by Paul Trynka
Rather than playing conventional electric guitar, Gabrels used a Roland processor, which digitally modelled different guitar sounds; the entire album was recorded on hard disk, rather than tape, allowing vocals or instruments to be cut and pasted within a song. As they excitedly explored this new world, their guide was Mark Plati, who’d been working at Looking Glass Studios since 1991. Tutored in the bass guitar by Duke Ellington’s nephew William at Indiana University, Plati moved to New York in 1987 and engineered, programmed and played at Arthur Baker’s Shakedown Studios while also filling the same role for superstar DJ Junior Vasquez. Plati had helped Gabrels craft the samples used for the summer dates, and over the three weeks in which they made the album, he became its co-producer, making music out of bits of sonic ‘junk’ – old tracks or samples that he and Reeves found around the studio.
Working with Brian Eno, David had gone through complex psychological techniques to bypass writer’s block; for Earthling, simply using a computer did much the same thing. The songs arrived quickly: lyrics assembled on Post-It notes, decisions made on the fly, vocals recorded first or second take, notably ‘Little Wonder’, where they ended up using the original guide vocal. Approaching his fifties, David’s voice and writing sounded fresh, revitalised – there were many echoes of his youth, a Tony Newley inflection in ‘Little Wonder’, or a trace of ‘Letter to Hermione’ in ‘Dead Man Walking’, which also featured the simple two-note guitar riff Jimmy Page had shown him at IBC studios with The Manish Boys, three decades earlier.
If it came easy, though, Earthling didn’t stay the course. By its release in January 1997, drum ‘n’ bass, and Bowie’s main obsession, Underworld, were both mainstream phenomena; although many reviews of the time praised the rejuvenated songwriting, the album was doomed to be consigned to history as another exercise in apparent bandwagon-jumping. Even the title, Earthling, seemed crassly self-referential, while the Alexander McQueen Union Jack frock coat looked like an attempt to cash in on Britpop, which was the talk of the spring. Yet despite the air of dad at the disco, the passion was real, and inspired Bowie and Gabrels to sneak to events like that summer’s Phoenix Festival, playing as the Tao Jones Index before their main set.
When David celebrated his fiftieth birthday at a packed Madison Square Garden on 8 January, 1997, the line-up seemed carefully chosen to emphasise the birthday boy’s cutting-edge credentials. Fans like the Smashing Pumpkins, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Black Francis from The Pixies and the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl were there to duet on better-known songs, but his own set was dominated by material from his last two albums; Lou Reed – ‘the King of New York’, as David fulsomely introduced him – was the only contemporary, joining him for ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘Waiting for the Man’. Only towards the end, after crowd and band had sung him Happy Birthday, did he run through ‘Under Pressure’ and ‘Heroes’ and then closed the evening with a beautifully simple ‘Space Oddity’.
It was a powerful ceremony, a convincing testament to his musical impact; but over the same period that the exacting preparations for the show had been going on, a more intimate package was being assembled. For months before, Iman had been calling up friends – some of whom hadn’t seen David for years – to ask them to contribute an artwork to be bound into a book, each contribution marking a moment of their life with this supposedly cold, calculating individual. The work, a collection of drawings and writing, was supremely moving, according to those who have seen it, an unaffected tribute to a man who is simply, as boyhood friend Geoff MacCormack puts it, ‘very funny – a good mate’. Friends from Bromley, Berlin and New York contributed – Iman charmed each of them, discovering new stories about her husband. Only Iggy, according to friends, didn’t contribute.
For many of David’s peers, hitting the age of fifty was a dark moment; a few, like Keith Richards, relished emulating heroes like John Lee Hooker and playing long into the good night. For Iggy, just three months younger than David, his fiftieth year on the planet was a time to split with his wife Suchi and embark on a crazed affair with an Argentinian girl, who inspired his crisis-ridden Avenue B album. David, though, seemed idyllically happy with Iman, telling friends and even people he bumped into casually – on a plane or in an airport shuttle – how getting married was the best thing that ever happened to him: the part of him that was utterly conventional seemed to have gained dominance.
