Starman

by Paul Trynka

  The night’s real resonance would come from the presence of Mick Ronson, a man who’d been as crucial an influence on the sound of Queen as David himself; David’s one-time lieutenant had been diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer the previous August. Yet even the unflappable Ronson looked uncomfortable when, at the close of ‘Heroes’, David knelt on one knee and narrated the Lord’s Prayer. The press reaction ranged from supportive to ridicule. Few commented on what an old-fashioned figure he cut alongside Annie Lennox, who could have been him twenty years earlier.

  Just four days after the Wembley show, David married Iman in a private civil ceremony in Montreux; once more, David’s simultaneous yearning for privacy and publicity was reflected by the public celebration at the American Church of St James in Florence which followed. The nuptials were celebrated in a twenty-three-page Hello! magazine cover story. David wore white tie; Iman a Herve Leger oyster dress with train. Joey was best man, Geoff MacCormack read Psalm 121, and Peggy had her photo taken with Bono. Yoko Ono and Brian Eno were among the guests. There were many flashes of humour in the accompanying interview, as well as instances of history being rewritten: ‘I don’t think I ever really had what we could call a proper marriage,’ he says, of his days with Angie. There was a conventional, happy air, as if he were grateful finally to put aside his days of androgyny and transcending moral codes, and start over.

  While many of the sentiments were standard Hello! fare – David’s comments on how his friend Thierry Mugler had done ‘a delightful job’ of designing his suit – there were many moments of insight, more than in some of the more probing interviews to which David had been subjected. His open statement that, while he is not formally religious, ‘God plays a very important part in my life,’ as well as his admission that he spent his first few weeks with Iman worried that his ‘silly sense of humour’ might put her off, were both illuminating demonstrations of how, in his forties, he was happy to admit to the strong streak of conventionality that had always run through him.

  If the wedding was memorable, the album that marked it would be generally forgotten – continuing Bowie’s unhappy recent tradition of attempting for commercial crossover and failing. David felt ‘pressured’ into recruiting Nile Rodgers as producer for this next work, says Reeves Gabrels. Rodgers had gotten over his resentment that, in the wake of Let’s Dance’s huge sales, David had barely mentioned its producer. He found, though, that he and Bowie had different intentions for this new album right from the start: ‘I literally said, “David, let’s kick Let’s Dance in the ass,”’ says Rodgers. ‘He said, “No, it’s impossible. We can’t do that.” “What do you mean we can’t?” “I don’t know.”’

  Reeves Gabrels, meanwhile, felt ‘we’d put all this effort into trying to get rid of the stuff that followed Let’s Dance to change expectations and allow David to be an artist again. So I was irritated by the notion, but, for whatever reason, they decided to do it.’ David, in turn, had an entirely different agenda, according to Nile Rodgers. ‘He made that record to mark his wedding. That’s what he told me. I kept thinking, Well “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl” would have played fine at a wedding.’

  Black Tie White Noise betrayed the mix of motives behind it; taken on its own merits, as a snapshot of influences, it made sense, was endearing even, with its backstory of the wedding, the LA riots, even, in ‘Don’t Let Me Down & Down’, a song written by a Mauritanian princess and rendered both in the Indonesian language and a Brixton patois. The album was launched with the usual fanfare, a collective sigh of relief from the critical community that David had apparently terminated his Tin Machine experimentation, as well as extensive promotion by David’s new record company, Savage, an ambitious start-up business who paid a reported $3.4 million for the record in order to establish their credibility – a deal which ultimately ruined the company, which declared itself bankrupt in December 1993 amid a flurry of lawsuits.

  David was relaxed and playful during the sessions; there were many flashes of his old brilliance. When Nile was about to record his guitar solo for the twitchy, insistent ‘Miracle Goodnight’, David used one of his trademark, left-field instructions. ‘“Imagine the fifties never existed,” he told me. I went, “Wow, now we’re in some nebulous era because if the fifties hadn’t happened there would be no Jeff Beck and Hendrix.” It was a great direction.’ Gabrels, meanwhile, contributed most of his guitar work when Nile was filming the The Tonight Show in California, working on several songs including ‘You’ve Been Around’ and a cover of Cream’s ‘I Feel Free’ – a song that David had lately revived with Tin Machine. Bowie recorded the song, he mentioned later, in tribute to Terry, and the Cream show at the Bromel Club that they had attended together; a second song, ‘Jump They Say’, addressed his ex-brother more directly.

