by Paul Trynka
During that most multimedia of years, it was perhaps fitting that a meeting which would have a profound effect on his future work was hatched as a result of a kids’ cartoon. David had been asked to contribute a song to the Rugrats movie (also featuring Iggy), and called Tony Visconti to produce the vaguely retro song, ‘Safe’. As he took the call, Visconti’s eyes ‘welled up. I hadn’t realised how much I missed him.’ Sadly, the song wouldn’t make the film, for the scene featuring it was cut. But their relationship had been rekindled.
As one friendship was being patched up, another was coming to its term. The Omikron project expanded into a full-blown album, first called The Dreamer, later renamed Hours, which was started in Bermuda, where David and Iman now had a holiday home. In search of a low-key, emotional feel, Bowie and Reeves reverted to conventional one-on-one songwriting methods. According to Reeves, he’d originally intended two of the songs, ‘The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell’ and ‘Survive’, for his own solo album. Throughout, his guitar work was tasteful, less exhibitionist than before: ‘I’m not sort of Jackson Pollocking my way through it, it’s more Norman Rockwell.’
After the aggression and exuberance of its predecessors, Hours was widely interpreted as a reflection on mortality. There is a distinct world-weariness about songs such as ‘Thursday’s Child’, exacerbated by David’s Nick Cave-influenced vocal; at other points, particularly ‘The Dreamers’, Scott Walker comes to the fore, in what is one of David’s more vocally self-effacing albums. The instrumentation, too, was conventional, predictable at times, in what seemed to be a ‘genre-free’ album, as if in conscious over-reaction to its predecessor. The best songs, notably ‘Seven’, and ‘Thursday’s Child’, were potential masterpieces, but their predictable, occasionally plodding arrangements suggested that David’s assured instinct for picking the right setting had deserted him. As if to confirm this, the sleeve, always an intrinsic part of the appeal of Bowie albums, was a mess: despite being crafted by noted San Francisco collagist Rex Ray, it was a hammy mix of designer clutter and mawkishness, with its photo of the long-haired Bowie cradling his short-haired alter-ego, as if in a deposition from the cross.
For most listeners, the autumnal mood was taken as Bowie reflecting on his life. In his talks with Reeves, David told him, ‘It was autobiographical but it wasn’t his biography, it was someone close to him. There was some discussion about whether he was writing from my point of view. I don’t know. The end was nigh. I knew I needed to go, it just took a long time to figure out how.’
Gabrels had helped lead Bowie out of the creative cul-de-sac of the late eighties, but both parties sensed it was time to move on. Mark Plati, the computer wizard behind Earthling, had now moved into a more conventional role as bassist, a change essentially initiated by Reeves. Gabrels had thus prepared his own replacement. There was no falling out, says the guitarist: ‘I was basically burning out. A lot of it didn’t have to do with David as much as with time away from home, time on the road and just dealing with some of the people around him. I thought it was amicable.’
In his later years, David was sometimes remarkably gracious about his previous collaborators; this was certainly the case with Reeves, to whom David would often publicly express his gratitude. Still, the pair soon fell out of touch: ‘I think it got misinterpreted over time – Coco got in there after I left,’ says Reeves. ‘I was no saint either at the end, but my crimes were entirely personal. I was trying to make my way home at that point – literally! I felt like if I had stayed I was going to become everything I disliked in musicians I had known – bitter and twisted – or I was gonna die because I would be so miserable I would just drug myself to death. I just knew I was done with that. There were also personal complications because I was having a child with David’s wardrobe mistress. That played into their hands as a source of shit-stirring.’ Gabrels’ last appearance with Bowie would be at the VH1 Storytellers performance, filmed in August 1999. (It was a good, slightly nostalgic show, with Bowie sharing some hilarious anecdotes, such as the time when, in Ziggy guise, he discovered he was expected to use the dressing-room sink as a urinal. ‘My dear man, I can’t piss in the sink!’ he protested. ‘Son,’ the promoter replied, ‘if it’s good enough for Shirley Bassey, it’s good enough for you.’)
