Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Joey – who would eventually revert to his first name, Duncan – was on set for some of the filming of The Hunger; it would become a formative experience in his eventual career. For Bowie, though, his longest stay in England since 1973 brought the family skeletons dancing out of the closet. Both his mother Peggy and his aunt Pat had long nursed resentments, feeling that they, and David’s half-brother Terry, were being neglected.

  Peggy had phoned Charles Shaar Murray at the NME back in 1975 to share her grievances, and was at the point of going public again. David’s ex-manager, Ken Pitt, had remained in contact with her, and dissuaded her from approaching the tabloids. Although admirably circumspect, Pitt sees Peggy’s boredom and constant demand for attention as problems that would never be solved. ‘I would be on the phone to her quite often, with some issue or other. In the end I used to say to her, “Peggy, if David were a plumber, you wouldn’t even be talking about him, would you?”’ Pitt’s influence and David’s more consistent efforts to ensure Joey remained in touch with his grandmother helped keep Peggy out of the press, but his aunt Pat was not so easily controlled, contacting the Sun and the Star that July to tell them that David was ‘callous and uncaring … and needs to face up to his responsibilities’.

  Pat’s anger was prompted by the increasingly sad condition of Terry. David’s half-brother’s outlook had improved after his marriage to Olga in 1972, but had again deteriorated in recent years. Pat would later accuse David of ignoring Terry and his wife, although her account is challenged by David’s friends, including Mark Pritchett, who remembers seeing the couple at Haddon Hall. Pat’s anger derived from the belief that she had taken on the lion’s share of caring for Terry; her relationship with her own husband, Tony, suffered under the strain of Terry’s illness, which had reportedly resulted in fist fights between Terry and his uncle. Although often accused of ignoring Terry’s fate, David had wrestled with the issue of his brother, opening up to confidants and even writers such as Timothy White, whom he told, ‘I’ve never been able to get through to [Terry] about how he really feels. I guess nobody has.’ David did go to see his half-brother during his stay in London; his visit was followed by an unhelpful headline in the Sun, blaring: ‘I’m terrified of going mad, says Bowie.’

  Pat’s attacks on Bowie, over this period and thereafter, ensured his reputation as a manipulative ‘ice man’, who used and then discarded family and friends without qualm. There were indeed many instances of his unashamed devotion to ‘Numero Uno, mate!’ Yet his ruthlesness usually had a musical motive – outside of his own career, he was genuinely kind to people like Esther Friedmann, Iggy Pop, Tony Sales and others. Some of David’s accusers, notably his ex-wife, insist that each and every example of David’s compassion was self-serving, aimed at shoring up his own credibility. Yet there are plenty of examples of help given and not publicised; notably, David continued to pay the school fees of Marc Bolan’s son, Rolan, once he realised the Bolan estate would not do so. In other instances, Bowie helped with his time, not money, searching out specialised medical treatment for the son of a writer friend. Angie’s depiction of David as a flat, one-dimensional, selfish character does not ring true.

  Selflessness and positivity often co-exist with pettiness and grudge-bearing – David was always capable of both. An example of such duality was the way David’s artistic bravery and contempt for convention was hampered by his unhealthy habit of reading reviews or features on himself. He could harbour resentment at perceived slights or inaccuracies for years. One issue of MOJO magazine featured Mick Ronson on its cover in 1997: two years later, David was still complaining about ‘the magazine that said Mick wrote all my songs!’ – irritated that colleagues such as Tony Visconti had highlighted Mick’s influence on David’s early albums.

  It was such haughty pronouncements, exacerbated by the flunkies and yes-men who surround most stars, which helped inspire his nickname ‘The Dame’, first coined by Smash Hits writer Tom Hibbert in the early eighties. Yet, once David was liberated from his flunkies, he could often confound expectations. That March, Carol Clerk, then a news editor for Melody Maker, spent an afternoon drinking poteen with The Exploited and other assorted acquaintances in Matrix Studios, where they were celebrating finishing their Troops of Tomorrow album. Come opening time – in those days pubs closed for a couple of hours in the late afternoon – they hit a few pubs and ‘late at night, really plastered’, says Clerk, ‘we arrived at Gossips [nightclub]. And Bowie was in there, with some discreet security. We took a table and to our amazement, given the terrible state of everyone, Bowie asked if he could join us.’

