![]() Counterintuitively, he and Iggy made the decision to get straight in Berlin. Keeping his own urine in the fridge to ward off evil spirits and bringing up Hitler in interviews more often than Ken Livingstone does, his world was coming apart at the seams in Los Angeles, and so with just a suitcase and Iggy Pop in tow, the Thin White Duke returned to Europe. How Bowie managed to make a record as good as Station To Station in 1976 while cooked out of his nut is anyone's guess – but there it was. "Starman" is great too, and the story goes that when he performed it on Top of the Pops, he looked so unashamedly effete that your granddad put his foot through the telly. But with songs as wonderful as "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", "Five Years", "Soul Love", "Hang On To Yourself" and "Moonage Daydream", one can only surmise familiarity breeds contempt. In many ways, the album is Bowie's Sgt Pepper – for years regarded as his indelible masterpiece, it has fallen out of favour somewhat with the albums from his Berlin trilogy (we'll get to those in a bit). Sitting at the pinnacle of this persona, a counterparts of sorts to Hunky Dory, is The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ![]() Like the Beatles before him, Bowie took on the persona of an imaginary artist, though he extended it to lengths that would later be exacerbated by excessive cocaine use. It's also difficult to imagine what a lifeline it was for kids who'd been hiding their sexuality who hitherto assumed it was just them and Are You Being Served? comedy actor John Inman. ![]() It's hard to imagine how much consternation this caused just five years after homosexuality had been legalised, especially as the singer had a wife, Angie. When promoting the record in January 1972, Bowie told Melody Maker, "I'm gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones". The epic, abstract ballads ("Life On Mars?"), the idolatry ("Andy Warhol", "Song For Bob Dylan"), the Velvet Underground pastiche ("Queen Bitch"), the obscure cover ("Fill Your Heart) and the achingly personal folk song wrapped up in a conundrum (The Bewlay Brothers") – this album is a great place to begin, and I know this, because that's where I started. This article may serve as an in, but there can only ever be one version of David Bowie and that's your own.Īfter years of drifting between genres and never quite appearing comfortable in his own skin, Hunky Dory is the record where everything seemed to come together. Maybe you're wondering what all the fuss is about. At this stage you may only know deceased Bowie, the colossal cultural deity whose music you've heard bits of but which hasn't resonated yet. As such, he is never short of fascinating once you have a foot in. He is a vessel, a fount of knowledge and a gateway to other cultural experiences. "Will Schoenberg lie comfortably with Little Richard?" He was a magpie who stole myriad shiny objects and built masterworks worthy of Gustav Klimt. "What happens if you transplant the French chanson with the Philly sound?" he asked the Berklee College of Music on accepting his honorary doctorate in 1999. His lyrics often lead you down labyrinthian corridors of arcane literature, problematic philosophy and scary religion, too – an elaborate patchwork of all his influences. A voracious reader who was unquenchably curious and artistically suggestible, his personas were often an amalgam of other people's thoughts. No rock star was ever more image conscious, yet he was happy for others to perpetuate the myths once he'd introduced the concept. In interviews he was often diffident and obliging, agreeing with whatever the interviewer said in order to allow them to project their own exegeses onto him and then go away and write up their own versions of him. As the cliche goes, he is many things to many people. Paul Morley's The Age Of Bowie hit shops that July and bombarded us with abstract slogans: Bowie is Man Ray singing Billy Fury Bowie is not David Jones Bowie is giving birth to himself over and over again… But while Morley's book prompted head scratching and little else, he was right about one thing: David Bowie is a figment of imagination, a concept of your own choosing. Many more arrived in the wake of his death – some trying to make sense of his legacy and others only causing further obfuscation. ![]() There have been around 200 books written about Bowie: some of them good, some of them awful, but tellingly none with the Brixton-born singer's co-operation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |