The 15th Christmas for this blog—time keeps at it. I hope that you’ve had a good year, or at least a middling one. Not much news to report, apart from Rebel Rebel (Revised) coming next summer, in case you missed that. Next year is the fiftieth anniversary of Young Americans and “Golden Years,” the thirtieth for 1. Outside, and, amazingly, the decade mark for “Blackstar”: all of which might get a fresh commemorative post. We’ll see.
The 64 Quartets project will at last resume, and should run at a decent pace again. Quartet No. 8, The Four Tops, will at last (!) conclude. Quartets 9 and 10 will be fun to write.
A Happy Christmas and New Year to you all! Here’s to 2025.
Rebel Rebel (Revised). Or maybe Rebel Rebel Again? Rebel Rebel (Second Edition). Rebel Rebel in some form. Coming, via Repeater Books, in summer 2025. I’m about to send in the manuscript.
This is a fully revised and corrected (yes, no longer does “Britain” win the 1966 World Cup, sorry) version of the book that I wrote in the early 2010s, and which was published almost exactly a decade ago. It covers about the first third of the Bowie catalog, from his earliest professional recording in 1963 to Station to Station, going through it song-by-song, in chronological order.
For those who got Rebel Rebel—I can’t thank you enough. But, hey, you might find the revision of interest, too.
Why do a new version?
Josie, showing patience during the revision process
Well, ten years have passed. It’s fair to say that a lot happened. We have far more details about Bowie’s work than we had in the early 2010s. The museum exhibit. The movies. The books: heavens, so many new books. Songs have appeared that no one (even the most devoted Bowie chroniclers) had ever heard of before. Thanks to auctions of Bowie’s until-then-unknown demos, and the ongoing issuance of archival sets, there are a decent number of “new” songs to chronicle, or greatly enhance, in the new Rebel Rebel, including (snare roll):
I Never Dreamed It’s True My Love I Live in Dreams How Can I Forget You I Want Your Love Bunny Thing Your Funny Smile Mother Grey The Reverend Raymond Brown (Attends the Garden Fête on Thatchwick Green) Angel Angel Grubby Face Goodbye 3d (Threepenny) Joe Run Piper Run Love All Around Animal Farm Jerusalem Hole in the Ground So Long 60s King of the City It’s Gonna Rain Again The Young Americans Medley and a massively-expanded entry on the Man Who Fell to Earth soundtrack.
In the years since Bowie’s death, many who knew him or had worked with him published memoirs. Three by his drummers! Earl Slick, John Hutchinson, Geoff MacCormack, Mary Finnigan, Suzi Ronson, Ava Cherry—the volumes keep piling up. There have been scads of documentaries and biopics and whatever Moonage Daydream could be classified as. Essential Bowie surveys by Jérôme Soligny, Leah Kardos and Glenn Hendler, among others. There’s a comprehensive book, Dan Gutstein’s Poor Gal, which digs into “Liza Jane,” the song that became Bowie’s first single.
Thus I’ve rewritten, or expanded, or flavored with new information and fresh quotes, nearly every entry in Rebel Rebel. I think it’s a much better book; if not, it’s at least a more thorough one, and as up-to-date as it can be.
Will Rebel Rebel (2) have a new look?
Yes. We’re taking advantage of the reissue to better align my two Bowie books, visually. Rebel Rebel (Rev.) and Ashes to Ashes will likely have a similar look, and their covers could even be connected in some way—I’m not sure yet. My hope is that they will, at last, look like a set, which had always been my intention; they will no longer be the Mutt and Jeff of Bowie books (see above).
I’ll have much more to say about the book in the new year. All best to everyone.
I was never quite sure of what real position Terry had in my life, whether Terry was a real person or whether I was actually referring to another part of me.
Bowie, on his half-brother, Terry Burns.
The world was asleep to our latent fuss.
1. Take two(master), recorded ca. 9-15 August 1971, Trident Studios. Released on Hunky Dory, 17 December 1971.
Among the last songs—likely the last—cut for Hunky Dory, “The Bewlay Brothers” was also the only song that Bowie hadn’t written before the sessions began. Decades later, he described its creation as being almost emetic: “I had a whole wad of words that I had been writing all day. I had felt distanced and unsteady all evening, something settling in my mind.”He recorded “Bewlay Brothers” at Trident on acoustic guitar (Mick Ronson did his overdubs later), then went out drinking at the Sombrero Club.
He was dismissive of “Bewlay Brothers” while he was making it, calling it a song for the American market. He told Ken Scott that as Americans enjoyed hunting for clues on LP sleeves and lyric sheets, he’d written something to really put them to work; in his press notes for Hunky Dory he mocked the song as being “Star Trek in a leather jacket.”
Until then all pop music was boy meets girl. Suddenly, you heard “The Bewlay Brothers” and you felt, that’s me!
Ken Scott: “I remember David coming in right at the end of the recording sessions saying he’d written a new song and so it was put together fairly quickly. This remix uses some originally unused pieces and omits other things.” The changes are sometimes interesting, often superficial, some unnecessary—hearing echo slathered on Bowie’s vocal is like seeing a colorized film. (There was another alternate mix, one barely discernible from the HunkyDory mix, on Ryko’s 1990 reissue of the album—it’s been memory-holed.)
To balance his verbosity and his vocal, which rivals “Changes” in its frenetic movements, Bowie made “Bewlay Brothers” compact. After an intro of twelve-string acoustic guitar and Ronson’s tremolo-shrouded Les Paul (which sounds like an organ—on stage, Mike Garson did the line on keyboard), the song plays out across three verses and refrains of equal length, and a coda. The chord progressions advance in the verses, retreat in refrains; the arrangement is two acoustic guitar tracks, two electric guitar tracks, and a bass that wakes up in refrains.*
*Is there bass? Sounds like there’s one (see 0:56, 2:17 in the original mix), the Off the Record complete score has a bassline transcribed, and a photo of the tape box (below) shows a notation of a bass overdub, but also, to make things confusing, a piano track, not audible in any released mix. Credits to the Divine Symmetry set list only Bowie and Ronson on guitars.
Tape box of the master, take 2, of “Bewlay Brothers,” recorded over 30 July 1971 takes of “Song for Bob Dylan” and “Fill Your Heart.” This led to confusion about the date of the “Bewlay” taping—it was a week or so after 30 July.
Bowie: This thing goes on…and goes on. Let’s wish us all luck on this one.
He never played “Bewlay Brothers” on stage until the last two touring years of his life.At its debut, a performance done for the BBC, he groaned at his lyric’s demands, saying it had more words than War and Peace, sounding like a man who wouldn’t recognize his younger self if he passed it on the street. He sang it delicately, giving a lilt to the close of verse phrases.
This cumulative belittling had been a protracted feint, Bowie rubbishing a song to hedge his audience from getting too close to it, much as how he alternated lines with the sting of memory with those of obscure wordplay.
At the heart of “Bewlay Brothers” was Bowie’s half-brother Terry Burns (Bowie would be occasionally frank about this, telling a radio interviewer in 1977 that the song was “very much based on myself and my brother”). Even its title, allegedly inspired by a London tobacconist chain down the street from Trident, is a syllabic and near-consonant rhyme of “Bowie.”