  It turned out that Bowie wanted to know all about The Exploited, thrash punk and Mohican fashion, and he was exactly as earnest and charming as he had been when pumping the Pork actors for information, a decade before. He sat with the chaotic, droolingly drunk group for hours, politely buying rounds. The punks were impressed by how the power of stardom ensured the bar staff ‘for the first and only time in my life’ brought drinks to the table and kept the club open beyond its 3 a.m. closing time. One of the few details Clerk could still recall the next morning was the way Bowie worried about Linc, the bass player from Chelsea, who’d passed out under his leather jacket before David arrived at the table. Throughout the night, Bowie kept lifting up Linc’s jacket, checking that Linc was still breathing, like an ultra-cool mother hen, until all the parties finally staggered home.

  It was in his guise as fan that David was always the most engaging; any perceived snootiness would evaporate in his boyish enthusiasm. As ever, there was no dividing line between his enthusiasms and his own work; they blended into each other imperceptibly. One perfect example happened during that July, when David returned to Montreux after winding up the shoot for The Hunger, just in time for that year’s Jazz Festival. This was the year that Stevie Ray Vaughan, then a struggling blues guitarist, had been championed by famed Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler, who persuaded Montreux mastermind Claude Nobs to present Vaughan and his band, Double Trouble.

  The unsigned outfit played on the acoustic stage, where Vaughan’s clanky, raw Texas blues brought boos and catcalls from an audience expecting cool, quiet jazz. Although their reception ‘did kinda hurt our feelings’, says bassist Tommy Shannon, the blues trio were so fired up by their first overseas show that they later carried their amplifiers downstairs to the bar, where they jammed until dawn. As the sun came up, they noticed a figure drinking at the counter: they knew it must be David Bowie – ‘He just had this look,’ says Shannon. Stevie and the band were not starstruck – they hardly knew Bowie’s music – but they were impressed by his charm, the way he’d stayed up until dawn to talk to them: ‘He was just real nice-looking, and handled himself well.’ He sat with them for a while, speaking mostly to Stevie, talking about guitar playing. David’s enthusiasm helped banish the memory of the audience’s boos, as did the response of singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who’d also seen the show and offered them free recording time in his home studio.

  David’s respite in Montreux turned out to be a brief one. Despite having planned to make a single movie in 1982, a project that he’d discussed several years before suddenly spun into action. Director Nagisa Oshima, best-known for In the Realm of the Senses, was planning a film based on the memoirs of Laurens Van Der Post. Oshima had approached singer Kenji Sawada to play the role of POW commander Yonoi; Sawada dropped out, to be replaced by Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakomoto, but only after he’d suggested David Bowie for the part of Jack Celliers. Oshima liked casting singers or other performers – ‘without the peculiarities actors often acquire’ – and approached David during his Elephant Man run. He readily agreed. Producer Jeremy Thomas had already worked on two films with Nicolas Roeg; Paul Mayersberg, who wrote the script with Oshima, had scripted The Man Who Fell to Earth, and once Bowie was on board, rewrote the part with David in mind. Thomas remembers that ‘Bowie knew everything about Oshima. Once he understood Oshima’s interest in him, he was interes
ted in the film. It was an ideal situation: he was immediately on board, saying, “Tell me when and where – and I’ll be there.”’

  The film was intriguing, the antithesis of a conventional prisoner of war drama. Three key roles were played by comparative novices: Bowie as Celliers, Ryuichi Sakomoto as Captain Yonoi – the commandant who is obsessed with him – and comedian Beat Takeshi as Sergeant Hara. At the centre of this nexus is Tom Conti, as Laurens Van Der Post, who attempts to bridge the huge cultural gaps between them all. Conti’s humanity carries the film; Bowie and Sakomoto’s characters are stylised, almost ritualistic – both of them yearn to be archetypes.

