Twitter had exploded with Yank-bashing righteousness—how embarrassing that an American should have mistaken a sixtieth Jubilee for a sixtieth birthday! How brash! How gum-chewing! How ridiculous that we had worried about what the Jubilee “is”—for, however much we didn’t know what a jubilee is, at least we get it that little bit more than the Americans, tsk.
But then, as the credits on the Jubilee Concert rolled, someone Tweeted that, actually, having Googled it, today was the Queen’s birthday, after all.
This meant that the big fact we could take from the entire Jubilee weekend—boats, fireworks, street parties, and McCartney—was that will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas is a far better subject than every single other person in Britain. And that, if you eat cake for four days straight, you will become very, very nauseous.
TV Review: Imagine If You Didn’t Love David Bowie
Okay—let’s go back to Bowie. Oh! How I loved you, David Bowie! Even though the first time I knew of you was as Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth, and so I had a bit of a shock when I found out you’d done “Rebel Rebel” AS WELL. It was like finding out Kermit used to be in the Beatles. Which actually, if I think about it, is the fan-fic project I would like to work on next.
Imagine if you didn’t like David Bowie. Wouldn’t that be weird? Not to love David Bowie. Not to love David Bowie—one eye blasted, hair dyed ginger in the sink, gaying it up with Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops for “Starman.”
Not to love David Bowie—pale like bone, voice like ice breaking—singing “Heroes” in Berlin: the sound of mankind giving itself a standing ovation.
Not to love Bowie—stalking towards the microphone during the intro of “Let’s Dance”—looking as sharp as any human’s ever looked; an albino leopard whispering, “You know what? In three years, I’m going to play Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth, in an outfit so tight my knackers will look like two badgers having a fight down my trousers—and I’m going to be fucking badass in that, too.”
People who don’t love David Bowie? I don’t even know what such a person would look like. Perhaps the person in Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
On Saturday night, then, every person of reasonable mind in Britain watched BBC Two’s Five Years—a feature-length documentary on David Bowie, made up of “unseen outtakes and unused footage,” telling the story of five key years in Bowie’s life—’71–72, ’74–75, ’76–77, ’79–80, and ’82–83.
Chronological and prompt, we started in ’71, when Bowie had spent nearly a decade studying mime, acting, writing songs, walking around London in a dress, being a “thing”—trying to work out which one of the things will make David Bowie big.
Nineteen seventy-one is the year he realizes he never had to choose: the point of David Bowie is that he will do all of these things—and that is the big thing. What will free him up is realizing that, for him, it’s actually easier to create something dazzlingly, grindingly, blastingly new—to take pop to the Kabuki theaters of Japan, the German avant-garde, into space—than it is to try and just be some kind of redux Anthony Newley. He’s not going to fit in anywhere—he’s going to terraform a whole new world, and take pop with him.
One of the first people he tries to explain this to is Andy Warhol—and Warhol’s having none of it. In black-and-white footage you can’t quite believe you’re seeing, in ’71, in New York, Bowie and Warhol have a standoff, on camera.
Warhol is trying to direct Bowie in a film he’s making—Bowie tries to direct him back. In the end, because it’s his film, Warhol shuts Bowie down. Bowie retaliates by filing a take where he mimes how he feels about this: ripping open his guts, spilling his entrails on the floor, and then pulling out his still-beating heart and throwing it up into the sky. Man, these are the pop-cultural moments I live for—David Bowie bitching off Andy Warhol with an angry mime. When the gays take over the world, all wars will be conducted like this.
But fuck Warhol—it’s ’71–72. Bowie’s not messing around. He’s got other fish to fry. He’s back to the UK for Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, “Moonage Daydream.”
Rick Wakeman—rubicund, crumpled; a keyboard Falstaff—appears, telling us about playing piano on “Life on Mars.” How absolutely illogical and astonishing the chord sequence is—on both “But the film is a saddening bore” and “Sailors! Fighting in the dance hall,” the song goes somewhere no one else on earth would ever take it: a violent, swooningly vertical takeoff into genius.
“It really is a piano player’s dream,” Wakeman says—newly agape at how confounding it is. He stares down at his hands. “I must go home and learn it.”
