He stayed in pretty much the same state of mind and body throughout the whole Californian mini-tour that month, and it was here that the cameras of Yentob’s Arena crew caught the ex-Spider, still weaving his web of self-deceit. But if the live clips from the L.A. shows were meant to convince his fans back home he still had something to say, while the fey cockney accent he adopted offstage would hopefully convince them he remained ‘one of us’, then the strategy was flawed from the very start. Broadcast at prime-time on a February evening in 1975, with the UK release of Young Americans just around the corner, the programme was very much an exercise in cinéma vérité – save that Bowie was not the orchestrator this time, he was Yentob’s victim. Charles Shaar Murray, who had acted as Bowie’s trustworthy conduit to the impressionable readers of NME for the past two years or more, was unsparing in his assessment of the former Emperor of Pop, who now had to stand naked:
Bowie’s all nerves, like some strange insect trapped in a jar. His conversation runs around in circles like a rat on a treadmill, he radiates cocaine paranoia and his eyes squirm in their sockets. He says that he’s glad to be rid of Ziggy and to start being himself, but that seems to be proving his undoing. Ziggy was a stronger and more fascinating creature than David Bowie; Ziggy sucked him dry. What Yentob got in his viewfinder were the dregs.
Americans had already been given their own insight into what happens when a star is sucked dry by his own ego, having witnessed Bowie’s first national prime-time interview on The Dick Cavett Show, broadcast on 5 December 1974. The live performance of three songs, including the unmodified ‘Footstompin’’ and an earnest ‘Young Americans’, still seemed to suggest he might have something to say. But the ensuing interview was painful to watch, as Cavett tried every trick in the book to get more than a mumbled platitude out of the man. What the hell had happened to rock’s most articulate self-promoter? The most revealing remark in the whole sorry saga came when Cavett ventured into David’s background, asking about his parents, specifically his mother. Bowie briefly stopped playing with his cane like some autistic child to half-jokingly suggest: ‘She pretends I’m not hers. She doesn’t talk much [to me]. We were never that close.’ In fact, it was him who was doing the disowning, from six thousand miles away, even as he continued playing the ‘mad family’ card to the American media:
David Bowie: My brother Terry’s in an asylum right now. I’d like to believe that the insanity is because our family is all genius, but I’m afraid that’s not true . . . I’m quite fond of the insanity, actually. It’s a nice thing to throw out at parties, don’t you think? Everybody finds empathy in a nutty family. Everybody says, ‘Oh, yes, my family is quite mad.’ Mine really is. No fucking about, boy . . . [But] I haven’t spoken to any of them in years. My Father is dead. I think I talked to my mother a couple of years ago. I don’t understand any of them. [1976]
To escape the family curse, he had turned his back on everyone he once held dear, and flown halfway around the world – only to find that all his psychological baggage had again arrived first. When self-denial didn’t work, he shut off his emotions – and the work suffered. Estranged wife Angie learnt the hard way that his ‘real psychological problem in the years I knew him was his emotional frigidity, the cure in his case being worse than the family disease. The real crazy stuff, the mania, delusions, and paranoia he exhibited during the second half of the decade . . . coincided precisely with his ingestion of enormous amounts of cocaine, alcohol and whatever other drugs he had on hand; his “madness” simply didn’t happen unless he was stoned out of his mind.’
His next creation would be a freeze-dried coke fiend with a streak of megalomania hardwired in. The Thin White Duke was another artistically successful alter ego, but it was a case in point of placing someone ‘there, where things are hollow’. By now, he really thought he had found some unique way to control those inner demons. Interviewed for Playboy by Cameron Crowe as he prepared to take the Thin White Duke around the world – with the shortest of pit-stops in London – he was asked if he thought he was schizophrenic: ‘One side of me probably is, but the other side is right down the middle, solid as a rock . . . My thought forms are fragmented a lot, that much is obvious . . . [But] being famous helps put off the problems of discovering myself. I mean that.’
