Paul Trynka - Starman: David Bowie. The Definitive Biography

IGGY POP: OPEN UP AND BLEED

PORTRAIT OF THE BLUES

DENIM

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-74812-991-1

Copyright Paul Trynka 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.hachette.co.uk

To Kazimierz and Maureen: Heroes

CONTENTS

T hursday evening, seven oclock: decadence is about to arrive in five million front rooms. Neatly suited dads are leaning back in the comfiest chair, mums in their pinnies are clearing away the dishes, while the kids still in school shirts and trousers are clustered around the small television for their most sacred weekly ritual.

The tiny studio audience, milling around in tank tops and dresses, clap politely as the artist at number forty-one in the charts strums out two minor chords on his blue twelve-string guitar. The camera cuts from his hands to his face, catching the barest hint of a smirk like a child hoping to get away with something naughty. But then as his friends Trevor, Woody and Mick Ronson clatter into action with a rollicking drum roll and throaty guitar, the camera pulls back and David Bowie meets its gaze, unflinchingly. His look is lascivious, amused. As an audience of excited teens and outraged parents struggle to take in the multicoloured quilted jumpsuit, the luxuriant carrot-top hairdo, spiky teeth and those sparkling, mascaraed come-to-bed eyes, he sings us through an arresting succession of images: radios, aliens, get-it-on rock n roll. The audience is still grappling with this confusing, over-the-top spectacle when a staccato guitar rings out a Morse code warning, and then, all too suddenly, were into the chorus.

From the disturbingly new, we shift to the reassuringly familiar: as he croons out Theres a star man Bowies voice leaps up an octave. Its an ancient Tin Pan Alley songwriters trick, signalling a release, a climax. And as we hear of the friendly alien waiting in the sky, the audience suddenly recognises a tune, and a message, lifted openly, outrageously, from Over the Rainbow, Judy Garlands escapist, Technicolor wartime anthem. Its simple, singalong, comforting territory, and it lasts just four bars, before David Bowie makes his bid for immortality. Less than one minute after his face first appeared on Top of the Pops the BBCs family-friendly music programme Bowie lifts his slim, graceful hand to the side of his face and his platinum-haired bandmate Mick Ronson joins him at the microphone. Then, casually, coolly, Bowie places his arm around the guitarists neck, and pulls Ronson lovingly towards him. Theres the same octave leap as he sings starman again, but this time it doesnt suggest escaping the bounds of earth; it symbolises escaping the bounds of sexuality.

The fifteen-million-strong audience struggles to absorb this exotic, pan-sexual creature: in countless households, the kids are entranced in their hundreds, in thousands as parents sneer, shout or walk out of the room. But even as they wonder how to react, theres another stylistic swerve; with the words let the children boogie, David Bowie and The Spiders break into an unashamed T. Rex boogie rhythm. For a generation of teenagers, there was no hesitation; those ninety seconds, on a sunny evening in July 1972, would change the course of their lives. Up to this point, pop music had been mainly about belonging, about identification with your peers. This music, carefully choreographed in a dank basement under a south London escort agency, was a spectacle of not-belonging. For scattered, isolated kids around the UK, and soon the East Coast of America, and then the West Coast, this was their day. The day of the outsider.

In the weeks that followed, it became obvious that these three minutes had put a rocket under the career of a man all-too recently dismissed as a one-hit wonder. Most people who knew him were delighted, but there were hints of suspicion. Hip Vera Lynn, one cynical friend called it, in a pointed reference to The White Cliffs of Dover the huge wartime hit that had also ripped off Judy Garlands best-known song; this homage was too knowing. A few weeks later, to emphasise the point, David started singing somewhere over the rainbow over the chorus of Starman as if to prove Pablo Picassos maxim that talent borrows, genius steals.

And steal he had, with a clear-eyed effrontery as shocking as the lifted melodies themselves. The way he collaged several old tunes into a new song was a musical tradition as old as the hills, one still maintained by Davids old-school showbiz friends like Lionel Bart, the writer of Oliver! . Yet to boast of this homage , to show the joins, brazenly, like the lift shafts of the Pompidou centre, was a new trick a post-modernism that was just as unsettling as the post-sexuality hed shown off with that arm lovingly curled over Mick Ronsons shoulder. This appropriation might have been a hot notion in the art scene, thanks to Andy Warhol, but for a rock n roller to declare Im a tasteful thief defied a sacred convention that rock n roll was an authentic, visceral medium. Rock n roll was real ; born out of joy and anguish in the turmoil of post-war America, and sculpted into the first electric blues. But David flaunted his lack of authenticity with brazen abandon. The only art Ill ever study is stuff I can steal from. I do think that my plagiarism is effective, he told an interviewer. The open lifting of iconic sounds was a disturbing new form of genius. But was rock n roll now just an art game? Was the flame-haired Ziggy Stardust potent symbol of otherness just an intellectual pose?

When David Bowie made his mark so elegantly, so extravagantly, that night on Top of the Pops , in a thrilling performance that marked out the seventies as a decade distinct from the sixties, every one of those contradictions was obvious; in fact, they added a delicious tension. In the following months and years as he dumped the band who had shaped his music; when his much-touted influences like Iggy Pop, the man whod inspired Ziggy, dismissed him as a fuckin carrot-top who had exploited and then sabotaged him; when David himself publicly moaned that his gay persona had damaged his career in the US those contradictions became more obvious still.

So was David Bowie truly an outsider? Or was he a showbiz pro, exploiting outsiders like a psychic vampire? Was he really a starman, or was it all cheap music-hall tinsel and glitter? Was he gay or was it all a mask? There was evidence aplenty for both. And that evidence multiplied in the following months and years as fans witnessed wide-mouthed astonishing moments like his wired, fractured appearance on The Dick Cavett Show , or his twitchy but charming approachability on Soul Train . Was this bizarre behaviour also a mask? A carefully choreographed routine?

In the following years David Bowie, and those around him, would struggle to answer this question. Hed emerged from a showbiz tradition propelled chiefly by youthful ambition, his main talent that of repositioning the brand, as one friend puts it. That calculation, that executive ability, as Iggy Pop describes it, marked him out as the very antithesis of instinctive rock n roll heroes like Elvis Presley. Yet the actions that apparently signalled the death of rock n roll announced a rebirth, too. Maybe this wasnt rock n roll like Elvis had made it, but it led the way for where rock n roll would go. Successors like Prince or Madonna, Bono or Lady Gaga, each seized on Bowies repositioning the brand as a set-piece example of how to avoid artistic culs-de-sac like the one that imprisoned Elvis. For Bowie himself, though, each brand renewal, each metamorphosis, would come at a cost.