Starman

by Paul Trynka

  On the Station to Station tour, there was always the sense that David was head of a family; this time around, it seemed that he was head of a business empire. Coco and Pat Gibbons formed the nucleus of Isolar, David’s management company, which changed in form over the next few years, but would always have David at its apex. In those early days, the fact that David effectively managed himself marked him out as a maverick; but that would change. The beginnings of the realisation that he was a businessman, as well as an artist, came with the announcement that he would release a live album, recorded primarily in Philadelphia, while the tour was still rolling across Japan. The double album was intended both to scupper the efforts of bootleggers and count towards David’s RCA obligation. The album’s financial motivations were undoubtedly too obvious – Jon Savage of Sounds epitomised the reaction when he described Stage as ‘a combined summing-up, money-making and time-gaining device’ – but the audacity of the live show was obvious, too, even in the album’s first version, released with its tracks sliced and diced into chronological order.

  By the time Stage was released on 8 September, 1978, David was using a short break from his tour to work on the third album in a trilogy that he’d announced back in January. Trilogies, even when rebranded as ‘triptychs’, as David called this set, risk outstaying their welcome, and Lodger, for all the randomness involved in its recording, lacked the sense of risk and excitement that had pervaded Low and “Heroes”. Some of that was down to the location: Mountain Studio in Montreux was carpeted, comfortable and bland compared to the edgy, unsettling vibe of Hansa. To the session stalwarts, like Carlos Alomar, Lodger was a more intellectual, less inspired affair than “Heroes”.

  For the previous album, Eno had used some of his Oblique Strategy techniques on the instrumental side, notably ‘Sense of Doubt’. On this project – working title Planned Accidents – they were used for the band tracks, most memorably in an exercise where Brian would point randomly at a chord chart on a wall and ask the musicians to play them. ‘And then I’m like, This is not going to substitute for a group chord chart which I can write,’ says Alomar, ‘and this experiment is stupid.’

  ‘It sounded terrible,’ says House. ‘Carlos did have a problem, simply because he’s very gifted and professional [and] he can’t bring himself to play stuff that sounds like crap.’

  David encouraged the reluctant guitarist – ‘Come on fellas, play along!’ – although the experiment was ultimately abandoned. It was indeed ‘not Brian’s finest idea’, according to Tony Visconti. Carlos does admit that on other occasions, Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards, which instructed random actions in order to bypass creative blocks, worked as theorised. ‘One time Brian asked me something and I was blocked because I didn’t understand what he wanted,’ says Alomar. ‘Then one of the cards said something like, “Remember those silent moments,” and then another said, “Think like a gardener.” Some kind of eclectic, weird reference. It worked – or let’s say you find yourself accepting it. I would have chosen other things to play – but in hindsight it was fun.’

  House was one of the few musicians who had played with Eno outside of Bowie – they’d recorded together on Robert Calvert’s solo album – and loved Eno’s creativity: ‘He’s always got an idea, is always on the case.’ But on this project he thought that Eno’s inspiration was ebbing away – and that the prime reason for his own use of Oblique Strategies was to cope with his own artistic block, not the musicians’.

  Eno’s preference seemed to be to experiment almost endlessly, and on this session it was Bowie who showed decisiveness, seizing on one idea to keep things moving, impatiently overseeing the last few days when the real creativity took place. The real beauty of the album came from the way that random ideas were scattered like confetti over ordinary (and in some cases, repeated) chord structures: Adrian Belew’s brilliantly warped guitar on ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, for which the band all switched to unfamiliar instruments, a trick David and Carlos had first tried on Lust for Life; House’s Byzantine violin, which influenced the Turkish vibe of ‘Yassassin’, or the twisted interplay of Alomar’s guitar and Visconti’s swooping strings on ‘DJ’. One night Visconti downed a bottle of Tequila and wrote out an arrangement for three mandolins, which became ‘Fantastic Voyage’. ‘It was a beautiful moment,’ says House, who played the part along with Belew and Visconti.