The half-brothers’ relationship had hung on Burns’ mental condition. While Burns had stayed at Haddon Hall in 1970, he’d begun to deteriorate by the time of Hunky Dory. Yet to consider “Bewlay Brothers” to be directly autobiographical, to parse each line for clues about a summer that Bowie and Terry spent together, for example, is to misread the role “Burns” plays in Bowie’s elegy: more a spent muse than any lost sibling. The break at the center of “Bewlay Brothers” is necessary: the lost brother needs to die so the singer can live.
You are a bunch of obscurists!Bowie, to the cheers when he announces “Bewlay Brothers.”
The sequencing of Hunky Dory’s “tribute” side maps a series of battles. Starting with the genial Biff Rose (“Fill Your Heart”), whose influence on Bowie was light and superficial, the sequence continues through figures that Bowie found progressively more difficult to assimilate: Andy Warhol’s flatness, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed’s dense self-mythologies. And the side closes with “Bewlay Brothers,” where Bowie grappled with the psychic power that Burns held over him.
Bowie had cast himself as Burns’ reflection, introducing himself as “Terry’s brother” to Haddon Hall visitors. Burns was, as Bowie once said, his doppelganger. “I wonder if I imbued my stepbrother with more attributes than he really had,” he said. “As long as I believed that’s what they were, it gave me the energy to be convinced I was worth doing it for.”
*The “Carling Apollo Hammersmith” was the then-current name of the Hammersmith Odeon, where Bowie had killed off Ziggy Stardust in 1973. A transitory phase between the Labatt’s Apollo era (1993-2002) and later incarnations like the HMV Apollo (2009-2012) and Eventim Apollo (2013-present).
Maybe I’m doing this, maybe I’m not doing it. Has anybody heard of it? I dunno, is it worth doing?
In Bowie’s childhood and early adolescence, Burns was everything non-bourgeois, non-suburban and non-British for a middle-class child in Fifties Bromley. As his mother’s illegitimate son, Burns was out of sorts in the Jones household: he and Bowie’s father disliked each other. He was liberating but chaotic, disruptive, upturning the house when he stayed there: he was an inclement weather pattern.
Burns introduced his brother to Buddhism, the Beats, jazz, science fiction, R&B; he programmed “David Bowie.” In “All the Madmen,” Bowie had pledged solidarity to those who society had pushed to the margins, while acknowledging a thin line separated him from the illness that had plagued much of his family.
“Bewlay Brothers” keeps its sympathies guarded. Tall tales from a sordid boyhood, the brothers as a gang (“the moon boys,” “kings of oblivion”) whose outlaw status Bowie builds up with lines from the gay underground (“real cool traders,” with Bowie raiding a favorite novel, John Rechy’s City of Night (see “Fascination”)). Set against them are agents of the Establishment. Like Ray Davies’ people in grey, these brawny close-cropped “good men of tomorrow” have, in Bowie’s wonderful line, “bought their positions with saccharine and trust.”
Lester Bangs’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” written for Creem, March 1975, reprinted in the NME.
Its performances had been a fluke of the Heathen tour, a treasured memory for a relative handful of fans. Then, in the last weeks of what would be his last tour, Bowie revived the song again. He brought in drums, which came across as a latecomer at a wake, and closed it out with a Gerry Leonard guitar solo.
By the second verse of “Bewlay Brothers,” something’s gone astray. The brother’s weakening; wax to the singer’s stone, he’s more impressionable to the world’s blows. Bowie closes the last verse with an act of generosity: he fuses stone and wax, turning his brother into chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature, letting him escape into art and memory. Bowie’s left behind in the world, taking stock of a broken estate of fragments: faces on cathedral floors, passwords whispered in dreams, names of lost paintings. The whale of a lie like they hoped it was, like the hope it was.
Apart from the fuzzed-up B minor chords to prod the song into its refrains, Ronson is content to haunt the Bewlays, constellating notes above Bowie’s voice, ruminating in empty corners of the song.
“The middle-aged audience that dominated the sold-out Event Center appreciated it when he dipped into the past.” The Press of Atlantic City, 31 May 2004. (After the song ends, you hear a guy yell “Hunky Dory!” on the bootleg.)
He has only sung this to an audience five times in his life, and this will be the last, though he says he wants to do it “a few more times”—the song is ready to depart again, to return to the air. He has only been its occasional transmitter. “It’s so old,” he says. “It’s older than I am, and I wrote it.“
Its mournfulness is thrown over in the coda, with its gargoyle chorus (Bowie’s multi-tracked voice, sped up and down to span over an octave). Like “After All,” it’s the Laughing Gnomes as specters. Having possibly borrowed this final melody from Marc Wilkinson’s theme for the 1971 British horror Blood on Satan’s Claw,* Bowie ends song and album on a fine grotesque note. As the track fades out, you hear a scream.
*Noted by David Dent back in 2010. The film had been released in the UK by June 1971, so there was a chance DB saw it!
Fifteen years ago today, I published the first entry on a WordPress blog that I’d set up a few days earlier. It was a six-paragraph essay on David Bowie’s first single, “Liza Jane.” My insightful assessment: “There’ve been greater debuts, but there’ve been far more worse.”
Not auspicious. But that was the idea: do some quick takes on Bowie. Listen to a song a few times, research it a bit, write a few graphs, bang, publish a blog entry, have breakfast and get on with the day. I was doing a Bowie song-by-song blog as a writing exercise. At the time I still had an MP3 blog, Locust St., which I had been running since 2004, while working sporadically on a travelogue/culture book about presidential grave sites (made it to Grant, Pierce, Coolidge, the Adamses, Cleveland, and JFK before I abandoned the idea). I thought about calling it Dead Presidents, and then in 2016 Brady Carlson put out a book on presidential grave sites which was called exactly that—I was not fated to write that book.
Fifteen years is an odd stretch of commemorative time. Long enough away to feel like “the past” but it also feels like no time at all, until you go back and see how much has gone. How many people aren’t here now; how much the air has changed.
A minor example. When I started the blog, it was hard to find any of Bowie’s early singles and some of his LP cuts uploaded on YouTube, which was a toddler then. My idea was to have a link to the song that I was writing about, but most of Bowie’s Sixties stuff simply wasn’t available. There was no Spotify, nor Apple Music, or what have you. So I either uploaded an MP3 on the Earthlink server I used, or, in some cases, I linked to an Italian Bowie fansite that had his Sixties songs on a sort-of RealPlayer setup that often crashed.
Social media was just getting going. I joined Twitter at the end of ’09 to promote the “Space Oddity” entry, as I recall. Facebook was still greatly a means to connect with people that you knew in high school, who you soon realized you had nothing in common with and had nothing to say to, but you now had to see their vacation photos until you died.
It was the end of the MP3 blog age, that combo of zines and college radio on the internet (Neil Young voice: “Back in the Google Reader days…”). You linked to someone whose work you liked, they linked to you. I started the day at work clicking through the blogroll, and hey, Tofu Hut or Moistworks or Soul Sides or Marathonpacks had put up something new. I felt like I was talking into the air for much of the Locust St years, then I’d get a comment from someone who liked what I was doing, so I kept on. I even got interviewed once by the Dallas Morning News and sounded like a crank.
The anonymity of it was freeing. I had spent my twenties writing bad short stories (on typewriter! while smoking! at least I didn’t wear a hat), then attempting a novel that was so self-evidently dreadful, even in its earliest stage, that I felt like I was indentured to a corpse. I had gotten nowhere at 30. I liked writing about music but the idea of even trying to submit something to the New York Press or Village Voice seemed unimaginable, a folly. Then I discovered MP3 blogs and I had the punk conversion: Ican do this. I will do this. So I did. That’s all it takes, still.
