by Paul Trynka
By May of 1984, David Bowie had made fifteen studio albums; each had been conceived in a burst of creativity and ideas, usually accompanied by a manifesto that was floated around the press, or previewed live. Even Let’s Dance, for which new songs had been at a premium, was born out of a love for R&B and a yearning to evoke the spirit of Little Richard. Little Richard had scored hit records without compromising himself, without losing his status as an outsider. David thought he’d finally managed the same feat.
In the old days, he had advised his friend Glenn Hughes, ‘When everyone turns right, turn left!’ Now he himself turned right, without noticing.
A year or so later, David would compare the concept behind album number sixteen, Tonight, to Pin Ups. He was referring to the album’s emphasis on cover versions, but the comparison was also apt in that the main inspiration for Pin Ups was to keep a commercial rollercoaster moving. Last time around, of course, it was Tony Defries who was intent on relieving the fans of their cash; in 1984, it was David.
This wasn’t the only change in David’s philosophy. Just a few years earlier, he had told pianist Sean Mayes he was ‘suspicious of virtuosos’. Now, following the example of Let’s Dance, he surrounded himself with them. David’s key assistant for Tonight was Derek Bramble, previously bassist with Heatwave – briefly the UK’s most successful home-grown funk band and recently famous once more thanks to keyboard player Rod Temperton, who’d crossed the Atlantic to huge success as principal songwriter on Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Perhaps David thought Bramble would graduate to similar fame; he also valued the fact that Bramble could play ‘proper reggae bass lines’.
David’s venture into reggae would prove the most bizarre of his stylistic about-turns. He’d fallen for The Velvets before they’d had a record out, and Neu! when they were hardly known outside Germany; now he was experimenting with white reggae just as the smart money – notably The Police – was moving out.
The location for the recording of Tonight was suggested by Hugh Padgham, best-known as producer of The Police (and more recently McFly); he was the man who inspired the simple, yearning piano part on ‘Every Breath You Take’, which was recorded at Le Studio in Morin Heights, a skiing resort north-west of Montreal. Padgham suggested using the same studio, and volunteered to step down to an engineering role because he wanted to work with Bowie. Well aware of the restless creativity that Bowie had summoned up for a decade or more, Padgham was taken aback to find that the singer seemed simply ‘bored’ once sessions started. There were similar recollections from some of the studio staff, who remembered ‘he was obsessed with the I Ching’, one of them asserting he even used it to determine if a mix was ‘done’. The only traditional aspect of his recording behaviour that seemed to have survived from the old days was the pursuit of sex; and that old energy only seemed to return when he was trailing women on the dancefloor of the nearby club.
Padgham’s role as engineer grew to that of producer as the sessions dragged on. He remembers some experimentation in the early stages of the album, but that in general David only betrayed excitement when he talked about his friend Iggy, who was at the sessions. ‘David was talking about how he’d rescued Iggy. And I remember him telling lots of stories about him, like how they cut short his tour after Iggy had stamped on a girl’s head and made her bite off her tongue.’
Padgham was at a loss to know the intentions behind Tonight; the most charitable explanation is that it was designed to make some money for his friend, for the album’s nine tracks featured four Iggy credits, although the sole new song, ‘Tumble and Twirl’, was a confused assemblage, far from the glories of Lust for Life. But then, ‘Tonight’, the song Iggy and David had written for Lust for Life, was hardly recognisable, too; cut in a sanitised reggae style, with pristine drums and a warbling competition between David and guest star Tina Turner, both of them struggling to out-emote the other. The original’s thrilling, shouted intro – ‘I saw my baby, she was turning blue’ – with its reference to a heroin overdose, was Bowdlerised: ‘I didn’t want to inflict it on her …’ David explained to Charles Shaar Murray when it came time to promote the album. ‘It’s not necessarily something that she would agree to be part of.’
