All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Before that decision was made, however, Terry’s presence at the recently established communal headquarters of Bowie Enterprises seems to have directly inspired Bowie to write his first real song of brotherhood, ‘All the Madmen’. Here he positively welcomed the possibility that he might end up among ‘the madmen’, being ‘quite content they’re all as sane as me!’ And whenever the subject came up in interviews at this time – usually at his prompting – he painted Terry’s internment at Cane Hill in glowing terms, though nothing could have been further from the truth: ‘The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution. As for my brother, he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much . . . He’d be happy to spend the rest of his life there, mainly because most of the people are on the same wavelength as him.’

  Angie was not so bowled over by the sentiment of a song in which the narrator is ‘on the same wavelength’ as the madmen. By now, the pair had established a routine where ‘he would play me what he’d just written. If I liked it – well, even if I didn’t, even if I judged it too dark or twisted or melodramatic, as I did “All the Madmen” – . . . he’d polish it up.’ This time she couldn’t relate, but ‘All the Madmen’ was set to define the latest and most convincing Bowie persona, while the rest of the songs cut for his next Mercury album would follow its lead into equally dark, twisted terrain.

  Never entirely comfortable with the skeletons he now chose to confront in song, it would take Bowie thirty years to admit he had been feeding off his own fearfulness: ‘I’d been seeing quite a bit of my half-brother during that period, and I think a lot of it, obviously, had been working on me . . . I think his shadow is on quite a lot of the [Man Who Sold the World] material . . . I think I was going through an awful lot of concern about what exactly my [own] mental condition was, and where it may lead.’

  Of the songs contained on TMWSTW, ‘After All’ is perhaps the scariest. Straight out of Village of the Damned, these children really do ‘sing with impertinence, shading impermanent chords’. While for all the megalomania unleashed on side two (the title track, ‘Saviour Machine’, ‘The Supermen’), what is wholly absent from this newlywed’s new album is any song of love. Its one ‘love song’ is the jaundiced ‘She Shook Me Cold’, where a maneater ‘sucked my dormant will’, even as he willingly offers to ‘give my love in vain / to reach that peak again’. Throughout the album, wholesome emotions are put behind frosted glass; a lesson Bowie’s father had taught him. As Bowie told The Times back in 1968, adopting his father’s voice (and values): ‘To get emotional about something, well, that’s only fit for the servants’ quarters – like mental illness.’

  Bowie’s post-‘Fame’ description of TMWSTW songs as ‘all family problems and analogies, put into science fiction form’ was meant as an oblique allusion to the album’s real subject matter at a time when his true biography remained misted by myth. More disingenuous was a simultaneous assertion – at a time when cocaine was wont to do the talking for him – that the 1970 album was a case of ‘holding . . . some kind of flag for hashish. As soon as I stopped using that drug, I realized it dampened my imagination’.

  In truth, his wild imagination rarely ran riot as it did on the nine TMWSTW . . . songs. He had finally delivered the goods – even if he had to be given a strong nudge in the right direction by right-hand men guitarist Mick Ronson and producer Tony Visconti. (Visconti later complained: ‘David was so frustrating to work with at the time. I [just] couldn’t handle his poor attitude and complete disregard for his music.’) In fact, it seems to have been Visconti and Ronson who were largely responsible for the sheer heaviness of the sound on the album; with Bowie allowing them to have their way, as he openly admitted to journo Penny Valentine on its release:

  David Bowie: It was my idea initially to get heavier – just to try it another way – but [Tony Visconti] got it all together. I probably needed a heavier sound behind me, and obviously it’s worked. It’s not that I have a very strong feeling for heavy music – I don’t. In fact I think it’s fairly primitive as a musical form. [1971]

  Two months before he had begun work on TMWSTW, Bowie had described a very different record to the same female pop journalist: ‘The next album will be more solid. As the first side will be completely augmented it means specially writing a whole set of new material. The second side will just be me with a guitar.’ The half-acoustic/half-electric format – which may have originated with manager Ken Pitt, publicist to Dylan when he had used said format to such effect on his apocalyptic 1966 tour – was adopted by Bowie in concert throughout 1970–71. But when it came time to make the album, it was primarily Ronson who imposed the sound on Bowie’s songs; and as Visconti says, ‘Mick’s idols were Cream. [So] he coached Woody [Woodmansey] to play like Ginger Baker and me to play like Jack Bruce.’

