Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Les Lambert/Rex Features

  The Thin White Duke: February, 1976, David commences his biggest tour to date, quoting Aleister Crowley and flirting with fascist chic. Yet despite appearances, says new friend Iggy Pop, behind the scenes he would ‘never show bad form. Not even once.’

  Duffy/Getty Images

  The beautiful but ‘heavy’ alien: filming The Man Who Fell to Earth, summer 1975, with Nic Roeg. The movie shoot was a brief respite from David’s consumption of Merck, potent medicinal cocaine supplied by legendary hanger-on Freddie Sessler.

  Richard Creamer

  ‘Everybody was in trouble in LA then.’ Iggy Pop stabbed and humiliated on-stage in Los Angeles, 11 August, 1974, and soon to be resident in UCLA’s psychiatric ward. David Bowie was one of his few visitors. Incredibly, the two casualties would help cure each other – encouraged by David’s cocaine supplier.

  Press Association

  ‘Der Fuhrerling’ : the accusation that Bowie had been snapped making a Nazi salute at London’s Victoria Station, 2 May, 1976, was unfair – but although he’d conquered cocaine by this time, his obsession with fascist imagery took longer to vanquish.

  Andrew Kent

  The Thin White Duke on furlough in Moscow: dinner at the Metropol with Iggy Pop and Corinne ‘Coco’ Schwab, circa 23 April, 1976. The three set up home together in Berlin that summer.

  Andrew Kent

  David celebrates his thirtieth birthday with Iggy Pop (standing), Romy Haag and Coco Schwab (just out of view), l’Ange Bleu, Paris, January, 1977. ‘This is a guy who a year before was supposedly out of his mind on cocaine,’ says one friend from the time, ‘and here he was in sensible shoes, jacket … flat cap, just open and chatting to everyone.’

  Eduard Meyer

  ‘Everything said, “We shouldn’t be making a record here”.’ Berlin’s Hansa TonStudio in 1976: set among the ruins that evoked Brixton in 1947.

  Eduard Meyer

  David Bowie, Tony Visconti and Ton-meister Eduard Meyer, completing Low at Hansa, October, 1976.

  ITV/Rex Features

  Filming Marc with old Mod friend Marc Bolan, 9 September, 1977 (with Bowie’s old bassist, Herbie Flowers, behind). Their last public appearance together was marred by a silly tiff that epitomised the pair’s intertwined friendship and rivalry. Marc would die in a car crash on Wimbledon Common on 16 September.

  Barry Plummer

  Moving on: relaxing at London’s Dorchester hotel, September, 1977, after emerging from his Berlin seclusion.

  Mirrorpix

  David Bowie finally proves himself as an actor on-stage, inhabiting the role of Joseph Merrick in Elephant Man, summer 1980. He enchanted his fellow actors – who nonetheless concluded his was ‘the most horrible, horrible life.’

  Getty Images

  New York’s Daily News shows John Lennon signing Mark Chapman’s copy of Double Fantasy, 8 December, 1980. Chapman’s murder of The Beatles singer, with whom David had recently renewed his friendship, inspired Bowie’s flight from New York to Switzerland.

  News Ltd Newspix/Rex Features

  Hobo intellectual: Bowie filming Baal, August, 1981, in a rare break from his seclusion in Switzerland. The Brecht play represented a farewell to Berlin and underlined Bowie’s newly acquired intellectual credentials – but was destined to be remembered as a flop.

  Barry Schultz/Sunshine/Retna

  David Bowie signs on the dotted line for EMI, 27 January, 1983, in a $17m deal that would today, says the A&R who signed him, have record companies ‘in a line around the block’.

  © Denis O’Regan/CORBIS

  ‘You have no idea … it’s like they’re feeding you the sun, the moon, and the stars.’ David Bowie, bona fide superstar, on the Serious Moonlight tour.

  17

  I Am Not a Freak

  He just had a tacky T-shirt, a pair of jeans and a cardboard suitcase. It was the most horrible, horrible life.

