Starman

by Paul Trynka

  In essence, the work harked back to David’s first trip to America, when he’d discovered the music of outsiders like Iggy Pop, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and the fake Lou Reed. Hoping to tap a similar source in their quest to record the most extreme music of their careers, Bowie and Eno ventured, in January 1994, to the Gugging Hospital near Vienna, where psychiatrist Leo Navratil had assembled a group of patients who would become known as Outsider artists. In 1981, Navratil opened a formal Haus der Künstler (house of artists) within the hospital, where these artists could live and work as a community. Bowie told Interview magazine later, ‘Some of them don’t even do [their art] as an expression of themselves; they do it because their work is them. Their motivation for painting and sculpting comes from a different place than that of the average artist who’s sane on society’s terms.’

  Interviewer Ingrid Sischy was sensitive enough not to ask the obvious question: whether David Bowie’s half-brother might have benefited from a similarly enlightened regime, rather than the depressing, under-staffed confines of Cane Hill. Unsurprisingly, David and Eno were ‘both very affected by the experience’ of visiting the Haus der Künstler.

  In some way the album sessions, which started in March 1994, were like a replay of the Berlin days; for Garson it was a throw-back to Philadelphia and Young Americans, his last full album outing with Bowie. The two had been reunited after a chance remark by writer Jérome Soligny, who happened to mention that the pianist had quit Scientology. Partly inspired by the news that Garson was no longer a parson, Bowie called him a few days later to overdub piano to Buddha. But for their first meeting in a studio in nearly twenty years, there was no nostalgia, says Garson: ‘He just settles into it and that’s all that exists at that moment in time. If I was to meet him tomorrow I’d have to come in as a fresh artist – none of the things from the past would mean anything.’

  Today, Garson expresses no regret at his two-decade separation from David; rather there is an admiration for David’s immersion in the present. ‘We would sit down every morning when we got in the studio, push RECORD and just play and play and play. It was a wonderful experiment and it turned into great music. There were times when David and Brian would play us tracks through the headphones; we’d be listening to a Marvin Gaye song and improvising against it, then they’d take that away and mess around with what we got from that based on how we were influenced by that piece. I thought that was brilliant.’

  Reeves Gabrels arrived in Lausanne roughly a week before the album sessions to write, and just to hang out. In this new context, he realised how David might have eight hours set aside, six of which would be spent talking: ‘but all of that informs the two hours when the flash happens’. The sessions were consciously arranged as an art happening. Each musician had his own corner in the studio; when David wasn’t setting up their head space, talking to them and making suggestions, he stood at an easel, sketching the band in charcoals. He constructed his lyrics using a randomising programme on his Apple Powerbook to recreate the old cut-up technique he’d used on Diamond Dogs. As in Berlin, he was using words for their sounds and associations, rather than a linear narrative.

  Eno had prepared role cards for the participants, aimed at forcing them out of stock ideas and responses. At times, Garson remembers Eno holding up cards signalling chord changes and being ignored by the Reeves-Garson-Kizilcay trio: ‘Erdal was incredible, like a one-man jazz-rock fusion ensemble, all filtered through his growing up in Turkey. He was like, “I don’t get this shit, what is this shit?” He would ultimately play incredibly well.’

  In this new atmosphere, Kizilcay, who’d worked on Bowie sessions since the pre-production for Let’s Dance, felt uncomfortable. He missed the musical intimacy of the Buddha sessions and he was not a fan of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, in which each musician was assigned a character: ‘He wrote me something like that I was an Arabic Sheik and I wanted to marry this guy’s daughter – so I needed to show him I can play psychedelic, arabesque funk. But I don’t need a letter to play Oriental stuff!’

  Gabrels was more receptive: ‘Mine was, “You’re on the third moon of Jupiter and you’re the house band.” I liked that. What was funny was I would sometimes play that game in my head anyway.’ Garson’s card read, ‘You are the morale booster of a small ragtag terrorist operation. You must keep spirits up at all costs.’ Bowie, when he wasn’t sketching, was ‘a town crier in a society where the media networks have tumbled down’.