One gleaming signpost of this conventionality were the perfect white teeth he now sported. The disappearance of his slightly crooked, overlapping fangs in favour of even, Hollywood-style crowns would later become the subject of a hilariously sleazy British TV show, Celebrity Surgery, featuring several Bowie acolytes, all of whom thought they were contributing to a conventional documentary. The snippet is now a YouTube classic, studded with poignant comments from fans, mourning the departure of his iconic English gnashers. The teeth completed a style makeover that also included a small, alternative-rock goatee and the body art applied in Kyoto in 1992, by a tattooist popular with the organised crime syndicate, the Yakuza: a figure riding a dolphin, overlaid with a Japanese serenity prayer and Iman’s name in Japanese Kanji characters, on his left calf. (Iman reciprocated with a Bowie knife above her right ankle.)
There was something about David’s well-groomed, ‘alternative’ appearance that looked distinctly airbrushed and American: the product of spending more time with New York’s fashion and music crowd. (Iman disliked the Lausanne house, which the couple put up for sale the following year.) The couple loved the city, and in the following years could often be seen huddled, deep in conversation, in cafés nearby their condo at 708, Broadway. Still, he remained distinctly British, for Iman brought out his playful, funny side, and loved the ever-present dry humour. Many a New York waiter would be caught out by his little jokes, handing him a hot rolled towel before he ordered, only for Bowie to look at it quizzically and ask, ‘Is it dead?’ Even the occasional toot of cocaine was consigned to the past; now he rarely drank to excess, and while he cut a cool rug in his frock coat for that summer’s tour, he was content to leave Reeves Gabrels to check out the dance culture with which he’d aligned himself: ‘He couldn’t really go to raves – nor was he inclined to, being, at that point, sober for a long time.’
Gabrels and Bowie had as close a musical relationship as any of those between Bowie and a fellow musician, all the more complex because the guitarist was from a younger generation, someone who’d grown up on Bowie’s music. Gabrels would teeter between waves of euphoria at working with a childhood hero, and frustration at dealing with Bowie’s business organisation and niggles about percentage breakdowns on songwriting credits, which seemed to crop up around that time. Many of Bowie’s musicians cite him as among their best employers – ‘I’m his biggest fan, in that respect,’ says Carlos Alomar – but others found dealing with Isolar consistently unpleasant. Bowie’s management gave some collaborators, like Erdal Kizilcay, the impression he should take the percentage on offer and count himself lucky. The Bowie camp had a point – after all, any musician working with David was practically guaranteed an overnight transformation of their financial fortunes – but such arguments were especially hard to stomach in the late nineties, at a time when David was gaining new fame, not for music, but for the money he was fast accumulating.
‘Bowie Bonds’, the controversial means by which David raised 55 million dollars against revenues from his back catalogue, would cause a sensation within the music industry. The bonds – securities issued against Bowie’s future royalties for the next ten years – would also make a star of David Pullman. The man most associated with the Bowie Bond, Pullman would, at age thirty-nine, be named as one of Time magazine’s 100 Innovators, and go on to package similar deals for other musicians. Soon he was being celebrated in profiles across the world’s press, while the most convincing testament to the fame of the bond phenomenon arrived in 2001, in the shape of a thriller, Something Wild, in which novelist Linda Davies wove a complex plot around the issue
of Bowie Bonds; ‘Linda’s book gives readers a look at how exciting this industry can be,’ gushed Pullman, in a press release around its launch.
Yaël Brandeis Perry
With producer Hugh Padgham (centre, in glasses), at Le Studio, Marin Heights, near Montreal, to record Tonight, David’s move into white reggae – just as the smart money was moving out.
Kevin Armstrong
‘Absolute Beginners’: Bowie making his last great single of the 1980s at West Side Studios, June, 1985, written and arranged in a whirlwind with a new young band. When the session was finished he thanked them for doing him a favour.
Kevin Armstrong
Recording ‘Dancing in the Street’ with Mick Jagger, Kevin Armstrong (centre) and singer Helena Springs. Bowie was relaxed, Mick more ‘vocal and mouthy’, remembers one musician.
