by Wendy Leigh
EIGHTEEN
GOLDEN YEARS
David was happy and content with Iman, and although he had stepped down his work considerably, he still pursued an eclectic array of artistic projects. In an utterly radical departure from his image and from the world of rock music, in April 1995 he made a deal with the flowery British fabric and fashion company Laura Ashley to design a range of wallpaper.
As he explained, “I chose wallpaper because of its status as something extremely incongruous, particularly in the world of art. I haven’t completely lost my sense of irony, you know!”
The wallpaper was only on sale in a limited edition at the London gallery where a retrospective of his paintings was on exhibition. In the midst of it all, he nevertheless retained a sense of humor: “Hanging wallpaper isn’t my kind of thing, but I could definitely art direct, and I could light it beautifully. I could tell other people how to hang it, believe you me,” he said.
Meanwhile, in September 1995, Brian Eno produced David’s Outside album, on which David sang in a series of different voices. That same month, he co-headlined an American tour with Nine Inch Nails called the Outside tour, which bred a million-dollar-selling album and won him the Lifetime Achievement award at the Brits, which was presented to him by then prime minister Tony Blair.
Morrissey briefly toured with Bowie, but their relationship had never been smooth or trouble-free. In his autobiography, Morrissey remembered meeting David for breakfast at a Beverly Hills restaurant and being horrified that David was about to eat some cold cuts. Whereupon, he asked, “ ‘David, you’re not actually going to eat that stuff, are you?’ Rumbled, he snaps, ‘Oh you must be HELL to live with.’ ‘Yes, I am,’ I say proudly, as David changes course and sidles off towards the fruit salad and another soul is saved from the burning fires of self-imposed eternal damnation.”
On a different note, Morrissey revealed, “David quietly tells me, ‘You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive.’ ” Down the line, according to Morrissey, David telephoned and asked him to cover “Mr. Ed,” a recent song of his. According to Morrissey, “He stresses that if I don’t do the cover, ‘I will never speak to you again, haha,’ which is hardly much of a loss since David doesn’t ever speak to me.
“A few months later I am at my mother’s house when the telephone rings. My mother hands me the 1940s shellac antique. ‘It’s for you—it’s David Bowie,’ and boyhood’s fire is all aglow again, although I cannot understand how David found my mother’s number.
“He explains that he would like to send me something through the post. ‘Do you have an address?’ I ask. ‘Oh, just write to me care of the management,’ he replies. ‘No, I meant do YOU have an address for ME?’ I say.”
Iman did not always travel with David, or see his shows, simply because, as she put it, “How many times can you hear the same songs?” Alone on the Outside tour, David telephoned Iman regularly and also stayed in touch with friends and fellow musicians.
During the Outside tour, as Eno remembered in his diary, “Bowie called me from a distant American hotel room to relay the O. J. Simpson verdict to me as it was delivered, describing the scene in court, etc. Then it was on our TV too, so we were watching it together. I don’t know what city he was in—Detroit, I think.”
David was deeply unnerved by the trial verdict. Eno quoted him as saying, “It’s all down to investigative journalism now.”
On the movie front, David agreed to appear in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, playing the part of Andy Warhol. When they had first met, Andy had failed to take him seriously, had rejected him, and David couldn’t have failed to note the irony. “God knows what he would have thought of me actually playing him in a film all those years later. We never particularly got on,” he said, later adding, “I’m not sure that there’s such a thing as a fond memory of Andy Warhol. He was a strange fish. Even people who say they knew him well, I don’t think they did. I certainly didn’t know him well.”
Intent on portraying Andy in every aspect, he borrowed his clothes, including Andy’s handbag and its contents, from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. When the film was released in August 1996, he received positive reviews, with no less a luminary than Janet Maslin of the New York Times praising his performance with, “Andy Warhol . . . is brilliantly caricatured by David Bowie as an art world Wizard of Oz.”