  For Garson, this was a powerful experience: ‘There was a camera, too. Hours of it every day just running, fixed cameras on each of us. So they knew it was special on some level. Then David doing charcoals of everybody as we’re improvising was almost like another instrumentalist playing, part of the creation.’ All of the musicians remember the genesis of certain key songs, including ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’, as dating from this period, with over thirty-five hours of songs that evolved over the sessions. When complete, the work was edited into two CD’s worth of material, titled Leon. Brian Eno, in particular, was keen to release the results as a black label ‘with no name on it’, says Gabrels: ‘Let it leak that it was David Bowie but put it out as a completely separate entity, like Prince’s Black Album. Use it as a work of art and also something that creates interest for the next project.’

  As they laboured in the smoke-fogged studio at Mountain, with both Bowie and Gabrels chain-smoking one Marlboro after another, the way ahead seemed clear. For David, there was an obvious artist on whom to model himself: Scott Walker, the man who had turned him on to Jacques Brel and whose career he had followed for twenty years now, since hearing the singer in Lesley Duncan’s room at Redington Road. According to Gabrels, ‘Scott Walker was still one of David’s heroes,’ and the small group of musicians saw their project in a similar uncompromising vein to Scott’s more challenging works.

  But near completion of the album, David encountered exactly the same problems finding a sympathetic record company that had plagued Scott Walker. The best prospect was Virgin America, now owned by EMI; according to Gabrels, it was on their persuasion that David reworked the album over January 1995, mostly at the Hit Factory in New York. Carlos Alomar returned to contribute sublime rhythm guitar to ‘I Have Not Been to Oxford Town’. Over the same period, they introduced another version of ‘Strangers When We Meet’, ‘Thru These Architect’s Eyes’ and ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, which originated from a Reeves’ ambient tune called ‘Moondust’.

  Soon after the New York sessions, Kevin Armstrong got a call to turn up at West Side studios in London; his own song, ‘Now’, recorded for the first Tin Machine album but left in the vault, was reworked as the title track of Outside; Armstrong also added guitar to ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’ and ‘Thru These Architect’s Eyes’. The songs’ dark, gothic atmosphere was offset by the breezy presence of Sabrina Guinness, heiress and ex-girlfriend of Prince Charles. Guinness had recently returned from Hollywood and was setting up a video workshop for deprived kids, who filmed the sessions. Brian Eno agreed to a taped interview with the children, the intellectual guru turned total sweetheart: ‘He was absolutely charming with them,’ says Armstrong; the kids, in turn, added their voices to ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’.

  That song caused one of the first artistic disagreements between Gabrels and his boss, showing how hard it could be for a musician who was simply an employee. After recording the first version, Bowie had second thoughts and re-recorded his vocals with new lyrics – based on the theme of English landscape painters. Gabrels voiced his reservations: ‘Maybe I was too critical, so he said, “Why don’t you go away and come back in two hours?”’ says Gabrels. ‘I came back and heard it and said, “David, that’s nice and all – but it’s kind of destroyed the essence of the song, don’t you think?” And he just waved his hand, “Fine, we’ll just move on.” “No no, David, I don’t mean to hurt you.” “No, forget it, we’ll just go to another track. We’ll come back to that next month.”’

  Th
e pair never discussed the subject again, but when it came to the mix, David had reverted back to the original. The final version eventually ended up in a celebrated slot over the end titles to David Fincher’s twisted serial-killer movie, Se7en – perhaps a treatise on English landscape artists would not have done the trick in that setting.

  It was, of course, typical of the entertainment industry that David and Brian had started the project inspired by an artistic community who were blissfully heedless of commercial pressures, and then had to rework their initial concept to get a record deal. Yet the album would soon undergo a second reworking at David’s hands, intended to restore the art-house element he thought had been lost. Over 1995, he added spoken-word recordings, reshaping the album into a concept piece based on a surreal murder story he’d written for Q magazine in late 1994 called ‘The Diary of Nathan Adler’: what Bowie called a ‘non-linear gothic drama hyper-cycle’. The plot revolved around the murder and dismemberment of fourteen-year-old runaway Baby Grace Blue, her body parts destined for a Damien Hirst-esque artwork, with Bowie’s Nathan Adler providing a Philip Marlowe-style voiceover in a dodgy Brooklyn accent.