Pushing Ahead of the Dame (as I’ve long said, not a great name) started life as an MP3 blog offshoot. It had a very modest readership at first, less than that of Locust St.’s, which was eternally modest. I didn’t take it seriously for a few months, and got through most of Bowie’s Sixties songs at a fast clip. Then came “Space Oddity,” and I thought I should go to town on that one, really give it the treatment. That got some notice. Tom Ewing, on Popular, linked to it, and that brought in some readers. TIME magazine, for whatever reason, linked to it. The Guardian did. So by late 2010, I actually had a readership, a community, who turned out to be some of nicest and most insightful commenters anyone could have wished for. I’m grateful for them still.
Some lucky strikes. The writer Owen Hatherley found the blog via Popular; he recommended it to his publisher, Tariq Goddard, who asked me to turn the blog into a book. It took about three years to do the first book, Rebel Rebel. I still didn’t consider myself a “writer,” so the whole blog-to-book conversion process was a lengthy stretch of operatic self-doubt and slog. But here we are: there have been two books published based on the blog, and I’m currently revising Rebel Rebel. It will be out next year, it will take into account all of the “new” songs that have popped up in the past decade and the scads of information unearthed in the years after Bowie’s death, and it will be pretty much my last word on Bowie.
Last summer in New York, I was in the same dressing room with Carlos Alomar and George Murray, two of my favorite musicians, and the only reason I was there was that I’d started a weird blog on a whim. Life can be strange but good.
Why Bowie? People have asked that a lot over the years. The idea was to do a single rock musician or group’s songs in chronological order, and someone who’d been around for at least two decades. It quickly narrowed down to Neil Young, Pete Townshend, and DB (Dylan and the Beatles were over-tilled land, and I had nothing to say about them; Joni Mitchell seemed too daunting (read Ann Powers’ book!)).
Neil Young soon got the chop because his catalog was just too sprawling and borderline impossible to organize, and this was years before the Archives project started, mind.
Townshend, with or without The Who, held promise, but his work tapped out at the start of the Nineties. Plus I’d been too caught up in his music in my youth to be “objective,” I thought. Townshend remains the only musician I’ve heckled. In my defense, I was young, very very drunk, and he was performing Psychoderelict in its entirety on a hot summer evening outdoors, having actors in speaking roles, and his backing tapes kept breaking down. I believe I yelled “play something else! anything, Pete, for fuck’s sake!” in the midst of this.
This left Bowie.
The more I considered him, the more sense it made. I liked his music, but I didn’t know a good deal of it—my teenage listening consisted of the Ryko CDs, The Man Who Sold the World through the Berlin albums (though I never got Pin Ups); I knew the big Eighties hits, of course, as anyone who was 11 years old in 1983 would have; I got Outside when it came out, but I lost touch with him by the late Nineties. So reviewing his songs wouldn’t be so much interrogating memory but more learning about someone’s work and hearing and assessing it for the first time—that seemed a lot more interesting.
In June 2009 I was in a used record store in Northampton, MA (Turn It Up!—still around) and saw, in the CD racks, two early Bowie compilations, Early On and the Deram Anthology. I think I got each for $4. Another sign that Bowie was the one. I’d only known of his earliest songs via career surveys which described his Sixties music as godawful weedy theater juvenilia. I listened to the discs and yeah, some of it was that, but there was also lots of weird and intriguing music as well, and I thought I could find something to say about it.
And the timing was good. Bowie, in 2009, was as much of a private citizen as he ever would be. He wasn’t recording, wasn’t touring, wasn’t even being harassed much by the paparazzi. He felt a bit neglected. He was gone, but still here, and his fans had started to really miss him, to wonder about what he was doing. I gave them a place to talk about his music. I’m glad I was there, especially on that January morning in 2016.
My initial sources for the Bowie blog, as I recall, were Nicholas Pegg’s essential Complete David Bowie, then in its fourth edition; a few biographies (David Buckley, the Gillmans, George Tremlett, Christopher Sandford), Kevin Cann’s Chronology, a collection of Starzone interviews, Pimm Jal de La Parra’s Concert Tapes, and a few others. The websites Bowie Wonderworld and the Illustrated DB Guide, and a few no longer in existence, inc. Helden and Teenage Wildlife. Over the years came more guides: in particular, Paul Trynka’s bio Starman; Cann’s magnum opus Any Day Now; Roger Griffin’s Golden Years; Leah Kardos’ brilliant Blackstar Theory. Reeves Gabrels, Maria Schneider, and many others helped set me straight on facts over the years.
One of the achievements of my life is to see my work listed in such company now. Thanks for being part of it.
[Meant to add: just FYI, 64 Quartets is most of my work these days.]
Has it been another year? Somehow, it happened. A very quiet year on the Bowie front (will there at last be a Ziggy Stardust-Aladdin Sane archival box set in 2024? ah, who knows), though it was wonderful to attend the Bowie World Fan Convention in NYC back in the summer, where I got to meet Nicholas Pegg and Nacho, among many others.
I’ve been slowly working on updating Rebel Rebel and (even more slowly) reviving my64 Quartets project, with the longest entry yet (it’s about one-third done, and being serialized at present on the Patreon—hopefully it will be completed in a few months). As for this old blog, it will likely spark to a life a few times next year: it’s the 50th anniversary of Diamond Dogs, the 60th of “Liza Jane,” and a few other things.
Merry Christmas: health and happiness to you all. Here’s to the new year.
Thirty years ago today, David Bowie released the soundtrack of The Buddha of Suburbia, a four-part serial which was, at the time, being aired on Wednesday nights on BBC2. More accurately, this record was billed as the soundtrack, complete with a cover photo of a seemingly crucified Naveen Andrews, with Bowie’s name given as much prominence as that of his co-producer David Richards (he did get the back cover, however).
The record got little notice in the British press, where it was mostly treated as an inconsequential bonus to the telefilm; the concurrent release of the BowieSinglesCollection got as much, if not more, attention. It got close to zero notice in the United States, where the film wasn’t shown and the album wasn’t released (it wouldn’t appear until 1995).
But it was not quite a soundtrack (Buddha had prominently used “Time” and “Fill Your Heart,” neither of which appeared on the record, and the only thing that one might have recognized from the show was the title track). It was, in truth, the erasure and deconstruction of a soundtrack: a secret album that Bowie slipped out at the end of 1993. Bowie always said that it was one of his favorites, and it remains one of mine.
It had started with Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the Buddha of Suburbia novel and its TV adaptation. He and Bowie had gone to the same school, Bromley Tech, and both were Bromleyites, if of crucially distinct generational subsets. Bowie (born early 1947) had grown up in a Bromley which had changed little from when H.G. Wells had lived there. Kureishi (born late 1954) had grown up in a Bromley whose most famous escapee was David Bowie. Both, however, had the same arts teacher: Owen Frampton, father of Peter.
The two met in early 1993 for Interview, a conversation that touched often upon Bromley. Bowie was in a nostalgic mood, having helped to compile an issue ofArenathat cataloged his past and giving a Rolling Stone interviewer a guided tour of London and its suburbs. Kureishi said he was adapting his novel for television and asked Bowie for permission to use some songs. Bowie agreed. Working up the nerve, Kureishi then asked Bowie if he felt like contributing any original material. A few months later, Kureishi and his director/co-writer Roger Michell were in Switzerland, listening to Bowie’s score for the series.
