by Paul Trynka
Over that period Temple had accompanied the singer to Brixton Carnival, watching his minders clearing a path ahead of him, witnessing the problems of ‘that bubble life’. Watching David work over three separate phases of his career, the director saw the biggest problem David had to contend with was the ‘gruelling nature of reinvention. The huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll, psychically – and that’s beyond the normal clichés of fame. The pressures of stardom do take their toll – even on David, who may not appear as overwhelmed by them as others.’
In their conversations over 1987 and 1989, Bowie had shared with Temple a desire to ‘escape: to parachute out, to find a strategy that would give a glorious exit’. Over those years, of course, Bowie’s career was sliding into a creative downward spiral. The reception of Never Let Me Down, and the debacle of Glass Spider, had delayed Bowie’s fantasy of going out with ‘a real, stunning escape mechanism – a kind of Houdini escape from pop stardom.’
For well over a decade, at least part of David Bowie had still been seeking to make that glorious exit, that one grandiose explosion behind which he could disappear. Ultimately, mortality provided its own less glamorous escape mechanism. And as one of David’s friends points out, ‘If you were in hospital after a heart scare, would you be wishing you’d spent more time flogging yourself on tour? Or would you be wishing you could spend more time with your five-year-old?’
In the meantime, those around David moved on. Today, Coco is back from California and works with David fairly closely once more. Having devoted decades of her life to caring for him, she has duties that are now less stressful. She now has time to walk around Manhattan, with a dog that keeps her company.
Iggy Pop reunited with his Stooges, to be fêted at festivals around the world, but by the late nineties David had lost touch with the man who more than anyone had benefited from his help. Asked about their friendship by writer Robert Phoenix, David acknowledged, ‘I probably shouldn’t talk about it,’ while admitting, ‘We have drifted away from each other.’ The problem was a simple clash of egos: ‘Jimmy,’ he said, had come to resent the fact that ‘he couldn’t do a fucking article without my name being mentioned’. Over recent years, Iggy repaired his relationships with Stooges guitarists Ron Asheton and James Williamson, with whom he had fallen out spectacularly. Yet there is still a certain reserve when he discusses David, a man with whom he was indisputably closer. According to one close mutual friend of the two, ‘I think in any close friendship you can use the word “love” – and in many friendships you’ll see that one person loves the other more than the other loves him or her. I believe David loved Jim more than Jim loved David. And, in the end, I think Jim found he could manage without him.’ Three months younger than David, Iggy continues to tour with the reformed Stooges. He looks frail in person, with a noticeable limp, but still hits the stage with the joyous energy of a spring lamb.
The career of Tony Defries, the man who more than anyone benefited from Bowie’s success, was as eventful as that of his one-time employee. After falling out with his next management charge, John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp, Defries steered the troubled early career of Sandy Dillon, was involved in inconclusive negotiations to manage Madonna, invested in a steel plant, and recently claimed to have patented a new means of converting solar energy into electricity. In August 2007, he announced the imminent publication of an autobiography, but six months later the book was abandoned as news leaked that Defries had lost $22 million in a Cayman Islands tax haven, set up by the Swiss Bank Julius Baer. That spring, the IRS started tracing Defries’ contacts, investigating whether he’d paid tax on the huge sum; over the same period, lawyers working for Griffin Music, to whom he’d sold rights for several Bowie rarities and live albums in the early nineties, were in pursuit, as rumours spread that the Svengali had abandoned his estate in Virginia and disappeared to Europe. In 2009, he appeared to have resolved his legal disputes and returned to the USA; but the $22 million, a huge proportion of the money David Bowie had paid to reclaim the most fertile period of his creativity, had apparently disappeared for ever.