While Hours was undistinguished, its marketing was world-class. The build-up to its 4 October release featured a ‘cyber song contest’, offering fans the chance to contribute four lines of lyric to one song. Bowie’s website unveiled the album cover one section at a time, strip-tease style, while announcing the album would be available as a download before its CD release: another first for an established artist. And if this wasn’t sufficient media saturation, in the run-up to release, ‘Heroes’ blared out regularly from British TV screens in a £8.5 million campaign for CGU Insurance, which, the ad agency announced, ‘focuses on the consumer as “hero” for taking responsibility for the financial future’. The promotion, and the fans’ genuine affection for the more traditional, unvarnished Bowie, helped the album to number five in the UK charts. American sales were disappointing, however; at number forty-seven it was his worst solo chart performance since Ziggy Stardust.
But as the century ebbed to its close, there was welcome vindication from the Sun, whose readers voted him the biggest star of the twentieth century, beating Michael Jackson and Liam Gallagher; in a Q magazine poll of the ‘Greatest Star of the Century’, he pipped Madonna to come sixth, after Lennon, McCartney, Cobain, Dylan and Elvis. On Christmas Eve that year, he spent two and a half hours chatting with 19,000 fans on an intermittent internet feed, thanking the kids who mentioned their parents thought him a bad influence, promising new sessions with Tony Visconti, throwing in a good joke every line or two, mentioning his son was standing by with a saucepan and explaining that the Christmas tree had been decorated, ‘but our balls keep tending to fall off’. It had been a good half-century.
The fresh new decade was a good one, too. David and Iman had been trying for a child since the late nineties, resorting to IVF, Iman said later, and undergoing two unsuccessful bouts before conceiving naturally. The pair announced Iman’s pregnancy on 13 February, 2000, monopolising headlines worldwide. (The competition for cheesiest headline was won by music365.com, whose story read ‘Nappy Ch-ch-changes …’.) Iman later told Jet magazine she’d used an old African technique to get pregnant; holding a borrowed baby, kindly supplied by Christie Brinkley, during a Vogue shoot the previous September.
Of all the regrets that David ever voiced in public, the fact that his son had had such an irregular upbringing was the one he mentioned most often. After leaving Gordonstoun, Joey had worked briefly with handicapped kids in Switzerland, and at the Jim Henson puppet workshop – a connection he’d made during his dad’s work on Labyrinth – before winning a scholarship to the College of Wooster in Ohio to study Philosophy. Once there, he started using his given first name, Duncan. In 1999, David had suggested Duncan accompany him to the shoot for Tony Scott’s TV series of The Hunger; Scott became a mentor to Duncan, inspiring a love affair with cinema. In February 2000, the Daily Mail trumpeted the news that the ‘quiet and polite’ Duncan had enrolled at Covent Garden’s International Film School.
From the beginning of 2000, David knew there would be parallels with the summer that Duncan had been born, for Glastonbury organiser Michael Eavis had called before Christmas, asking him to return to the festival, twenty-nine years after his first appearance there. The spring was dominated by the preparations, with Earl Slick returning to the fold, joining Plati, Gail Ann Dorsey, drummer Sterling Campbell and backing singers Holly Palmer and Emm Grynner. There were three warm-up shows in New York, one of which was cancelled, as his voice gave out. Perhaps for that reason, David was conspicuously nervous before his Sunday night slot at the festival, on 25 June.
BBC executive producer Mark Cooper oversaw the live coverage, and remembers, ‘He took the place by storm. He came back dressed in Hunky Dory mode and played a
set full of hits, every one was a winner.’ The performance was fabulous; only one factor stopped the set being the live broadcast of the year: ‘They [David’s management] told us they would only let us broadcast six songs. I wept. It was such a stonking set, he had the whole crowd eating out of his hand. And it was painful to come off it.’ Rather like musicians who describe encounters where David played the Angel and Coco played the Devil, the BBC executives were struck by the contrast between David’s cheery demeanour and the difficult, almost miserly attitude of his organisation when it came to broadcasting the show. ‘I always thought of Bowie as someone good at hoarding his past,’ says one of them, ‘paying it out a bit at a time. Like Scrooge.’ Cooper, meanwhile, saw the performance as a life-changing event, which should have been shared more widely: ‘An artist can be reborn with a performance like that, get another ten years in their career. He’s earned the right to deliver things on his terms, but I think it was a mistake. Because this was the moment.’