More footage, all previously unseen—Bowie in lapis lazuli trousers with his tits out, singing “Queen Bitch”—“Oh, God! I could do better than that!” Lots of shots of him putting makeup on, going crackers on the Rimmel as you murmur, “Rewind on the blusher, love.” He kills Ziggy at the end of ’73. His scale is vast, fast—how is he doing this while being so utterly off his tits?
“He even ate breakfast like a superstar,” Woody Woodmansey, the Spiders from Mars drummer, recalls, which is quite a commitment if Bowie was eating, say, shredded wheat, or kippers.
’74–75: “David Bowie was never meant to be. He’s like a Lego kit. There is no definitive David Bowie.”
This new Bowie, six months later, is pale, cadaver-like—so thin his teeth look fat. He doesn’t look like he’s eating breakfast like a superstar anymore. He doesn’t look like he’s eating breakfast at all. You’ve never seen anyone look more ill on cocaine. It practically crystallizes on his skin, like salt on salt fish.
“He was the whitest man I’d ever seen,” his new guitarist, Carlos Alomar, says. “I’m not talking pink-white. I’m talking translucent. I said, ‘You look like shit. You need food. You need to come to my house.’”
But Bowie’s driven—“I was tumbling over myself with ideas.” These are his soul years: the heart is warm, even though his face is frozen. “Young Americans,” “Fame,” “Golden Years.” He appears on The Dick Cavett Show, coked to the gills—sniffing constantly. At one point, you can see a sniff dislodges an old nugget from his nose—it hits the back of his throat, and you can see him register the acrid blast before chewing on it. He has a cane, with which he traces patterns on the ground.
“What are you drawing?” Cavett asks, clearly scared of Bowie. Bowie is so blasted he can’t even look him in the eye. “Don’t look on the carpet. I drew something awful on it.”
Cracked Actor, The Man Who Fell to Earth: “I knew Bowie had serious problems at the time—I just told him to put his clothes on and walk right through it,” director Nicolas Roeg says. Have I said before how amazing all the footage is? Bowie being interviewed by Russell Harty, and Harty getting the song titles wrong: “Your new song, ‘Golden Tears.’”
“‘Golden Years,’” Bowie corrects—a face on a wooden-cased TV screen on a table on Harty’s show, with a poor transatlantic connection.
Bowie ends up introducing the song himself, in his cut-glass voice. Los Angeles is not good for him.
“People took so much coke they couldn’t talk. They’d just . . . whistle.”
’76–77. LA exited. Berlin. Bowie stripped down in jeans, riding around on a bicycle. The cold, clean air of Brian Eno’s production—the introduction of new instruments, and Robert Fripp’s high, spiraling exposed-wires solo on “Heroes.” Co-producer Tony Visconti calls Bowie and Eno—he has a new toy for the studio, called a Harmonizer.
“What does it do?” Bowie asks.
“It fucks with the fabric of time,” Visconti replies. They book him onto the next flight, and make Low—a new reset button for pop. Half instrumental, pistons hissing on “Sound and Vision.” Always crashing in the same car.
’79–80. Bowie on The Kenny Everett Video Show in extreme close-up, still with his Steve Buscemi teeth, looking astonishingly beautiful, playing “Ashes to Ashes” and pretending to be scared. Or perhaps he is scared? You still can’t tell when Bowie�
��s being Bowie—or Bowie. It’s endlessly beguiling. If you were never actually in love with him before you see this clip, you will be afterwards. Still only thirty-three, and he’s regenerated ten times, all alone: no George, John, or Ringo to hang out with. His only bandmates are his massive genitals, which in these trousers seem even bigger than before: as if a small Shetland pony were living in his knickers. Maybe one was. Hot tramp! I love you so.
It ends with ’82–83—Bowie on the Serious Moonlight Tour, where he comes onstage and attacks “Let’s Dance” like a matador putting a sword right through a bull’s heart. How did Andy Warhol not think this would work? Couldn’t he see all of this even then, in Bowie’s blasted pupil?