  For the first time, the intensity of the music matched Bowie’s edgy new lyrics, the doom-laden message being further reinforced by the (original) album sleeve. Both Bowies had happily approved a cover they had commissioned from their Arts Lab friend Mike Weller, which placed a rugged rifle-toting cowboy in the foreground and Cane Hill in the background. Weller would later make the extraordinary claim that it was his ‘idea to design a cover that depicted Cane Hill, [the] main impetus [having come] from visiting a friend who was a patient there’. That original TMWSTW cover, though, is such an exact visual representation of ‘All the Madmen’ – with a hint of ‘Running Gun Blues’ – it would be somewhat incredible to discover it was not Bowie’s conception. Perhaps Weller’s assertion was his way of getting back at Bowie after the singer replaced Weller’s sleeve – with the infamous ‘dress cover’ – for the UK edition.

  By the time Weller delivered his evocative sleeve at the end of 1970, the singer-songwriter was already starting to think he may have put too much autobiography into his latest creation, and began to back-pedal. The change of sleeve was probably one manifestation of this concern, though it came too late for his American label, who were preparing to ‘rush-release’ the album to coincide with Bowie’s first US visit in February 197118. Yet once he was thousands of miles away from Beckenham, he seemed happy addressing the album’s more autobiographical elements. When Creem’s Patrick Salvo noted that ‘growing up before one’s time can . . . lead to any amount of various functional disorders, [and] this is found quite plainly in some of your writings’, the still largely unknown Bowie did not summon his disingenuous self. He simply agreed: ‘You’re right. It happened to my brother . . . I mean, there’s a schizoid streak within my family, so I dare say that I’m affected by that.’

  Back home, though, the English album, issued the following April, was hastily housed in the ill-conceived ‘dress cover’, perhaps another attempt to sabotage the album’s prospects; or just another ill-conceived attempt to construct an image ironic enough for a young rock audience and outrageous enough to worry their mamas and papas. After all (by jingo), he had called the band he formed back in the winter of 1970 The Hype, a name he claimed at the time he ‘deliberately chose . . . because now no one can say they’re being conned’. Although the glammed-up ensemble looked more like Village People than The Spiders From Mars, Bowie would later claim a direct lineage. At the July 1972 Dorchester press conference his manager organized to introduce Ziggy he told the largely American press: ‘We died a death. [But] I knew it was right . . . and I knew it was what people would want eventually.’ Tony Visconti, The Hype’s legendary stardust cowboy bassist, would go on to claim that The Hype’s Roundhouse debut was ‘the very first night of glam rock . . . [There was] Marc Bolan visibl[y] resting his head on his arms on the edge of the stage, taking it all in.’

  If the BBC broadcast of The Hype’s debut concert suggests they were still a long way from the finished article, it confirmed that the songs had started coming thick, fast and heavy. Almost the whole of TMWSTW would be written from scratch in the two months following The Hype’s live debut, including at least a couple of songs – ‘Black
Country Rock’ and ‘The Width of a Circle’ – for which the final lyrics were only produced when there was a backing track already recorded and a vocal track urgently required. The former track, according to Visconti’s lively autobiography, ‘was actually its working title, which simply described the styles of music we’d used. [But] David [then] cleverly incorporated those words into the song.’ As for the Bolanesque wail, mid-song, ‘David spontaneously did a Bolan vocal impression because he ran out of lyrics.’ Scrabbling around for song ideas, he even nicked the refrain for ‘Saviour Machine’ from 1968’s unreleased ‘Ching-a-Ling’.