  Ken Ruta

  1977 had been a joyful year, but it was a strange kind of joy, one many people wouldn’t recognise. As a teenager, David had avoided proper work, but now it was more obvious than ever that as an adult he enjoyed the worthiness of studying, of good old Yorkshire graft. He’d dug deep into his reserves of psychic stamina during the Spiders era, with compelling results, but this second creative streak was arguably even more impressive. There would never be another twelve months in Bowie’s life as productive as those that stretched from the summer of 1976 to the summer of 1977, months in which he recorded four landmark albums: The Idiot, Low, Lust for Life and “Heroes”, all of which would have a huge effect on the musical landscape. David knew the significance of these albums – he was filled with ‘a special kind of optimism’ over that time, as Tony Visconti and others recall, in words filled with a kind of nostalgia. Yet even as he immersed himself in work, David was filled with a sense that this special period wouldn’t last.

  He had always moved on briskly when he sensed his musicians had nothing more to offer him. Yet he was even more ruthless with himself; and even as he came to the last of his Berlin albums, he was dismantling the lifestyle that gave birth to them.

  Immediately after the release of “Heroes”, David embarked on an old-school publicity blitz. The single itself was released in three languages, evoking the carefree early days of The Beatles, and David’s promotion of the record took him to Rome, Amsterdam, Paris and London and even, in September, to the Elstree TV studios just outside of London, where venerable crooner Bing Crosby was recording a Christmas special for ITV. Swapping scripted jokes before duetting on ‘Little Drummer Boy’, looking clean-cut and healthy, David seemed strikingly similar to the twenty-two-year-old who’d camped around on Malcolm Thomson’s promotional film, back in 1969. But while the dialogue seemed fake, the jokey pleasantries and the engaging politeness were genuine. Many of those who encountered him over those weeks were put off their stride to find that David, while serious, was easygoing and pliant, not the assertive, rather megalomaniacal creature on display early in 1976. He retained his equilibrium even when faced with the most ludicrous questions, like that posed by radio interviewer John Tobler, in January 1978. Tobler pointed out that, with Bing Crosby’s death in November, plus Marc Bolan’s tragic accident back in September, David’s most recent collaborators had both died soon after working with him. ‘Do you see anything sinister in that?’ Tobler enquired. ‘No, I don’t,’ David replied with commendable restraint, before mentioning that the next act on his list – for production, not termination – was Devo. His championing of the band helped them secure a Warner Brothers deal, although time pressures meant it would be Brian Eno who produced their debut album.

  In between the rounds of interviews, David spent a quiet Christmas at Hauptstrasse. Coco cooked goose for a cosy, celebratory get-together, according to the Berlin friends who attended, including Edu Meyer. But it would be their last Christmas break in Berlin, and caused a public spat with Angie, in an outburst that effectively announced their marriage was over. The exchange kicked off with Angie complaining to the Sunday Mirror’s Tony Robinson on 8 January, 1978, that her husband had ‘without my knowledge taken our son’ from the Swiss house over Christmas. In fact, she’d left Zowie with Marion Skene while she visited friends in New York. ‘I really want David to suffer,’ she told Robinson. ‘Perhaps the only way he’ll suffer is if I do myself in.’ Soon after the first interview, she attempted suicide by downing sleeping pills, then smashed all the glassware in the house before throwing herself down the stairs, breaking her nose. According to Robinson, Angie apparently created so much commotion at the Samaritan’s hospital that the woman in the neighbouring bed, admitted after a cardiac arrest, suffered a relapse.

  Just six months before, David and Angie had been happily playing pool in the Tschungle; both of them with identical haircuts and trench-coats, ‘like brother and sister’, says Esther Friedmann, Iggy’s girlfriend. Angie’s outburst in the tabloid, attacking her husband in public for the
first time, was an act of war – and of desperation. It was a sign of her isolation. As one German friend put it, ‘She was just helpless – she had no one on her side. We’d say “Die Felle schwimmen weg” – your furs are swimming away.* Everything is falling apart.’ Angie blamed Coco for edging her out of her husband’s life, but by now her distaste for David’s music and lifestyle could not be concealed: she disliked Dostoyevsky, she detested flat caps, she even hated the food he and Iggy sampled in Berlin – ‘They ate offal!’ she exclaims today in disgusted tones, as if this alone explains her estrangement from her husband. Such distaste only speeded up the inevitable, given Angie’s lack of interest in sublimating her own life to David’s. Now, she told Robinson, ‘I have to seek a divorce.’

  Angie’s official exit made little difference to David’s romantic life. Since separating from Ava Cherry in the summer of 1975, he’d relied on Coco for many of his needs – conversation, jokes, protection and domestic necessities – although by now she’d moved into her own little apartment in the Hinterhof, like Iggy. In Berlin, both he and Iggy developed the habit of disappearing for a couple of days every now and then, ‘going where the drugs and girls were’, says a friend. ‘David had his little muchachas that he would visit and Jim probably had his. Coco would wind up looking for them all over Berlin worried something had happened.’