’71–72, ’74–75, ’76–77, ’79–80, and ’82–83. The date stamp for the invention of much of modern pop culture. Duran Duran, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Daft Punk—whenever pop is ambitious, whenever pop is odd, whenever pop dresses up, whenever pop looks like nothing you’ve seen before, it is using tools and a framework largely built by one man from Bromley with tombstone teeth, and his name borrowed from a fixed-blade fighting knife. Did I say I love David Bowie? I love David Bowie. I loved this hour and a half with David Bowie.
The Smells of Your Childhood
My sister works in a perfume shop in Brighton, where they stock the perfume David Bowie wore. “Do you want to know what David Bowie smells like?” she asked us—opening the bottle. It smelled of pineapple, and smooth platinum, and quietly purring through New York, in summer, in an air-conditioned car, if your heart were made of emeralds. We sprayed ourselves with the smell of David Bowie, and walked around town, drunk, pretending to be David Bowie, which is an excellent and cheap hobby for the young to engage in, and one I can thoroughly recommend.
I have forty-seven perfume bottles in my bedroom, and every plant I grow in my garden must be scented. Even the trees, with their oozing amber sap, which you can cover your fingertips with and inhale. I love how scent can overwhelm you. It can make you utterly, brilliantly dumb. I like to be completely undone by it. Crushed. Made small.
There was a conversation on Twitter a couple of weeks ago—started by a writer called @mooseallain. You know—from the Hertfordshire Mooseallains—about what smells reminded people of their childhood.
Some were beautiful: “My mother’s perfume—when I smelled it, I knew everything would be all right.” “The smell of moss and wood when you’re climbing trees.” “Erinmore, and Old Holborn tobacco smoke—in sweet blue folds, through the living room.”
Others were so specific, small, and true they were like tiny plays: “Pencil shavings at the bottom of a school bag.” “Savlon on skinned knees.” “The smell of sweat, released by the heat of the iron on my dad’s work shirts.”
And some were just like a shopping list of a child’s life in 1986. “Matey bubble bath, Pears soap, calamine lotion and my dad’s Old Spice cologne,” one read: everything an eight-year-old would encounter, in one tiny bathroom cabinet.
The idea was a beautiful way to while away an afternoon, and the whole collection is now on Storify—a catalogue of smells that children were intoxicated and overwhelmed by in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Cola cubes. Their dad’s leather gloves. Chips. Plasticine. A newly opened packet of Panini stickers. Privet. Vimto, in a glass, on a pub table. The wooden seat of a swing heating up in the sun.
Who doesn’t want to think of the smells of their childhood? Childhood—when you have five senses working overtime, and your memory is just a big white bag waiting to be filled. And it stays filled: What adult now does not still essentially freak out over mown spring grass, or autumn bonfires; rotting seaweed, or the blind, white, echoing smell of first snow?
These smells smell just the same as they did the first time around: they never change, they never fade. They are a note that plays over and over in your life. They are the quickest route back to being just three feet tall—overwhelmed, in love with, or awestruck by, the world.
Were there fewer smells back then—or more? I cannot tell. Sometimes, it feels like my childhood world was made entirely of coal tar. Coal tar in the creosoted fences, covered in tiny spiders. Coal tar in the thick, medicine-y syrup of Vosene, and coal tar in coal tar soap. Coal tar in the tarmac being poured, black, onto the road: my mother and me the only ones who liked the smell—loved the smell—pausing at roadworks and sniffing it, lasciviously, as the rest of the family walked on, pretending to choke. Coal tar fills your lungs, and your head: it’s the smell of things getting done, being mended, being cleaned. It’s the smell of working-class estates in the 1970s and 1980s.
There were other smells, of course: the packed lunch box smell, of plastic, bread, crisps, an apple starting to ferment. The tin of Roses being opened on Christmas Eve—half chocolate, half squeaky, jewel-colored cellophane. Heinz tinned ravioli being heated on a gas hob, in a caravan, at dusk—door open to the Welsh mountains outside, and the rushing black river at the bottom of the valley. Kids running barefoot back through long grass, in the almost dark, to eat the hot, orange, tin-flavored squares.
The very specific smell of 1988—the year my parents bred Alsatian puppies. Puppies, mixed in with Jeyes Fluid—another coal tar smell!—and shit.
