by Paul Trynka
Soon after the ‘Absolute Beginners’ demo, David called Armstrong. ‘I’m doing a concert for Bob Geldof for charity. It’s going to be a big deal. Do you want to help me out?’ Armstrong agreed, as David continued, ‘I’ve got this extra idea for a record to support it. Would you meet me at this film company in Soho at 10 o’clock and bring an acoustic?’
Armstrong arrived in Wardour Street at the appointed time. When David walked in, he was accompanied by Mick Jagger. The pair explained that they had planned a transatlantic duet for the upcoming concert but the delay caused by the satellite link made it impossible, so they’d decided to pre-record and video their number, a cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’.
When the band convened at Westside, they enjoyed a fascinating glimpse of Britain’s two best-known rock singers at work. Bowie arrived first, with a copy of Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ and told the rhythm section to match that feel. Then Seligman and drummer Neil Conti felt a ‘whirling dervish’ presence behind them, as Jagger whisked in, with his fourteen-year-old daughter Jade in tow. Once the backing track was nailed, the ten or so people present watched the pair camping it up and competing as they recorded their ludicrously over-the-top vocals. The two old friends got on well, but their rivalry was obvious. ‘My gut reaction was to feel a bit protective of David,’ says Seligman. ‘Mick was much more vocal, mouthy – more rockist. David was the smiling indulgent one, more good-natured about the whole thing.’
The ‘big deal’ charity show would of course turn out to be Live Aid, an infinitely bigger deal than anyone could have imagined; the event brought out a new, non-competitive side of David. It was the first time he’d worked with a younger band, now featuring keyboard player Thomas Dolby, and before the Wembley concert he bustled around like a mother hen, despite the fact he was busy filming at Elstree for another new project, the movie Labyrinth. Hearing that his sax player, Clare Hirst, had confessed to her local paper that she was nervous about the show, he phoned her up and reassured her. Then he sweetly requested if the band could all wear turquoise for the performance and asked Hirst if it would be OK if he grabbed her hand during ‘Heroes’.
On the day, David was ‘very up – it hit home, as it did for everyone what a great event this was’, says Armstrong. David showed them the waistband of the Young Americans suit he was wearing, sharing his delight that, at nearly forty, he could still fit into it. The band drove by Stansfield Road on the way – a couple of them had lived in a squat there – and noticed the streets of Brixton were quiet, all the residents glued to their TVs. As he squeezed into Noel Edmonds’ helicopter, David’s hands were shaking, cigarettes constantly on the go – the pilots complained the smoke was obscuring the instrument panel. Otherwise, there was no sign of nerves.
Queen, according to posterity, stole the show, but on the day no one knew or cared. David had chosen one of the youngest, most under-rehearsed bands of his entire career and treated them as if they were doing him a favour, joshing them along, especially Seligman, whom David had nicknamed ‘Brenda’ in revenge for the bassist mentioning that ‘Blue Jean’ was boring. Before they hit the stage, the band heard him shout, ‘Remember, no monitors for Brenda!’
There were flurries of nerves: David fluffed a line, introducing singer Tessa Niles as ‘Theresa’; sax player Clare Hirst stood holding her hand out at the scheduled moment, like a lemon, as David danced around on the other end of the stage; Kevin Armstrong started ‘Rebel Rebel’ way too fast. Yet throughout, David’s joy was infectious, pushing forward the band who were totally focused on remembering the songs they’d rehearsed exactly three times. Somehow, it was perfect, says Thomas Dolby. ‘To my astonishment, I felt like I was on a magic carpet ride. These songs were like our teenage anthems – my fingers were just wafted along.’
Of every artist, Bowie was the most focused on pushing the cause, not himself, cutting short his set – which up till the penultimate rehearsal included ‘Fascination’ – to save time for a harrowing video of starving Ethiopian children, which raised donations to a new peak.
His fulsome tribute to the band – ‘I’ll be for ever in their debt’ – was repeated off-stage after the performance, when they all hugged, overcome with emotion. Later he dropped in on the Royal Box, and cheekily asked Princess Diana, ‘Will we be getting you up on stage for the grand finale?’