His incidental music was greatly motifs—combinations of guitar, synthesizer, trumpet, percussion, sitar. Kureishi found it surreal to watch his film, a fictional document of his adolescence, playing on a TV monitor while the idol of his adolescence worked the mixing desk; he also found it daunting to tell his idol that the music wasn’t quite right.
After revising the soundtrack, Bowie thought he could rework some of the pieces into a new album. “He said he wanted to write some songs for it because he wanted to make some money out of it,” Kureishi recalled to Dylan Jones. (Bowie was perpetually surprised to discover how poorly the BBC paid.)
During his nostalgic turns in early 1993, Bowie had mused whether he could make a fourth “Berlin” album out of scattered pieces of his and Eno’s trilogy, a falsified Lost Berlin Tapes album that “never existed.” Not long before, Ryko had reissued the “Berlin” albums on CD, featuring allegedly lost outtake bonus tracks like “I Pray Olé” and “Abdulmajid.” These, in truth, were trial runs, with Bowie taking some bits from late Seventies sessions and compositions and fashioning essentially new tracks out of them. On Buddha of Suburbia, he’d do the same with his soundtrack motifs, fusing them into new shapes.
Relying on his usual jack-of-all-trades, the Turkish musician Erdal Kızılçay, Bowie worked at Mountain Studios in Montreux in the summer of 1993 to extend the Buddha motifs into six- or eight-minute loops, isolating their “dangerous or attractive elements,” then recording vocals and instrumental lines over said elements. After a week’s recording and a fortnight of mixing, he had a fifty-minute album.
Bowie had found in Kureishi’s novel an observation that he felt rang true: a curse of being a suburban artist is a self-conflicted ambition, a need to feel you’re bettering yourself while fearing being found out as a fraud. “It’s a miracle,” Bowie once told Tin Machine guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, as their tour bus went through Brixton. “I probably should have been an accountant. I don’t know how this all happened.”
Once asked why Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had been so influential on his work, Bowie said “for those of us born in South London, you always felt like you were in [the novel]. That’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in.” The Buddha characters who thrive are those who transform themselves, like the protagonist Karim; those who wither, like Karim’s fundamentalist uncle Anwar, are those who can’t shake free of the past. Yet in Buddha this self-transformation, this multi-ethnic suburban counterculture, is ultimately twinned with Thatcherism—novel and series end on the night of the general election in 1979. The ferment generated by suburban hippies and punks parallels the economic “liberation” of Thatcher. The revolution, when it comes, will be a suburban one.
The Buddha film had lovingly recreated early Seventies Bromley for Bowie. For his new songs, he said that he drew from what he called a “personal memory stock” ranging from his teenage years through the late Seventies in Berlin. His Buddha would be impressionist autobiography. As he wrote in his liner notes, “a major chief obstacle to the evolution of music has been the almost redundant narrative form. To rely upon this old war-horse can only continue the spiral into the British constraint of insularity. Maybe we could finally relegate the straightforward narrative to the past.”
Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1993
There was “South Horizon,” a join-piece of “trad” and “acid” jazz, featuring one of Mike Garson’s loveliest piano solos. Devoting as much care to the spaces between notes as to the notes he plays, Garson closes with a fractured lullaby on his highest keys. On his “Aladdin Sane” solo, Garson sounded like he’d soaked up every speck of music he’d ever heard and was able to reproduce it at will, like God’s player piano. His work here is more concise, conciliatory. He often keeps silent, or hints at some greater pattern.
The wonderfully odd “Sex and the Church.” The cold beauties of “The Mysteries,” an instrumental worthy of the Berlin years (which Brett Morgen used well on his Moonage Daydream). The only dud for me is “Bleed Like a Craze, Dad” which sounds like the sort of thing you get when you ask a random rock trio using your studio to jam with you for an afternoon.
Its finest tracks include the giddy “Dead Against It,” which Bowie considered revising for 1. Outside and Earthling. It’s the track that most sounds like its making: Bowie and Kızılçay camped out in the studio, eating hamburgers and listening to Prince, making odd little sketches.
Three lengthy instrumental stretches bookend and break up verses and refrains—an arpeggiated synthesizer line is answered by one on guitar. Bowie’s larking vocal is full of ascending phrases, sinking when reality sets in (“begins to sigh,” “my words are worn”). His lyric is clotted with internal rhymes and consonance: “I couldn’t cope/ or’d hope eloped/ a dope she roped.” There’s a barb in this spun sugar—he stares at her while she sleeps; she reads to avoid talking to him but talks to strangers on the phone—but it’s lost in the blissful waves of guitars that close out the track.
The melodic bounty of “Untitled No. 1” and the intriguing severity of its sister, “Ian Fish, U.K. Heir.” Where “Ian Fish” is an ebbing—what’s left when the tub’s drained—”Untitled No. 1” is the waters rushing in. The little melodies that Bowie and Kızılçay keep adding, like spinning plates upon a table; a rising scale figure answered by groaning bass, like sunlight rousing a sleeper; the stately entrance of the synthesizers; the swirling synth figures in the breaks; Bowie’s warm, adhesive ooooohs; the guitarist playing a line so entrancing that he won’t let it go, sounding its last notes again and again; the jangling countermelody to the opening scale motif that becomes a barrelhouse piano line. The saxophone line at the end of the first verse, soon bestowed on piano and keyboards. The breakdown into a quasi-Indian dance track until a guitar strums things to a close.
Two verses and a refrain of blur-words, cut to fit the generous spread of music: “Now we’re swimming rock [farther?/harder?] with [the doll?/the gull?] by our sides.” An indecipherable chorus hook: Sleepy Capo? Cynical Fool? Shammi Kapoor? (the first word in particular mutates throughout). A prayer is buried in the second verse.
A bleating vocal suggests that Bowie’s again lovingly parodying his lost friend, Marc Bolan. A tribute that more honors the living, the gracious hours that we have left to us. Its most distinctly-phrased words are “it’s clear that some things never take” and “never never.” “Untitled No. 1” burgeons. There were a few times where Bowie could have stood up and never recorded again: eddies of finality in which everything reconciled for a moment. This is one of them.
Bowie, Bromley Spheres, 1993
“Ian Fish”: I was too dismissive of the track when I first wrote about it, a decade ago now, and earned an incisive response at the time by Magnus Genioso, whose ears were far better:
“Imagine for a moment that the guitar is not there, then turn the backing tracks way, way up. There’s a lot of information there. The bells at the beginning of the track. The rainy “street” white noise that adds the high frequency information. Not one, but two layers of reversed vocals, one of them with an actual harmony part. Several layers of keyboards, two ambient drones in different octaves along with some slight shimmers. What appears to be a harp-like plucking part at the two minute mark. You can hear best just how many instruments there are at the very end of the song as they all fall apart one by one.”
Most of all there’s “Strangers When We Meet,” a strong composition that Bowie knew he’d buried here and so remade it for 1. Outside two years later. I prefer this earlier version, whose emotional charge comes in part from how it questions and undermines the elated mood of Bowie’s then-recent “wedding” album Black Tie White Noise— it’s what had to be buried before the wedding.
As a title, “Strangers When We Meet” references a Kirk Douglas film about secret lovers who need to part to preserve their marriages. They meet one last time in the empty house that Douglas, an architect, has built and get mistaken as husband and wife. Bowie draws on this, and on the broken couple of “Heroes”—a pair so consumed by passive-aggressive emotional violence that they no longer recognize each other.