Julian Schnabel observed, “I thought it was like a doppelgänger thing, where I have a pop icon play a pop icon. So you know you’re watching David Bowie in a sense, but it’s almost like, ‘Is Andy Warhol playing David Bowie, or is David Bowie playing Andy Warhol?’ ”
There was, of course, a third possibility: Perhaps David Bowie was playing David Bowie playing Andy Warhol.
In 1998, again in stark Bowie contrast, David played a gang leader in Everybody Loves Sunshine, simply because Goldie, whose script it was, had asked him.
In 1997, David made a return to solo albums with Black Tie White Noise, which included “The Wedding,” inspired by Iman, and “Feel Free,” on which he reunited with Mick Ronson after twenty years. Just a short time after they recorded the song, Mick died of liver cancer at the age of just forty-six. Afterward, David would say, “Of all the early-seventies guitarists, Mick was probably one of the most influential and profound and I miss him a lot.”
In 1997, now without Mick, he released his new album, Earthling, posing on the cover in a tattered Union Jack Coat, which he codesigned with Alexander McQueen. That same year, in a strikingly innovative move, one that was quintessentially David, mixing the visionary with the mercenary as it did, he issued $55 million of Bowie bonds, selling shares in back royalties of his twenty-five albums recorded before 1990, in return for an up-front payment. Investors would then be able to buy and sell “Bowie Bonds” which promised an annual 7.9 percent return.
“I just wanted the money. I couldn’t give a damn who bought them,” said David, then revealed that all the bonds had been purchased by Prudential Insurance. “I am very proud of what I’ve written and I’ve created. And I’m quite happy to earn my living by it. The money doesn’t present me with any embarrassment. Basically, I do the art and sell it,” he said. “I have a lot of money coming in over the next ten years from my back catalogue, but I’d rather have the cash now and not have to wait.”
Similarly, on the real estate front, in January 1996, primarily because Iman was never happy in the rarefied atmosphere of Mustique, David sold his estate there to businessman Felix Dennis for $400,000 less than the $4 million at which he originally put it on the market.
As always, uncannily forward thinking, intellectually searching, and continually alert for the next trend, the next world-shaking innovation, even at the early stage in the general use of the Internet, David was already ahead of the curve. He plunged in heart and soul, carried a portable computer everywhere, and, a full two years before e-mail became a popular form of communication, used it as much as possible. An e-mail addict at a time when only a small number of Americans had it, he enthused, “I’d be completely lost without it! I always like to e-mail quick messages to Iman if I know she is out for the day. But I still call her on the telephone if we are away from each other for any length of time.”
Every morning when he got up, he invariably logged on, posting diaries of his thoughts and activities, and even entering chat rooms under a pseudonym. “I don’t announce myself when I go into my chat rooms, but I do have a pet name which they know as ‘Sailor’! As in ‘Hello, Sailor.’ I just couldn’t resist it,” he revealed in an interview with Richard Wallace, which David insisted be conducted over the Internet.
“I love the chat rooms, because you get to hear what people genuinely think,” he said. “The communication between me and my web audience has become more intimate than it’s ever been. It is a feeling I enjoy because it is new to me. It is adventurous, it is a new position of what the artist is, it is a demystification.”
David being David, he thre
w himself into exploring the Wild West of the Internet with a vengeance. “I was an obsessive, I’d surf the web all the time, just crazed,” he admitted afterward.
However, after six months, he made the decision to cut down on his time surfing the Internet, “because I was on too much. Iman wasn’t too happy because I just never came to bed. But now I’m very disciplined,” he said. Then, in a comment that prefigured the cataclysmic effect of the Internet on relationships ten or fifteen years later, he added, “Once you start surfing at night, you can really break up a relationship. You’ve got to be very careful about that.”