The spontaneity of Live Aid would help David’s reputation more or less recover the momentum he’d lost with Tonight, but rather than attend to his own career, he spent much of that winter working with the man who’d become his best friend. Since setting up home with Suchi in New York, Iggy had demoed his own songs with ex-Pistol Steve Jones, anxious to self-start his own project. By October 1985, the pair had made an impressive set of demos; when Iggy tracked David down to send him the tapes, he was surprised to find David was making the kid’s movie, Labyrinth, at Elstree. (Lambasted by critics, the film would eventually win Bowie a new generation of fans, rather like Ringo’s efforts on Thomas the Tank Engine.) Practical as ever, David told Iggy, ‘They’re all midtempo, so you’ll need some slow ones and some fast ones.’ He volunteered to fill the gaps if Iggy and Suchi would join him and Coco on a working holiday into the New Year.
They spent some of their three-month jaunt on Mustique, where David had bought a holiday home, installing a small recording setup. Joey, now fifteen, came too; David was notoriously strict, demanding his son return home while the other rich kids stayed out partying. ‘The other kids all made fun of Joey, because he had to be home at 10 o’clock,’ says one friend. ‘[David] was very strict – but it worked for Joey. And of course a lot of those other kids ended up as cokeheads or junkies.’
After Mustique, there was skiing in Gstaad and an agreement to complete the album later in the spring. Meanwhile, David worked on promoting Absolute Beginners, which was released on 4 April, 1986. The film had been hatched with a media onslaught which helped attract the backing of UK production company Goldcrest, but ultimately brought a huge critical backlash. Temple’s labour of love was vilified, becoming a celebrated box-office flop. As Temple’s problems multiplied, Bowie was ‘genuinely supportive. A lot of the problems we had brought on ourselves, [but] I’d invested a huge amount, psychically, in that movie. And he understood.’
A few weeks later, David was back helping Iggy recover from his own legacy of failure. Aided by Erdal Kizilcay, a local multi-instrumentalist who’d worked on the Let’s Dance pre-production, they recorded Iggy’s album in two weeks, starting at 10 o’clock each morning, Bowie, once more the punctual professional, scheduling each overdub with his clipboard. The album’s standout song was ‘Shades’, with both words and music written by David, after he’d seen Iggy give Suchi a pair of sunglasses: ‘He saw that situation and turned it around … made it one of those reformed-guy songs,’ says Iggy. David was in the middle of a creative drought; now he gave what was, after ‘Absolute Beginners’, his best song of the late eighties to his friend. Kevin Armstrong arrived a few days in to add his guitar. Watching the pair together, he saw Bowie’s behaviour as essentially selfless: ‘I think he was genuinely saying, Iggy needs help here, and I’m the guy that can do it; I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.’
When the album was complete, David had his management company, Isolar, secure a deal with A&M. Nancy Jeffries, the A&R woman who signed the deal, remembers there was a hefty price tag attached, so that David could recover his costs. But having worked for RCA, she knew the value of the album. ‘It was almost like the David Bowie record that you wished you’d had, but never got.’ Blah Blah Blah, released in November 1986, would deliver Iggy’s first ever Top 50 hit, and launch him on the road to something resembling a conventional career.
Iggy wasn’t the only hero that David tried to champion over 1986. In June, he holed up in London’s Edgware Road with his old manager, Leslie Conn, for a couple of days. After talking about Georgie Fame – whom Leslie had worked with, and David had imita
ted in the early sixties – they decided to resuscitate his career. David drew up a memo, offering to invest £100,000 in Georgie Fame, as part of a stable of artists to be produced by David, Bill Laswell and Clive Langer.
The plan of building up a production stable, building on Bowie’s hugely successful but strangely underrated role as a producer, was an intriguing one. He’d produced career highlights for Iggy, Lou and Mott The Hoople, yet his production skills were rarely discussed – under-appreciated, almost. Where many producers worked on developing a trademark sound, his approach had always been psychological; vibing up musicians, easing the flow of ideas. Yet Bowie’s move into mainstream production was to remain an intriguing might’ve-been, for by the autumn of 1986, he’d abandoned the idea and devoted himself to his own career. Outwardly, he remained unconcerned by the state of his reputation, but in private he’d mention that he was worried about his relationship with EMI. When he started his next recording project, he told his main collaborator, Erdal Kizilcay, ‘let’s keep it simple,’ like the Iggy album. They didn’t.
