Hallo spaceboy : the rebirth of David Bowie

417 Pages·2006·3.91 MB·English

by  Bowie

HALLO SPACEBOY
THE REBIRTH OF DAVID BOWIE
HALLO SPACEBOY
THE REBIRTH OF DAVID BOWIE
DAVE THOMPSON
Copyright © Dave Thompson, 2006
Published by ECW PRESS
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200 , Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written
permission of the copyright owners and ECW press.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing In Publication Thompson, Dave, 1960 Jan. 3–
Hallo spaceboy : the rebirth of David Bowie / Dave Thompson.
ISBN 1-55022-733-5
1. Bowie, David. 2. Rock musicians—England—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.B784T46 2006 782.42166’092 C2006-900494-3
Developing editor: Jennifer Hale
Typesetting: Gail Nina
Cover design: David Gee
Text design: Tania Craan
Cover photo: Lester Cohen / WireImage.com
Color section, in order: Philippe Auliac; Philippe Auliac;
Richard Beland; Richard Beland; Fernando Aceves;
Fernando Aceves; Fernando Aceves (top and bottom); Fernando Aceves;
Fernando Aceves (top and bottom); Richard Beland; Philippe Auliac;
Richard Beland; Richard Beland; Philippe Auliac; PhilippeAuliac;
Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com
Ticket stubs courtesy: Robert Thompson (pp. 7, 64, 84);
Graham McDougall (pp. 63, 75, 150, 155, 180, 183);
Bianca Dietrich (p. 153); Simone Metge (pp. 185, 195, 212, 223, 240,
261, 262, 266, 274, 276, 279, 282)
Printing: Transcontinental
DISTRIBUTION
CANADA : Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Avenue, Georgetown, ON, L7G
5S4
UNITED STATES : Independent Publishers Group, 814 North Franklin Street,
Chicago, Illinois 60610
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE – Kissing the Viper’s Fang
CHAPTER TWO – Don’t Look on the Carpet
CHAPTER THREE – Andy, Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?
CHAPTER FOUR – I’m Glad You’re Older Than Me
CHAPTER FIVE – When It’s Good, It’s Really Good
CHAPTER SIX – Where Have All Papa’s Heroes Gone?
CHAPTER SEVEN – Nail Me To My Car
CHAPTER EIGHT – Don’t Forget to Keep Your Head Warm
CHAPTER NINE – Standing Tall in the Dark
CHAPTER TEN – Business Cesspools Hating Through our Sleeves
CHAPTER ELEVEN – Living for the Best Times
CHAPTER TWELVE – Like Seeing Jesus on Dateline
CHAPTER THIRTEEN – Everyone Says “Hi”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN – Breaking the Ruptured Structures
FURTHER READING
DISCOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For interviews and conversations conducted in person, by phone or via e-mail
over the course of the past decade and more, all awaiting the day when they
could fall into this framework, my thanks to: Carlos Alomar, Brett Anderson, Ian
Astbury, Boz Boorer, Chris Carter, Billy Corgan, Peter Frampton, Lisa
Germano, Dave Grohl, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Nile Rodgers, Mick Ronson, Tony
Secunda, Robert Smith, James Stevenson, Tony Visconti, together with
everybody who agreed to speak with me, but asked that they not be identified.
Grateful acknowledgments also go out to everybody at ECW, to Amy Hanson
and Jo-Ann Greene, and to everybody else who helped bring the beast to life:
Anchorite Man, Bateerz and family, Blind Pew, Mrs. B East, Ella and Sprocket,
Gaye and Tim, Gef the Talking Mongoose, the Gremlins who live in the furnace,
JD, K-Mart and Snarleyyowl, Geoff Monmouth, Naughty Miranda, Nutkin,
Pointy Ghost Face, Sonny, a lot of Thompsons and Neville Viking.
Finally, two dedications: to Sherrill Chidiac, my agent for ten great years, but
who passed away just as this book reached its final phase; and to the boy who
wrote “Cygnet Committee,” and who still sounds like he meant it. This book
would not have happened without the two of you.
INTRODUCTION
When the covers closed on the first volume of this biography, Moonage
Daydream, back in 1987, it would have been a brave soul indeed who
prophesied a second volume. Never Let Me Down, Bowie’s album that year, was
almost universally hammered, not because it was a bad record, but because it
was the wrong one for the time and place in which it was released. Three years
before the end of the decade, rock was in desperate need of fresh direction. The
firestorms that had shaken and shaped it through the early 1980s had long since
passed; worse than that, they had been utterly subverted, absorbed into the body
of an “entertainment industry” that valued everything for which rock ’n’ roll had
once been anathema.
Hindsight offers any number of flash points, from the British New Romantic
crowd dancing with royalty at sundry showbiz galas, through to Live Aid, the
single most successful charity event in rock history (and the single most
damaging blow to the notion that rock stands outside the societal norm).
True, there were bands who didn’t play at Live Aid, and who wouldn’t have
if they’d been asked — there were even one or two, led by such (then)
underground concerns as Chumbawamba and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who
spoke out against the notion that a day of live music could suddenly reverse the
western world’s culture of greed and selfishness. But bands such as these
operated so far below the mainstream radar that they could only preach to the
same handful of listeners they’d always spoken to. To the public in general, the
rock rebellion had finally thrown in the towel — and now it could reap the
rewards of its common sense.
Shocked and shaken by their elevation to a level of royalty that had hitherto
been afforded only to the true aristocrats of rock — the Stones and ex-Beatles,
Cliff and Dead Elvis — performers that were scarcely worthy of tying John