Kevin Armstrong
A quick cigarette with Freddie Mercury, backstage at Live Aid. Bowie looked after his nervous band like a mother hen during the day, devoting himself to the cause rather than his career.
Bellia/Dalle/Retna
Eduard Meyer
Famously ludicrous, the Glass Spider tour marked the point at which Bowie (here flanked by Peter Frampton and Erdal Kizilcay) moved from being a relaxed delegator to a nervous control freak. Still, the Berlin show, on 6 June, 1987, was a triumph, sparking riots in East Berlin, while U2 would later lift some of Bowie’s staging ideas. Right, he visits Hansa’s Edu Meyer before the Berlin show.
Kevin Armstrong
Among friends: with girlfriend Melissa Hurley and new guitarist and confidant Reeves Gabrels, Compass Point, Nassau, late 1988, finalising Tin Machine’s debut album.
Ebet Roberts/ Getty Images
‘It never really gelled – it was a battle.’ Tin Machine, February, 1989, with Reeves Gabrels (right) and the irrepressible Sales brothers – Tony on bass, Hunt on drums.
Ron Galella/ WireImage
‘I have never been so happy.’ Bowie met Iman Abdul Majid on 14 October, 1990. He later mentioned that he started thinking of baby names that first evening.
Kevin Mazur/WireImage
A modest party, with only 17,000 guests, to celebrate David Bowie’s fiftieth birthday, 9 January, 1997, at Madison Square Gardens; the music drew mainly on Earthling, the image – augmented with refurbished, all-American dental work – was state-of-the-art MTV.
Toby Melville/PA
‘He came back dressed in Hunky Dory mode and played a full set of hits, every one was a winner.’ Taking Glastonbury by storm, June, 2000, with a band which included old hand Earl Slick, David Bowie finally seemed reconciled with his own past.
Brian Rasic/Rex Features
David, in a kimono – with ‘tiny Japanese slippers on his tiny feet’ – greets Bono and Eno backstage at London’s Royal Festival Hall after his recreation of Low, June, 2002.
Startraks Photo/Rex Features
‘A mature singer, like Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra.’ A nervous Bowie returns after his heart attack, 8 September, 2005. The bandages and ‘bruising’ signalled his identification with the battered state of New Orleans; his voice was now grainy and world-weary, too.
WireImage
‘It was an unusual relationship.’ A rare public appearance in 2009, this time playing support to director son Duncan for Moon’s appearance at the Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April, 2009.
L. Cohen/ WireImage
‘We’ll see what’s meant to be.’ David Bowie’s last tour, Los Angeles, 2003. Its final curtailment formed a de facto ‘Houdini Escape’ – a rationale for the retirement of which he’d long fantasised.
Bowie banked $55 million from the deal – £39 million at 1997 sterling rates – some of which was reportedly used to pay British taxes. However, David wanted the money for quite another reason: to buy back his own music.
When David had first negotiated his split from Tony Defries in March, 1975, his ex-manager retained a percentage of all the music David recorded, right through to 1982. This percentage was on a sliding scale – reportedly a full 50 per cent of Bowie’s share on the pre-1975 releases, and less thereafter – but the money was due in perpetuity. Defries retained co-ownership of the masters – and even retained the right, he claimed, to issue further Bowie recordings; a right he exploited from the early nineties, with the release of the Santa Monica 72 live album in 1994, plus other albums based on BBC and Astronettes sessions. By the mid-nineties, Isolar opened negotiations with their predecessor for Bowie to finally buy out his rights. The talks, according to Defries’ friends, were amicable: David’s people told Defries’ people he wanted the assets ‘to pass on to his children’. None of the parties involved has ever confirmed how much of David’s $55 million went to Defries, but some of those peripherally involved suggest it was at least half. If so, Tony Defries made over $27 million; an impressive return for the £500,000 it had cost him to buy Bowie’s masters from Laurence Myers, back in the summer of 1972.
Over subsequent years, the notion of Bowie Bonds would be raised again and again, often with the implication that David, like Mick Jagger, was obsessed with money: a lower-middle-class boy wanting to make up for childhood austerity. Few commented on the fact that, at the age of fifty, he was paying tens of millions to reclaim his own life’s work. Following the transaction, Tony Defries bought an impressive estate in Virginia and – on top of his considerable existing assets – now had tens of millions to invest, a practice in which he’d always been an expert. David had purchased his own past.
