"In the beginning there was no David Bowie, so he had to invent himself"
In 1975, a 28-year-old David Bowie was the subject of a BBC Omnibus documentary at the height of his stardom. So RT commissioned Anthony Haden-Guest to follow the "20th-century phenomenon, rock star, ex-mime and visionary" on his tour around the United States…
Alamy
- Anthony Haden-Guest
Add Bowie in Berlin to your collection.
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"Bowie?" says the receptionist. "How do you spell that?" The Pierre Hotel is one of New York’s grandest, but discreet. Its lobby is rosy and golden, as though sculpted from Turkish delight, and tranquil. Usually tranquil, that is...
"David Bowie!" shrieks the fan, his or, quite possibly, her voice like a tiny stamp of the foot. The fans are clustered in the lobby, dazzling in silver, satins, snakeskins, with thick unisex make-up, and there are shrieks and giggles as the commissionaire lumbers heavily forwards.
Fans are waiting for David Bowie of Beckenham, Kent. Apprentice mime, failed Tibetan monk, and angel of the bisexual apocalypse in his frocks and eye-shadow... and now, at 28, with over two million record albums sold in Britain, concert tours sold out in America – and worldwide riots – one of the biggest and certainly the unlikeliest rock ‘n’ roll superstar in the world.
The slow climb up in the 1960s
In the beginning there was no David Bowie, so he had to invent himself. He began as David Jones, son of a public relations man for Dr Barnardo’s Homes. Already at 17 he had a band: Davy Jones and the Lower Third. "I was a really heavy mod," he recalls. The band was a big-noise affair, somewhat modelled after Pete Townshend’s Who (then called the High Numbers).
By the age of 19 he had quit his job as visualiser for an ad agency and was a full-time musician. The transformation from Jones to Bowie was effected because of the rise to packaged stardom of the Monkees, who had a Davy Jones all their own, and the transformation to sci-fi androgyne was shaped by 18 months with Lindsay Kemp’s underground mime troupe. By the later 60s Bowie was well established on the (then thriving) London underground circuit doing a melange of mime, poetry, song and dance.
And then, in 1969, he put out a record, a freakish and eerie single, called Space Oddity. It became a surprise hit, huge in America and in England straight to number one. Bowie was 22, and a star.
Bowie's persona is one of calculated outrage, but the bigger the outrage, the bigger the hits. The world, it seems, is ready for David Bowie.
But it came too soon. Bowie recalls the agony of ballrooms, being booed as he went on (in Dylanesque curls) by bovver-booted skinheads. "It turned me off the business." Still at the top, he cut out and started an arts lab near his new home, Beckenham. It faltered, and Bowie found a new manager.
The hits began to come again. Singles and albums. The act, or the persona, became more and more one of calculated outrage, but the bigger the outrage, the bigger the hits. The world, it seems, is ready for David Bowie.
I met up with the Bowie menage while he was touring America with a new act. Tonight, and for several nights, they are playing New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Angie Bowie, his look-alike wife, and Zowie Bowie, the baby daughter, are elsewhere. Touring is gruelling.
Radio City — a palace of Art Deco, best-known for its leggy chorus line of silver lame Rockettes — is a splendid venue for Bowie’s special brand of… Glam Rock? Rock ‘n’ Rouge? Call it what you like. The show starts with a six-strong band and a soul chorus dominated by Luther Vandross, a portly 21-year-old singer/songwriter, Ava Cherry and her frizzle of snow-blonde hair, and Geoff McCormack, a childhood friend of Bowie’s whose stage name is Warren Peace.
David Bowie as his persona Ziggy Stardust in the early 1970s. Alamy
Not women's dresses, but men's
As he comes on, there is turbulence in the aisles, a scamper of teenage girls, which Bowie rewards with that wasted, brilliant smile. He has the emaciated fineness of a very grand old lady (Greta Garbo, Marlene), and his body has the paper-thin elegance of a fashion drawing in accoutrements, which ring changes on the tatty shocks of yesteryear (the gilded jock-straps, the leopardette, and the dresses which, Bowie punctiliously explains, aren’t women’s dresses – but men’s.