Recorded at Mountain and completed at New York’s Record Plant, Never Let Me Down was neither as good nor as bad as Tonight. In his efforts to ensure the album was a hit, David worked out each song carefully with Erdal Kizilcay beforehand, thus excising any hint of the random. It featured no cod-reggae, nor any songs that, while derivative of his own work, were memorable, like ‘Loving the Alien’ had been. Instead, the album was filled to the brim with conventional music, lyrics and sounds. ‘Never Let Me Down’ was startlingly reminiscent of the opening section of John Lennon’s ‘Starting Over’; the same breathy counter-tenor delivery, confessional feel and a similar chord sequence. ‘Glass Spider’ was preposterous, and hence at least noticeable. The utter dearth of inspiration was epitomised by the sole cover version: Iggy’s ‘Bang Bang’. The original had been an act of desperation on Iggy’s part when he’d been told by Arista to deliver a hit or leave the label. David’s rendition of the plodding, predictable chord sequence and coke-addled lyrics represents the very nadir.
The reviews, when they came, were dreadful. That was not the main problem, for plenty of Bowie’s contemporaries had made poor albums. More serious was the way that this album seemed to damn all his previous work by association. As Rolling Stone’s Steve Pond commented, ‘[Bowie] has reached a startling level of influence and status while making few genuinely groundbreaking records.’
The subsequent Glass Spider tour, based on the album’s silliest track, would become notorious, a celebrated disaster in David Bowie’s career. Such is the distaste in which it is held, that its one transcendent moment has been forgotten. It took place on the Platz Der Republik, Berlin, just north of Hansa Tonstudio 2, on 6 June, 1987.
David had dropped in to see his friend Edu Meyer, who was working on a session with David’s band, two days before. ‘He was still the same guy I remember from Lust for Life, still a worker.’ The city was already filling with West Germans who’d made their way out to the isolated enclave of Berlin for the show: ‘A big event for the whole country,’ says Meyer, ‘and the [East German] government was pretty upset that it was happening so close to the Wall.’
That night, David launched into ‘Heroes’ in the shade of the Wall, five minutes from where the song had been conceived, and realised the song was being redefined. ‘As we got into it, we could hear the thousands of kids who had gathered on the other side, the Berlin side,’ he says, ‘all joining in [the song]. It was terribly emotional.’ ‘He let them do the singing,’ says Edu Meyer, ‘and the DDR government tried to get these people away from the Wall … but with no success.’ Fifteen years later, when David played in Berlin, he suddenly became aware that many of the audience had been the voices he’d heard: ‘the ones on the other side’.
It was one of the few happy moments on the tour. Previously, David had always chosen his key collaborators then left everything to them. Now, he was becoming a control freak, fussing over every detail, always ‘very very tense’, says bassist Erdal Kizilcay. After the third date, Chip Monck, stage designer for The Rolling Stones, who’d been commissioned to build the huge glass spider prop that loomed over the stage, left the tour: ‘I got the thing built and only saw the first few shows. That was enough.’
The contempt in which Glass Spider was held is often seen as being the product of hindsight, part of a reaction against the obese over-production of the late eighties; indeed, the tour was, according to press reports, the most successful of Bowie’s career, out-grossing Serious Moonlight, with 3 million tickets sold over its eighty-six shows. But for the Bowie fans who’d seen his previous tours, the memory of the Glass Spider shows is still traumatic. Tony Horkins, then editor of International Musician magazine, was one of many who walked into Wembley Stadium and caught sight of the spider looming over the stage. ‘It wasn’t just that they were obviously trying too hard; it was that they hadn’t spent the money to hit what they were aiming for. The spider looked pathetic.’
David was simply dwarfed by the ludicrous spectacle. ‘Serious Moonlight had been a big production – but it was about him, and his voice sounded great,’ says Horkins. ‘This looked like an am-dram production, very overblown, detached, and he was dwarfed by all these gimmicks. It didn’t have any real soul.’ The emptiness on display was embodied by the endless guitar masturbation contests between Carlos Alomar and David’s old Bromley Tech friend, Peter Frampton, both competing to see who could play more notes in a second. Their juxtaposition of guitar gurning and drum machine-beats, lifted from Eddie Van Halen’s work on Thriller, was five years out of date. The impression that this was an emotionally empty exercise in generating cash deepened with the announcement that Bowie’s huge earnings were being further bloated by a Pepsi sponsorship deal; it was headlined by a predictably naff commercial in which David was joined by Tina Turner, with the duo camping around by a vending machine, yelping, ‘puts my choice in my hand’, to the tune of ‘Modern Love’.