It took until the fag-end of 1976, and a protracted trip to East Berlin intended to cleanse him and his symbiotic sidekick, Iggy, of the new world and old habits, for the boy from Brixton to realize that there was a reason he was always crashing in the same car. When he did realize he had been living in the land of hollow men, he snuck on back to the city of New York, to which his new friend, Lennon, had already retreated. For the pair of them, this island of insanity off the East Coast of America was quite close enough to the childhood homes they alluded to repeatedly in their early-Seventies songs, but spent the second half of the decade disavowing. Lennon even explained his reasoning on the dangers of returning home: ‘That’s one time when you can’t hide from yourself. The records, the fame – none of it shields you. You remember exactly who you are deep inside.’
Bowie’s old friend, Bolan, had also eventually tired of his own season in the L.A. sun. By the beginning of 1975 he was ready to board the trans-Euro express. Stopping off in France for a detox and a musical rethink, he re-emerged in 1976 a slimmer, leaner Marc. Like Keith Moon, he had found his time in L.A. to have been desperately unproductive, merely fuelling a sense of dislocation bordering on homesickness. For both these party animals, London would prove to be their final resting place – literally. Both would be dead by the end of 1978, the former killed by the worst-placed tree in west London, the latter by an overdose of the same anti-depressant that killed Drake.
If Bowie finally split the L.A. scene because he had started to see pentagrams on floors and demons at the windows, it took one of Ziggy’s surrogate fathers, ex-asylum inmate Peter Green, to class the people around him in the city of angels as in league with Lucifer. It was 1978 before Green made it back to L.A., but when he did, it was to indulge in an ill-fated marriage to one of L.A. witchy women, which ended in a matter of months because, as Mick Fleetwood says: ‘He felt that she had made a covenant with the Devil.’ A bemused Green had already found that his former band had reinvented itself as the quintessential radio-friendly AOR band, coming up with their own FM-freeway phenomenon, Rumours, the previous year. For their new audience, though, the period with Green was essentially an irrelevance and ‘Black Magic Woman’ was a Santana song.
Indeed, by this time much of English rock was an irrelevance Stateside. And the change had come about in 1974–75, while all these English rockers were cavorting in the pools of Hollywood and Burbank. For at the very same time, up in Laurel Canyon, the likes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young were laying down their own response to these difficult times – and in 1974, that meant Court and Spark and On the Beach, two pure-bred pedigree examples of California’s own new wave of singer-songwriters, a little burnt out but beautifully self-absorbed. Meanwhile, in Malibu, the granddaddy of them all, Bobby D., was sleeping on the floor of his empty new mansion with Bay Area girlfriend Ellen Bernstein, and writing the album that best expressed the time when ‘revolution was in the air’, Blood on the Tracks. Fittingly, it was he who closed the book on the Sixties’ socio-musical legacy. And on the timeless ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, he could have just as easily been describing the madcap Barrett as rather consciously evoking his own Rimbaudian muse:
There was music in the cafés at night,
And revolution in the air.
Till he started into dealing with slaves,
And something inside of him died.
Well, in Syd’s case, something or someone inside had died. As of 1975, I really was another. After his little 5 June stunt at Abbey Road, Roger would not let Syd come out to play. The following year, when Capital Radio DJ Nicky Horne called on Barrett at his home to ask if he would co-operate in a radio retrospective on the Floyd, ‘this huge fat man ans
wered wearing only pyjama trousers. He looked down at me, and said, “Syd can’t talk.” When I told Dave Gilmour [what happened], he said the man had been Syd, and he’d been telling the truth. He really couldn’t talk any more.’
Meanwhile, the Pink Floyd of Gilmour and Waters remained one of the few English rock acts to retain and expand a US audience through the second half of the Seventies. The Who maintained their live audience by pandering to them, while The Kinks just stopped trying. And Bowie took regular two-year breaks from the stage to stoke up demand. The English wave of musical madness that had so spectacularly crashed on foreign shores was just about done, with Punk just around the corner, ready to impose the last rites on the kind of musical indulgences that the Sixties mindset had given licence to.