In “Heroes,” the act of being together is courageous. Here’s the other side of it—a relationship that survives out of habit, the cowardice of someone knowing the match won’t work but refusing to admit it. A union never to be blessed by a wedding. The TV’s a blank screen, as is the window (“splendid sunrise, but it’s a dying world”). The man weeps in bed, cringes when she tries to embrace him. By the final refrain, he welcomes this state: after all, if they’re strangers again, they could fall in love again.
“We’ll cycle to the discotheque,” Iggy Pop says, a smile cracking across his face, as he and Bowie sit in the limo, stalled in Los Angeles traffic. A flick of a hand towards the window. “And we’ll cycle home!”
A prison break set to regal synthesizers, Lloyd Cole’s “The Idiot” makes overturning one’s life seem simple: “it’s easy!” as John Lennon had once sung. Cole turns Bowie and Pop’s time in Berlin into a boy’s adventure story, if one undertaken by thirty-year-old recovering addicts.
Cole has always been astute about Bowie—see his consideration of Low (“if he is aiming at minimalism, [Bowie] fails. There is too much melody, too much structure. And maybe he was frustrated, but he has too much of the music he grew up with in him to be able to completely discard it”)—so it’s no shock that his song is among the loveliest tributes yet.
Placing the story in Iggy’s voice, Cole has Iggy’s sharp eye, his self-deprecation, the generous sense of absurdity. Bowie stands at a remove in the song. Even Pop doesn’t know what to make of him, though he knows what his friend wants. “How are we still alive?” Cole closes; there’s no answer to his question.
Saint Etienne, “Whyteleafe” (Home Counties, 2017).
“Whyteleafe is near where Pete and I grew up. The song is really about somebody who lives in a small town in the home counties who feels like they’re the only person in the office who voted ‘Remain’ in the Brexit referendum. I was also imagining if David Bowie had never made it and just stayed in the suburbs and had an office job.”
Bob Stanley
Tucked away on St. Etienne’s Home Counties, “Whyteleafe” has Sarah Cracknell seizing upon a well-dressed man on the Caterham line as if she’s spotted a White’s Thrush in the forest. A man always seen with a new book, or with a copy of the Guardian or the TLS or, until they stopped the print edition, the NME. A discreet cord tethering an iPhone in his breast pocket to high-end earbuds. Playlists include Vorticist Rock, Planned Accidents.
The man for whom it didn’t happen, the man who left open the void “David Bowie” was meant to fill. The “what if Bowie was a civilian?” alternate-world scenario is, of course, one I’ve indulged several times, too. It’s so rich an idea, because unlike Elvis or even Mick Jagger, you’re able to conjure up an anonymous Bowie, a Bowie making his way through the world as an elegant absence. The extraterrestrial who could pass, if he wanted to, as an earthling.
The David Jones of “Whyteleafe,” a man nearing retirement, working as a consultant, making jokes about Colin Wilson and Julian Schnabel that his co-workers don’t get. He’s been in cities where his other self had roamed and has made his way to others—he was in Paris in May ’68, where he once stood next to Booker T. Jones, a pair of tourists watching students use a crowbar to pry out paving stones (“well, they’ve got energy,” Booker says—he’s hobbling on crutches, and the Englishman helps him get back to his hotel).
He was in Berlin in the Seventies (overrated; not much going on; Munich was where it was at, he’ll say). In his fifties, he gave up a lucrative in-house position and lived in Stockholm for a time, spending the white nights with students half his age, often buying the rounds. They still remember “Bromley Dave” (“I swear, he said he had a single during Beatlemania; I can’t find any sign of it online”) whenever they get together now, which is rare—kids, COVID, you know how it goes.
One day you board the train and expect to see the man in the tailored suit, tranquil in his window seat, his eyes following the ring road. But he’s not there. The conductor thinks he might’ve moved away.
You often ask me why I don’t write. I could answer you by saying I have no sense of history. It costs me an entire day’s effort to think about the next day.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Tres Tristes Tigres.
EFFIGIES INDULGENCES ANARCHIST
When I engaged with it deeper, I found the longer you sit with it the better you see the trick he’s trying to pull. I can see he was trying to pull off something quite grand and meta. Whether the material started off intended for a musical or as some kind of experiment or exercise to build back his songwriting chops, maybe that’s one of the reasons why it’s got some weird shapes and so much surplus detail.
One of my conclusions about it is that it works best when you consider it as assemblage art, like the key is not only seeing what it resembles, but also seeing the various parts and remnants that comprise it, the bolts and screws and seams, the proximities of everything.
A fun memory: telling Geeta Dayal that her book on Eno’s Another Green World was in this pile
Not long ago at all, was it? Not very. Find a photograph from 2013 and have a look: not much has changed. Lots of superhero movies. Something ridiculous or awful happens and you complain about it on some social medium. The fashions, the haircuts, even the phones haven’t altered much. Well, you were younger: there’s that.
Number one hits include “Harlem Shake,” “Blurred Lines,” “Get Lucky,” “Roar,” “Thrift Shop”: songs for which I can’t imagine anyone having nostalgia (cue young nostalgists). There are no scuffed stand-six-feet-apart footprint marks on store floors, no masks on airplanes. The President of the United States is Barack Obama. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a member state of the European Union, is David Cameron. The President of Russia is Vladimir Putin, who in September writes an editorial in the New York Times: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”
In 2013, I’m doing this blog and slowly writing the book that will become Rebel Rebel. I don’t know the woman to whom I’m now married, but she has recently moved to New York from London. I’m living in a place where I don’t live anymore.
David Bowie is alive in 2013. So is Prince, Anna Karina, Chadwick Boseman, Tom Petty, Leonard Cohen, Walter Abish, Tom Verlaine, George Michael, Queen Elizabeth II, my dog.
VAMPYRIC PANTHEON SUCCUBUS
Who was “David Bowie” in 2013? That’s what was gnawing at him: was he past it? Was this a folly? Did the world need a new David Bowie record? Would he be better off remaining an absence?
The Next Day came out on the same day that Eric Clapton released Old Sock, whose cover photo is a selfie. Old Sock: now that’s a title you give an album released in your sixth performing decade, an album which only your devoted longtime fans will buy. A dad Christmas present: you’ll find it on a shelf a year later, still in its shrink wrap. Was Bowie making an Old Sock? (As it turned out, Bowie gave Clapton that title.)
“The Next Day is an album that didn’t need to be made. Plenty of his contemporaries—including Elton and the Stones —still release albums at his level of craft, a couple of which sundry publications have even patted on the head and cited in year-end lists. But because Bowie requires context and reactive poses for vitality—and uses distance as a muse—his albums don’t function as mere singer-songwriter collections; they demand to be accepted as statements. He can’t, at 66, suddenly cultivate a new imaginary universe commensurate with the demands of such an infamous style thief and aesthetic flâneur. Does he still require vampiric devotion at the level described in “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”?”
The secrecy of the LP’s making, its sense of being a heist in which the aim was to smuggle something into the museum, was in part meant to lessen the inevitable letdown—the first new Bowie album in ten years would be defined more by its surprise existence. The deftness of its making was more notable in the press than any of its tracks. Marketed by silence, with vigorous obscurity: no interviews, no explanations, no glad-handing, just cryptic slogans, masks, and code words. The album cover was the absence of one, an erasure of one.
HOSTAGE TRANSFERENCE IDENTITY
That was the public context, the scaffolding, of The Next Day—the Bowie “comeback” record, the one that he made as if in witness protection, the opening chapter of what would be the last Bowie narrative.
