ebook img

The Complete David Bowie PDF

1459 Pages·2011·6.07 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview The Complete David Bowie

THE COMPLETE DAVID BOWIE EXPANDED and updated SIXTH EDITION NICHOLAS PEGG TITAN BOOKS © Front cover: Performing ‘My Death’ on Russell Harty Plus Pop, 17 January 1973 (photograph ITV / Rex Features) © Back cover (top): Performing ‘Cracked Actor’ at the Vorst Nationaal, Brussels, 19 May 1983 (photograph Ilpo Musto / Rex Features) Back cover (bottom): Performing ‘New Killer Star’ at the Isle of Wight Festival, 13 June 2004 (photograph © Brian Rasic / Rex Features) THE COMPLETE DAVID BOWIE ISBN: 9780857682901 Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd. 144 Southwark St. London SE1 0UP First Titan edition: September 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 © The Complete David Bowie copyright Nicholas Pegg 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011. All rights reserved. The moral right of Nicholas Pegg to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. Did you enjoy this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please e-mail us at: [email protected] or write to Reader Feedback at the above address. Designed by Amazing 15, based on original design by Chris Bentley. To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website: www.titanbooks.com 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 written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the USA. CONTENTS Introduction: The Music Is Outside How To Use This Book 1 THE SONGS FROM A TO Z 2 THE ALBUMS (i) Official Albums (ii) Soundtrack Albums (iii) Other Artists’ Albums (iv) David Bowie Compilation Albums (v) Various Artists’ Compilation Albums 3 LIVE 4 THE BBC RADIO SESSIONS 5 THE VIDEOS 6 THE ACTOR 7 THE ARTIST AND THE WRITER 8 INTERACTIVE 9 APOCRYPHA 10 DATELINE 11 SINGLES DISCOGRAPHY Afterword: Future Legend Sources & Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION: THE MUSIC IS OUTSIDE “The piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation – and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle.” David Bowie, December 1999 On 8 January 1947 Elvis Presley celebrated his twelfth birthday and Stephen Hawking his fifth. In New York, Jackson Pollock made his first drip-painting. In London the day began with a portent, when freezing conditions caused the Lambeth Town Hall clock to strike thirteen times at midnight. Less than half a mile away, at 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, Peggy Burns gave birth to a baby boy. This book is about that boy, but it is not a biography. It’s a reference work which, it is to be hoped, will satisfy the enthusiast and inform the newcomer. To both I implore: if you want to enjoy David Bowie’s work to the full, keep an open mind. What makes Bowie such a supremely fascinating artist is that his career presents an implicit challenge to conventional notions of creative continuity. He has repeatedly confounded attempts to pigeon-hole him as this or that kind of artist, and the result has been one of rock music’s longest and most successful careers. “People would like artists to be expendable, to fit into one generation or another,” said Bowie’s painter friend Julian Schnabel in 1997. “They don’t like it when somebody keeps going.” Bowie himself is fond of quoting a maxim of Brian Eno’s, as he did on Radio 2’s Golden Years documentary in March 2000: “In art you can crash your plane and walk away from it. If you have that chance, you should take it. The worst thing would be to maintain a particular kind of celebrity and commercial success for the entire career, and then look back and think of all the things that one could have tried and could have done, and think – why didn’t I do that?” There will always be those who mistrust Bowie because he borrows other people’s ideas. Serious glam-rockers will state a preference for Marc Bolan, advocates of synthesizer minimalism will go straight to Kraftwerk, soul-boys grimace at Young Americans, drum’n’bass aficionados have no time for Earthling. Bowie’s ability to remake his music, his appearance and even his personality has prompted some to accuse his work of a kind of fundamental dishonesty. The charge frequently levelled against Bowie throughout his career is that he is a dilettante, a style vampire who has his finger on the pulse but never his hand on his heart. “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second- hand ideas,” said Brian Eno in 1999, “but that sounds like a definition of pop to me. It’s a folk art. It’s only in the conceited fine arts that we’re supposed to be totally original and pretend that it came out of nowhere, straight from God to us. In pop music, everyone is listening to everyone else.” A decade earlier Bowie had told Melody Maker that “There’s no point in just ripping something off, but if you hear something and think, ‘I like what that guy is doing; I know what I can do with that’, it’s like having a new colour to paint with, and I think it depends very much on what you do with that colour once you’ve found it.” The not uncommon hypothesis that the Ziggy Stardust period is Bowie’s only true moment of relevance is based on the circumstantial fact that that’s when the public at large happened to start buying him. “I know that they were decisive years for me,” David said in 1998, “because for the first time I had a real audience. But at the same time, I really worked hard before 1970.” Glam rock was merely the latest idiom of an artist who had already worked though the guises of R&B frontman, Mod, psychedelic balladeer, Dylanesque protest singer and embryonic prog-rocker. Bowie has attributed the long years of his pre-fame struggle to the very fact that he was unwilling to nail his colours to one stylistic mast: “At that point, particularly, it wasn’t ‘right’ to have an interest in all areas,” he said in 1999. “It was make-your-mind-up time. You were either a folk singer or a rock singer or a blues guitarist ... I felt: well, I don’t wanna be like this. I wanna keep my options open; there’s lots of things I like.” In 2003 he described his creative principle as “an undiminished idea of variability. I don’t think there’s one truth, one absolute. It’s an idea that I have always felt instinctively, but it was reinforced by the first thing I read on postmodernism, a book by George Steiner called In Bluebeard’s Castle. That book just confirmed for me that there