grounds, confused and naked but for a forties-style Burberry Macintosh – Bowie called a meeting with Laurent Thibault. He’d brought a huge case over full of albums, which he played through, critiquing each of them, including a couple by Thibault’s previous band, Magma, before announcing that in a couple of days he was taking a trip to his new house in Switzerland, but he’d return in a matter of weeks to produce Iggy’s solo album, and would use Thibault as engineer. Later, it transpired that a crucial sweetener for using the Château was the prospect that David and Iggy’s living costs would be picked up by a record company: David had no cash for day-to-day expenses. With the flow of MainMan-era royalties staunched, and imminent legal disputes with Michael Lippman, he was forced to watch every penny. Over subsequent weeks, onlookers would be astonished to see Corinne reprimanding David for spending 100 francs on a new jacket; when he came to settle the bill for Iggy’s recording, David’s cheque bounced.

  In Switzerland, Angie had taken great care in selecting the first marital home the couple would actually own. The move was perhaps an act of self-deception, given that she and David had been living apart for two years, with Zowie under the care of the redoubtable Marion Skene. Yet David had continued to maintain that deception in print, telling Cameron Crowe in February that Angie was ‘remarkably pleasant to keep coming back to. And, for me, she always will be.’ Believing that her problem-solving abilities would continue to endear her to her husband, Angie had steered her way through the Swiss bureaucracy, investigating the various tax and residency issues, convinced that with this feat, as with so many others, she could prove herself indispensable. Clos des Mésanges was a luxurious house, with seven bedrooms and a caretaker’s lodge, set in several acres of land in the village of Blonay, just above Lake Geneva. Her efforts were wasted: the first home she jointly owned with her husband would be the last. When he arrived in Switzerland, David took one look at the house, exchanged only a few vague words, and then disappeared. As so often, Angie swung from exhilaration to near depression, and soon started looking for the villain in the scheme, not for the first time alighting on Coco Schwab. Undoubtedly there was little love lost between the two women; but Corinne was in essence a convenient scapegoat, for David’s dissatisfaction with his marriage had predated Coco’s arrival on the scene. In any case, Angie’s suspicions that her marriage was doomed were correct, for it was during his brief stay in Switzerland that David, who had so far kept remarkably quiet about his problems with both Angie and Michael Lippman, first confided in Iggy, discussing the future without being too specific. ‘He’s English,’ says Iggy, by way of explanation, ‘reserved and all that.’ Within a couple of days the pair, along with Coco, set off again for the Château, probably stopping off in Berlin for some flat-hunting en route.

  By the end of May, David was in the Château for the sessions, concentrating all of his focus on Iggy. The album would be based around ‘Sister Midnight’, a song he’d written with Carlos Alomar, and had played Iggy within a couple of days of their meeting in February, telling him how he’d love to put together a solo album based on a similar dark, electronic groove. It was a long way from The Stooges, but Iggy instantly responded to the challenge, realising that in its minimal, robotic way, it boasted a unique power. ‘For me it was perfect! And I loved it, when I heard it I went whoa. And there wasn’t one stinker on that whole period, he only pitched me great balls – and I grabbed every one.’

  If there is any period in David Bowie’s songwriting that is under-appreciated, it is this one. The music was once again flowing out of him, and behind the twisted, distorted facade of The Idiot, the subtlety and deftness of David’s craft was at a latter-day peak. Most songs were sketched out with David’s electric piano and guitar, augmented by Laurent – ‘Tibo’ – playing scratch bass. Brittany session-man Michel Santangeli did the same for the drum parts; David would keep whatever bits he liked and augment them with other musicians later. Bowie had explained to Jimmy back in the spring that this would be a chance for him to explore concepts he planned to use in his own work, yet Iggy would also get the benefit of songs, like ‘China Girl’ and ‘Nightclubbing’, which were more commercial than anything David had kept in stock for himself.

  The pair
made an engaging, odd couple: David with his severe, Germanic haircut, focusing intently on the music, sitting in a lotus position on a chair by the console; Jimmy, blond haired, spreading out like a lizard on the floor amid sheafs of lyrics, or bouncing around the grounds like an enthusiastic puppy when David was busy in the control room. Zowie played in the grounds, accompanied by Marion Skene, or other kids from the studio household. David’s old friend Daniella Parmar showed up at one point to add to the family vibe; Angie, of course, was absent. With Corinne following David around – all-purpose factotum, helper and lover – and Iggy sunbathing by the pool, there was an intriguing, warped domesticity about the setup. The impression was heightened by incidents like the time Iggy took a day out to see his old flame, Nico, in Paris. The Velvets chanteuse was known to be a diehard of the Parisian heroin scene, so Iggy or a minder had to call in regularly to reassure Coco he wasn’t high, like a teenager calling home.