  ‘I Feel Free’ was shrouded in two layers of loss. There had been regular exchanges between Bowie and the ailing Mick Ronson throughout the year; David had sent several songs for the album Ronson was struggling to complete, and had publicly complimented Mick’s production of Morrissey’s Your Arsenal. The new version of ‘I Feel Free’ was essentially complete before Ronson arrived in the studio to contribute his signature sound; Gabrels’ solo was wiped to make way for his predecessor. ‘It wasn’t sad – it was simply great to play with him and to have him around,’ says Nile Rodgers. ‘Mick just did it and it was cool.’

  Ronson’s presence on Black Tie White Noise helped generate a flurry of press on the album’s release in April 1993; whereas David had been careful to avoid the role of elder statesman in the eighties, he bowed to the inevitable in the early nineties, a time when the influence of Ziggy Stardust was at its peak thanks to Britpop pioneers Suede: the partnership of Bernard Butler’s muscular guitar and singer Brett Anderson’s feyness closely mirrored the Ronson/Bowie relationship.

  Interviewed with Anderson for the NME in March, David was genial, relaxed, effortlessly taking on the mantle of founding father of Britpop – which, in most fundamental respects, he deserved, for various phases of his own career had indeed made their mark on The Smiths, Suede and Blur. The NME story helped generate a sense that David was back to making personal, rather than corporate albums: the intensity of ‘Jump They Say’ powered the single to number nine in the UK charts, while Black Tie White Noise debuted at number one in the UK.

  The album’s sales were a powerful vindication of Bowie’s scorched-earth policy with Tin Machine, and seemed also to show him fitting neatly into the nineties, while acknowledging his own past – influences like Mick and Terry – with a new honesty. Mick Ronson’s death, on 30 April, emphasised the passing of an era. Yet its aftermath showed that not all of David’s demons had been exorcised.

  Shortly after Ronson’s death, David paid a fulsome tribute to his best-known lieutenant: ‘He was really up there in the so-called hierarchy with the great guitar players … superb, absolutely superb.’

  There had been no formal reconciliation after their seventies split, for one was not really needed – ‘I’ve got no complaints, why would I?’ Ronson told this writer in 1989 – but Bowie’s relationship with the guitarist who had, more than any other musician, powered him to fame, remained troubled. The issue flared up at Ronson’s memorial concert at the Hammersmith Odeon the following April, an event at which Bowie was conspicuously absent.

  Trevor Bolder, Bowie’s Spiders bassist and Ronson’s old friend, was told, ‘He had a couple of issues with some people on the bill and he didn’t want to get involved.’ Bolder also heard that David was worried about playing to a small crowd. ‘Fair enough. It’s sad you have to worry about [such] things.’ Others involved in the event, like Suzi Fussey-Ronson, ask, ‘If he felt that the event wasn’t big enough for him, why couldn’t he have made a video, to at least say something?’

  Quizzed on this subject in 1998, Bowie responded: ‘The truth is I was not convinced by the motivations of this event but, frankly, I prefer to stay silent.’ Many of David’s fans questioned hi
s motivations – especially considering his presence at Freddie Mercury’s memorial. Perhaps the rivalry between Bowie and Ronson survived the guitarist’s death. For instance, in his otherwise illuminating contributions to Mick Rock’s book, Moonage Daydream, Bowie comments, ‘Another of Mick’s singular abilities … was the ability to take a hook line that I might whistle or play badly and make it sing – we worked well together because of this talent of his as an interpreter.’ Suzi Ronson was one of many who were offended by Bowie’s condescending attitude: ‘Like David had arranged all his bloody solos. I spent $500 on that book and sent it back, saying I was disgusted. Mick Rock and I didn’t speak for a while after that.’