There is something sad, or deluded, as he sits in the Savoy with Murray, attempting to justify why he has emasculated a song he wrote just six years before; suddenly he sounds as if age or mainstream success has drained his ambition – and his hearing, for at one point he claims that the syruppy, phoned-in version of ‘Tonight’ ‘still has that same barren feeling’. Most strikingly, the confidence and intensity of his normal conversation has ebbed away. In the old days, his music was always presented with a manifesto; now he utters tentative generalisations such as, ‘The interesting thing about rock is that you never think that it’s going to go on for much longer. Then you find that it has.’ Just two years before, when he was acting in The Elephant Man, he had been filled with a sense of mission; now, there’s a subdued, depressive undertone when he discusses his impact on society in the seventies, then tells Charlie Murray, ‘I don’t think I would ever contribute so aggressively again.’
In later years David would blame the recording, pleading that the album had ‘great material that got simmered down to product level’. Yet more fundamental was David’s refusal to choose collaborators who would challenge or inspire him and the loss of the key driver of his career to date – his appetite for risk, what his next collaborator, Julien Temple, describes as the ‘appreciation of the randomness of things. It’s a great artistic strength, if you’re bold enough to follow it.’
As far as Tonight was concerned, Bowie’s sense of risk, of the random, had ebbed away. Yet when it came to a new medium, the music video, David was energised, fired up that there was still much to learn. After seeing the work of Julien Temple – whom he’d searched out at a preview screening of the director’s Sex Pistols documentary The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle back in 1980 – Bowie had done as consummate a job of charming and enthusing the director as he had with Nile Rodgers on Let’s Dance. He opened up to him, talked about his philosophy: ‘There is a real side of him which isn’t confident. And then there is the dazzling super-star,’ says the director. ‘He can be quite a normal guy at times, with this amazing ability to transform into a glittering star. The charisma is not always there.’
It was this nervous, self-critical Bowie, the ‘nerdy fan’ persona that he displayed to Temple, who would be immortalised in the video Jazzin’ for Blue Jean. Temple had played with the idea of two personae on some of his previous long-form videos, but David took the self-mockery further, splitting David Jones/Bowie into two characters. In the twenty-one-minute film, Bowie plays the geeky Vic – an artless cockney with an incessant, hopeless sales patter – who is attempting to impress the glacial Eve Ferret by taking her to meet rock star Screaming Lord Byron, David’s other persona – a New Romantic concoction of silk and slap, haughty and unreachable, but helpless and isolated behind his painted sneer. Vic’s efforts come to naught, and when Eve Ferret disappears with Screaming Lord Byron at the end of the evening, Vic shouts out an accusation that ran hilariously true: ‘You conniving, randy, bogus, Oriental old queen! Your record sleeves are better than your songs!’
The shoot was intense, running seriously behind schedule; finally, dawn broke and they ran out of night for the final shots. As the sun comes up, David steps out of his Vic character, and complains to Julien about the ending in what Screaming Lord Bowie would describe as a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt – played for laughs. ‘It was when he worked up a new ending that I realised how good he was at responding to crises,’ says Temple, ‘and making spur of the moment decisions.’
The video would be regarded as a triumph, and its energy and sense of fun helped damp down the critical backlash to Tonight, which started out with promising sales, entered the UK charts at number one, and was certified platinum by the end of November. But by the spring, when it came time to record a video for
the album’s only other half-decent track, ‘Loving the Alien’, the zest he’d managed to summon up for his videos, if not his music, seemed to have dissipated, too.
Possessed of more self-awareness than most of his peers, Bowie would also be more acutely conscious of his failures. From the 1960s he had made a habit of reading all his own reviews, and cultivating writers and critics, but by the mid-eighties, he would exist in a bizarrely bipolar world – working mostly with unfailingly approving acolytes as he made his music, and then falling victim to the finely honed knives of critics once the music was unleashed. It was tough for a man who’d always been a critics’ favourite to realise that, once he’d joined the mainstream with Let’s Dance and Tonight, he was distinctly out of favour: the mainstream, the commercial, The Dame.
Bowie’s nickname reflected some of the cynicism that was unleashed by his unashamed grab for mainstream success. Yet the attention David received from critics paled into insignificance compared to the onslaught of the tabloid press in the wake of a family tragedy.