  Bowie would in future years rarely comment on his marriage to Angie; one of his most memorable observations was that the experience was ‘like living with a blowtorch’. While his public criticisms were limited, his feelings about Angie eventually verged on mutual hatred; he would rarely mention her by name, and simply referred to her as ‘my ex-wife’. Like Tony Defries, her role in David’s rise to stardom, as well as her name, would never be mentioned again, as she was airbrushed out of his personal history. Subsequently, the gruelling intensity of life with Angie had a predictable effect on his future liaisons, which he would try and keep casual. Occasionally there’d be the odd obsession. On tour with Iggy in Vancouver, he’d become besotted with a boutique owner named Bessie – ‘beautiful, African, just as striking as [David’s second wife] Iman’, according to Annie Apple, an old friend of Iggy’s – and he’d begged her to come back to Berlin with him. But after travelling on with him to Seattle, she’d been disturbed by the manic intensity that surrounded David; even eating at a Shakey’s Pizza Parlour in the suburbs, Bessie noticed how fans would steal his cigarette butts. Two days of this was thrilling, but the idea of more sounded horrific. Shortly afterwards David would date another striking black woman, an ex-girlfriend of Shep Gordon’s who stayed with him in Vevey for a few days before being sent back home. Towards the end of the year, David briefly dated Bianca Jagger – then still married to Mick – with the kind of exaggerated secrecy that ensured the news spread far and wide. They made an attractive couple, but David’s courtship of her didn’t outlast the forthcoming tour.

  Instead, during his last months in Hauptstrasse, away from his tour entourage, David revelled in dressing anonymously, spending time with Zowie, still wandering down to the Kreuzberg clubs, smoking his way through three packs of Gitanes a day, but also cycling on his Raleigh to ‘pretty normal places, talking about life and the books he was reading’, says Tangerine Dream drummer Klaus Krüger – whom David called up that spring, asking him if he’d like to join Iggy’s band, shortly after Iggy had given the Sales brothers their marching orders.

  At the end of January, 1978, David started work on the movie that constituted his farewell to Berlin. Just a Gigolo was the brainchild of David Hemmings, the Blow Up star’s second movie as a director. David was at first enthused by the production, which embodied many of his Berlin obsessions and was filmed around his regular haunts, including Café Wien. Hemmings had secured a remarkable coup, which helped draw David into the venture, by signing up Marlene Dietrich for her first film in eighteen years. David had spent hours in Berlin, chatting to antique-store owners who’d known the reclusive star back in the day; the prospect of meeting her was an intrinsic part of the movie’s appeal.

  Hemmings was ebullient and easygoing – his catchphrase was ‘not too shabby, not too shabby’ – and David told friends he bonded more with the old-fashioned, hard-drinking luvvie than he had with the more intellectual Nic Roeg. But it wasn’t long before the shoot started to go awry. During a celebratory dinner with Bowie, other crew members, Iggy and Esther Friedmann, Hemmings went missing. ‘Something weird happened,’ says Friedmann. ‘[Hemmings] went somewhere and never came back, people were looking all over. And then David never got to meet Marlene. It turned out instead of acting with her, he was acting with a chair.’

  Hemmings explained later that Dietrich’s brief appearance in the movie would be filmed in Paris; her half of the exchange with David was filmed in a set recreating the Café Wien, intercut with his lines, delivered back in Berlin. The scene – like the movie – was disjointed and irredeemably stilted; still, from today’s perspective, the movie is a poignant last glimpse of the great German star, while David manages to look fetching, carrying a pig.

  The fate of Just a Gigolo would typify David’s cinematic career, which was more successful than those of rock-star rivals like Jagger and Sting, but never came close to justifying his new job description, which he announced that year was ‘generalist’ – a term obviously influenced by, but lacking the charm of, Eno’s ‘non-musician’ tag. Picking out a decent script was a crapshoot in which David would never quite beat the odds – and as Hemmings’ problems mounted, with finance problems and negative reactions to his first edits all publicised in the movie press, the prospect of David’s own biggest tour to date provided a welcome distraction.