If the motivations for Bowie seeking another $55 million were misunderstood, the furore signalled a period when his name was invariably connected with commerce. The implications of Bowie Bonds were closely followed within the financial industry, although the gloss was taken off them by a series of lawsuits between Pullman and various other parties, arguing over who had invented the bonds. The final verdict indicated that the inspiration for the bonds came not from financial wiz-kid David Pullman, but from David’s own business manager, Bill Zysblat. The controversy around the issue would never subside. Lamont Dozier, the acclaimed Motown songwriter, would later sue the advisers who worked on his own bond issue; in the wake of EMI’s financial problems, Bowie Bonds were downgraded by Moody’s, the leading credit ratings agency, to one notch above junk grade in 2004.
Since the days when he had kept a close eye on finances on the Serious Moonlight tour, Bill Zysblat – who also worked for the Stones – had become David’s key adviser. In the wake of the excitement generated by the Bowie Bonds, Zysblat would also plan a Bowie Bank – an idea that was eventually dropped after problems with the bank chosen to operate the scheme – and, in the summer of 1998, announce that he was going to create an internet provider called BowieNet.
Over the past few years, David had become as fired up by the internet as he was by art and music: ‘He was right at the forefront, and it made sense he would be,’ says Thomas Dolby, Bowie’s Live Aid keyboard player. Dolby had moved to America’s West Coast to launch an internet start-up company, and Bowie had shared his excitement with him. ‘It was a hedonistic thing – of being in the moment, of getting a thrill, a rush out of what he was experiencing.’ Dolby had lived through a similar arc, of seeing contemporaries like David Byrne progress from hanging out at the Mudd Club to exploring the medium of video. ‘These were the lightning rods for creativity. And he was very fired up – what he was seeing was a return to a grass roots movement. He could have a ringside seat, and be in control, do spontaneous things and get instant feedback.’
Bowie’s life would be mapped out online for at least the next decade; yet his influence went beyond his own site, or his own music. According to some industry insiders, he was mapping out the very future of the world wide web. Technology writer John Naughton later cited Bowie as a ‘leading futurologist’, the originator of some of the ‘most perceptive observations anyone’s ever made about our networked world’. In the late nineties, Bowie saw the web’s potential for building new commun
ities; yet he also spotted the long-term implications for copyright, predicting how authorship and intellectual property would become endangered. Most presciently, in 2002 he suggested that music ‘is going to become like running water or electricity’, anticipating the rise of streaming services like Spotify. Bowie would always stop short of describing himself as any kind of visionary – his opinions on the evolution of modern culture were usually confined to promotional interviews. But his perceptiveness inspired Naughton to comment, in 2010, ‘If you want to know the future, ask a musician.’
By January 1998, David was promoting the launch of his own websites, davidbowie.com and bowieart.com, and on 1 September an internet provider, BowieNet (subscription fee $19.95 per month). One of the staff at Outside, his PR company, remembers that the launch was ‘one of the most stressful things I can remember, there would be webcasts with him, Boy George, Visconti – and he absolutely loved it’. The obsession – David would also drop in on his own chatrooms; his handle ‘sailor’ – was also recreational; he’d spend hours trawling the world wide web, or looking for bargains on eBay.
Over the same year that the Bowie brand was launched online, the man himself was launched as an independent digital entity, too. Towards the end of 1998, David called Reeves Gabrels over to London to join him and Iman at a meeting with a computer game company, Eidos. The developer needed not only a soundtrack, ‘They wanted David, Iman and me to be a character in a game,’ says Gabrels. ‘So we started talking about how to do it, set up in a hotel room and started writing.’ The resultant game, Omikron, was a cult classic, albeit no mainstream success, but ‘Survive’, the main song Bowie and Gabrels crafted for the game, was a gem, simple and unaffected, almost Scary Monsters in vibe, without any of the over-complexity and over-thinking that otherwise seemed synonymous with nineties Bowie.