  David was sweet with Zowie, less distracted than in the Ziggy days. For the French staff, his lack of physical affection with Zowie – for he was not a tactile person – raised eyebrows, then was dismissed as typically English – which indeed it was. He didn’t cuddle Zowie, but when he was with him, he gave him his full attention. One day in the dining room the staff saw David and his son chatting away; Zowie was drinking a coke, when his dad joked, ‘You’ll get paranoid if you drink that.’ Instantly the five-year old responded, ‘Well, no one believes what a paranoid person says, anyway.’ Bowie laughed proudly at his son’s quip; it sounded as if paranoia was a regular subject for father–son repartee.

  In the opulent surroundings of the Château, David took to the role of le grand seigneur, politely asking if he could have the largest room, with fireplace, as well as a stereo. His polite requests were invariably repeated, more forcefully, by Coco, who initially irritated the staff – before they realised ‘she had no life’ and sympathised with her self-imposed ‘slavery’. The Château’s owner, composer Michel Magne, had let his musician friend Jacques Higelin take up one wing of the building, along with his girlfriend Kuelan Nguyen and three-year-old son Ken. A brief affair between Kuelan and Iggy added to the edge and intensity of The Idiot sessions, and within its first few days was immortalised when Iggy re-wrote one of David’s songs, ‘Borderline’, to become ‘China Girl’ – whose lyrics simultaneously implored Kuelan to come with him to Berlin and warned her away. David seemed to savour the energy and vitality that their affair represented; he, too, focused on Kuelan, rubbing her back flirtatiously, or puffing on the pipe he’d lately taken to smoking, enjoying the ambiguity of the situation: ‘It’s good for Jimmy’s heart to be loved that way,’ he told Kuelan, almost like a father giving his consent.

  Gossip from this period has David as a cocaine-raddled paranoid wreck – perhaps the best apocryphal story has him abandoning a session after Iggy invoked occult forces by pushing him in the pool – but throughout the recording, David’s main vices were beer and women. It was only when rival musicians arrived, say the staff, that the atmosphere soured. There were rows, inspired by old rivalries, when Bad Company prepared to move into the studio; Edgar Froese was also frozen out, after arriving at the Château to add some synthesiser parts. Called up to the control room, Froese listened to a rough mix, then over dinner confided to David, ‘At first I didn’t really like your record … but finally I know you are making very interesting things. I am very proud to be here.’ Casually, David told him they’d call down later for him to record. Several hours had passed when Pierre Calamel went to check on Froese, who was still sitting near the pool. ‘I came over and said, “Are you OK? Do you want something more to drink?” It was a sunny, very hot day and I moved the parasol because the guy is getting very pink. And they didn’t call him up. I was very sorry for him.’

  When the time came for Froese’s flight back to Berlin, the Château staff ordered a taxi, and the Tangerine Dream founder left without a backward glance.

  The surreal atmosphere of The Idiot sessions was even more obvious once David and Iggy left the Château to make room for Bad Company. Their next studio, Musicland, had been built in the basement of a Munich hotel and mall; Thin Lizzy were recording there by day, Iggy and David would piece together their gothic soundscapes by night.

  Guitarist Phil Palmer was called to the phone late one night by his mum, and spoke to a polite, charming David, who asked him to bring his Telecaster and hop on a plane to Munich. Palmer found the nocturnal, subterranean sessions disconcerting, ‘“vampiric” would be the word’. David’s instructions were more psychological than musical: ‘Imagine you’re walking down Wardour Street and as you’re walking past each club you’re inspired to play what’s coming out of it.’ That would be the most specific instruction he’d get throughout the recording. The sessions were ‘experimental on every level’, says Palmer, with the pair pushing him for more extreme guitar sounds, asking if he would like to order in any sheep brains to eat, or leafing through monographs by artists such as Egon Schiele and Eric Heckel: ‘They were very supportive of each other, and just having fun. And they were … obviously experienced in some pretty weird stuff. I wasn’t aware they were taking anything – but their minds were a little odd.’