  Once the frustrations of the first few days were over, with the basic tracks montaged from tape edits, the recording sessions were blissful. The songs were sculpted into shape in the setting of an idyllic Indian summer, during which the musicians basked in the gorgeous view over Lake Geneva and enjoyed chats with Eugene Chaplin, Charlie’s grandson, who’d bring over trays of beer. ‘It was a perfect fortnight,’ says House. ‘Although the music didn’t ever perfectly gel.’ The violinist had high standards, though, for he considered Low and “Heroes” perfect albums, which couldn’t be bettered.

  Adrian Belew arrived at a later stage of the recording, once the backing tracks had been edited into shape. He was warmed up with a compliment first. ‘I walked in, and David, Brian and Tony are all smiling, like they’ve a shared secret. Soon I ask, “What’s going on?” And they said, “When we did all the tracks with Robert Fripp for “Heroes” we did them as composite tracks. We took something from each take, edited it all together to make something that was impossible to play. And you didn’t know that, and you played it all live!”’

  The trio were buttering him up; knowing he had played the impossible, he was expected to deliver the same on the session. Belew was sent upstairs to the recording room, where Bowie, Eno and Visconti watched him through a closed-circuit TV camera, while the guitarist’s only contact with the outside world were the instructions that came over his headphones.

  Belew had only just plugged in his Fender Stratocaster when he heard someone tell him: ‘The drummer will go 1, 2, 3, then you come in.’

  ‘What key is it?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Don’t worry about the key,’ he was told. ‘Just play!’

  There were maybe three passes at the music, which arrived in a torrent over his headphones, then he was told that was it. As the recording went on, that became the pattern: three goes at each song, with the resulting parts edited into one composite track. ‘When I heard the final versions, I had no memory of how I came up with these parts. And meanwhile they’re going, “This is the first time this guy has been in a recording studio!”’ Today, Belew can’t remember how any of the individual songs came about, bar ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, where they told him that Carlos was playing drums. ‘It was like a freight train coming through my mind,’ he says of his now celebrated solo. ‘I just had to cling on.’

  Completed in March 1979 at New York’s Power Plant, Lodger would meet with a respectful, slightly subdued reception on its release in May. Visconti blamed the lack of enthusiasm on a rushed mix. Much of the instrumentation did indeed sound thin next to the ebullient clatter of “Heroes”; the same applied to the emotional content, for where its two predecessors were deep, Lodger was restless and quirky. The album would attract admiration rather than visceral love or hatred, but its art-rock intellectualism sat neatly alongside emerging bands like Talking Heads – produced by Brian Eno over the same timeframe – or New Romantic bands like Spandau Ballet, whose Germanic name, sound and peg-leg pants were all based on the 1978-model David Bowie.

  After the break for the main Lodger sessions in September, the tour continued through Australia and Japan. For Belew in particular, the experience was one of the most fulfilling in his career: ‘We got to Japan and it was amazing, like the stratosphere of super-fame.’ Seven months of touring with David ‘really propelled me into being the guitarist I became. He was the first person to give me the freedom to go and explore, in front of 20,000 people. When you have that scenario, you almost transcend yourself – you dig deep and find stuff you didn’t know was there. I was on a permanent high.’

  Lodger enjoyed a decent c
hart run, reaching number four in the UK and number twenty in the US, but for all the slackening in his chart momentum, David was positioned perfectly, alongside Eno, as a patron of the late seventies New Wave. Now in his thirties, he seemed to be moving on more quickly, from album to album, than he had in his twenties – and the impressiveness of his achievement was underlined, if it needed to be, by the fate of the two men who were his closest peers as patrons of the New Wave, namely Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.

  After the triumph of Transformer, and its densely wrought, emotionally gruelling successor Berlin, Lou’s music had spiralled into self-parody with Coney Island Baby and Rock and Roll Heart. Reed was short of ideas and money, and by his spring 1979 European tour he was drinking his way through two pints of Scotch every three days, swigged straight from the bottle.

