by Paul Trynka
When the applause died down, Bono and Brian Eno were among those queueing for admission to the tiny dressing room; this event alone was great theatre – David looking spent but cool as a cucumber, dressed in a kimono, ‘with little Japanese slippers on his tiny Japanese feet’, remembers Max Glenn. When David introduced Brian Eno to Mark Plati, he told him, ‘This is the man responsible for all of this.’ Thinking Bowie meant he was the architect of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Plati pointed at the ceiling and murmured, ‘Nice job!’
For both the album and the tour that promoted it, there was a consensus in the coverage: that this was an artist who, if not at the peak of his own giddy career, was still producing work that towered over most of his younger rivals. And with the fevered activity, he said, ‘I’m very confident and trusting in my abilities right now.’ The old sense of having to rush that had driven him through the 1970s was renewed. Back then, the impetus came from youthful ambition; now it came from what seemed an excessive sense of his own mortality: ‘I’ve got to think of myself as the luckiest guy,’ he said that summer, ‘Robert Johnson only had one album’s worth of work as his legacy.’ After smoking obsessively, trying brand after brand for forty years, he’d managed to cut down to a minimum now he was a father again.
The Heathen tour concluded in late October 2002, marked by shows in each of New York’s five boroughs, but David was thinking of new songs even as he settled back into his daily routine of walks and reading sessions with Lexi, visits to Iman at the 7th Avenue office of her cosmetics company, or his three-times-a-week boxing sessions at a nearby gym.
After a couple of days pre-production in November, he and Visconti were ready to start work again in January. This time they recorded in New York, at Looking Glass, but in a smaller studio, which gave a more constrained, urban feel ‘to capture the angst of NYC’, says Visconti. He and David worked closely together, making decisions quickly; there was a matter-of-factness about the recording, much of it using David’s touring band. Mike Garson, like Chuck Hammer and Dominic Muldowney before him, was struck by how intuitive their musical relationship was: ‘I worked with perfect love with Tony Visconti. He’s an incredible guy.’
Throughout his life, David had developed his unrivalled genius for getting the best out of musicians; in just two songs, ‘The Loneliest Guy’ and ‘Bring Me the Disco King’, he seemed to reach into Garson to inspire something new. The latter track, with Garson’s minimal, milky chords underpinned by a drum loop saved from Heathen, was as fine as anything they’d recorded together in the last thirty years. ‘You promised me the ending would be clear,’ David sang, in a voice rendered cloudy by four decades of Gitanes and Marlboros; after twenty-eight albums, he was still constructing songs that were fiercely understated, yet would yield up new secrets with repeated listens.
From The Spiders onwards, one of the most frequently voiced accusations about David’s work was that he exploited his musicians and influences – that he was really a curator, not a creator. But as Garson attests, he had a practised, effective and indeed almost mystical ability to inspire them to create something entirely new: ‘Somehow his beingness and his essence pulls out the best,’ says the pianist. ‘He might give you little guidances but never says do this or do that. Just by his space I always tend to play my best stuff, to contribute every aspect of my playing. I don’t think I would have come up with those solos had he not been there.’
Garson, in his own way, summarises all the issues of how David conjured up music from his musicians. In his early days, the word ‘vampiric’ was used more than once to describe how he benefited from other musicians’ creativity. Yet, in reality, he rarely took from them – he inspired them, as Garson points out, to summon up ideas that would never have existed without him. In these years, David Bowie was always modest about the achievements to which he laid claim; but he was demonstrably correct when he told Livewire.com: ‘To not be modest about it, you’ll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I’ve worked with have done their best work by far with me. I can shine a light on their own strengths. Get them to a place they would never have gotten to on their own.’ This was a bold claim, but as Garson and others attest, it was true. He didn’t take. He gave.
Tony Visconti thought that David looked tired when he next saw him. Reality was released, to a warm response, on 15 September, 2003, and by October David had embarked on his biggest tour of the last five years. In retrospect, the portents had been stacking up for months, but at the time, the tour was thrilling: ‘We didn’t sit on our laurels – at one point we had sixty or seventy songs in our repertoire,’ says Garson. ‘He would call things out from nowhere sometimes and we would just play them in front of 3,000 people. It was pretty brave.’ Yet on 12 November, the Toulouse show was cancelled as David contracted laryngitis; two days later, they resumed, only for the first leg of the US tour to be delayed by a week when he came down with influenza. Come January he was back on the road again, but tragedy struck on 6 May, 2004, in Miami, with the night’s performance cancelled after a lighting engineer fell to his death. Then on 18 June, his outdoor show in Oslo was interrupted when a female fan throw a lollipop that lodged momentarily in the socket of his left eye. For a few moments his composure deserted him as he demanded to know who had thrown the object – then, relaxing, he warned them, ‘I’ve only got one good eye, you know,’ before telling them he planned to retaliate by making the concert extra long. Five nights later, David cut short his set after fifteen songs in Prague, complaining of what felt like a trapped nerve in his shoulder. He played one more show, at the Hurricane Festival in Scheessel, Germany, on Saturday 25 June, before collapsing backstage in agony.