There was another nod to 1971 two days later, with a show at the BBC Radio Theatre, which echoed the show at which he’d premiered the newly written ‘Kooks’. Then, back in New York, he started sessions on the sixties-themed album that he’d trailed in the December webcast. Named Toy, the proposed album was inspired by one of his first great songs, ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’: ‘place your ragged doll with all your toys and things and deeds’. With Mark Plati overseeing, they cut a terrific version, imbued with the spirit of Mick Wayne, who’d played on the BBC version – the Hull guitarist, Ronson’s predecessor, had died in a house fire in June 1994, his work forgotten. Tony Visconti, whose inspirational arrangement for the song had marked his debut collaboration with Bowie, was called in for some of the sessions, in which David delved deeply into his own back pages, to re-record Ziggy-era numbers such as the jewel-like ‘Shadow Man’: a near-masterpiece, this obscure, forgotten work illustrated the quality and breadth of the song catalogue he’d built up over thirty-five years.
Though they’d been working hard, there was the most welcome interruption to the sessions on 15 August, 2000, with the birth of Alexandria Zahra Jones at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. David and Iman celebrated the event in the now obligatory cover feature in Hello!, sharing with the public their bliss, their fantasies of later having a boy they could name Stenton, after David’s father, and the universal frustration with builders, whose delays prevented their move to their bigger, new apartment in Chelsea, New York, in time for the birth. Iman mentioned that David was doing his share of nappy changes for Alexandria – her name inspired by the ancient Greco-Egyptian seat of culture. The notion of a multimedia superstar dealing with such down-to-earth routines was heart-warming, but apparently the novelty wore off, for three years later, in bloke-ish mode, he announced, ‘I don’t do nappies.’
A year after Alexandria’s birth, David was still describing his main job as ‘daddyfying’, his excitement at the new experience just as all-consuming as the obsessions of his youth. His work schedule was light; there was a short break filming a hilarious, self-parodic cameo for Ben Stiller’s film Zoolander, plus more frustrating weeks spent wrestling with problems over the completed Toy album – in June David mentioned ‘scheduling conflicts’ with EMI/Virgin. In reality, this was a terminal falling-out, triggered by managerial conflicts within the company. He was unconcerned by the hassles, as far as anyone could tell; instead, he seemed to have settled in to life in New York. The public perception was of him as a culture buff, always visiting the ballet or a new exhibition, or hanging out with local musos like Moby or Lou Reed, all of which he did. But he was just as happy Googling randomly in ‘the bunker’ – his computer and work room – waking up at 6 a.m. and dealing with emails before taking Lexi for a walk around SoHo or Greenwich Village in her buggy, or sitting chatting to Iman over a bowl of pasta by a restaurant window, the two of them smiling graciously if they happened to be interrupted by a fan.
In his first few years as a New Yorker, he still considered moving back London; it was a part of who he was. But over the next couple of years he came to detest British celebrity culture, the prospect of having to endure ‘having a camera lens stuck in either my face or my wife and child’s face every morning’. He had reverted to much the same sentiments he’d expressed in 1980, the feeling that New York was the perfect place to wander, seek out interesting book or antique shops, pick up the urban buzz without being hassled. Only once did he venture out publicly that spring, to Carnegie Hall for the Tibet House Benefit on 26 February, 2001. Together on-stage for the first time since The Hype, he and Tony Visconti played an extraordinary version of ‘Silly Boy Blue’. When they’d recorded it together in December 1966, it had disappeared without trace, prompting thoughts of giving up music; now the pair were backed by Philip Glass on piano and Moby on guitar, and led the enraptured crowd in a chant of ‘Chime chime chime’ in tribute to the monk David had gone to see at the Tibet Centre.
The sense that, as a new father, David was becoming reconciled to his own past deepened in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Margaret Mary Jones’ passing was announced on 2 April, and for David had come ‘out of the blue’. Several faces from his youth were at the funeral, including Ken Pitt and Pat Antoniou, the aunt who had so publicly accused David of callousness to his half-brother, prolonging the feuds that had blighted the Burns family for half a century. When David saw her, he ‘walked straight over, threw his arms around her’, says Ken Pitt, the one man who had stayed in touch with all the various disconnected branches of the family. ‘He was absolutely wonderful.’