More repercussions of the troubled relationship between Bowie and MainMan rumbled on: in 2009, five years after Bowie Bonds were downgraded by credit rating agency Moody’s to one notch above junk grade, headlines around the world read, ‘Is Bowie to blame for the credit crunch?’ BBC journalist Evan Davis claimed the global financial meltdown was caused by bankers who took their cues from David Bowie; seeing him securitise his future income, they followed his lead with their mortgage business, with disastrous results. (Subsequently, other financial experts surfaced to ridicule the charge.) Bowie’s own financial fortunes are thought to have declined gently in the recession; in 1997, Business Age magazine estimated his wealth at $917 million, although this is regarded by most financial experts as an exaggeration; a recent survey by the Sunday Times put his wealth at £100 million. In 2012, his back catalogue will be available for licence once more, outside EMI, and many fans hope to see more of what is thought to be the most intriguing set of unreleased recordings of audio and video outtakes of any major recording artist.
Yet there was one person, in the early years of the twenty-first century, whose career was taking shape even as David Bowie let his own lie fallow. In November 2004, Duncan Jones painstakingly recreated the England of 1979 – a world he had known only briefly – for a commercial celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of McCain’s Oven Chips. His first press interview didn’t even mention his father’s identity; by the time he’d been recruited by ad guru Trevor Beattie and attracted the gimlet-eyed glare of the Daily Mail for the ‘lesbian kiss outrage’ of his 2006 TV commercial for fashion brand French Connection, a few reports mentioned his parentage. Then in 2009, Duncan Jones elegantly stepped out into the world’s media to publicise his thoughtful, lovingly crafted debut movie, Moon.
Duncan’s interviews provided a revealing insight into the life of David Bowie, father: there were stories of how they’d worked on stop-frame animation together, and of David bringing home his bootleg videos of Star Wars. There was also evidence of how David had kept a tasteful distance to avoid overshadowing his son. (Bill Zysblat, David’s business manager, was credited as executive producer on the film, but there was no mention of Mr Jones senior.) It is probably unfair to note the presence of the words ‘I think’ in Duncan’s description of his upbringing: ‘I think we always loved each other, but he was travelling and working a lot, and I was in his custody, so it was … tricky, because obviously there were people who would look after me, but a lot of the time he might not be around. So it was an unusual relationship.’
David had often voiced his guilt over his son’s unsettled childhood; but there was some vindication of the way he’d nudged his son towards the cinema in the overwhelming positive reaction to Moon, which was made for the unthinkably tiny budget of $5m, grossed $6m within the first nine weeks of release, and picked up two international awards before finally clinching Duncan a BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer in February 2010. Jones politely dismissed suggestions that his modest science-fiction gem had been influenced by his dad’s ‘Space Oddity’ (or indeed Kubrick’s 2001), citing instead later influences such as Silent Running and Bladerunner. But there was plenty of resonance with his father’s work. The isolation and loneliness of the sole protagonist, Sam Bell, evokes the lonely childhood of Duncan Jones and the isolation of his father. More profoundly, Bell takes solace in sculpting a church out of balsa: an image that echoed Merrick’s cardboard church, or the ‘cathedral made of matchsticks’ which David had eulogised in one of his Heathen interviews as a symbol of the British amateur tradition – that compulsion to perfect a job, whether or not anyone will see it. Lastly, Bell is imprisoned in a cycle of rebirth, wearing out each new manifestation of himself until finally he manages to achieve, as Bowie never did, his ‘Houdini escape’.
David’s appearance with Duncan at the Sundance Film Festival on 23 Jan
uary, 2009, was a surprise event, fleeting, but perfectly timed; remaining in front of the camera long enough to ensure a flurry of press for the movie, David, dressed in grey, let his son do the talking. At a Q&A after the screening, Duncan thanked his father for giving him ‘the time to work out what I wanted to do – because it’s taken me a while’.
Together with an appearance alongside Iman for Moon’s debut at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival in April, this would be Bowie’s only media outing of the year; by 2010, Iman would generally appear on red carpets solo, until David turned up in a tux and black scarf for his wife’s acceptance of her ‘Fashion Icon’ award. And every few months there would be a new reissue: the DVD based on his VH1 Storytellers appearance, ten years after it was recorded; a fortieth-anniversary edition of the Space Oddity album, complete with an iPhone app, allowing fans to mix their own version of David’s debut hit; and later, the announcement of an illustrated book of Bowie artefacts.