For the next nine days, BowieNet would trail the message that the tour had been cancelled ‘due to continuing pain and discomfort from a trapped/pinched nerve’. Only when David was back in New York, on 8 July, did his US publicist announce that he had undergone emergency angioplasty surgery for a blocked artery. Two days later, press reports quoted a tour insider who asserted that David had suffered a heart attack backstage, and had undergone surgery the night of his collapse: ‘The heart surgery wasn’t routine. It was a lot more serious than anyone is letting on.’ David’s friends would later be told that the procedure involved stents – spring-like mesh tubes fitted inside an artery to keep it open – a less invasive alternative to heart bypass surgery, which happened to be a speciality of the Klinik St Georg in Hamburg, where he was rushed after the Scheessel show.
On 28 July, David was photographed walking around the streets of New York City’s Chinatown. Wearing a stetson and a green T-shirt, he shook hand with well-wishers, then stepped into a health food shop to stock up on tea and a variety of ancient Chinese remedies. One year later, Iman told friends that David was still busy with writing and recording: ‘We’re not retiring people,’ she said.
22
The Houdini Mechanism
The thing I remember was a sense of wanting to escape: to parachute out, to find a strategy that would give a glorious exit. That was what he was looking for. A stunning escape mechanism – a Houdini escape from pop stardom.
Julien Temple
Wasn’t he brave? To do what he did?
George Underwood
Aliens are immortal; that was what fans continued to believe in the months that followed David’s heart attack, punctuated by tantalising glimpses of the man in the audience for shows by Gail Ann Dorsey, Arcade Fire and the occasional red-carpet event. It was over a year later – 8 September, 2005 – before David stepped once more into the limelight, an event fraught with nerves, emotion and warmth.
The rehearsal for the Condé Nast Fashion Rocks show, organised in aid of the Hurricane Katrina victims, was nerve-racking. Bowie had not met up with Mike Garson, his sole accompanist, until their rehearsal the afternoon of the performance. When they ran through the song, various performers and crew were busy around Radio City Music Hall. Then, as Garson rippled into the opening chor
ds at the rehearsal, he realised, ‘Everybody who was performing that night was listening – you could hear a pin drop’. ‘Life on Mars?’, the song that had been gifted to the twenty-three-year-old Bowie on the bus to Lewisham, sounded radically different from any previous version.
Garson had first played the song with David on his New York debut thirty-two years before, but at the Fashion Rocks performance that evening he was more nervous than he could ever remember, his feet and knees shaking as he sat down at the grand piano and Alicia Keys announced, ‘My good friend, David Bowie.’ The pitch of the song had been shifted down all the way from F to B; the new key was tricky, unfamiliar, ‘and if I screwed up, it would almost inevitably make him screw up. There was no one else to cover up. No safety net.’
David was even more tentative; he was out of practice, almost a little scared: ‘You have a heart problem, you’ve got to be wondering to yourself, “Am I gonna drop dead on-stage?”’ says Garson. ‘Anything could go through the mind – you’ve had a rough period, you don’t know if that’s gonna happen again.’ Yet for Garson, as Bowie settled slowly into the song in front of an enthralled audience, there was something magical about the moment: the fact that their rendition was on the edge and vulnerable gave it a new depth. ‘It was poignant and nostalgic. It was magical – one of the deepest things we’ve done, with factors that go beyond the laws of music; rhythm, harmony, melody and intonation and all that. It was a deeper thing. Almost more of a spiritual experience.’
The sight of David walking up to the mike-stand, nervously clutching it almost as if for comfort, was affecting and – as the camera panned to show him wearing high-water pants, showing bare ankles, with a bandaged wrist and black eye – faintly ludicrous. With the pitch at which David sang lowered by half an octave, there was a sense of the changing of the seasons, from spring to fall. The song had originally been delivered by a young buck, a snotty challenge to Sinatra. Tonight, even in the lower key, that glorious octave leap up to ‘Mars’ that had launched a career was no longer effortless and transcendent; it spoke of pain. David Bowie was not facing down the Chairman of the Board; he was following in his footsteps. ‘He came out as a mature singer that night, like Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra: someone with presence. A gentleman in his fifties who was not about to try and do something that a twenty-year-old would. It was phenomenal,’ says Garson.
There were countless resonances in those moments. The high-water pants, the bandage and black eye make-up reflected many ludicrous outfits of the past. Yet its reference to Louisiana’s flooded, battered state also reached back to the aura around New Orleans, where Little Richard had recorded those first songs that electrified the boy from Bromley. In the flicker of doubt so plainly evident as he hit the high note on ‘Mars’ – or what was once a high note – it became obvious this was a great, profound Bowie performance: the first in years that boasted the on-the-edge danger – the omnipresent fear that ‘it could have fallen apart’, as Garson puts it – that characterised his career.