We kept the puppies in the old coalhole, and every time we opened the hatch, the ground would suddenly disappear beneath an ankle-high wave of tiny bodies, hysterical with wagging, and barks so small, the sound was bark bark bark. And they would lick your face, with their tiny milky new-earth-smell tongues, and you would think, “This is the newest and most alive thing on earth,” and you would squash them a bit, between the palms of your hands, because you were so excited.
I’d far rather think of the happiness of childhood smells than the sadness. Because the simple fact is there are things that you loved as a child you will never smell again—and that will make your heart ache if you dwell on it. People you knew—your nan, your granddad, the soft-lapped auntie who died—you will never breathe them in again, that unique mixture of their perfume and habits and bone. Not even the richest man in the world can re-create what it’s like to have his face pressed near to those who have gone, and to inhale. The absence of a scent can make you tearful with longing—or, on the other hand, just ruin a summer.
The year my father sheared all our lilac trees down to three feet high—“To invigorate them!” he said—they did not become invigorated, after all.
Every other summer, we had lived surrounded by their wild, drunk, intoxicating froth—it filled the house like light, birdsong, and magic—but this year, they sat, squat and sulky as a bathed dog, and steadfastly refused to bloom. The air remained plain, and undrunk. The house felt dark, and silent. And it was not summer without the smell of lilac. It was not summer at all that year.
The Unhappy Bus Tour Guide, New York
I went to New York with my sister, and we took a bus. And it turned out to be the most New York thing ever.
He sits at the front of the bus—New York–Italian, disheveled, looking fifty in the eye and not liking it. Like Al Pacino in a cheap anorak. Al Pac-a-Mac-ino.
He’s holding a microphone in his hand, and sighing heavily. He is our tour guide on this open-topped bus ride around Manhattan, $27.
“I gotta tell you, sweetheart—I’m only going to be operating on a third of my usual powers today,” he says, pausing by my seat. He has taken a shine to me and my sister. We have no idea why. “This crowd here—they’re not gonna get it. They’re not gonna get it, London.”
His tired hand gesture takes in the big Pakistani family, a couple from Austria, a woman in a burka, a couple from St. Lucia. A single, prim-looking Korean woman.
He sighs. “I can tell. It’s gonna be a waste. Today, London, I’m dialing in Roberto Baddacelli.”
He is Roberto Baddacelli. He might be the worst tour guide in Manhattan.
Generally, I am a fan of the “bad tour guide” genre. We once had a tour guide in Athens who began his walk around the Parthenon with �
�I hate the English. Hate the English”—a bold statement even when uttered to a large, internationally mixed crowd but twice as exciting given that he was speaking to a group that consisted of only me and my husband, who are English.
But Baddacelli might be even better than him.
“The picture’s THERE! The picture’s THERE!” he shouts, as we go past the Flatiron Building. “LEFT LEFT LEFT, TAKE IT NOW! ST. LUCIA, TAKE YOUR PICTURE! LONDON! TAKE YOUR PICTURE! NOW! JESUS CHRIST!”
Apparently, I am “London.” He tells a joke. It’s about Hitler. The couple from Austria don’t look happy. And they haven’t even seen the storm yet. As we go across the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan skyline is wearing a massive bouff of black cloud, cracked with lightning. Baddacelli looks personally angry about that weather.
“Everybody, everybody—thanks very much for hauling me out here during a thunderstorm. I really appreciate it,” he says.
The woman from Pakistan is worried. She has three children.
“What will happen?” she asks, in pieced-together English.
“We’re in a tin can going over the Brooklyn Bridge—what do you think will happen, Pakistan? PULL OVER!”
He bangs on the side of the bus, to alert the driver.
“I know a guy who got KILLED this way. STRUCK BY LIGHTNING!” he tells the bus—just as the sky cracks open and everyone is instantly, violently soaked. In less than three minutes, the floor is four inches deep in water. This is monsoon.
Baddacelli climbs down the central aisle passing out yellow plastic rain ponchos—trying to keep his shoes out of the water by climbing on the edges of the seats. As he passes us, he goes, “Jesus Christ, London. Jesus Christ.”
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