  Oshima filmed extremely fast, with no rushes, and Sakomoto would later comment that when he saw his own performance, ‘I couldn’t believe how bad my acting was … I was traumatised.’ Bowie’s portrayal of Jack Celliers – the perfect soldier who is attempting to atone for abandoning his crippled brother – is also variable, most notably the faintly risible flashback to Celliers as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy. Nonetheless, Bowie’s physical beauty – all jagged teeth and exquisite cheekbones – and ethereal air is perfect for a character who, as his initials indicate, is a Christ-like figure, human but other-worldly. Flawed but meaningful, engagingly human, Bowie’s performance would prove the high watermark of his cinematic career.

  In America, the movie – titled Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence – was a box-office failure; as scriptwriter Paul Mayersberg explains, ‘US audiences were baffled by a prison camp movie where nobody tried to escape’ and roles of this calibre would ultimately dry up. But in Europe and Japan, the movie’s themes of atonement, cross-cultural incomprehension, homo-eroticism and a search for meaning were more resonant and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence acquired the reputation of a classic. As Jeremy Thomas, who would go on to produce films like The Last Emperor and Sexy Beast, points out, ‘It was my first film that caught the public imagination and was shown all over the world. And it has aged well, because it was set in period – and because Bowie somehow doesn’t look any older today than he did then.’

  The filming wrapped up with David presenting an impromptu show which was rapturously received by the crew. It marked an unexpectedly intense year, for along with filming in Rarotonga and New Zealand with Oshima, and London with Tony Scott, he’d also shuttled between Montreux and New York, where friends like Anne Wehrer and Esther Friedmann enlisted his help with Iggy, who had returned penniless from Haiti that summer, apparently under the influence of a voodoo curse, still in what seemed like an unstoppable downward spiral.

  In the weeks when he wasn’t working, David started to base himself in New York, in parallel with the impressive château-style house he’d recently bought in Upper Lausanne, Switzerland. Sometimes he’d venture out of his Midtown loft with bodyguards – one musician who had a disagreement with him remembers being turfed out of the room by two attractive women, ‘like Bambi and Thumper, Blofeld’s bodyguards in Diamonds Are Forever’ – but by the summer he felt comfortable enough to hang out solo in musician’s haunts like the Continental, in Manhattan. Occasionally this meant chatting politely to coked-out upstarts like Billy Idol – presumably talking about the old days in Bromley, where Billy had grown up, too. Idol was a regular at the club, and arrived around 5 a.m. one morning with a friend in tow: Nile Rodgers, the founder, with Bernard Edwards, of Chic. David and Nile talked till dawn. Just a few days later, David asked Nile to produce his next album.

  In hindsight, David’s collaboration with Nile Rodgers looked a sure-fire winner. At the time it was anything but. Rodgers’ red-hot winning streak with Chic, Sister Sledge and Diana Ross was now a couple of years old, and since then his magic touch had deserted him: Debbie Harry’s Koo Koo had not delivered one hit single while his own solo album had also failed to set the charts alight. ‘To this day, I owe David for his commitment – because at the time I had five flops in a row,’ says the celebrated producer. ‘I mean it, five! It was really tough for me.’

  Rodgers was probably the most experienced producer David had ever teamed up with – but the way he worked with David was utterly unlike anything he’d done before, or since. Yet if their collaboration was unique in Rodgers’ experience, for David it marked the summit of a working method he’d established with Dek Fearnley, or Mick Ronson, many years before, where he delegated key tasks, giving his collaborators huge freedom. On the album that would become Let’s Dance, his delegation was even more extreme, with Rodgers responsible for recruiting key musicians, as well as overseeing the finest details of the arrangements. It was Nile Rodgers who programmed the music. But it was David Bowie who programmed Nile Rodgers.

  The process began at David’s new house in Lausanne, where they spent days getting to know each other, before one morning David walked into Nile’s room with a twelve-string guitar. Or what had once been a twelve-string. ‘It had just six strings on it, which was weird. Why not use a six-string guitar in the first place?’ says Rodgers. ‘And then he played me this song. And told me he thought it was going to be a hit.’

  The song was folky; David played it vaguely in the style of the Byrds, and it was called ‘Let’s Dance’. ‘And I was like, “That’s not happening man.” It totally threw me. And it was not a song you could dance to.’ Rodgers simply didn’t understand. Was this some kind of mind game? So he called a mutual friend in New York: ‘Do you think David is the kind of guy who would play a trick on me?’ he asked. ‘Is he playing me this song he says is going to be a hit to see if I’m some sort of sycophant?’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t do that,’ came the reply. ‘If he says that, he really believes it.’ The information didn’t help. ‘Oh shit! What do I do now?’ Nile asked himself.