For the fans, Bowie’s continuing absence seemed an almost unforgivable desertion. Day by day, fewer of them pay the $60-a-year subscription fee to BowieNet, while the bowieart website closed down entirely in 2008. The faithful huddle together on the net, their numbers diminishing. Despite the continuing reissues of his classic works, there would be a growing consensus among fans and business figures that this man is not maintaining his work; that it’s like a grand estate with weeds sprouting in the garden and paint flaking from the window frames. What could he possibly be doing that was more important than attending to them?
‘It is the wrong way round,’ says George Underwood, as he pours coffee into a china mug decorated with one of his serene, slightly sinister paintings and places a couple of lemon curd biscuits on a plate. Yesterday George celebrated his sixty-first birthday with the aid of a giant hamper of Fortnum & Mason delicacies sent by his schoolfriend and ex-bandmate. Today, we sip coffee and sample some of the hamper’s goodies, as George describes his 1958 trip to the Isle of Wight with a ukulele and a washboard bass in the back of the van, of cocky letters sent to millionaires, and of the times his best mate shot him looks ‘like daggers’ because he’d scored his own record deal with Mickie Most, who groomed him for success, advising him on the music business and driving him around the West End in his Roller.
For many fellow pupils from Bromley, or kids who’d hang around The King Bees, George – good-looking, outgoing – was the boy most likely to. Yet his career in music was impressive but short. After one single with Mickie Most something happened: ‘I will never know what caused it, but the men in white coats came to take me away.’ Confined to hospital for three months, he would never know if someone had slipped a tab of acid in his drink, or some other random stimulus had triggered his breakdown. A promising career was over. It was, he says, ‘a blessing in disguise. Because I don’t think I’d be sitting here talking to you. I would have said yes to everything – and ended up dead somewhere.’
David, his friend once more, would eventually secure the success he craved. George, over the same period, established himself as an artist and illustrator, crafting dozens of record and book covers, for David, Marc Bolan and countless others. Today, sitting in his elegant, airy north London house, his artworks studded throughout like jewels, there is still a kind of wonder for what his friend achieved. Not for the money, or the fame, but simply, ‘Wasn’t he brave? To do what he did?’
Yet with the admiration, there’s a sense of what David missed out on: the family life, all the little tokens of which surround us, the photos, the well-worn objects that signal a well-worn life. For a moment, I feel pity for Underwood’s friend. And then George mentions how David has lived his life ‘the wrong way round’. How the twenty-year-old who loved kids is finally getting the chance to spend time with his own, as a sixty-year-old. A few weeks later, I find other old friends whom David has started calling again, to tell them of his nine-year-old daughter, as if what she’s up to is more interesting than his current business. Often he’ll open a phone call by putting Lexi on the phone for a chat. As if there just might be a legacy more important than the hundreds of songs known to remain in the Bowie vault.
In the meantime, the music is not static. Every new generation of musicians, whether aimed at the stadium or the college circuit, takes some part of Bowie’s legacy as a template. As Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch, a leader of the generation of musicians that followed him in the 1970s, puts it, ‘He changed the face of music. And the world. Everybody’s got mad hair or mad clothes now – when he kicked off in 1973 it was rare. I was twelve when “Starman” came out, and it connected with me in a way that no other record ever had. I was still impressionable and naive – and at that moment I knew exactly what I wanted to do.’
Generations since have experienced similar epiphanies. Bowie has been derided for billing himself as a cult artist, a seemingly ludicrous claim for someone who has scored so many Top 10 singles, yet there is a truth in this, for his music continues to speak to outsiders, those who are either on the edge, or wish to go there. For Black Francis of the Pixies, whose music would define the nineties so-called alternative rock scene, it was the Bowie of Low, “Heroes” and The Idiot that called to him: ‘It was so brave’. That sentiment occurs again and again: ‘He showed no fear,’ says Nicolas Godin of Air, who discovered the same trio of albums while training as an architect in Versailles. The French band’s ‘humble’ career was inspired by the example of how Bowie mixed electronics and rock, but Godin stresses that Bowie’s influence goes far beyond this: ‘He’s the total artist – the look, the voice, the talent to compose, the stage presence. The beauty. Nobody is like that any more. Everybody is reachable; he was unreachable.’