But although it still had plenty to say about this English malady itself – and in the form of Ian Curtis, its own Drakean poster-boy for the new depression – English rock had lost its grip on that international mass audience. It had also developed an ideological aversion to albums on which the sum was more than the parts. Art was again supposed to be consumed in three-minute sound bites cut for seven-inch vinyl.
The term ‘conceptual unity’ was banned by the Ministry of Punk Propaganda at King’s Tower. The idea of creating order from inner disorder, and calling it a piece of art, was a no-no – even after Siouxsie & The Banshees managed to slip their own concept album about suburban madness between the covers of their own long-playing debut, The Scream (1978). The Fall’s first EP, Bingo Master’s Break Out, was another 1978 mini-masterpiece wholly inspired by Mark E. Smith and girlfriend Una Baines’s experiences working at the local asylum. Who knew?
But for the likes of Poly Styrene, who formed X-Ray Spex at the mid-point between two nervous breakdowns, a Bowie-esque flight from childhood remained the order of the day – even as her song ‘Identity’ ripped the lid off this barely maintained pretence. If many Sixties rock artists had burned, burned, burned until they just burned themselves out, it would be as nothing to Punk’s headlong rush into self-ignition. X-Ray Spex would be just one of a number of punk bands that had the lifespan of a plate-juggler’s act. But then, even the punk drug of choice foreshortened the arc of creativity: ‘A lot of speed / is all I need’, to quote a particularly Rotten phrase.
And still the English continued sacrificing the brightest and the best at the altar of its very own rapacious art-form, rock music. And if the drugs didn’t help, perhaps it was never that simple. As Syd Barrett’s replacement in the Floyd once said: ‘Acid and stuff . . . acted as catalysts . . . [but] it’s more that he couldn’t handle success on that level . . . And [something] to do with his past life, his father dying and all that stuff.’ In fact, as Barrett knew only too well from his own reading, his complaint was hardly his alone. It was, in fact, symptomatic of a very English malady.
‘We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terribly brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it.’
– Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977)
Afterword: ‘. . . They First Make Mad’
Wherever the intellect is most excited . . . there is an increase of insanity. This malady prevails most widely, and illustrates its presence most commonly in mania, in those countries whose citizens possess the largest civil and religious liberty . . . whose free, civil and religious institutions create constantly various and multiplying sources of mental excitement.
– Praying a Grant of Land for the Relief and Support of the Indigent and Incurable Insane . . . , Dorothea Dix, 1848
It seems to me that in England all feelings, selfish and liberal, religious and moral, low and high, are extremely active. Not only the feelings, but also the intellectual faculties, have no restraint but that of their own power. If genius be not always encouraged, its activity at least is not suppressed . . . Thus, the powerful activity of the mind seems to me a great cause why insanity is so frequent in England.
– Observations on the deranged manifestations of the mind, or, Insanity by J.G. Spurzheim, 1833
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continental intellectuals were convinced that the unusual civil liberties enjoyed by the English – and its English-speaking ex-colony across the way – at least partly accounted for its tendency to produce a disproportionate number of lunatics. Although J.G. Spurzheim also mentioned the English proclivity for liking a drink, and connected this to ‘deranged manifestations of the mind’, he made no mention of the role of drugs in such an endemic dérèglement. John Jones’ The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d (1700), though, had already commented on how opium, freely available by then, ‘in excessive dose, do[th] cause, at first, Mirth, and afterwards a kind of Drunken Sopor in some, in others Fury, or Madness’, while, ‘long and lavish use . . . causes a dull and moapish disposition’.
Likewise, the idea that a particular genus of mental disease was quintessentially English precedes Spurzheim by at least a century. It was one subscribed to by George Cheyne, who in 1733 published an entire book on The English Malady, or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds. And in his introduction, Cheyne observed: ‘The Title I have chosen for this Treatise, is a Reproach universally thrown on this Island by Foreigners . . . by whom nervous Distempers, Spleen, Vapours and Lowness of Spirits, are in Derision, called the English Malady. And I wish there were not so good Grounds for this Reflection.’ Cheyne’s own explanation – it was ‘the Variableness of our Weather’ and ‘the Richness and Heaviness of our Food’ – may even now have its advocates. It may also partly explain why there was a network of private asylums around England – along lines established by the medieval hospital at Beth’lem (or Bedlam) in Southwark – long before any similar network grew up elsewhere in Europe.