David’s half-brother Terry had remained at Cane Hill for long periods since David had last visited him, during filming for The Hunger. Since that time his isolation and depression had deepened until, on 27 December, 1984, he decided to end his life. Walking down to the local train station, Coulsdon South, he lay down on the rails, waiting for a train to approach before apparently changing his mind at the last moment. On 16 January, he took advantage of Cane Hill’s shortage of staff, returned to the station, and once again placed his head on the rails. This time he did not lose his nerve.
Whatever anguish David felt, ‘We probably can’t imagine,’ says his Beckenham friend, Mark Pritchett. But the family traumas reached a new intensity when David’s aunt Pat, angry at both Peggy and David for not visiting Terry often enough, shared her anger with the Daily Mirror and then the Sun. ‘I hope God forgives you, David, for this tragic rejection,’ she told the newspaper. ‘David turned his back on his brother when it would have been so easy for him to do so much. David cheered him up and promised to see him again, after a time. But he never did. This has caused a big rift in our family.’
Bowie decided not to attend the funeral, which became the culmination of a tabloid feeding frenzy. The note on David’s bouquet, echoing Rutger Hauer’s final soliloquy in Bladerunner, read: ‘You’ve seen more things than we can imagine, but all these moments will be lost – like tears washed away by the rain. God bless you – David.’
The newspapers condemned him for not attending the funeral, too. Later, Pat would expand on her grievances via two Sunday Times reporters, Peter and Leni Gillman. The couple’s biography of David, published the next year, would open with a graphic account of the family mental instability, catalogued mostly by Pat, and would close with Terry’s suicide. In between, their gripping account – which rarely mentioned David’s music except where it related to schizophrenia, gay sex, or the Burns family history – set out a portrait of an uncaring, manipulative monster. Some of David’s confidants – notably Tony Visconti, whom David had last seen during the Serious Moonlight tour – spoke to the Gillmans for the book, and were hence judged accomplices in this assault on his privacy. Bowie would not speak to Tony for another fourteen years.
According to Ken Pitt, David’s aunt Pat would come to bitterly regret her attack on David in the wake of Terry’s death. ‘She was never the same. It had a big effect on the whole family. It was very, very sad.’
Numbed by this family tragedy, seeking to escape the tabloid press, David stayed holed up in Switzerland for most of the spring of 1985. Around May, Julien Temple had a crew ready for a video shoot for ‘Loving the Alien’. Bowie, the reliable showbiz trouper, did not turn up. When they finally met up there was no haughtiness or grand excuses: David told him he simply couldn’t do it. ‘He was very down. He was open about how he felt, about not feeling vibed up to be able to do the video.’
If David was in a mental tailspin, it would be fevered activity that pulled him out of it. By June, Temple had finally managed to obtain backing for Absolute Beginners, his film based on Colin MacInness’s 1958 novel. Temple pursued Bowie subtly for the role, but David proved an easy sell, enthused by the role of ad exec Vendice Partners. His character’s name was a reference to Vance Packard, author of The Hidden Persuaders, the definitive fifties work on media manipulation – in fact, the movie encapsulated most of Bowie’s obsessions, including the fifties, the birth of the youth culture that had liberated him, the notion of being British, rather than American, and also the advent of modern marketing, the ‘branding’ that David understood so intuitively. ‘David was hugely into this, the simultaneous birth of the teenager, and the creation of a market,’ says Temple. ‘And like everything he does, there was total commitment.’ Bowie learned to tap-dance for his main scene, which involved him frolicking round a huge typewriter, climbing an adman’s phoney Everest, all set to his advertising anthem ‘That’s Motivation’.
It was when he had committed the first song to tape that he told Temple he’d come up with a second. ‘He’d written “That’s Motivation”, which we needed. And he surprised me with “Absolute Beginners”. He was surprised by it as well – it just kind of arrived.’