So many other artists have picked up on aspects of Bowie’s work, from Madonna to Lady Gaga, Radiohead to Momus – the enigmatic Scots musician who laments that ‘I was lucky, as a teenager, to have someone like that to latch on to. Bowie wasn’t just a rock star in the seventies – he was an exemplary creative animal. He took influences from so many sources: from Kabuki, from Jean Genet and William Burroughs, from the New York Downtown art scene, from Die Brücke, and so on. Because of his influence, musicians could take their cue from other artforms. I saw an interview with him where he said he thought he might have been a good teacher if he hadn’t been a rock star, because he loves introducing people to cultural things and seeing their excitement. And I thought, Well, you’ve been both!’
Philip Glass, a composer, friend and interpreter of Bowie, also laments what now seems like an all-too-brief period when popular music and experimentation co-existed. ‘What Bowie and Eno were trying to do was to redefine certain parameters in pop music. To work less in terms of formula and to work in a more experimental fashion. The idea was that pop music had an artform to it; it wasn’t always commercial music, it didn’t always have to be entertainment music, those people could work in another mode. It was this funny world of art rock, which has since disappeared. But it was a beautiful moment for a while.’
John Lennon, the man who acted almost as an elder brother to David Bowie, occasionally complained how the world always wanted more from his band. The Beatles made eleven albums together, he’d tell people: ‘What more could you want?’ As David Bowie wanders around New York, watching his daughter grow up, he’s entitled to share Lennon’s sentiment. Yet even those who worked with David in the past can’t help sharing the fans’ longing – that once again, this man will free the music that will otherwise stay locked within. ‘I’m waiting,’ says Mike Garson, his longest-serving accompanist. ‘The magic is not in the air right now. We’re in a little bit of a slump so maybe in a couple of years he’ll start hearing the next thing.
Still, there remains the uncertainty of that elusive alchemy. Can the man who transformed himself perform that magic again?
‘If he’s not feeling it, who knows?’ says Garson. ‘Sometimes an artist knows when to cool it. Why do something if you’re not feeling it or hearing it? We’ll see what’
s meant to be.’
DISCOGRAPHY
David Bowie
Recorded: November 1966 – February 1967; Decca Studios, West Hampstead, London.
Released: Deram, 1 June, 1967.
Chart Peak: – (UK); – (US).
Key Personnel: Derek ‘Dek’ Fearnley (bs, arrangements); John Eager (dms); Derek Boyes (kbds, early songs only); plus session musicians unknown.
Producer: Mike Vernon.
Nineteen-year-old David Bowie had bowled over Decca executives, who were convinced of his genius. This first studio album provides convincing evidence of the fact – in everything but the songs. The sheer breadth and ambition of the material – from the kooky sci-fi epic ‘We Are Hungry Men’, to the earnest, Lionel Bart-ish ‘When I Live My Dream’; the playfully sinister ‘Uncle Arthur’ to the disturbingly psychotic ‘Please Mr. Gravedigger’ (which references the Myra Hindley murders) – is staggering, even today. His confidence in the studio was, in retrospect, astounding, but the young Bowie lacked the skills to realise his lofty ambitions and it’s only the more conventional material, such as ‘When I Live My Dream’ or the single ‘The Laughing Gnome’, which succeeds on its own terms. Yet although later derided, this quirky album established Bowie’s reputation amid a small crowd of London faces. More crucially still, it gave him his first experience of using the studio like a giant sketch pad, a technique which would become fundamental to his career.
David Bowie
aka Space Oddity (UK 1972 re-release); Man of Words/Man of Music (US).
Recorded: June – September 1969; Trident Studios, London.
Released: Philips/Mercury, November 1969.
Chart Peak: 17 (UK); – (US.
Key Personnel: Mick Wayne, Tim Renwick (gtr); John ‘Honk’ Lodge (bs); John Cambridge (dms); Keith Christmas (acoustic gtr).