By the end of the nineties he had launched what the Economist called “a creative empire.” Apart from signing a special edition Mini car, he had his own radio network on Rolling Stone’s Internet radio site. Barnesandnoble.com hired him to write online reviews of books, and he shocked the music business establishment by releasing his album Hours on the Internet. On September 11, 1996, he released his track “Telling Lies” exclusively on the Internet through his own site, Davidbowie.com, which 350,000 fans downloaded.
Later on, in a 1999 interview, he accurately prophesized, “The exciting part of music on the Internet is the impact it could have on delivery systems. . . . It would be good news for the consumer, too, who by choosing the individual tracks or making a compilation of various artists, would in a sense become the producer.”
Then he went on to warn, “Record companies may resist the web until the last minute before being forced into action. My record company isn’t exactly jumping on board. . . . I think if I was starting out in music now, I think I’d look on rock as a stodgy, traditional format and the Internet as what’s happening tomorrow.”
With that in mind, in September 1998, he launched Bowienet, a high-speed Internet service that offered customers e-mail addresses with the suffix @davidbowie.com, and a multitude of other Bowie-related elements: live chats, live video feeds, chat rooms, and question and answer sessions with David, himself.
Subscribers wishing to use Bowienet as their full Internet service provider paid a fee of $19.95 a month, and users who only wanted to avail themselves of content paid $5.95 a month. A great resource for all things Bowie, the site would survive for fourteen years.
On January 7, 1997, David celebrated his fiftieth birthday at Madison Square Garden, where he performed in aid of Save the Children with Lou Reed, Robert Smith, and many others. That same year, he performed at the Phoenix Festival in aid of Amnesty International’s Refugee Campaign in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. And on January 31, 1997, Madonna inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but, predictably, he didn’t bother to show on the night. “I’m not really one for those awards shows,” he commented. “That aspect of competiveness leaves me a little cold.”
Afterward, hearing what Madonna had said about him, he professed to be deeply touched by her words. This is what she said that night: “Before I saw David Bowie live, I was just your normal, dysfunctional, rebellious teenager from the Midwest, and he has truly changed my life.
“I’ve always had a sentimental attachment to David Bowie, not just because I grew up with his music, but it’s because it was the first rock concert that I ever saw and it was a major event in my life. I planned for months to go and see it.
“I was fifteen years old, it was the end of the school year, and leading up to the week of the show, I begged my father and he said, ‘I absolutely refuse, over my dead body, you’re not going there, that’s where horrible people hang out,’ so of course I had to go.
“So my best friend spent the night at my house and when we thought everyone was asleep, we snuck out of my window, which was no mean feat, as I was wearing my highest platform shoes and a long black silk cape. Don’t ask.
“We couldn’t drive, so we hitchhiked into Detroit and I don’t know who was scarier . . . the drivers that picked us up, or us in our outfits. Anyway, we arrived at Cobo Hall and the place was packed and we fought our way to our seats. And the show began.
“And I don’t think that I breathed for two hours. It was the most amazing show that I’d ever seen, not just because the music was great, but because it was great theater. And here’s this beautiful, androgynous man, just being so perverse . . . as David Byrne so beautifully put it: so unconventional, defying logic and basically blowing my mind.
“Anyway, I came home a changed woman, as you can see, and my father was not sleeping and he knew exactly where I went, and he grounded me for the rest of the summer. But it was worth every minute that I sat and suffered in my house that summer. So I would just like to thank you, David Bowie—wherever you are—for inspiring me and I would like to accept your award. Thank you.”
On April 1, 1998, he and Iman hosted a party thrown at artist Jeff Koons’s SoHo studio, launching the book Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928–1960, ostensibly a biography by William Boyd. The book was published by David’s new art-house publishing company, 21, and in it, Boyd recounted the tragic story of Tate, who, after destroying 99 percent of his work, jumped off the Staten Island ferry and drowned.
