Starman

by Paul Trynka

  *

  Throughout the first half of 1981, David revelled in his seclusion; now, the focus and dedication that had usually been directed at his music was applied to ‘seeing [Zowie] grow … and be excited about the future’. There was just one musical venture that summer, for which he only had to stroll down the road: the previous year, he’d agreed to collaborate on the theme song for Paul Schrager’s remake of Val Lewton’s classic movie Cat People. The song was Bowie’s first and only collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, whose work he’d discovered back in Los Angeles. The Italian electro pioneer was best-known for the chattering sequencers of songs like Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, but for this song he constructed a bleak, minimalistic soundscape, based on the simplest of two-chord changes. Bowie recorded his languorous, hypnotic vocal over Moroder’s backing track at Mountain Studios; the opening minutes would count among the most magnificent, and restrained, of his career. A modest success on its release the next April, ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fires)’ would become one of the most overlooked Bowie gems until Quentin Tarantino unearthed it for his Nazi splatter-movie, Inglourious Basterds, in 2009.

  It was during his visits to Mountain – which eventually became a second home once he negotiated his own, off-peak, David Bowie discount – that David reacquainted himself with a fan-turned-rival who was recording in the main casino studio.

  David had met Freddie Mercury back in the summer of 1970, when the Queen singer worked on a stall in Kensington Market and fitted Bowie with a pair of suede boots. Introduced by their mutual friend, ex-Beatstalker Alan Mair, Freddie had shyly mentioned he was rehearsing with a new band. David, then disenchanted with Ken Pitt, had replied, ‘Why would you want to get into this business?’ Fortunately Freddie had ignored him, but over the next few years would take more than a few leaves out of the Bowie book. Queen turned up regularly at Bowie shows, recorded at Trident and hired MainMan photographer Mick Rock, while the influence of Mick Ronson’s pioneering work on songs like ‘The Supermen’ was readily discernible in Brian May’s trademark multi-layered guitar style.

  According to Mercury’s personal assistant Peter Freestone, Bowie only realised Queen were in Mountain working on their R&B-flavoured album Hot Space by chance. Asked to add backing vocals on the song ‘Cool Cat’, David stayed for a marathon session in which Queen’s song ‘Feel Like’ was transformed into ‘Under Pressure’. David contributed the bulk of the lyrics, set over drummer Roger Taylor’s descending chord sequence. By now, Mercury had developed more of an ego than in his market-stall days, and it was the Queen drummer who was at the heart of the session, interacting with the interloper. ‘Roger and Bowie got on very well,’ according to Freestone, ‘although the lyrics and title idea came from Freddie and David.’

  David was charming, polite, sensitive in his dealings with these four relative strangers, but also remarkably confident, just as he had been in his youth, showing his songs to bands like The Beatstalkers, certain they’d accept them. ‘It was hard because you had four very precocious boys – and David, who was precocious enough for all of us,’ says Brian May. ‘David took over the song lyrically. It’s a significant song because of David and its lyrical content – I would have found that hard to admit in the old days – but I can admit it now.’ David championed the song, encouraging Freddie, and contributing a classic, swooping melody, as well as one of his own distinctive, reflective middle-eight sections (‘the terror of knowing what this world is all about’).

  Queen were uncertain about the track, even after Bowie and Mercury re-worked their vocals and mixed the recording at The Power Station in New York, a fortnight later – John Deacon’s distinctive bassline was added at the same session, hummed to him by David. Brian May was particularly unhappy, recalling the ‘fierce battles’ around the mix, and his own misgivings about the song’s release as a single; instead, it was Queen’s record company, EMI, that pushed the collaboration, which finally hit the streets that September and would became Queen’s second number one, hitting the top of the UK charts on 21 November, and number twenty-nine in the US a few weeks later.

  It was a satisfying coup for David, helping craft another hit from behind the scenes, as he had for many others, all the more so given his sudden disappearance from the music scene. He was happy to relinquish ‘Under Pressure’ to Queen – it would take persistent persuasion to get him to perform the song, decades later – but another incentive for him to take a back seat was the fact that his contractual obligation to Tony Defries wouldn’t expire until October 1982; Queen were welcome to take the mechanical royalties on the record, rather than his former manager. Instead, he would lie low for a year, venturing out only to work on a project that was of interest mainly to academics, and would produce one of the quirkiest, most overlooked and – in its own way – perfect records of his career.