  Challenging, complex, often thrilling, over-long and – in the spoken segues – undoubtedly self-indulgent, 1.Outside finally made it to the record shops on 25 September, 1995, eighteen months after the first Montreux sessions. Its release met with a deluge of media attention, most of it effusive – ‘bold and fascinating’ said Tom Doyle of Q – although dissenters, like the San Francisco Examiner, proclaimed it ‘pretentious and nearly tuneless’.

  In what would soon prove a habit, Bowie chose to lead with an uncompromising single – ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’ – accompanied by a deliberately provocative video directed by Sam Bayer, also responsible for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. The video was a magnificently squelchy snuff-movie assemblage, whose cabinet of freaks and sepia styling echoed the video for Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ – which was famously screened on MTV with ‘Scene Removed’ placards to denote the cuts. As was surely intended, MTV duly refused to screen Bowie’s promo, which was later broadcast in edited form, and the single limped to ninety-two in the US, thirty-five in the UK.

  Bayer’s video – the MTV kids with body piercings and tattoos assembling a Minotaur from spare body parts – embodied the mid-nineties aesthetic so perfectly as to suggest that Bowie was merely jumping on a fashionable bandwagon. If anyone had form for that crime, it was he. Yet, in fairness, artists like Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and of course Nirvana, who had recorded their limpid version of ‘Man Who Sold the World’ back in November, 1993, all took elements of their dense, claustrophobic sound from Bowie. In any case, Bowie’s incursion into the MTV alternative scene was aimed more at getting his groove back, than in pursuit of commercial success.

  Even as Bowie’s music started to pass out of youth culture, as a father and forty-something he seemed to have a more profound understanding of it. In 1971, he’d predicted a post-sexual society, throwing together a youth manifesto that was, in retrospect, half-baked. In the 1990s, many of his pronouncements about art provoked sniffiness, with adjectives like ‘portentous’ being directed at him by interviewers such as British writer Chris Roberts. Yet in retrospect, Roberts realised the insight behind some apparently throwaway comments. When the two met in 1995, Bowie predicted a ‘non-linear’ society, telling him, ‘I think that we as a culture embrace confusion. We’re happy to recombine information, we take event horizons incredibly fast. The generations – and I can use that plurally now – underneath me have an ability to scan information much quicker than my lot, and don’t necessarily look for the depth that maybe we would.’

  In a couple of sentences, he’d summed up how the information society was starting to change, anticipating how people would consume media over the forthcoming decades. Within that interpretation though, there was the unmistakable implication that in the coming years, the cultural impact of a single pop star, however famous, would be limited. The manifesto was becoming more modest.

  The impact of Outside, too, was limited, and not just for reasons of cultural change; the narrative segments, in particular, would become unbearably irritating on repeated listening, and in subsequent years the album would fall out of favour. Yet two decades later, when albums are indeed being consumed in non-linear fashion, shuffled on iTunes with the irritating portions removed, Outside is being seen in a different light, according to pianist Mike Garson, who has lately become convinced that the album is a career highlight. ‘I remember thinking, This is quite a special album – because it was a little far out. Maybe people wouldn’t get it for a long time but recently I’ve had a lot of calls and emails – I have a feeling that people are starting to get it.’

  When Outside was being recorded, Bowie had played down his affinity with younger bands like Nine Inch Nails, saying that his major influence was the Swiss industrialists The Young Gods. But when it came time to promote Outside on the road, Bowie chose to explicitly link himself with NIN front man Trent Reznor, touring on a joint bill in a deliberately challenging move which left him open to trend-hopping jibes and even hostile reactions.