However, any intellectual consensus conceiving of a relationship between freedom of expression and madness had long lapsed by the time the 1960s decided to test such a thesis once and for all. And this time freedom of expression came with a desire for experimentation wholly alien to the staid Victorians, ever concerned with social order and public decorum. If, in the period 1965–75, English rock produced an extraordinary body of work – I would suggest unparalleled in its popular culture since the heyday of Jacobethan drama – it was not only a case of the postwar traumas of a sundered society finding release in the popular arts, but also that intoxicatingly heady feeling this newly permissive attitude to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness fleetingly inspired. Such a spirit of optimism and experimentation inevitably fed into all forms of populist art.
This dewy-eyed optimism – which would-be hedonists did not merely apply to the traditional recourses of the aspiring aesthete, sex and drugs, but crucially extended to the preeminent form of contemporary artistic expression, rock music – died well before the concomitant spirit of experimentation did. Even in a recording studio – where the sums of money at stake could run to the millions a bestseller would bring – freedom of expression and a widespread encouragement of experimentation were the twin pillars of rock’s late Sixties/ early Seventies heyday.
For that is what it truly was. Bands were free to choose their producers (a relatively recent innovation), or even produce themselves; they were generally free to run up as much studio time as the demands of their artistic vision required (in the case of Pink Floyd, they had even had the wit to insist on an ‘open studio time’ clause in their original 1967 contract with EMI); they could and usually did employ independent designers to produce the packaging that formed such an integral part of The Album as Artefact (Floyd insisted on using their old friends at Hipgnosis, while artist Roger Dean provided bands such as Yes with their own ‘house style’); and when they delivered the finished sequence, the record company was expected to issue it exactly as it was given to them. Gone were the days when American labels could dictate the content, even in opposition to any UK release, creating a gen
eration of American consumers who thought there was a Rolling Stones album called 12x5 and a Beatles collection named Yesterday and Today.
Even in the case of Nick Drake – after two albums, neither of which had sold more than a couple of thousand copies – Chris Blackwell’s Island not only released the twenty-eight minute Pink Moon exactly as they received it, but also gave the album a fold-out sleeve, and the budget to commission an artist friend of the family, Michael Trevithick, to design the cover after Drake informed them ‘he wanted a pink moon’. Indeed, the only one of the half-a-dozen albums at the heart of this microcosm of madness not lovingly wrapped in a fold-out sleeve was Ziggy Stardust, and even that came housed in an inner sleeve with a full set of lyrics. Meanwhile, the ostentatious packaging for Quadrophenia would run Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Elton John’s Captain Fantastic close in any contest for the most O.T.T. album-sleeve in rock history.
This free spirit in English rock was also reflected in the labels themselves, which were fronted by free-thinking overseers, independent in spirit and deed; witness Immediate (Andrew Loog Oldham), Island (Chris Blackwell), Charisma (Tony Stratton-Smith), Chrysalis (Chris Ellis), Virgin (Richard Branson) and Track (Chris Stamp). To compete with these independents, the mighty EMI were obliged to set up their own ‘prog’ label, Harvest (to whom Floyd, Barrett and Roy Harper all absconded), while Decca came up with Deram, and Pye brought in Dawn. Between them, these ‘indie’ labels would release most of the groundbreaking English rock music of the late Sixties and early Seventies.
As for touring to promote the album after the fact, the record label just had to hope the artist felt like playing their newly released songs – rather than any they’d written in the interim. But, irrespective of touring activities or chart action, the record labels were expected to keep their albums in print until the world caught up – even if that was never. Meanwhile, a British concert circuit still built around many subsidised colleges and universities, town halls and larger theatres was able to sustain a veritable jamboree of pop acts who only ever teetered on the edge of chart-action.
All the Madmen Page 31