As time spools on, the scaffolding drops away. It always does. There was a context that we no longer have for Young Americans—-how a diehard Ziggy Stardust fan felt when he heard Bowie doing “soul.” How the soul Bowie fan felt when she first put on Low. How someone who loved Low felt when she first heard “Let’s Dance” on the radio, knowing Bowie was no longer hers. How a kid who only knew Bowie through “Let’s Dance” felt when he saw Bowie sing “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” on Letterman.
The privilege of a point in time is to experience something in a way that everyone who comes later can only approximate. The mistake is to think this will matter. Like a gambling house, the future always wins.
Ten years on, what is The Next Day? A Bowie “late work,” the crankier older sister to Reality, the lead-up to Blackstar, that wasn’t as good as Blackstar, that’s underrated compared to Blackstar (I’ve seen the latter argument of late). Even this sort of cause-and-effect structuring is shaky. The Next Day, Bowie’s first streaming-era album, already lacked definition: it existed in competing editions, with various songs appended (three bonus tracks currently aren’t streaming and thus, to many, no longer exist—the album already has apocrypha). Its sequencing never seemed right, as if Bowie knew its fate was to be shuffled through, to wind up as another source of Bowie Content: songs guided by inscrutable algorithm into a “Heavy Moods” playlist (“Where Are We Now”), or licensed for a moderately edgy Showtime drama in 2026 (“Love Is Lost”).
MAUER INTERFACE FLITTING
The truth was that now that I had time to stop in front of the stores after months of ignoring their existence, they had too much to say to me.
Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps.
Its first set of songs were tracked in early May 2011, though vocals were done sometimes over a year later. Many of these share a mood: they’re loud, raucous, a bit strained. Working back into shape with his fists, it’s Bowie in training montage, as if in a Rocky movie. (With asides by commenters from the original blog entries in 2015.)
The Next Day. The first track Bowie cut upon his return to the studio, and it sounds like a starter: a sparse construction, with long stays on the home chord. Here I am, not quite dying!; a lyric in part inspired by Robert Palmer’s study of Senegambian griots, who are thought to converse with evil spirits, their bodies left to rot in hollow trees. Momus: It feels to me like a movie trailer, which hypes up an action film by packing way too much catastrophe into too little space. DB self-references: “Repetition,””New Killer Star.”
Atomica. Sharing with “Next Day” a harmonic stinginess and a guitar sound that manages to seem dated without quite having a time to date back to (so, very Bowie). Meta-banality? Some lines now read as if generated by ChatGPT. It goes on too long. Deanna K: And that’s the problem with the album! Songs don’t die on their own terms, they’re put on life support but then eventually shot when it gets too expensive for everyone. ‘Just die already!’, they yell.
How Does the Grass Grow? Along with the title track, a sign that The Next Day will be stocked with old violence; the guitar solos sample Bowie eras as if moving between aisles in a warehouse. Though Tony Visconti once said the track “was very different, new Bowie, new-style Bowie,” its refrain is that of Jerry Lordan’s 1960 “Apache,” overt enough for Lordan’s estate to get co-composition credit. Gcreptile: It sounds a bit as if all the unused ideas for this album were crammed into a single song. I do like the high voice in the bridge, which reminds me of old 60s/70s songs like “Sugar Baby Love” or something like that. DB self-reference: “Boys Keep Swinging.”
You Feel So Lonely You Could Die. A keeper—it sounds even more sumptuous today. A line that makes me crack up now: how Bowie sings “you got the blues, my friend!” in this dotty, vicious register, making this nondescript line a curse by a petty God (“people don’t like you!”). Billter: I’ve been thinking more about this song’s relationship with “Rock’n’Roll Suicide.” The latter’s message was “You may think you’re alone in the world, but you’re not. There are others out there who will understand you–you may not know them yet, but they exist.” The newer song’s message is “In case you were wondering whether you’re alone in the world…yes, you are. People don’t like you and they all wish you would die.” (Shades of “Pug Nosed Face.”) DB self-references: “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” “Five Years.”
If You Can See Me. One of the weirdest pieces, temporally and harmonically, that Bowie wrote in his later years. Leah Kardos, in her Blackstar Theory: “The drumbeat, guitar and percussion rhythms are in 4/4, but the bass and changing harmony is in 5/4. This creates a phase relationship where downbeats only come into alignment after five bars (counting in 4/4), or four bars (counting in 5/4)…The polymetric interplay between these elements is disorienting and cumbersome, cogs of uneven size turning at different speeds.” In retrospect, the signal change for “Sue” and Blackstar to come. Like “You Feel So Lonely,” it could be sung by a vengeful deity. David [not DB, to my knowledge]: The apocalyptic vagaries of 1Outside, Man Who Sold, Five Years and Diamond Dogs are all in attendance, but this one has a blacker soul, a buzzing, crawling feeling of imminent dread running through. DB self-references: “Ricochet,” “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family.”
ISOLATION REVENGE OSMOSIS
I didn’t think it was going to be controversial. As I say, it’s just me and David talking so I didn’t realise. But I think that’s good because I think that people don’t normally discuss albums because the golden age of record sleeve design has gone…The design process was all very secretive, as requested, to be safe. And we never used David Bowie’s name or the album name–we had a code word for it: he was just called The Artist and the album was called Table. I don’t know why.
Jonathan Barnbrook, on his album cover, 2013
CRUSADE TYRANT DOMINATION
Dancing Out In Space: Engagingly minor; a joy for the vocal arrangement alone (“big bay-bee”) Momus: If The Next Day sounds geriatric in some ways—this backward-looking, death-oriented, future-oblivious thematic—it’s worth remembering that the medium itself, rock music, is essentially an oldies artform now, with a rock press firmly in retro mode. DB self-reference: “Lust for Life.”
Like a Rocket Man: As close as Bowie came to a first-person account of being a cocaine addict, of someone who had found, as per the novelist Edward St Aubyn, that cocaine “was an opportunity to explore the arctic landscape of pure terror.” Or as John Lennon once sang, help! I need somebody! I’ve come to love this one. Postpunkmonk: What really stood out for me when listening to this was The Return Of Anthony Newley®, for perhaps the last time, in Bowie’s vocal performance. DB self-reference: “Starman” via the knock on Elton John. EJ: “David and I were not the best of friends towards the end.”
Born In a UFO: First tracked in May 2011, then rebuilt from scratch in summer 2012: a lot of work for a song in which Bowie falls in love with his alien inamorata’s fashion sense: her A-line skirt, clutch bag, Perugia shoes, and lavender mesh (“she was all Courrèges!” he swoons). Afterallalong: I like the sound of DB cutting loose. Or, a bit looser, anyway. DB self-reference: “Shopping for Girls” (the verse melody).
INDIFFERENCE MIASMA PRESSGANG
Heat: The endemic violence of The Next Day—dying men in trees, soldiers pinned down on beaches, high school shooters, traitors dangling from ropes—stops at last in “Heat,” a world bled free of killing as anything else. Mishima’s dog is already dead, just obstructing the flow of water. MC: For me, its pastiche of Scott made it a fantastic closer for TND; it’s right in line with the album’s backward-looking (in Anger) tendencies, but with its eerie sense of movement – a perfect distillation of mid-period Walker – setting it apart from the preceding album, as you say in the entry… in retrospect Heat points pretty clearly toward The End, more than anything else on TND. DB self-references: “Nite Flights,” “The Motel.”