  The project was the brainchild of Alan Clarke, a brave, gritty director best-known for the controversial movie Scum. Early in 1981, he had discussed the notion of a TV version of Bertholt Brecht’s first full-length play, Baal, with BBC producer Louis Marks. Clarke planned a minimal, studio-based production of the 1918 play, using a pioneering split-screen effect for Brecht’s trademark Verfremdungseffekt – in which the actor directly addresses the audience, commenting on events.

  The play was ‘ambitious – bordering on the dangerous’, says Louis Marks. ‘But I had great confidence in Alan Clarke; he was a great director.’ From the start, Clarke, Marks and writer John Willett were preoccupied with the casting of the central character. The three debated Steven Berkoff and Barry Humphries (Willett admired Dame Edna Everage’s ‘demonic intensity’) before the writer suggested Bowie; he knew of his work on The Elephant Man, and guessed he ‘might be interested in pre-1933 Germany and even in Brecht’. He guessed right: Clarke and Louis Marks went to see Bowie in Vevey in mid-July. ‘When they came back, we had our Baal,’ says Willett.

  The casting was a fascinating one: the notion of an amoral hobo poet shagging his way around the world was appropriately close to David’s nomad sex-junky existence with the Manish Boys – a time that, from his safe Swiss retreat, seemed a world away. Bowie didn’t hesitate, says Marks. ‘The chat at his house was very brief – and then it was simply down to practicalities, him and Alan talking about how they would do it.’

  Marks, Clarke and Willett’s experience with David closely mirrored that of The Elephant Man’s crew. Bowie was a trouper, but the atmosphere around him was disturbing. The project was shrouded in obsessive secrecy; once rehearsals started the crew were ordered not to reveal Bowie’s involvement. Two security guards stood by the studio door throughout; the sign on the entrance to BBC Studio 1 read simply ‘Classic Play’.

  Producer Louis Marks was a Doctor of Philosophy, an Oxford-educated expert on renaissance studies; John Willett was the English-speaking world’s foremost Brecht scholar and translator, who’d met the playwright in 1956 – both of them were bona fide intellectuals. Once David had arrived in the rehearsal space in Acton, the trio sat down to discuss the play. Their conversation turned to the look of the play; Willett explained how he saw it as reminiscent of the illustrator Masereel. ‘How wonderful!’ David replied, before mentioning how he’d tracked down some of his prints in Berlin, part of his growing collection of expressionist art. They discussed the Brecht recitatif singing style. ‘I think of it rather like plainsong,’ Bowie murmured. Willett was shocked; the comparison made complete sense, but had never occurred to him. They continued talking about Brecht and the Neue Sachlichkeit art movement – the stripped-down, austere reaction to expressionism – and Bowie’s understanding seemed just as sophisticated.

  As they walked away from one discussion, Willett turned to Marks, ‘He knows more about Germany as a whole – and Brecht in particular – than anyone we know!’ They didn’t discuss whether David knew more than the two of them – but it was a distinct possibility.

  A decade before, David absorbed his culture from people, whether Willia
m Burroughs or Andy Warhol, skipping around different subjects like a gadfly. It was in his cocaine period that he’d learned to focus, spending endless hours pondering alien visitations or Nazi folklore; yet when he’d put that focus to real use, studying in Berlin galleries or poring over artist monographs, he’d transformed himself from a sophisticated name-dropper to a figure who could impress and even intimidate Oxford’s finest intellectuals.

  As discussions gave way to rehearsals, the pair were impressed by how Bowie took command of Brecht’s music, imposing sense and rhythm on the words. Yet, as an actor, he was totally unconventional. An actor would build up a performance from scratch, adding or modifying elements with each rehearsal. David, instead, gave a set of completely separate, different performances. Each version seemed complete, full of ideas: ‘Nothing he said was routine,’ says Willett.