  Lou and David had met only occasionally since the MainMan days, but an air of excitement bubbled around Lou and his band in April 1979, when they heard David would be showing up at Lou’s Hammersmith Odeon date. The show was a mess. Seeing David sitting on an amplifier case at the side of the stage, Lou started screaming at his musicians and switched the set around. But once he made it through to the last number Lou was ebullient, overjoyed to see his friend. The pair hugged each other at the side of the stage, Lou running his hands lovingly through David’s hair, before the pair climbed into the tour bus, then set off in search of a restaurant.

  The dishes were on the table at the Chelsea Rendezvous, when an infamous spat broke out. Lou was flanked by his girlfriend Sylvia; David by another woman and Lou’s guitarist Chuck Hammer, who heard Lou ask David if he would produce his next album.

  ‘Yes,’ David agreed, ‘if you clean up your act.’

  Lou slapped David across the face, hard, once on each cheek, screaming, ‘Don’t you ever say that to me! Never say that to me!’ Lou’s manager, Eric Kronfeld, wrestled him away, and for a few minutes peace resumed, until suddenly Lou slapped David again. This time David’s bodyguards pulled them apart, and within seconds, Lou and his party were bundled out of the restaurant.

  The fracas, witnessed by an astonished Allan Jones of Melody Maker and Giovanni Dadamo of Sounds, would feature in the respective music weeklies, but neither writer saw the next act of the drama. An hour or two later, Reed’s band were back at the hotel and guitarist Chuck Hammer was on the phone, describing the night’s events to a friend. Suddenly he heard footsteps in the corridor outside, the sound of fists hammering on a neighbouring door and then shouts of ‘Come on Lou – I know you’re in there!’

  For perhaps the first time in his life since being clocked in the eye by George Underwood, the man who had proclaimed he was ‘not much cop at punching’ in ‘Kooks’ was attempting to pick a fight. But the dark prince of New York decadence, if he was in his room (no one found out), remained cowering under his duvet, and after a few more minutes of stomping up and down the hall, David left the building.

  Even a month later, when David told Iggy and girlfriend Esther Friedmann about the fight, he was still ‘devastated’, remembers Friedmann. The incident showed the pitfalls of helping out people you admired. Relations with Iggy, too, were strained. The ex-Stooge had managed one fairly successful album, New Values, under his own steam, but since then he’d been growing increasingly depressed. David and Coco had attempted to help, taking him and Esther on holiday with them, including a trip to Kenya, ‘but sometimes when people are good to you it’s worse’, says Friedmann.

  By September 1979 Iggy was in a bad way; marooned in a residential studio in Wales, lost in a haze of dope and booze, and seemingly unable to finish the follow-up to New Values on his new label, Arista. David drove out, with Coco, to help, cheering up Iggy and the musicians with a long monologue on Johnny Binden, the gangster, hanger-on and owner of a legendarily huge cock which he’d displayed to David’s former MainMain stablemate Dana Gillespie and Princess Margaret, among others, on Mustique. The story ended up being turned into a song, ‘Play it Safe’. Bowie was dauntingly impressive – ‘like a creative playmaster’, says keyboard player Barry Andrews – but his visit seemed to highlight Iggy’s failure at finding his way through the corporate maze. Both men shared similar demons – egotism, jealousy and a tendency for a kind of musical post-natal depression, once they’d completed a project – but David’s competitive nature always inspired him to bounce back with a characteristic zest.

  That competitiveness would add a satisfying edge to David’s next project, for as Lou Reed hit an artistic block on his next album, Growing Up in Public – leaving most of the music to collaborator Michael Fonfara and writing the lyrics drunk, by the studio pool – David was schmoozing Lou’s guitarist, Chuck Hammer. ‘Lou had really been an asshole [in London],’ says Hammer, ‘and I was really impressed by David. He was just the perfect gentleman. But I always wondered, later on, if David was trying at get back at Lou, trying to break up his band a little bit.’