The Stars (Are Out Tonight): The stars of the 2010s are in the late-capitalist cycle of working longer for fewer rewards. “We have a nice life,” Bowie tells Tilda Swinton in the video. Compared to the ever-hustling celebrities of today, he’d gotten off easily, and he knew it. Soto: The album’s best track: mania as done by an aging man. Bowie’s sounding out of breath works for the track. I’m taken with the doubletracked harmonies on the “toss and TURN at night” line–an echo of a Hunky Dory moment, gone forever. DB self-references: “Looking for Water,” “Starman,” “Star” and so on.
So She: One of the three songs from the Next Day bonus CD currently unavailable on [US at least] streaming, and so deepening an already-obscure song’s obscurity. A shame, as it’s lovely. Jubany: “When I first heard this track I thought: “Bowie wrote a Neil Hannon tune!” DB self-reference: “I Would Be Your Slave.”
DISPLACED FLIGHT RESETTLEMENT
Tony Visconti, on The Next Day: “[It] started out trying to do something new but something old kept creeping in…”
The Next Day is a catalog missing half its pages. A museum exhibit, one without …’hours’ or order, without curatorial notes, the cracked mirror of the actual museum exhibit, which opened in London a week after this record came out. The exhibition of a process, no results. Bowie’s own Museum of Jurassic Technology, with its dioramas and miniatures and stuffed oddities. Lawrence Weschler, on the Museum: “It’s here that you’ll encounter, across a maze of discreet alcoves, in meticulous displays exactingly laid out, the ant, the bat, the falls, the diva, the insomniac…”
Bowie walking through David Bowie Is with his family. A knowing smile on his face, bringing to mind what he once told Nicholas Pegg, about Pegg’s definitive guides to his music. “An amazing job, but, of course, it’s all wrong!”
Did songs come out of the 100 Favorite Books list? (Nabokov via Otto Friedrich, Mishima, Waugh, etc.). So many lists made. The compilations, the redactions, the archival digs. The contracts, the bills of lading. The Amazon wishlist. Getting things done: remix Lodger, redo Never Let Me Down, talk to Brian about 2. Contamination. Piling everything up, trying to cram everything in. The man in “Conversation Piece,” with his papers strewn on the floor of Ken Pitt’s apartment. The man in Berlin in 1978, watching the skies. Any sudden movement, I’ve got to write it down. The man a decade before, looking for UFOs on Hampstead Heath with Lesley Duncan, who’s been playing him albums by her ex, Scott Walker. A see-er, also a liar.
Were the songs about exile and emigration intended for Lazarus (named after Emma, after all)? Are all of them about Thomas Jerome Newton? How much of this record is Bowie simply doing a tribute to Dennis Potter, whose works he apparently gorged on during the “retirement” years? (“Heat” is the second episode of The Singing Detective.)
A room of bloody history, you made sure of that
FUNEREAL GLIDE TRACE
Writing is the art of disorganizing an order and organizing a disorder.
Severo Sarduy, Cobra.
BALKAN BURIAL REVERSE
The second block of tracking for the album, in early-mid September 2011, yields:
God Bless the Girl: Originally “Gospel.” At the close, he sings “the years pass so swiftly” in a despairing tone, all but lost in the swirl of voices. RB: All great Bowie songs are also a little bit about himself. And this is one of them. It should be used for a soundtrack, and maybe someday it will be. DB self-references: “Underground,” “Panic in Detroit.”
I’ll Take You There: One of the Gerry Leonard co-compositions, one of the songs of exile, displacement, refugees and emigrants. Anonymous: Chris O’Leary dropped the ball on this one. There’s clearly a little bit more going on in this song than just a raucous re-tread of dippy, disgusting, guilty pleasure ‘Beat Of Your Drum’ and O’Leary…should be ashamed for not giving some of it notice….dude are you burning out? DB self-reference: “Beat of Your Drum”
Love Is Lost: Along with “Where Are We Now,” the track from TND that will likely go the longest distance. Always conceived as a Lazarus song? As “Jane” wrote on the blog entry: Makes me think of “The man who fell to earth” with the new accent, maid, and eyes. The fear of losing his family. What have you done, Newton? DB self-reference: Low (viva Harmonizer).
Boss of Me: Time doesn’t improve some things. Ric: One of those where the co-writer is there to share the responsibility, rather than the credit. DB self-reference: “Shake It.”
The Informer: Hitman holed up in a bathroom, windows shattered, down to his last clip. The end is closing in, so he arraigns his employers, tries to balance his accounts. Gcreptile: The end of an era that has run all out of gas. All guitar-rich swagger and bleak lyrics, with underdeveloped melody and very standard instrumentation.” DB self-reference: “Changes” (“I still don’t know/what we were looking for”).
I’d Rather Be High: With “How Does the Grass Grow?,” “The Informer,” and “Valentine’s Day,” “I’d Rather Be High” is part of a broader theme —civilization’s recursive betrayal of its youth. Bowie’s was a generation that, for once, hadn’t been slaughtered in its prime by the wars of old men. Had he been born in 1895 or 1920, he would have been on a beach, bullets spraying around him, dreaming of pleasures that postwar British teenagers took as their birthright. Sylvie D: I find it quite extraordinary that a song about young people getting killed in stupid wars ended up in Louis Vuitton commercials.
Dirty Boys: One of the best pieces of sequencing on TND, a clean break between the title opener and “Stars.” Momus: I think what troubles me about it is the slightly reedy and strained vocal. It’s one of the tracks in which Bowie sounds old, and that disturbs me in all sorts of ways. DB self-reference: “The Gospel According to Tony Day.”
MANIPULATE ORIGIN TEXT
There’ll probably be another album not far behind this. I don’t know. I don’t think he knows. He doesn’t owe pop music anything. The next album could be this one defaced again, you don’t know.
Barnbrook, 2013.
The moment you know, you know you know
TRAITOR URBAN COMEUPPANCE
The subject of our testimony is an exceptional case. It is the story of a man who, unlike us, could not or would not adjust to this practical world. On the contrary: he explored absurd and desperate paths, and worse yet, paths where he attempted to take with him everyone he met.
Reinaldo Arenas, The Doorman.
The last songs, cut in summer-autumn 2012. As if Bowie couldn’t stop working on the album, that there was another, better version of it always just out of reach.
(You Will) Set the World on Fire: As per the Michael Cunningham piece, Bowie in the late 2000s/early 2010s was working on a musical which included “fake Bob Dylan songs”—if true, this one was perhaps a refugee from it. Recorded late in the day, and an addition to the record that never made sense; perhaps why it was included. Tresilaze: I have a quarter-baked theory that The Next Day is a muddled, non-linear narrative, maybe one that’s made of multiple abandoned stories that were forged together. Basically, it’s about someone fleeing a country torn by war and/or paranoia for America and trying to become a star. Songs dealing with where she left: The Next Day, Dirty Boys, Valentine’s Day, If You Can See Me, I’d Rather Be High, How Does…, You Feel So Lonely, Heat. The “father” in Heat is the subject of You Feel So Lonely. Songs about the girl: I’ll Take You There, Set The World on Fire, Boss of Me, The Stars Are Out Tonight, God Bless The Girl, Where Are We Now (this could be a return to her home country, or it could be set there and about living in a totalitarian state. DB self-reference: “Bang Bang.”