  Ironically, the frenetic way the album was pulled together gave it a real unity of sound and vision. Yet at the time, TMWSTW made very few waves. In the UK, the hook-free non-album single ‘Holy Holy’ didn’t help, proving that when Bowie said, ‘I don’t want to be one of those singers whose career depends on hit singles’, he wasn’t joking. In the US, not only was the album released a couple of months earlier, it was supported by the altogether more appropriate lead-single, ‘All the Madmen’, the perfect introduction to the darkened grotto of The Man Who Sold the World. Despite Bowie’s refusal to champion what he (plus Ronson and Visconti) had wrought, taken as a whole TMWSTW was a real statement of intent. And it was one that was recognized, by NME’s Nick Kent at least, as a musical manifesto for the 1970s:

  [The album is] a great epic work of tortured third-generation rock & roll poetry. Whether it was the ‘Width of a Circle’, an eight-minute odyssey where Dante and Genet meet and do battle in Bowie’s own inferno of crazed puns, homosexual encounters and black magic symbolism; or ‘All the Madmen’, where ‘the thin men walk the streets, while the saints [sic] lay underground’; or the menace of ‘Running Gun Blues’ and the neurotic and blaringly sexual ‘She Shook Me Cold’. Bowie delivers them all in a style that can only be paralleled with such works as ‘Desolation Row’ and Astral Weeks, while his band, led by Mick Ronson, played like the Cream on a forced diet of Valium.

  Even Kent’s verdict, though, was not delivered until October 1972, when the world was just about catching up. By then, wife Angie and new business manager Tony Defries had begun to drill into Bowie that mystery was a necessary prerequisite for superstardom. As of March 1971 – with the UK finally succumbing to T-Rextasy with their first number one, ‘Hot Love’ – he also had the example of his close friend Marc Bolan to draw on. On March 10, Bowie entered Radio Luxembourg’s London studio to cut some demos of songs he had been working on during his trip to the States. The first demo, ‘Moonage Daydream’, was a sci-fi analogy-in-song destined to form a key part of Ziggy’s repertoire. Another demo, initially called ‘Song for Marc’, would be introduced to the rock world the following year as ‘Lady Stardust’. Stardom beckoned for Bowie, as a theme if not an actuality. The megalomania of the man who sold the world was about to give way to the kind that drew on the unquestioning adulation of a rock audience.

  4. 1971–72: Half In Love With Easeful Death

  I had no hope of producing anything like the expansive music I had envisioned and attempted to describe in my fiction, but certain people around me believed that was my target. Whispers of ‘madness’ fluttered backstage like moths eating at the very fabric of my project.

  – Pete Townshend, 1999 (describing the 1971 Lifehouse project)

  I got things inside my head / that even I can’t face.

  – David Bowie, 1969

  That whole LP [Muswell Hillbillies] was a story about a person who was thrown into an environment and had to come to terms with it, and went through depressions, nervous breakdowns. That was what it was all about.

  – Ray Davies, 1971

  By 1971, the biggest touring acts in the world, all English, were at the very zenith of their ziggurat. The Who and The Stones, the great survivors, were doing very special things at Leeds University, and anywhere else that would have them. Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple were making English hard rock so heavy it would have made Cream curdle. And Pink Floyd seemed intent on taking their form of cerebral space-rock to the whole planet, music hall by music hall.

  Each had their own way of dealing with the poppier aspects of psychosis in song. If The Stones turned the Boston Strangler into some lascivious back-door man doing the midnight ramble, and Deep Purple stretched their hit-single paean to a ‘Strange Kind of Woman’ to almost album-side length by year’s end19, the Floyd started dabbling with demons a lot closer to home than some notorious US serial killer or a slightly crazed groupie. Waters, who was now exercising total control of the band’s lyrical direction, was particularly keen to turn the band away from space-rock. ‘If’, one of the better tracks on Atom Heart Mother, had been the first gear shift, as Waters acknowledged in hindsight: ‘“If” is about not presenting the caring side of oneself . . . There’s lines in there like . . . “If I go insane, please don’t put your wire in my brain” . . . [which has] some of what I [then] did on Dark Side of the Moon.’