A ghost had been laid to rest, but others would remain. On 11 May, Freddie Buretti died of cancer in Paris. David had kept nearly all the costumes Freddie had made for him. And the problems with Toy deepened during the summer; the record would be a casualty of Mariah Carey’s legendarily disastrous album, Glitter, which sold so badly that Virgin were forced to pay a reported $19 million to terminate her contract early; Nancy Berry, who had signed Bowie as well as Carey, was fired. But even before the album’s fate was sealed, David was planning its replacement. In June, he came to stay with Tony Visconti and his new girlfriend at their ‘humble’, draughty, wooden, three-storey apartment in suburban West Nyack, New York. The pair worked on songs together in Tony’s loft, just as they had in the Haddon Hall basement, only this time they would cut and paste ideas using Pro Tools software, rather than Mark Pritchett’s Revox. On their second day, Tony took David to see Allaire, a beautiful wood-lined recording studio set in the Catskill Mountains: it felt like a finely crafted Edwardian yacht, with panoramic views over the reservoir that quenches New York City. The moment David stepped in the room, he said later, ‘I knew exactly what lyrics I was to write – although I didn’t yet know what the words themselves were.’
When they started recording, David brought his ‘little family’, who stayed in a tiny house in the grounds some of the time, and there he remained, until the album was essentially finished. One morning, he got up around five, as was his habit, looked out of the windows and saw two deer grazing below the field, in the fresh light of the rising sun. In the distance a car was driving slowly past the reservoir, and then words started streaming out of him and tears ran down his face. The song was ‘Heathen’: ‘I didn’t like writing it. There was something so ominous and final about it.’ The lyrics read as if taking leave of a lover; but the object he addresses is life.
The song was indeed bleak, but throughout the Heathen album, there is a visceral connection with the world David saw around him, and an almost loving engagement with his craft. (Later, he’d enumerate all the instruments he played in the sessions, including his Stylophone and Brian Eno’s old EMS synth.)
For the past two decades, Bowie had wrestled with that worry about whether, in his later years, he could ever ‘contribute so aggressively’ again. In the relaxed, almost spiritual atmosphere of Allaire, he had found his answer, for a renewed confidence and passion pervades each of the songs. There was a
luminous simplicity about most of the material that evoked Hunky Dory; but where Hunky Dory speaks of rebirth, of the shiny and new, Heathen displays a hard-won confidence in a life that’s been well lived, like beautifully worn leather – the quirky, almost baby voice on ‘A Better Future’; drifting, dark, drum loops on ‘The Angels Have Gone’; impassioned singing, reminiscent of ‘Heroes’, on ‘Slow Burn’. Perhaps there wasn’t the visceral thrill of the twenty- and thirty-something Bowie, but there was nonetheless the sense that this was a classic album, one that didn’t suffer by comparison with Scary Monsters.
Many of the reviews of the album were coloured by the knowledge that Bowie and Visconti were still out in the Catskills on 9/11; David was talking to Iman, who was back in the apartment, on the phone as she saw the second plane hit. When David returned to Manhattan, there was an ominous gap in the familiar view from the kitchen window; Iman realised that many of the men who used to greet her and Lexi as she wheeled the buggy by the local Fire Department station a couple of blocks away were probably dead. It would cement the family’s relationship with the city; David headlined October’s Concert for New York and would talk no more of moving back to London. But for all the fear and anxiety David sensed in the air, convinced there would be a further attack, he was infectiously optimistic, recounting Lexi’s babywords verbatim to friends, reading her books, telling those around him how lucky he was.
The sense of event around the release of Heathen in June 2002 was palpable – the presence of Tony Visconti seemed to fire up fans far more than an internet marketing campaign. The excitement was stoked up by a show at New York’s Roseland Ballroom, and then his appearance at the culmination of his own Meltdown Season at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The series had been controversial – or rather ‘disappointingly unadventurous’, according to the London Evening Standard – for his involvement as curator was patchy, with his attention diverted by negotiations with new record company Sony. Yet the closing night was a sensation, mostly for the performance of Low, in its entirety, followed by Heathen. Mark Plati had prepared by listening through the original Hansa and Château multitracks: massive, long-obsolete reels of two-inch tape, which had to be baked in an oven to stop them crumbling into dust; he crafted individual mixes which he gave to each band member, as a kind of karaoke version of the album. The show was ‘genuinely overwhelming, people did recognise the magnitude of the event’, says Glenn Max, who had struggled to put the festival together. As the band launched into ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’, the audience took to their feet, and pretty much stayed there. The only problem with the show was that by the close of Low, the audience were drained: ‘It had been so dazzling, you almost needed a two-hour run around the block to recover,’ says Max, but then the band came out again, David changed from his Thin White Duke shirt and waistcoat to a white silk suit for a gripping rendition of Heathen.