Some things are hard to admit. Pilfering cigarettes from your Mum’s dinner party would be one. Using the same train ticket for six weeks would be another. But admitting David Bowie hasn’t been much cop for about 25 years – well, that takes real emotional courage.
If there was ever an artist touched by an almost supernatural genius, surely it was Bowie. From 1969’s 'Space Oddity' to 1980’s 'Scary Monsters', he produced a body of near faultless work. Not simply interesting or satisfactory, but heart-stopping in its scope, invention and creativity. What’s more, unlike contemporaries Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, he was a household name and hugely commercially successful. Even the more experimental exercises on 'Low' and 'Heroes' did nothing to detract from his standing as one of the world’s most admired, dazzling and purchased recording artists.
But Bowie was always a breed apart. While Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones were firmly anchored in the rhythm and blues which spawned their careers (likewise Dylan and protest folk), David Bowie appeared to be creating brand new genres on a six monthly basis – sci-fi rock, glam, white soul, industrial synth and more. If he was ever too camp or outré for the post-hippy musical traditionalists, he was never dissuaded from his theatrical adventures and constant re-invention. Indeed his approach dared the conservative plodders still adhering to the twelve bar formulae of Deep Purple and the nascent metal acts to re-think everything. Through the 70s, only T-Rex and Roxy Music really challenged rock and roll convention with anything like the same vigor. Until punk, it would have been a very dreary decade without Bowie, Bolan and Ferry. And Bowie led that trinity.
Punk is often seen as a year zero. This was the movement with the scorched earth policy, which took no prisoners and left the old school dying in the dust. But there was an exception. Indeed, the Bromley Contingent – the Sex Pistols’ fan base, which gave birth to Siouxsie and the Banshees and Generation X – came together through their shared admiration of David Bowie.
In the early 80s, The Blitz Kids (later New Romantics) arrived to replace the stagnating punks and who was their figurehead? Who pushed them to a wider audience via his Ashes To Ashes video?
And yet, and yet. Even as Bowie led Steve Strange and his friends along that beach, in their nun, priest and clown costumes, David Bowie was only a couple of years from the ‘Tonight’ album and drop in quality so marked, it was hard to believe this was the same artist and not some imposter recruited to compensate for the real David’s unexplained disappearance.
This was no forgivable blip. After ‘Tonight’ things went from bad to worse. I recall a press conference to launch the Glass Spider tour in 1987. Bowie seemed to be subtly acknowledging his frailties and promising a return to form, with fantastic sets and a fine band. Most of us believed him until we saw the gigs. Dismay rapidly set in as we gazed upon a mulleted man in a crimson jump suit with plastic wings, trolling out anemic versions of his old hits and new stuff so lame it was hard not to wander off to the pizza stand shaking one's head.
‘Never Let Me Down’ – the album he was plugging - was a new low (as opposed to a new ‘Low’, sadly) bringing grown men to tears of disappointment and frustration.
Admittedly forming a ‘proper’ band was at least unexpected and did much to give us hope of a Bowie revival and new impetus for the man who once made songs like ‘Scary Monsters and Supercreeps’ sound at once effortless and so astonishingly good they may well have been beamed from another dimension. Surely he still had that ability in his head and that power in his heart. No, not really.
The Tin Machine project has enjoyed some retrospective kudos, but not much. They were superficially noisy and owned some smashing suits, but their output was never anything inspiring and had they not had Bowie as their lead singer, they would never had managed so much as a contract, let alone two albums.
I’d like to pinpoint a moment when it all came right, but I cannot. At the same time it is also too painful to recount the evaporation of the man’s talent, release by release, track by track. So the simple truth is this: somewhere around 1983 David Bowie lost it. Whether you include the ‘Let’s Dance’ collection as the start of the decline or regard it as Bowie’s last great (albeit very mainstream) album is a moot point – nevertheless either just before or just after the release of that huge selling LP, an unexplained rot set in.
Maybe such a level of exceptional achievement is just unsustainable and we should be grateful that Bowie’s abilities were so mighty they carried him through a fifteen year period of unbroken highs. Perhaps Bowie’s only failing was forgetting to retire in 1984. But being a rock star isn’t like being a civil engineer and I can’t think of a single example of a famous musician simply putting down pen and guitar to spend their days in a country cottage. And as a solo artist, David could hardly split up.
Earlier this week, Radio 2 re-broadcast a live performance given by David Bowie to a select BBC audience in 2002. Although the man was in fine avuncular form between songs, the set was heavy on material from that year's so-so ‘Heathen’ album and, although admirably eclectic, firmly resisted the spectacular glories of 'The Man Who Sold The World' or 'Aladdin Sane'.
Then, without warning, he rolled out the divine ‘Bewlay Brothers’ from 1971’s ‘Hunky Dory’. And how it leapt from the DAB, sublime genius rippling through every note, every cadence. Sung with conviction, style and skill, the Bowie we fell in love with was right there.
And then he was gone.
Magnus Shaw, February 2011