  The rest of the band also recognized it was time to stop ‘blundering in the dark’. As Nick Mason told the Live at Pompeii director the following year: ‘We [were] in danger of becoming a relic of the past. For some people, we [had come to] represent their childhood, 1967, underground London, the free concert in Hyde Park.’ The breakthrough, as far as guitarist Gilmour was concerned, was the twenty-five-minute live epic debuted at another large London open-air show, Crystal Palace Bowl, in May 1971. Half-jokingly referred to in this period as ‘The Return of the Son of Nothing’, in the fullness of time it would become ‘Echoes’. The transition in subject matter from outer- to inner-space, from Kubrick to Coleridge, was signalled by the opening line’s change from ‘Planets meeting face to face’ in early live performances to ‘Overhead the albatross’ by the time it was fixed to disc. The Floyd was increasingly confident about developing such songs live prior to taking them into the studio; or even between bouts of further shaping in the studio. And the process immeasurably improved the final cut. As EMI engineer John Leckie notes: ‘They’d got [“Echoes”] into shape because they’d been playing it live.’

  Unfortunately such relentless touring brought its own problems – and the scale of US tours invariably brought the biggest headaches. Boredom, frustration and loneliness fed those inner voices and spawned ever greater ennui in the air-conditioned comfort of room-service, with the latest grateful orifice there to wile away the hours till the next gig, the next buzz. (The epoch is captured in all its jaded glory in The Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour documentary, Cocksucker Blues, which was hastily scrapped and an anodyne alternative, Ladies and Gentlemen, substituted. It has still never been officially released.)

  If the Floyd avoided many of the more obvious temptations, the one band they seemed to enjoy crossing paths with on the road was the wholly hedonistic Who. Waters was particularly impressed by Keith Moon’s artistic way of demolishing hotel rooms, calling him, ‘a very sophisticated smasher’, while Nick Mason considered the self-proclaimed Moon the Loon ‘very good company . . . [when] a lot of [rock] people are just drunken maniacs’. The 1971 Moon was still playing court jester to the (other) stars. And both bands found themselves traversing the States in November 1971 with sets intended to advance on all previous incarnations. The Floyd had finally cast aside all Barrettian detritus, while The Who had reduced their own albatross, Tommy, to a five-song medley; debuting the bulk of Who’s Next to the throbbing throngs instead.

  For The Who, touring Tommy around the arenas of America had been a financial necessity. They had never really dug themselves out of the various holes created first by busting up their equipment nightly then their hugely expensive decision to extract themselves from the talons of producer Shel Talmy, and finally by letting manager Kit Lambert and resident looney Keith Moon take any personal sense of inadequacy out on the nearest inanimate (or sex) object, until they ran out of objects or energy. For Townshend, though, the success of Tommy was stopping him and the band from moving on, and he was starting to feel a little a
ntsy:

  Pete Townshend: Tommy and America – the great consumer nation – took us over and said, ‘There are fifty million kids that wanna see you perform; what are you gonna do about it – are you gonna stay in Twickenham and work on your next album, or get your arse over there?’ So you get your arse over there and you get involved in the standing ovation and the interviews, the nineteen-page Rolling Stone articles, the presentations of the Gold Albums, you know . . . and that takes two years to get out of the way, and then you realize that it’s gonna take another two years to work on the [next] thing. [1971]

  Descriptions such as ‘the most important milestone in pop since Beatlemania’ – Rolling Stone’s verdict on Tommy – were dogging its creator’s footsteps and doing his head in. In fact, Townshend had already started to see all the flaws in his former creation and wanted to change it, even as an American mass-audience caught on: ‘Tommy was very clumsily put together . . . [but] the American audience thought that it was completely watertight, and that . . . everything hung together.’ His immediate ambition was to transcend Tommy’s triter elements with what came next, while insisting that ‘[Tommy] was highly overrated . . . it was rated where it shouldn’t have been . . . [in that] it attempted to tell a story in rock music.’

  The relentless slog around America was not doing wonders for Townshend’s writing muse, either. The Oo’s first single since smash-hit ‘Pinball Wizard’, and their first post-Tommy statement, came with an appropriate title, ‘The Seeker’. It just didn’t come out in the studio quite how Townshend had envisaged it, though it ‘sounded great in the mosquito-ridden swamp I made it up in – Florida at three in the morning, drunk out of my brain . . . But that’s always where the trouble starts, in the swamp. The alligator turned into an elephant and finally stampeded itself to death on stages around England.’