Lennon’s shoelaces were suddenly pronouncing on all of the world’s faults and
failings, or else subverting any urge to rock the boat that they might have
entertained, and delving deep into the soft, gooey underbelly of “mass
entertainment” with records that might have made all the right noises in all the
right places, but actually said — and did — nothing. Worthless platters from
pointless prognosticators.
David Bowie had already made a couple of albums that fell into that void,
although one (1983’s Let’s Dance) was so successful that its manifold failings
remain a closely guarded secret more than twenty years on, while the other
(1984’s Tonight) is usually best ignored. Besides, every artist should be
permitted the odd dodgy stretch, where the music and the mind fall out of step
with one another. But surely enough had occurred in the years since then, both
personally and in the wider world of music, to stir Bowie back to some form of
outrageous opinion? Rock was looking for leaders, and, as he had done so often
before, Bowie was expected to be among them.
Instead, he delivered Never Let Me Down, an album that, while vastly
superior to Tonight and eternally more enjoyable than Let’s Dance, nevertheless
completed a trilogy as solid and unmistakable as either the Ziggy/Aladdin/Dogs
triumvirate of the glam era, or the Low/“Heroes”/Lodger lineup of the late
1970s. The problem was, this one was as brutally out of synch with its times as
those albums had been brilliantly aware of theirs (although, let us not forget,
both Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs were given a rough ride by the media,
while the bulk of Lodger remains better in theory than in the actual execution).
Much of the credit for Never Let Me Down’s renaissances, such as they were,
must go to Bowie’s choice in collaborators. David Richards, Erdal Kizilcay and
Carlos Alomar were familiar names from the past, of course, each well aware of
precisely what the boss man wanted, and how he’d want it done. The wild card,
however, was Peter Frampton, the second most famous man to have attended
Beckenham Secondary School.
Frampton had been a couple of years behind Bowie at school, but he was a
couple of years ahead of him in the stardom game. Frampton had been a chart
topper with The Herd while Bowie was still stringing out the sixties in a variety
of novelty voices; he was a stadium filler with Humble Pie while Bowie played
the folk clubs and bars; and a bona fide superstar while Bowie played at
provincial Godhead. But by the early eighties, Frampton had — in commercial
terms at least — fallen on hard times, withdrawing from the front line to
concentrate on his family and homelife.
By 1986, however, a new album, Premonition, had reawakened Frampton’s
hunger, and a surprise phone call from Bowie, raving about the record, did the
rest.
“I was on the road, in Chicago, and the phone rang: ‘Hi, it’s Dave . . . I’ve
just heard your new album and I want you to come to Switzerland and do some
of that great playing on my new record.’ So he sent me a ticket and I went over
there.”
there.”
Frampton plays on all but three of the songs on Never Let Me Down, and he
views the album as one that has withstood the test of time considerably better
than Bowie himself thinks it has.
“He was great with it at the time,” the guitarist recalls. “He’s always got a
great excitement. I’ve seen him record before, and he gets very intense, he really
gets into it. It’s this way or no way at all, and then someone says ‘try it this way’
and he’ll go, ‘yeah, you were right.’ But he’s totally in control of every aspect,
he doesn’t pass the buck as it were, and let someone else do the dirty work.”
This is in stark contradiction to Bowie’s own insistence that he barely showed
his face at the sessions, preferring to let “the guys arrange it, then I’d come in
and do a vocal, then bugger off and pick up a bird.” But Frampton will not
budge. “The first thing he did when I got there was give me cassettes of the
tracks, and show me the lyrics he was proud of; he’d got a new baby and he
wanted to share it. It was great.”
It cannot be denied that Frampton’s effortless leads, themselves a virtual
summation of everything he himself stood for, helped raise several tracks way
above the expected quality level. Others catapulted from a corner of Bowie’s
talent that had never been given its voice before. The song “Zeroes,” in which
Ziggy meets Prince on the way back from an early Traffic gig; the buoyant pop
laziness of the album’s final mini-hit, “Never Let Me Down”; and the frankly
bizarre “Glass Spider,” all stood so far from the norm that they were all but
revolutionary.
Bowie’s subsequent habit of writing off Never Let Me Down as just another
ill-advised album at a time when he really should not have been making music,
is especially galling when one considers the strength of this trio. “Time Will
Crawl,” another genuinely powerful but conventional song, only amplifies the
injustice. Maybe he was treading water, if only in terms of the experimentation
that established his reputation. But even that was preferable to what most of his
contemporaries were doing — to what he himself had so recently been doing —
as the black hole that was the eighties continued gorging on its own lifeblood.
Neither was Bowie about to allow Never Let Me Down to disappear into the
ether like Tonight had. He neither toured for Tonight, nor broke his back
promoting it, to the point where the hyper-epic Jazzing for Blue Jean video
remains many people’s sole memory of the entire debacle. This time, however,
he announced a world tour that would dwarf even the extravaganzas of the early
to mid-1970s, a veritable Broadway spectacular that would showcase the new