‘Absolute Beginners’ was Bowie’s last great composition of the 1980s. Like his perfect songs of the early seventies, it arrived almost instantaneously. The song was an afterthought at an Abbey Road session arranged to demo ‘That’s Motivation’; short of a band, David had called up an A&R at EMI, Hugh Stanley Clarke, for suggestions. Clarke’s nominees, including guitarist Kevin Armstrong, bassist Matthew Seligman and Attractions organist Steve Nieve, were instructed to turn up at Abbey Road for a session with a ‘Mr X’.
The musicians had guessed Mr X’s identity before the session started; they were all nervous, eager to please, and the sense of unreality was intensified by David’s flirtatious affability. Kevin Armstrong would go on to work with Bowie for years, but this first session nearly ended in disaster. ‘The only time I ever was with David Bowie that I saw him do anything with drugs was at that very first day. I don’t know why he picked me, but he asked me to get him some coke halfway through the day. I rang a friend to see if he had any going – he rang me back an hour later to say he’d managed to find someone who helped him out: “You will never guess who I’ve got this coke from? Angie Bowie!” And I said, “You’ll never guess who it’s for – David Bowie!”’
A more experienced operator might have been more circumspect, but assuming his new boss would be amused, Armstrong told him, ‘My mate is getting this coke from Angie!’ Bowie’s unruffled, cheery demeanour cracked. ‘No, not that fucking witch! I hope she doesn’t know who it’s for?’
‘No, no, I never told my friend,’ lied Armstrong. ‘Which was not true of course,’ he says today. ‘So I nearly had my marching orders there and then. We went on to work together for ten years so it’s probably all right. And I never came across any reference to drugs from him ever again.’
In fact, David Bowie after a large toot of cocaine was not noticeably different to the Bowie Armstrong would get to know later. ‘He was on sixty to eighty fags a day. He’d have a coffee machine and some Cuba Gold coffee delivered wherever he was and it would be constantly on the brew. Seriously, he’d be chucking down the coffee and fags – and it would always be pretty neurotic and manic around him. Also, it was my first experience of being in the orbit of someone so hugely famous – there’s a kind of electrical crackle around them anyway.’
Fired up, Armstrong and the band laid down a demo of ‘That’s Motivation’, and were left with an hour of studio time. David played Armstrong some chords and a few lines of a new song, listened attentively as Armstrong helped sketch out the arrangement, then they explained the song to the band – eight bars at a time, recording each section piece by piece. ‘By not knowing the whole song, it totally forced you out of your comfort zone,’ says bassist Matthew Seligman. ‘It was an amazing technique, very art scho
ol.’ In the opening bars Seligman was overcome by a joyous, ‘Velvet Underground, “Sunday Morning” kind of feeling’, and played an ebullient, melodic bass riff – ‘It was the sound of me being happy.’ He expected Bowie to comment that it was too intrusive; instead, it became an integral part of the intro. At one point in the session he arbitrarily changed key; Bowie changed key with him. It was almost telepathic: ‘It felt like mind control – it was very powerful, this switched-on radar.’
The lyrics for ‘Absolute Beginners’ revolved around ‘absolutely’ – a buzz-word for the movie crew: ‘It just seemed to be a word that everyone used a lot that year,’ says Temple, ‘maybe because Absolut vodka came out at that time and David just picked up on it.’ Among the simplest of Bowie lyrics ever committed to tape, the words were scribbled down and recorded in chunks. ‘He got an idea, and followed it without thinking too much,’ says Armstrong. When they finished the demo, David was exuberant, thanking the musicians, as if they’d done him a huge favour. ‘I feel like I felt when I finished “Heroes”,’ he told them.
Temple was ‘blown away’ by the demo. When the official version was recorded, only one extra touch was needed. Bowie said, ‘I want a duet with a girl who sounds like a shop girl.’ Armstrong piped up with the news that his sister worked at Dorothy Perkins; the twenty-two-year-old Janet Armstrong duly turned up at West Side for her first ever professional vocal session, which also happened to be David Bowie’s last Top 5 single, when released in March 1986. A conventional but fabulous song, it offered a tantalising promise that Tonight’s creative block was only temporary.