  Rodgers kept schtum about such worries as his discussions with David continued. For much of the time they’d talk about fifties album sleeves, flipping through David’s collection of vinyl albums, some of them venerable originals that he’d bought twenty years before at Medhurst’s in Bromley. They played records like ‘Twist and Shout’, discussing the difference between The Beatles’ sweat-drenched version and the Isley Brothers’ original; they both fondled the film noir sleeve of Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn and Nelson Riddle’s Route 66 soundtracks, chatted about the Chicago Art Ensemble and Lester Bowie, and they spent a lot of time listening to and looking at photos of Little Richard, the childhood hero whom David still revered. It was like being inducted via a series of visual and auditory mood-boards.

  It was only later that Rodgers realised he was being programmed: brainwashed, in a musical version of The Manchurian Candidate. For many of Bowie’s previous records, he had honed the art of briefing musicians, getting them to pull something out of their consciousness that they hadn’t known existed. Now he was doing it on a bigger scale.

  The simplest illustration of how this worked comes on ‘Let’s Dance’. Rodgers knew that if this was to be a dance hit, it needed funking up; no problem, this was his forté. But all his previous hits had a memorable opening, too. The solution came from ‘Twist and Shout’: Rodgers simply lifted the vocal stacking effect – the bit where The Beatles sent teenagers crazy – and put it at the beginning of the song: ‘Ah … Ah … Ah … Ah!’

  After each line of the verse there was a space, which required some kind of response. The solution was Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn horn riff – dropped in directly after David sings the words ‘dance the blues’. ‘It was taken straight from that record, a thing I never did before,’ says Rodgers. ‘That [riff] seemed to me so anti-groove, but sticking it on something that was so hard groove it was like, “Shit! This is magic!” And I realised that all that fifties and sixties stuff was a snapshot of Bowie’s brain. Then I was like, “Wow! You can do that!”’

  Himself a master producer, used to vibing up musicians to get the right take, Rodgers realised that he too was being produced, but given absolute freedom, in a way that no other musician had attempted. ‘When we did Let’s Dance the pre-production was so clear. I’ve neve
r worked with an artist like that before or since. It was all beautiful images. We went to people’s houses that he knew had certain things … it was like fact finders, treasure hunters, conquistadores looking for gold and we were going and looking at everything, in museums. “Nile look at this picture. Look at this!” So he was like the world’s greatest cook showing you, This is what we want it to be. Once I had that I was clear as a bell. I was unwavering.’

  The same process would apply with the other standout songs on Let’s Dance; David played Nile Iggy’s version of ‘China Girl’, again telling him it was a hit, and he had to work out how to make it one, adapting the opening riff from Rufus’s ‘Sweet Thing’ to give it a Chinese feel. After their extensive discussions, and pre-production at Montreux, the sessions at New York’s Power Station were brief; the studio was booked for twenty-one days, and, according to Rodgers, the tracks were recorded and mixed by day seventeen. There was only one artistic disagreement; Rodgers was unimpressed by Bowie’s suggestion of Stevie Ray Vaughan for most of the guitar solos, telling him the guitarist just sounded like Albert King. ‘This guy’s different,’ David told him, ‘he’s got a whole other thing going on.’

  Vaughan was recording his debut album at Jackson Browne’s studio using downtime over the Thanksgiving holiday when he got the call. The guitarist was intrigued by the offer. ‘It was a challenge – and Steve was always confident about being in the studio,’ says Stevie’s bassist, Tommy Shannon. Vaughan showed up within a day or two, and added his guitar parts ‘instantaneously’, according to Nile. Vaughan played an old Fender Strat, plugged straight into an old Fender amp – all the tone coming from the player, with no tricks. The same applied to the rest of the music, for Let’s Dance was at heart a simple, minimal album, with most of its impact coming not from electronic effects, but from the intuitive musicianship of players like Vaughan, and the consummately funky Tony Thompson – who would later be called in to play drums with Madonna, Robert Palmer and others, but would never surpass the effortless swing of Let’s Dance.