  Hammer would become a key contributor to what many Bowie fans would regard as their hero’s last truly great album. There’s much justification for that view, for Scary Monsters still sparkles today. Its intense, churning grooves sound remarkably contemporary – in retrospect, it’s the obvious source of Blur’s angular rock attack from Park Life onwards – but despite the complexity of its arrangements, there are many moments of unaffected simplicity.

  In a signal that it was a move on from his European albums, Scary Monsters was recorded mostly at New York’s Power Station, widely regarded as the best-sounding American studio of its time. But for the first time since Ziggy’s nod to fifties rock ‘n’ roll, the album also looked back, both at Bowie’s own career and at the ‘New Wave kids’ who were coming up behind him.

  Popular folklore has it that Bowie was intent on scoring a hit record. Certainly that’s the impression that Chuck Hammer got, for he arrived to witness a much more focused, almost conventional work ethic compared to the last Eno collaboration. Although now an established artist, David was still recognisably the confident, punctual young buck remembered by teenage friends like The Manish Boys. For the recording David, sporting a moustache, dressed in a full-length leather coat and Japanese sandals, brandished a clip-board, on which he’d tick off items on a musical ‘to do’ list. Just as in the Iggy sessions, he was entertaining, with that trademark flirtatious jokiness, but with a formidable sense of focus. Tony Visconti was almost scarily ‘on it’, recording and planning ahead at the same time. ‘They were an absolutely unified team,’ says Hammer, ‘really impressively organised, there was no chaos – but it was very relaxed and creative, too.’

  Hammer was called in primarily to work on a song titled ‘People Are Turning to Gold’. He had been working on a new technique of building up synthesised layers, which he called Guitarchitecture, and had sent a tape of his experiments to Bowie. As he worked on the song, which as yet had no lyrics, he quickly added distinctive ‘choir’ parts to the chorus, before moving on to ‘Teenage Wildlife’ and the gospelly ‘Up the Hill Backwards’ (the latter part didn’t made the cut, being replaced by Robert Fripp’s superb, frenzied electric guitar). ‘Chuck was very experimental for us, it was 50/50 whether he would make the cut,’ says Visconti, but as so often, Bowie drew out an inspiring performance from the young guitarist, to offset the conventional electric guitar parts which Robert Fripp would record a few days later for the rest of the album. Bowie would wait another two months before writing lyrics for the song, finally naming it ‘Ashes to Ashes’: ‘We did love it immensely, and knew it was one of the major tracks,’ says Visconti.

  For all the arresting sonic effects laced through ‘Ashes to Ashes’, it was the song’s melodic inventiveness that underpinned its success: it represented a return to David’s old-fashioned songwriting, with a swooping melody in the verse, and one of his characteristic pre-verse digressions – ‘the shriek of nothing is killing me’ – as well as a conventional, but gorgeous middle eight, which even seemed, with its ‘never done anything out of the blue’, to a
ddress the age-old criticism of David that he was premeditated and calculating.

  As a UK number one single, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ seemed to signal that Bowie would dominate the 1980s as convincingly as he had the seventies. For the video, an intrinsic part of the single’s eventual success, he commandeered the Blitz club scene – a scene which, of course, took Bowie’s style as a template. In what was one of the first instances of him interacting with a new generation of artists whom he’d influenced, he was again the epitome of charm, dropping in for an evening with the club’s host Steve Strange, then inviting him to the next day’s 6 a.m. trip to Southend for the celebrated video shoot, which reprised the Pierrot style of Lindsay Kemp, again with a costume designed by Natasha Korniloff. Now thirty-three, he was relaxed, sociable – and, says Steve Strange with pride, ‘when he snogged me, I got some tongue, too’. If David did intend to get back at Lou Reed, he must have considered two-timing him with his guitarist, and scoring a number one in the process, had put him in his place.