Yet it was also the first David Bowie performance in which the boyish radiance, the charisma that had so entranced Ken Pitt during Bowie’s rendition of a Judy Garland song in 1965, had plainly faded away. That radiance had become a platform on which a mediocre musician had built his acknowledged genius. Now, as he sang the haunting melody that marked his debut as a great songwriter, all most people noticed was the fragility of his voice and the solidity of his frame.
The spectacle of David Bowie, older gentleman, was one that his fans found hard to contemplate. Over subsequent days, and months, as still photos and then videos – the kind of view behind the gilded curtain that would have been unthinkable in the MainMan era – spread around the world wide web – where Bowie fans lived – the reactions ranged from affection and sympathy to horror and ridicule: ‘He’s a mess,’ was one of the kinder opinions. ‘He looks a bit … dead,’states YouTube commenter Lindadox, before adding insult to injury: ‘[and] the hair isn’t quite working for him’.
Over the next year, occasional flurries of activity encouraged some observers to liken this quiet period to the pregnant pause that followed Scary Monsters. There were more guest appearances: ‘(She Can) Do That’, co-written with trance pioneer Brian Transeau for the abysmal Top Gun-wannabe movie Stealth, a guest vocal on Kashmir’s The Cynic, plus backing vocals for TV on the Radio, the Brooklyn band who, throughout 2005 and 2006, would notice his appreciative, expensively suited presence at the side of the stage for their every show in NYC. Then in September, David guested on Courtney Pine’s Radio 2 show, and when the saxophonist asked if he was working on a project, told him, ‘Yeah, I’ve started writing already and … er … it looks pretty weird, so I’m happy.’ A few weeks later he signed up to play Nikolai Tesla, his finest movie role in years, for Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige – which depicted two rival magicians, each obsessed with staging the most glamorous, shocking disappearing act.
Still, the next major outing was not until 2006, in a tribute to Britain’s most celebrated, most reclusive rock casualty, Syd Barrett. David Gilmour was playing London’s Albert Hall on 29 May, and had just sailed through a complete performance of his recent soft-rock solo album, On an Island, when the audience were jarred out of their slumbers with the words, ‘I’d like to announce Mr David Bowie!’ Syd’s famous fan – elegantly dressed, spookily reminiscent of actor John Hurt – paused momentarily at the rapturous applause, and almost shyly was heard to voice the words, ‘I hope I warrant that.’ For the crowd, it was an ‘extraordinary, unexpected, real pinch-yourself moment’, according to audience member Ian Gittins. There were nostalgic flashes of that London voice – ‘almost East End’ – whose whimsy, style and above all Englishness had been inspired by the Pink Floyd singer – who was to die of diabetes just a few weeks later, in July. At the end of the year, Gilmour and Bowie’s version of ‘Arnold Layne’ was released on single and download, and would crack the UK Top 20.
Yet, over the weeks that the news and photos of David’s appearance at the Albert Hall spread, so did quotes from an off-the-cuff exchange at a Vanity Fair party that same month: ‘I’m fed up with the industry,’ he told Jada Yuan. ‘And I’ve been fed up for quite some time … Just don’t participate. I’m taking a year off – no touring, no albums. I go for a walk every morning, and I watch a ton of movies. One day, I watched three Woody Allen movies in a row.’ On 5 June came the news that Bowie would guest in what turned out to be a hilarious edition of comedian Ricky Gervais’s Extras. Gervais’s humour had always traded on embarrassment, the agonising silence that follows an attempted joke or insight; here, Bowie brilliantly parodies his own image as a stoney-faced manipulator, mercilessly mocking the ‘little fat man’ who attempts to bond with him, recruiting the crowd around him for a singalong. ‘The Little Fat Man (with the Pug-Nosed Face)’ would be the most significant new Bowie song of an entire half-decade. Distressingly, fans noted, David now seemed to confine himself to walk-on roles, with the occasional sighting at fashion-related events – there was another tantalising guest appearance at New York City’s Black Ball benefit that November, again backed by Mike Garson, and duetting with Alicia Keys on ‘Changes’.
Even David’s virtual appearances were becoming infrequent. Since 2005, the updates in his BowieNet journal had become more desultory, before, on 5 October, 2006, David Bowie penned the most enthusiastic entry in years: ‘Yesterday I got to be a character on – tan-tara – SpongeBob SquarePants. We, the family, are thrilled. Nothing else need happen this year, well, this week anyway.’ And nothing else did. For in January 2007 came the news that a planned live date, which would close a Bowiecurated Highline festival the following May, had been quietly cancelled. In place of the Bowie show was a live rendition of ‘The Fat Little Man’ with Ricky Gervais and then … nothing.
*
As David Bowie disappeared from the music scene, the assumption that this was the calm before a new burst of activity was natural, given what had been a prodi
gious work rate in the previous forty years. The off-the-cuff remark – ‘just don’t participate’ – surely represented a passing disenchantment. The prospect of a permanent retirement seemed unthinkable – except that retirement was an option for which David had been longing, for at least twenty years.
It was in the lull after Tonight that Bowie had first shared a yearning for an escape with director Julien Temple, who points out: ‘He does always appear very vibed up. But maybe he’s not underneath.’