  Ken Scott, the producer who witnessed their collaboration, agrees there were indeed instances where David was very specific indeed about some instrumental passages – ‘“Moonage Daydream” in particular’ – but as for the suggestion that David humming Mick’s solos to him was their normal practice, ‘I wouldn’t agree. No. That’s not the way I remember it.’ The frostiness between the Bowie and Ronson camps was maintained with David’s reference in the same book to Suzi Fussey, Ronson’s wife and David’s long-serving personal assistant, as ‘a local hairdresser in Bromley or Beckenham’. There were, obviously, parts of David’s past with which he was not quite at peace.

  Bowie’s belated, ungracious comments on Ronson were counterproductive: a case of The Dame doth protest too much, suggesting that David was more aware than he cared to admit how integral Ronson had been to his breakthrough. Certainly, the negligible long-term impact of Black Tie White Noise – a pleasant, competent album which soon vanished from human consciousness along with the record company that released it – seemed to show how reliant David was on a musical foil; a Ronson or a Brian Eno whom he could feed off, who made his music gel. Without one, he seemed to be locked into a cycle of diminishing returns.

  But that foil, that source of inspiration, didn’t have to be a musician; for in the case of David Bowie’s best album in nearly a decade, a rushed commission done on a tight budget, the vital spark came from a relatively obscure novel about a Bromley childhood, which was turned into a film by the BBC.

  The genesis of the project that would re-ignite Bowie’s creativity came in the closing minutes of a Q&A with one of David’s favourite magazines, Interview, famously founded by Andy Warhol in 1969. As so often, the magazine sent a celebrated name to interview the month’s cover star, and the choice of writer Hanif Kureishi was particularly astute: the novelist, like David, was a Bromley boy and a fellow ex-student of Bromley Tech. In the closing moments of the encounter, Kureishi mentioned the BBC were planning a TV version of his 1990 novel, Buddha of Suburbia, based on Kureishi’s own upbringing in south-east London. Cheekily, Kureishi asked if David would contribute the soundtrack. Instantly, David agreed. The pair were huddled over a mixing desk at Mountain Studios just a few days later.

  The recording fell into two sections: the first a more conventional soundtrack, written against a video of the shows. Kureishi dropped in to observe, overawed by the fact his own work was being screened over a mixing desk, ‘dotted with dozens of buttons, levers and swinging gauges’, and later by the fact that David, noticing a couple of pieces changed the mood of key scenes, quickly rewrote them. Then, most of the themes used to soundtrack the drama were extended into a full Bowie album. Buddha of Suburbia, like so many of Bowie’s triumphs, from The Idiot to ‘Absolute Beginners’, benefited from its rushed creation. ‘Something happened for that album,’ says Erdal Kizilcay. ‘There wasn’t a big budget, David explained the story before we started. It was a challenge, it was a small budget, but David just said, “Let’s go, let’s do it,” and everything worked.’

  Throughout the 1990s, countless music critics remember that, every time a new David Bowie album was biked into the office, it would be preceded by a PR’s guarantee that, ‘It’s his best since Scary Monsters.’ Probably the only album sent over without such blandishments, it was the one most worthy of them; in its modest way, the Buddha of Suburbia album was a perfect evocation, not just of Kureishi’s youth, but of his fellow Bromley boy, now aged forty-six.

  There were plenty of nostalgic moments in the Buddha album, but perhaps its most pervasive connection with its own life was that, like all his best works, it was made without thinking too much – moments snatched out of the ether. Bowie and Kizilcay worked alongside each other, Bowie using the instrumentalist as a kind of one-man sound library. They’d work from 10 a.m. until 8 o’clock at night – joking, eating burgers, playing records by Prince or Nine Inch Nails to get them into the mood. A fair amount of the time, they’d talk about Turkey; Erdal was a cultural transplant in Switzerland, like Hanif Kureishi was in Bromley – as was David, the kid who’d once fondly imagined himself ‘the English Elvis’.