Valentine’s Day: Just after the blog post published in 2015, there was Umpqua Community College. As I was finishing the book revision in 2018, there was Parkland High. The line central to the refrain—he’s got something to say—perverts what Bowie had offered his fans: the belief you can transform yourself, become a star in your own world, build a life on change. Now it’s a demand— listen to me, look at me— at the point of a gun. The terrorist position, as Leonard Cohen called it in the early Nineties. “So seductive that everybody has embraced it,” Cohen said. “Reduce everything to confrontation, to revenge.” DB self-reference: “Everyone Says ‘Hi,'” his cover of “Waterloo Sunset.”
ENDCREDITS: SUBHEADS: DB. DB PHOTOS: THE EVER MYSTERIOUS JIMMY KING, 2013. BARNBROOK TND PHOTOS: BARNBROOK. DETOURNAMENDED TEXTS REPEATER BOOKS OTHERS USED IN THE SPIRIT OF GOODWILL AND FAIR USE. FOR L, R, & J. EASTHAMPTON 2013 EASTHAMPTON 2015 EASTHAMPTON 2018 SOUTHAMPTON 2023.
Graffito on a broken piece of the Berlin Wall, ca. late 2000s
By the summer of 2012, the obscure song-by-song David Bowie blog that I’d started on a whim three years before had become a lively small corner of the internet. Its comments section had managed to avoid snobbery and personal attacks (well, mostly) and was populated by people with fresh insights into Bowie’s work. One debate we had back then was whether Bowie was through. If he would ever put out new music again.
I hadn’t been aware of Bowie’s “retirement” when I started writing the blog, though in retrospect his absence was one subconscious reason why I chose him to write about—it seemed like David Bowie was no longer in the conversation as much, that he’d wandered off without notice and was worth looking for.
But by 2012, what once had been the general take—“oh, I guess he’s taking a break”—was becoming far more “did he really just quit? And tell nobody?”
When asked what I thought, I’d usually say, yeah, maybe Bowie really was done with making new music. After all, he’d flirted with departing before: to give it up and concentrate on painting, have time to read even more books. Around 1968, when he was between record deals and desperately shifting from folk music to cabaret to auditioning for Hair. Around 1981, when he seemed more interested in doing movies and plays, was stuck waiting out an onerous settlement with his ex-manager, and was shaken by the death of John Lennon, killed by an alleged super-fan.
And in the late Eighties, when Bowie was in the doldrums, he told the director Julien Temple of his yen, in Temple’s words, “to parachute out: to find a strategy that would give a glorious exit…a kind of Houdini escape from pop stardom.” (Tin Machine, it turned out, served as his Houdini device then.)
In the early 2010s, there were a lot of signs that this time, he was gone for good. He had a young daughter. His son was starting on a promising film career. He was happily married, rich, comfortable—he’d bought out Tony Defries at last, and now had his song royalties back, after a decade of loaning them out to bankers. The iTunes/Soulseek era, and its concurrent implosion of record retailers and labels, meant you didn’t earn as much from records, particularly for a “legacy” act who hadn’t had a hit in over fifteen years. He’d had a health scare in ’04 and looked to be done with touring, which he’d always been ambivalent about.
I said maybe he was working on a memoir. That would make sense, no? He finally had the time to sit down and go through it all. He’d hired an archivist some years back, and in December 2012, the museum exhibit was announced. The past seemed like his future.
Of course, as we now know, he’d been working on a record since the autumn of 2010, recording it in secrecy in 2011 and 2012, and having regular second thoughts about ever releasing it. His confidence was shaky. Had he been gone too long? Would his big return land with a flop? Was the work good enough? It wasn’t until the autumn of 2012, when he hired Jonathan Barnbrook to do the LP cover and told a few executives at Sony they were, to their surprise, going to release a new Bowie record, that he committed to his comeback.
On Tuesday morning, January 8, 2013: a new song. The announcement of a new album (Bowie’s PR did a masterful job of alerting just enough journalists the night before to expect the news—he captured the news cycle without giving a single interview). Over a dozen new song titles to wonder about.
On the blog, the current entry was “Untitled No. 1.” I’d written it in the days after Christmas, through a pretty sorry New Year’s. As I’d been thinking that Bowie had retired without notice, I ended the entry with “there are a few times where it seemed as though Bowie could have stood up, then and there, and never recorded another note again: these tiny eddies of finality, in which everything in Bowie’s work and life reconciled for a moment before they broke apart again. This is one of them.”
The comment section, now frozen in time, is a wonderful record of people around the world learning the news, learning that he was back.
I found out through texts and notifications on my phone, waking up to constant pings. Once I realized all the ado was about Bowie, for a moment, until I processed what was going on, I feared he was dead. It turned out to be the dress rehearsal for three years later.
Now, somehow, it’s ten years later. Bowie’s been gone for seven. As Sandy Denny once sang, who knows where the time goes? Or as Bowie sang, where the fuck did Monday even go?
How does “Where Are We Now?” sound, a decade on? We now know how dissimilar it was from the rest of the loud, occasionally hectoring The Next Day. He crafted it as the official comeback song: meant it to be weary, sad, mournful, to be “David Bowie is Old, and Nostalgic,” to suggest that his voice had withered to a late Leonard Cohen rasp. One of the great fakes in a career full of them, as it turned out.
That’s not to say there isn’t a great well of sorrow deep in the song, that Bowie isn’t reckoning with time’s carnage, for he is. He’s just doing it in his oblique way—imagining himself, or a version of himself, as a old man tottering through an unrecognizable Berlin, a Berlin in which the Wall is a bad dream that a dwindling number of its citizens once had. A list of old names in his head, arranged like a code sequence: the Dschungel; Nürnberger Straße; KaDeWe; Bösebrücke.
The Berlin of Christopher Isherwood and Kurt Weill; the Berlin of “Heroes,” of Hansa By the Wall and Iggy Pop and Romy Haag; even the Berlin of the early 2010s, a still-affordable metropolis sitting in the middle of a continent at peace—all are discarded editions. You walk through the city now, turn a corner, see that something has changed that you didn’t expect—a subway stop has vanished; there are no more newsstands; the coffee shop on that street, which had been around since the War, closed for good during COVID. A young man brushes by who wasn’t born when Bowie released Reality.
One response to time is a simple incredulity. You never knew that—that I could do that, Bowie sang, addressing a lost lover, maybe reckoning with a past self. What sticks with me the most from “Where Are We Now?”, a decade on, is how Bowie sings “the moment you know, you know you know.” He’s caught another glimpse of how others must see the faker, and has a handful of years left to baffle them yet again.
Hello! I hope you’ve all been well. It’s Christmas again, somehow. Another year over, and quite the one for me. I got married, and I moved out of the place I’d lived in since Bowie’s Reality era. Boxes, exhaustion. As Patrick Troughton once said, “life depends on change, and renewal.”
This blog will continue keeping on, in its sporadic way. There will be some commemorations to come (maybe Aladdin Sane, maybe Let’s Dance, maybe The Next Day—who knows) and possibly a few surprises. I continue to revise Rebel Rebel, which should be done by mid-2023. They keep throwing new boxed sets at me, though—now I have to write an entry on “King of the City.” A bit like the old days, when the blog looked to be nearing a close because we’d hit “(She Can) Do That,” and then he’d put out a new album.
Also, next June: the Bowie World Fan Convention in New York. I’ll be there: I’ll get to meet Nicholas Pegg and Nacho and so many others at last! If you’re there, it’ll be great to say hi.
Happy Christmas, happy New Year. Best to everyone.
Posted by col1234 
Pushing Ahead of the Dame 