But now he has out-distanced all imitators, and is wearing an ornately flared pepper-and-salt suit, its jacket to a length we used to call "bum-freezer". Also a fob chain and a shiny black cane.
And the act? Well, it’s an expertly paced mix of hard rockers, lighter boogie numbers, and the eerie set-pieces with which Bowie made his name. Listening, I contemplate his predecessors, contemporaries, followers. The mod destructiveness of the Who, and Alice Cooper, who beheads dolls… the science-fiction weirdnesses of Pink Floyd, the urban camp ambiance of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol’s original Velvet Underground… and most of all the feline violence and unisex hints of Mick Jagger.
He may not be a great performer. But, even if the starlight is tinsel on plaster, he is, unquestionably, a star.
But David Bowie remains special. He hardly puts a foot wrong, even during appalling sketches hoofing onstage with two singer/dancers. He may not be a great performer. But, even if the starlight is tinsel on plaster, he is, unquestionably, a star.
Rehearsing a show for American television, Bowie demands: "Are you sure you’ve got that monitor at the level it was good at before?" His voice is surprising, an unreconstructed cockney, reminding one that on early records he mimicked Anthony Newley. The monitors are OK, and he launches into 1984; the relict from a projected musical on Orwell’s novel.
Bowie’s career is filled with unrealised projects: the expressed intention of filming the science fiction classic, Stranger in a Strange Land, and, a couple of years back, of retiring from live concerts. Now, a projected part with Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda in The Bluebird of Happiness, with George Cukor directing.
The interview is with Dick Cavett; in America, the thinking man’s talk show host, but politely incredulous at Bowie, and Bowie, for his part, notably ill at ease, waits and pokes at the orange shag carpet fretfully with his cane.
The questions are standard. Bowie’s favourite book right now? There isn’t one. Except a book of photographs by Diane Arbus, which he nicked from Mick Jagger. The audience moans softly, but Cavett, instead of exploring the (close) relationship with Jagger or indeed the liking for Arbus, chronicler of the freakish, the lonely, the ugly, wants to know what "nicked" means.
Why doesn’t he fly? He’s scared, Bowie says. And is he bothered when he walks around New York? "I drive around New York," Bowie corrects.
David Bowie as his persona Ziggy Stardust in the early 1970s. Alamy
No questions about politics, please
Finally, Cavett asks if Bowie doesn’t think it’s a pity that London is being so spoiled? Bowie flies into a tizzy. "Don’t ask me about politics," he insists.
He rises to perform, and Cavett sits at the side of the stage in a pool of shadow. "Cavett’s a word man," one of the fans says, acutely, "David should have done it all in mime. Right?" Right.
The first date after New York is Cleveland, an industrial town in the Middle West. It is not a particularly good night – problems with the acoustics – and nobody really expects to see much of Bowie afterwards, but later that night he flits into the hotel bar, looking ineffably fragile in a pale green siren suit.
People, including rock stars themselves, habitually expect rock stars to be penetrating about politics, literature, social issues, but what they are, after all, is musicians. Bowie chats about reggae, shies away from anything too heavy ("I’m not academic," he observes).
So we sit and listen. Mainly to Bowie’s own music, Bowie miming to his own sound, with huge glee. Indeed, rapture. Smiling that marvellous androgynous smile. Suddenly it is six am and time to leave.
I had thought to have seen the last of this bizarre and fragile phenomenon, but early the next morning I was leaving en route to Los Angeles. And here, flanked by two heavies, was David Bowie in the lift.
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He was looking nattily butch in a pale grey suit, his flesh translucently white; Garbo playing Camille. "No, not finished yet," he said wanly, in that incongruously throaty voice. "See you again." And swept on to Washington in a Cadillac.
Authors
Anthony Haden-Guest
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