  There were four weeks rehearsal in Acton before the one-week shoot, which reached a climax on the final day, 12 August, when Clarke had to tie up the split-screen shots and the opening ‘Hymn’, which was crucial both to set up the play and to establish Bowie’s credibility as the central character. The pressure was on as Bowie started singing the hymn; then suddenly there was a tremendous banging through the studio wall. Clarke stopped the cameras, and sent a messenger round to Studio 2 to tell them to be quiet; but the door to Studio 2 was locked. With the hammering echoing around the studio, Louis Marks phoned BBC administration, and the noise stopped for a few minutes; only to start again, from a slightly different location. The cycle repeated itself several times, and tempers were frayed, before Bowie announced, ‘I know how to stop this!’

  He strode into the centre of the studio, put his hands to his mouth, and shouted, ‘Lunch!’ Suddenly, the tension evaporated. The noise did reoccur, but the filming continued, with actors and crew energised once more, and Clarke wrapped up the shoot, confident he’d pulled off a difficult coup.

  By now, Bowie seemed to exert almost a superhuman influence over his distinguished colleagues; but he wasn’t poncy, rather he was enthusiastic and sincere. When working on the songs for the TV play, he’d collaborated closely with Dominic Muldowney, a pioneer in interpreting Brecht’s music. Towards the end, he’d confided in Muldowney that he’d like to record some of the material in Berlin; would Muldowney like to oversee the arrangements? Muldowney leapt at the chance; writer John Willett volunteered to come along, too. ‘Really, you will?’ asked David Bowie, with his dazzling charm. ‘You’d be doing me a terrific favour!’ He went on to explain that he wanted the recordings to serve as his final album for RCA. Muldowney would help not only bring one distinguished era of David Bowie’s career to a close, but free him for the next one, too.

  A few weeks later, Bowie assembled with Muldowney, Willett, Tony Visconti and Edu Meyer for David’s final recording at Hansa Studio 2. It was a relaxed session, relying heavily on the eight-strong band of Berlin musicians assembled by percussionist Sherry Bertram, which included plenty of Brecht old-timers, notably a seventy-five-year-old bandoneonist who’d played in the first productions of The Threepenny Orchestra.

  Bowie arrived late for the recording, which meant Muldowney and Visconti laid down the bulk of the backing tracks before his arrival. Muldowney had an unrivalled pedigree in classical and Brecht-related music, having studied with composer Harrison Birtwistle, but was staggered at the creativity on display: even as he arranged one string part, Visconti was already compressing and EQ-ing the sound, ‘and suddenly these four strings sounded like four tanks’.

  With the backing tracks complete they cleared the hall, and Visconti and Meyer set up microphones in each corner so that they could record David filling the Meistersaal with his voice, like the cabaret acts who’d performed there in the 1920s, finishing the entire set within three or four hours. It was a masterclass in technique, says Muldowney. ‘The stand-out was “The Drowned Girl”, which is like an Ophelia song, where she dies in the river. He’s singing about “Her slow descent” below the water, right down in the bass baritone. Then halfway through he jumps up the octave. I play this song to composers at the Royal Opera House on courses. When he sings up to the word “smoke” it’s got smoke all around it, it’s cloudy. Then we get to the “k” of smoke and you can see again. It’s an absolute tutorial in how to paint a text. The only other person I know can do that is Frank Sinatra.’

  After the day’s singing masterclass, David spent that night giving Muldowney a cultural tour. While the exhausted Visconti slept, David and Muldowney turned up first at a club in Kreuzberg where the clientele were draped over dentists’ chairs; next came a New Wave club, the Dschungel, where David danced with a beautiful, elfin, Ziggyish boy, flirtatiously sharing the same cigarette with him. Later still they were knocking on an imposing basement door: the peephole slid open, David was given a delighted welcome, and he ushered Muldowney into a transvestite bar. Chatting to the stunning creatures serving drinks, he admired the gilt mirror that ran the length of the bar. ‘Thank you,’ they told him, ‘it was made for Hermann Göring.’ Around four in the morning, Muldowney returned, spent, to his hotel on the Ku’Damm, and left David going strong, in his own goodbye to Berlin.