The empty virtuosity on display in London was a stark contrast to David’s joyous Wembley show of just two years before. By the time the tour reached America, Erdal and Frampton were ‘fed up. We just wanted to go home,’ says Kizilcay. On several shows, David’s voice gave out and Carlos had to step in. The energy with which David normally inspired his crew was gone – instead, he started blaming them for the poor reviews. When the tour finished in New Zealand, they torched the glass spider. ‘We just put the thing in a field and set light to it. That was such a relief!’ David acknowledged a couple of years later. In PR terms, the glass spider was a far bigger disaster than a Nazi salute.
Some versions of history cite Glass Spider as the beginning of a new high-tech touring vogue; in fact, Michael Jackson’s hugely successful Bad tour of 1988 featured stripped-down staging, as did Prince’s acclaimed Sign o’ the Times tour of 1987. In the previous four years both young artists, as well as Madonna, had adopted David’s fleet-of-foot style and made him look moribund and tired.
Yet, as ever, even the footnotes or failures in David Bowie’s career would lodge in other musicians’ consciousness. Over 2009 and 2010, U2 would tour their underwhelming No Line on the Horizon album, produced by Brian Eno. Hovering above the stage, in what was proclaimed the most lavish rock ‘n’ roll production of all time, was a huge claw.
20
It’s My Life – So Fuck Off
David would joke, ‘Why do David Bowie and Mick Jagger both feel compelled to keep going out touring? It’s laughable.’ We never came up with an answer.
Adrian Belew
By the end of 1987, David was spending little time mourning the fate of Glass Spider. He had something much more threatening on his mind – a lawsuit from a woman named Wanda Lee Nichols, who accused Bowie of sexually assaulting her in a Dallas hotel room, on 9 October, 1987.
As far as David’s immediate social circle was concerned, if he had deep-seated worries about his career he kept them to himself, but he didn’t conceal his worri
es about the Nichols lawsuit. ‘It was a big deal,’ says one friend. ‘He’s not invulnerable at all, it rattled the fuck out of him.’ It wasn’t so much the specific accusation – which in retrospect was bizarre, claiming that he’d bitten the woman and then mentioned he had Aids – so much as what it represented. He admitted to spending the night with Nichols but claimed the rest of her story was fantasy. From now on, whenever he was enjoying the traditional perk of his job in a hotel room, there was always the fear of another accusation and lengthy lawsuit.
Although a grand jury declined to indict him a month later, the accusation would hang over David for nearly three years before being dismissed. In the first few weeks that the ramifications of Nichols’ accusations started to unfold, David found a much-needed confidante in the form of Sara Terry, press agent for Glass Spider. A journalist for the Christian Science Monitor, Terry had joined the tour for a break soon after finishing a gruelling project on child prostitutes and soldiers. She was a forthright, valued adviser, being, in the words of friend Eric Schermerhorn, ‘cool, aggressive, subtle and intelligent – an alpha female just like Coco’.
Sara’s husband, Reeves Gabrels, also dropped in on the tour; not as outgoing as his wife, he was, says his musician friend Kevin Armstrong, ‘very quiet, kind, funny, shy, intellectual, one of those Americans with no mental barriers’. Reeves played guitar, and had studied at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, but had previously spent three years at art school. He’d never talked about his musical ambitions with David, who assumed he was a painter, but in the tour’s final days, Sara slipped David a cassette tape of Gabrels’ band, The Dark. After the tour, Sara resumed her work with the Christian Science Monitor and moved with Reeves to London. In January 1988, David checked out the tape and soon started recommending Gabrels for sessions. Then, in June, it turned out he needed a guitarist, too. All of a sudden, David Bowie was in a hurry again. ‘It happened really fast,’ says Gabrels. ‘David called me, I went over to Switzerland and we had this music to do – in a weekend.’