  Bowie’s band now sported a new rhythm section of drummer Zachary Alford and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, with George Simms, last seen on the Serious Moonlight tour, on backing vocals; Peter Schwartz was selected as musical director so David wouldn’t have a ‘favourite child’ among Carlos, Reeves or Garson: all previous incumbents. The tour opened on 14 September, 1995, in Hartford, Connecticut, winding up in LA in late October. Nine Inch Nails’ set included Bowie’s ‘Scary Monsters’ and ‘Subterraneans’; Bowie joined them for ‘Reptile’ and ‘Hurt’.

  Mike Garson: ‘I thought that was a brilliant move. We were standing on the side of the stage every night and watched them play their set. I was intrigued. In the middle of the show, when Nine Inch Nails were going off, our band would come on, David would sing “Hurt” and Trent Reznor would sing on the David Bowie song and it was amazing.’

  For Reznor, the experience was thrilling, but intimidating. Sometimes he’d find himself hoping that Bowie wouldn’t be there when he walked into the dressing room, so he wouldn’t have to talk to him. ‘Not that I didn’t like him. But I felt like I had to impress him. I had to impress his band. I couldn’t just let my hair down.’

  Reeves remembers: ‘It was a cool idea but also hard work because we would have to front-load our set with the up stuff because we’d be coming off the Nine Inch Nails encore. Also we did a meld where Carlos and I would join Nine Inch Nails. It was a tough one; some of the Nails crowd would leave when we came on, then our crowd would come in from the lobby. It made us work really hard – in a good way.’

  In November, the band hit the UK, with Morrissey replacing NIN. The UK leg started with a four-night run at Wembley. The tour was a prime example of an older artist refusing to play his greatest hits – although ‘Look Back in Anger’, ‘Scary Monsters’ and ‘Teenage Wildlife’ were all delivered in ruthlessly efficient versions – and met with the predictable response. If there were any Phil Collins fans in the audience, taking the stage to Philip Glass’s ‘Some Air’ and opening with ‘The Motel’ was an admirably effective method of dispersing them. Morrissey left the UK tour after the first ten dates, taking offence at Bowie’s suggestion their sets should overlap, like they had done on his American tour. Morrissey was not as accommodating as Trent Reznor of a move ‘which deprives people of saying goodbye to me’, he asserted later, adding for good measure, ‘He’s a business, you know. He’s not really a person.’

  On 19 February, 1996, as the European leg of the tour came to a close, there was a rather more fulsome tribute from Tony Blair, Labour Party leader, who hailed David as ‘an innovator’ as he presented him with a Brit award for Lifetime Achievement. The future world statesman was six years younger than David, who later commented he’d only turned up at the awards ceremony to perform his current single, ‘Hallo Spaceb
oy’ – if so, the tactic worked, for the Pet Shop Boys’ remix of the song entered the UK charts a fortnight later at number twelve.

  The success of ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ was a welcome vindication in a year in which David’s public, and the critics, gave his new material a generally grudging reception. His own enthusiasm, though, was fired up to a new peak, for after a short break in the spring the band – stripped down to Gabrels, Garson, Alford and Gail Ann Dorsey, whose vocals on a superb version of ‘Under Pressure’ were now a staple of the set – returned to Europe for festival dates in June and July. It was just a couple of days after the band had returned home that David called Gabrels to tell him he’d booked Philip Glass’s studio in New York, for a fortnight later.

  ‘That summer was the end of Outside and beginning of Earthling,’ says Gabrels. ‘I had written about six tracks, more like electronic stuff, on my laptop. I was trying to write without guitar at that point because we’d been crossing paths with bands like Underworld and The Prodigy.’ The sessions would be the most intense and untroubled of David’s 1990s: the band called the studio The Clubhouse, and visitors included David Lynch and Lou Reed, with whom David had now made his peace. Inspired by the sounds they’d heard over the summer – Bowie was an Underworld fan, Gabrels favoured The Prodigy – the team made a conscious decision to abandon tradition, says the guitarist. ‘I felt everybody was looking around them, musically, and thought, Fuck, it’s the end of the millennium and we’re still playing like we’re in The Rolling Stones. We’ve got to get on this otherwise people are gonna look back at us and say we were lame.’