  David’s anonymous exploits in Berlin were in stark contrast to the media frenzy that greeted the crew on their return to London. The news that the star, out of view for a year now, was appearing in an obscure German play inspired headlines and spreads in the Daily Express, the Sun, and most of the UK press. The Daily Mirror explained: ‘He plays a singing poet with a huge appetite for sex and wine called Baal by German’ – a typographically challenged précis which perhaps did not fully communicate the play’s significance.

  Clarke and Willett now discovered that the BBC had retitled the play Bowie In Baal, and delayed transmission until the spring, when they could showcase Bowie’s presence with a cover story in the Radio Times. There was ‘a spat’, as producer Louis Marks tried to fight the decision, but failed. An obscure play, previously of interest only to academics, was now being promoted as a ratings-grabber; Bowie was now overshadowing both Brecht and Baal.

  The play’s transformation into a prestige production brought its own repercussions. A few weeks before the transmission date, 2 March, 1982, Louis Marks discovered ITV had scheduled an equally prestigious play, starting that same evening but a half-hour earlier. A Voyage Round My Father, John Mortimer’s poignant, funny memoir of the decline of his cantankerous barrister father featured Laurence Olivier in one of his last and best-loved roles. The BBC was comprehensively up staged; ITV trounced Baal both in ratings and press coverage – although the reviews of Bowie’s acting were in the main complimentary. Clarke and Willett later agreed the production was hampered by its compromise between naturalism and minimalism – ‘it needed more edge and power’, according to Willett – yet even today it remains the definitive interpretation of this fascinating, immature work. ‘I have no reservations about it today,’ says Marks, the figure who more than anyone steered the project through the BBC bureaucracy. ‘I was thrilled to be involved.’

  Baal was destined to become a lost artefact, often discussed by Brecht scholars. Today, only the CD remains to document what was not only one of Bowie’s bravest artistic efforts, but would also constitute his final Berlin document. The Hauptstrasse lease had expired in February 1981, so he stayed in his old haunt, the Schlosshotel Gerhus, and went to visit Esther Friedmann, whose relationship with Iggy was splintering as Iggy’s own life was falling apart. He’d been booted off Arista Records, was back on cocaine, and stayed drunk most of the time to swamp his awareness that his music, the one thing that had always sustained him, sounded awful. Esther had seen David help Iggy out for years; now he sat playing piano in her new apartment in Kreuzberg, counselling her. ‘You know a lot about art,’ he told her. ‘You should do it for a living.’ Friedmann followed his advice, and later built up a thriving gallery business.

  The Baal EP was David’s final RCA release; it reached number twenty-nine in the UK album
charts in the spring of 1982. It was now an open secret that David was simply waiting out his contract with RCA – the motive was not just financial, for the company’s shortcomings had been obvious from his very first US tour, with their patchy efforts at arranging local airplay and promotion. The label’s lack of enthusiasm for Low had not eased his disenchantment. David’s solution was simply to ignore RCA while he pursued other business.

  It wasn’t long before other business started to stream in, for after a year in Vevey, David was getting itchy feet. With recording on the backburner, he turned again to acting. It had been Tony Defries who claimed he would make David into a mainstream entertainer, like Liz Taylor, and with two major movie projects in 1982, it looked like David was getting close. Both were quirky concepts, although the one that looked the most commercial turned out to be the bigger failure. Tony Scott, a successful commercials director, was hoping to make a leap into cinema like his brother Ridley – who had graduated from selling Lyon’s Maid ice-cream back in 1969, with an ad that coincidentally featured a young David, to directing Alien and Bladerunner. Tony’s first shot at the mainstream was The Hunger, a slick, glossy vampire movie based on a novel by Whitley Strieber. With its MTV-influenced visuals, bombastic soundtrack, a guest appearance by Goth band Bauhaus and scenes shot in the nightclub Heaven, it was exactly the kind of film in which you’d expect to see a rock star attempting to cross over into acting, and its combination of sensationalism and dreary predictability ensured this ‘sensual classic of perverse fear’ was a box-office flop on its release in April 1983. Eventually, however, its Goth glossiness helped the movie build a cult following, inspiring a nineties TV spin-off, which helped hatch a longstanding relationship between Tony Scott and David’s son.