Guests at the party, who all feted author William Boyd and toasted the memory of Nat Tate, included Charlie Rose, Jay McInerney, and assorted art world glitterati, all of whom listened respectfully as David read out an excerpt of the biography. However, a week later, Independent art critic David Lister revealed that Nat Tate was only a figment of Boyd’s imagination, and that the book was a hoax in which Bowie willingly and knowingly participated.
In 1999, David signed to make an album, Hours, for Virgin Records. Publicist Mick Garbutt worked with him on it and, subsequently, on Heathen and then Reality. He said, “David’s an absolute gentleman. He’s polite and takes an interest in you. He is generally nice; he disarms you and asks you how you are. But unlike [John] Travolta, who wanted to know everything my mother was doing, David doesn’t go into great depths.
“I’ve met him hundreds of times, and he has a gentleness about him. There is just an aura of otherworldliness about him. Obviously he has got those eyes, he has that look. There is a youthfulness about him, a sharpness.”
At one stage, while David was promoting the album in England, Garbutt traveled up to Manchester, where he met David at BBC Manchester. “When I got there, I realized that I’d got David’s schedule wrong,” Mick remembered. “He knew that I had, but he didn’t say anything to me in front of anyone. It was almost as if he didn’t want to show me up in front of them, but he was obviously annoyed.
“I apologized to him, and he just nodded. He knew his schedule better than I did and it was a good thing that I rectified my mistake. All of us who work with David feel that we don’t want to get anything wrong. We don’t want to disappoint him. He commands loyalty more than any other artist I know.”
When Garbutt flew to Manhattan to work with David further, he received another insight about him. “I remember I went to a studio on West Broadway, and David just sauntered in, wearing a black flat cap and didn’t have an entourage with him. He was on his own. He’d just walked down West Broadway alone and just turned up at the studio, without any flunkies whatsoever.”
In 1999, David played Wembley for NetAid, and Meg Mathews went with her then husband, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, to see him after the show, and remembered, “I went into his dressing room. We were having a laugh with him; it was very laid-back. I was a bit in awe. Gobsmacked. Noel was chatting away with him. David was very down to earth, really sexy voice, really polite. Gentlemanly, not a massive ego,” she said.
In 1999, David was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by the Berklee College of Music and gave a fifteen-minute commencement speech, in which he told the story of John Lennon’s fan-avoidance techniques. The rest of the speech was peppered with his customary wit and stellar advice for musicians of the future.
“Music has given me over forty years of extraordinary experiences. I can’t say that life’s pains or more tragic episodes have been diminished because of it. But it’s allowed m
e so many moments of companionship when I’ve been lonely and a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people. It’s been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in. I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it graciously offered me,” he said.
On June 25, 2000, David headlined at Glastonbury 2000, performing in front of more than a hundred thousand fans, many of them cold and tired after three days at the festival. David kept them rapt and enthralled. Beforehand, though, he had been, “nervous as a kitten,” but he swaggered through his two-hour show set and gave a masterly superstar performance.
NINETEEN
WHERE HE IS NOW
On February 13, 2000, David and Iman announced that she was pregnant with their first child. They had been trying since they first got married, and, as David put it, “It’s been a long and patient wait for our baby, but both Iman and I wanted it to be absolutely right and didn’t want to find ourselves working flat-out during the first couple of years of the baby’s life. This is a wonderful time in both our lives.”
In a more jocular vein, he said, “We are looking at names at the moment and all I can tell you is that it will be in keeping with the Somali-Bromley tradition.” Alexandria Zahra Jones was born on August 15, 2000, and weighed in at seven pounds, four ounces. David was in the delivery room and cut the umbilical cord.
With the birth of Lexie, as her parents call her, his thoughts strayed to his own childhood, and to his half brother, Terry. “He was an autodidact. He would go to libraries and art museums and discover music on his own, and he would say, ‘You gotta read these guys,’ and ‘You gotta listen to this.’ I think I’ve passed that on to my son, and I do hope that I will do that for my daughter,” he said.