  Ranging across four continents, with seventy-eight dates, many of them in huge stadia, the Isolar II tour would put the flakey, stressful zigzagging improvisation of the Ziggy era to shame. The show was an ambitious, futuristic epic, showcasing the largely electronic soundscapes of Low and “Heroes”, but it drew deep on David’s musical history. Clothes designer Natasha Korniloff was a friend from the Lindsay Kemp troupe; guitarist Adrian Belew was snaffled from Frank Zappa’s band. Violinist Simon House had hung out with David and Hermione in 1968 and played in High Tide with Tony Hill, David’s guitarist from Turquoise. Pianist Sean Mayes met David through the band Fumble, who’d rehearsed alongside him at Underhill and supported David for March 1973’s Aladdin Sane tour. Keyboardist Roger Powell came from Todd Rundgren’s Utopia; the four joined Bowie stalwarts Alomar, Dennis Davis and George Murray.

  Carlos had spent six days running the band through a set based on Low and “Heroes” – brandishing a baton, like a classical conductor, for ‘Warszawa’ – at the Showco soundstage in Dallas before David arrived on 19 March after a brief holiday in Kenya and suggested they work up a sequence of Ziggy songs. The seven-piece outfit was competent, not too polished, with Mayes’ stomping piano adding a vital roughness for a string of shows that were rapturously received.

  Over the three months, the shows settled into a predictable routine. Each night there’d be the desperate race for a good restaurant, or a club that was still open – Sean Mayes often acted as pathfinder, seeking out gay clubs where David or the others could arrive later. Whereas at the time of Station to Station the cavalcade had centred around Iggy and David, now Carlos acted as the head of household, with David quiet and humorous but rather distant. Meanwhile, business tensions seemed to fizz around the margins of the little crew, between Coco and Pat Gibbons, or Pat and road manager Eric Barrett – a seasoned pro, famous for his work with Hendrix. The tensions weren’t helped by what Simon House remembers as ‘mountains of blow’. David rarely participated, although on one memorable occasion in Paris on 24 May, he stayed up for a twenty-hour coke bender after the first show; no one in the band saw him until shortly before the second night’s performance. Simon House was chatting in the doorway of a dressing room when he sensed what felt like a kind of psychic vibration behind him. Turning round, he saw the singer
, pale and clammy, his whole demeanour transformed – but that night’s performance was storming.

  It was on stage that the disparate English and American band-members truly came together; an hour and a half of bliss, punctuated by musical communiqués or jokes. Dennis Davis was the key perpetrator, on-stage and off; often he’d attempt to render the whole band helpless on-stage by, for instance, playing a hugely extended drum fill, rolling over every drum in his kit in turn in a kind of mad extended rhythmic monologue that would crease them all up. (Off-stage, he was much the same, taking the mic whenever they were on the bus and delivering a mad, surreal, pseudo-tour-guide commentary.) David loved it; he seemed to relish the vibrancy of his band, who would, in turn, occasionally watch him, hypnotised by the spectacle. David retained a distance from his musicians – Sean Mayes referred to him as ‘his Lordship’ – but even today there’s a kind of loving fondness in their descriptions of sharing a stage with him: ‘He has some power,’ says House. ‘An aura that helps you transmit to thousands or millions of people. Freddie Mercury had it too. Maybe it’s just that they wrote these colossal songs. But the music was always the one good thing on this tour.’

  Adrian Belew shared with House the sense that Bowie was ‘somewhat troubled. Maybe he was still doing some drugs, I don’t know, maybe he was tired. I remember him overall as amazing to be around, but I did have a sense he was riding through it, not totally happy.’

  Simon House’s memories of the tour are much darker, for reasons unconnected with David. The violinist’s partner, Sue, was ill with Huntington’s disease. Her plight was all the more sad, for she wouldn’t acknowledge the problem which eventually left her hospitalised, and insisted on joining the tour. The illness manifests itself in varying guises; in her case, she’d act as if aggressive or drunk, causing so much racket in Tokyo that the hotel called the police. David, not unreasonably, got upset if he saw Sue while on stage. It made House feel like an outcast. Worse, Bowie didn’t address the issue directly so House couldn’t even explain Sue’s illness first-hand. In those situations, as with most issues, it was Carlos Alomar who brought an almost spiritual, soothing attitude. ‘Carlos is a psychologist, a spiritualist, one of the most charming people in the world,’ says House. ‘We got on really well; I wouldn’t have enjoyed the tour without him. He was the one would distract from the problems.’