  A couple of songs had been sketched out on demo – notably the subtle but anthemic ‘Strangers When We Meet’, which David had attempted with Reeves during the Black Tie White Noise sessions – but most of them were put together as first takes. They’d discuss an idea or chord sequence and Erdal would say, ‘I’ll try it.’ Then David would laugh, ‘Don’t try it – play it!’ Erdal’s own life journey was absorbed into the work, a huge amount of which was his improvisation – for instance, the gloriously meandering ‘South Horizon’, in which Kizilcay’s simple trumpet motif, swinging drums and busy bass duel with the piano of Mike Garson, who’d just reappeared on the scene and overdubbed his part on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Yet if the musicianship was Erdal’s, the driving force was David: ‘He is just a master – he knows exactly what he wants. I was like his hands, his musical hands.’ Even the more electro tracks – heavily influenced by the newly emergent Underworld – were tougher and more south London than the glossy sheen of White Tie’s dance songs. ‘The Mysteries’ was based on an Austrian classical work, sampled and reversed, rather like Low’s ‘Subterraneans’. Fragments of the lyrics were straightforward autobiography, mostly the title track, which mentions Plaistow Grove, by the railway tracks; Terry, too, is invoked through the words ‘ouvre le chien’, a quote from David’s 1970 song dedicated to his brother, ‘All the Madmen’.

  The album sneaked out in Britain in November 1993, almost unnoticed (it would wait another two years for a US release on BMG) although the title track reached number thirty-five in the UK singles chart. It was the best David Bowie album in a decade, and the first in twenty-two years to entirely miss the charts. Its creator, the man always focused on success, seemed not only unconcerned, says his collaborator, Erdal Kizilcay, ‘He was very happy.’

  21

  The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

  I’ve got to think of myself as the luckiest guy – Robert Johnson only had one album’s worth of work as his legacy.

  David Bowie

  By 1994, David had apparently expended almost as much energy in transforming himself into an underground artist as he had in transforming himself into a star. Yet no one could have possibly confused his lifestyle with that of a musician struggling to make ends meet. David and Iman largely divided their time between Los Angeles, Lausanne and Mustique, where he retained an immaculately groomed house, furnished in the airbrushed ethnic style purveyed by the most expensive international interior designers. There, he posed for Architectural Digest magazine atop an antique Indian mahogany lounger. ‘My ambition,’ he told writer William Buckley, ‘is to make music so incredibly uncompromised that I will have absolutely no audience left whatsoever – and then I’ll able to spend the entire year on the island.’

  The comments were partly a reflection of the Bowie sense of humour, but there was a serious core to the sentiment. Over the late nineties, a string of worthy, arty projects – a one-man show of twenty years’ worth of paintings at a gallery on London’s Cork Street in 1995 and a position on the editorial board of Modern Art magazine a year later – gave the impression that he was simply a rich hobbyist. It wasn’t true, though. In reality, his compul
sion to keep busy couldn’t be kept in check for ever, and within months of this statement, he was planning one of the most extreme recording experiences of his career – an art project, but one he would struggle to keep uncompromised.

  Mike Garson was the restlessly inventive pianist who had transformed Aladdin Sane, and last played with David on Young Americans. Like many musicians decades into their career, he’d wondered if he could match the creativity of his youth. In March 1994, he started his first complete album with David in twenty years, with those doubts nagging at him. ‘Personally, I didn’t think I could really meet the mark or come up to the standard that I had set on Aladdin Sane. I was thinking, Could I top that? I was a little doubtful. But there was this great affinity and rapport. I still remember thinking to myself, This is special. It was a gem, to me.’

  The inspiration for the new project came from David’s chats with Brian Eno at his wedding. Eno was, of course, hot property as a producer thanks to his work on U2’s electrifying Achtung Baby, an album steeped in the sound of Bowie, Eno and – it needs stressing – Tony Visconti’s experiments in Berlin. Once they’d decided to work together, their collaboration started to take shape through what was, in 1994, the most high-tech of methods. Reeves Gabrels first heard about the planned album just after he’d completed a tour with Free’s Paul Rodgers. He walked into a hotel rooom in Oklahoma City with the strains of ‘All Right Now’ ringing in his head and saw a fax from Eno lying on the floor. Soon fax machines around the world were spooling out apparently impossible concepts and intractable questions: ‘One idea that David and Brian were trying to figure out was almost like a Charles Ives thing where you have two songs playing simultaneously then have them suddenly link up where the same word, beat, everything was right on the same spot: a mathematical problem.’