  Engineer Thibault relished the experimentation, crafting long tape loops into electronic collages, but the nocturnal existence eventually took its toll as they concluded the mix. One night, frazzled, while David was out of the room, he crafted an Indian head-dress out of strips of red leader tape and attached it to his head. David returned, said not a word at this ludicrous spectacle, but then disappeared to use the phone. It’s likely that this was the moment David called Tony Visconti in London to ask him to assist on his own album, which he planned to start work on directly after The Idiot.

  It was around 20 August, 1976, that Tony Visconti arrived at 155, Hauptstrasse, a typical ‘altbau’, or period apartment, set on a tree-lined twin-lane avenue in Schöneberg, an anonymous district in the southwest of Berlin. Bowie had told him Iggy was living with him; Visconti knocked on the door, hugged his old friend, said hello to Coco, whom he knew from David’s ‘skeletoid’ Young Americans period. ‘Then David said, “This is Jimmy.” So I shake his hand and look around and say, “Great – where’s Iggy?” Everyone laughed, it kinda broke the ice.’

  The session had originally been booked for some preparatory work on the The Man Who Fell to Earth tapes from Cherokee; when they were delayed, Visconti helped put the finishing touches to Iggy’s album at Hansa Studio 1, on the Kurfürstendamm. Throughout the process, says Visconti, ‘You could see David evolving and developing his next phase from this strange record.’ Over the same fortnight, Visconti was plunged into another thrilling, confusing new world. ‘One thing about David is that he’s not a workaholic. He really loves to explore his environment.’

  In that first stay, Visconti lodged at the Schlosshotel Gerhus, a magnificent, decayed building once owned by art collector Walter Graf von Pannwitz. They’d work at Hansa Studio 1 in the afternoons, then in the evenings go to ‘Romy Haag’s or some dungeon club’, says Visconti. Bowie was keen to share the experience of Haag’s club. It was oddly wholesome: ‘It wasn’t really a gay thing, there were kids there as well as grown-ups, it was just part of their cabaret culture. Even if you couldn’t speak German you could get off on the cabaret. Romy was about six-foot tall and couldn’t possibly have been a woman, which added to the mystique, and we’d [always] get the best table.’

  Schöneberg embodied the contradictory nature of David’s fascination with Berlin. Five minutes down the road was a huge Nazi bunker on Pallasstrasse, the site of Goebbels’ ‘Total War’ speech. Another five minutes away was Christopher Isherwood’s old house on Nollendorfstrasse – the ‘deep, solemn massive street’ he’d immortalised on the opening page of Goodbye to Berlin, with its description of young men whistling up to the women on the upper stories in hope of an assignation – a pastime in which David, naturally, also indulged. It was indicative of Davi
d’s mindset that he was as interested in the iconography of Hitler’s Berlin as he was in the gay communities murdered by the Nazis, who were commemorated by a plaque on Nollendorferplatz, where David and Jimmy shopped for books or sipped coffee. Equally, David might visit the Brücke Museum, study works by Heckel or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that the Nazis had declared degenerate, then wander into antique stores and examine tickets and leaflets adorned with the tell-tale sticker that concealed a Swastika.

  Jimmy was relaxed about David’s interest in the Third Reich – hardly surprising, given that Iggy’s last new work presented on stage had involved him being whipped by his old bandmate, Ron Asheton, who was wearing a Nazi uniform complete with party armband. (Asheton, incidentally, claimed to have invented the ‘Hitler was the first pop star’ line that became a virtual Bowie catchphrase.) Other friends were equally non-judgemental; one Jewish acquaintance who knew David through his time in Berlin points out, ‘He was always fascinated by it. But the quote David was stigmatised for, he didn’t mean it in a bad way. He meant [the Nazis] knew how to work the media.’ Although convinced David was one of the least racist people she’d ever met, the friend does not remember him ever explaining his crass statements – only in the later Berlin days, when David had met pleasant young men whose fathers had served in the SS, did he fully realise the full implications of his fixation. It wasn’t until 1980 that he’d describe his flirtation with fascist chic as ‘ghastly stuff’. At the same time, in a wide-ranging interview with Angus MacKinnon for the NME, he pointed out, quite reasonably, that he’d never shown racism in his personal dealings. But he didn’t apologise.