was actually some kind of theory behind what I was doing with my work – realizing that I could like artists as disparate as Anthony Newley and Little Richard, and that it was not wrong to like both at the same time. Or that I can like Igor Stravinsky and The Incredible String Band, or The Velvet Underground and Gustav Mahler. That all just made sense to me.” Commercially Ziggy Stardust was of massive significance, but artistically it was just another milestone on the meandering road of discovery. Bowie may not have invented glam, but the point is that he conquered it. Unlike Bolan, he then escaped it. A few years later he repeated the same pattern with synthesizer pop, dropping a few classic albums our way and leaving behind another trail of imitators who failed to move on. That’s what makes him David Bowie. And that’s why, despite the occasional commercial jackpot, Bowie’s music has never been wholly accepted in America, where honesty and denim and Bruce Springsteen are what rock music is all about: “I’m not a guy that gets on stage and tells you how my day’s just gone,” he once remarked. Bowie’s work is about artifice, about allusion, about signifying the enactment of rock music. “I feel like an actor when I’m on stage, rather than a rock artist,” he told Rolling Stone in 1972. Twenty-five years later he informed another interviewer that “Bertolt Brecht believed that it was impossible for an actor to express real emotion in a natural form every night. Instead, you portray the emotion symbolically. You don’t try to draw the audience into the emotional content of what you’re doing, but give them something to create their own dialogue about what you’re portraying. You play anger or love through stylistic gesture. The voice doesn’t rise and fall and the face doesn’t go through all the gambits you would portray as a naturalistic actor. I’ve done that an awful lot throughout my career. A lot of what is perceived as mannered performance or writing is a distancing from the subject matter to allow an audience to have their own association with what I’m writing about.” This sort of assertion creates a problem only for those who consider theatre to be somehow synonymous with insincerity. Working within an art form which jealously guards its stylistic boundaries and stigmatizes those who fail to define their artistic allegiances, David Bowie has made a career out of playing counter to the unwritten rules of rock. Many of the major artists he has professed to admire – people like Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop and Joni Mitchell – have won respect precisely because they have stuck to their guns, devoting whole careers to the meticulous exploration of a carefully defined musical landscape. By contrast, Bowie delights in presenting a moving target. Making no attempt to conceal his own short attention span and his assimilation of new enthusiasms, he constantly challenges our complacency as consumers, writing and rewriting the parameters of his work on the tabula rasa he calls David Bowie. “Sometimes I don’t feel like a person at all,” he said in 1972, “I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.” Warning against autobiographical readings of his 1999 album ‘hours...’, he told Q that “I am only the person the greatest number of people believe I am. So little of it has anything to do with me, so I just have to do the best I can with what I’ve got [a close paraphrase of the album’s opening line] – knowing that it has a complete second life by the time it leaves me.” Undoubtedly, a crucial part of Bowie’s enduring appeal is his ability to shed skins: “I find that I am a person who can take on the guises of different people that I meet,” he told Russell Harty in 1973. “I can switch accents in seconds of meeting someone ... I’ve always found that I collect. I’m a collector, and I’ve always just seemed to collect personalities and ideas.” In 1997 he reflected that “I create something out of my enthusiasms of that particular moment. I get reenthused by something else, and suddenly I don’t see that any more, and I’m over here. And that’s the way I am. I have no apology.” Any attempt to pry beneath the theatrical guises would be hugely missing the point, but it does not follow that Bowie’s music is therefore without substance or continuity. Collaborators, influences, hairstyles and even accents have come and gone, but as far as the essence of the work is concerned, rather too much has been made of Bowie’s “changes”. There’s an obvious blood relation between Hunky Dory, Low and 1.Outside, or any other random batch of albums you care to pick. “The reinvention thing, I don’t buy into that at all,” said David in 1997. “I think there’s a real continuity with what I do, and it’s just about expressing myself in a contemporaneous fashion.” In the same interview he mocked the facile commentaries all too frequently trotted out about his career: “I’m probably the chameleon of rock because what I do is all about ch- ch-changes! The clichés are a stack high.” (Meaningless comparisons between David Bowie and a certain genus of polychromatic lizard will not be a feature of this book. “It’s a piece of lazy journalism, for several reasons,” Bowie himself pointed out in 2003. “One reason, of course, is that the chameleon is always trying to blend into his surroundings, and I don’t think that’s exactly what I’m known for.”) There are, however, deeper resonances at play. Central to Bowie’s habit of dismantling his music and himself, and reassembling them in unexpected ways, is the recurring motif of a quest for the authentic self. His lyrics disclose an abiding preoccupation with burrowing through the layers of pretence to discover who is, in the words of ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’, “really you and really me”. In ‘Changes’ he “turned myself to face me” only to find that to do so was to “turn and face the strange”. There are encounters with sinister doppelgängers in countless songs. Bowie’s constant refrain in interviews throughout the 1970s and 1980s was that each new album or tour was about to unveil “the real me”. It’s a subject that has clearly concerned David throughout his career: “I’m not sure if that’s really me coming through in the songs,” he said in 1972. “They come out and I hear them afterward and I think, well, whoever wrote that really felt strongly about it. I can’t feel strongly. I get so numb.” The constantly shifting “me”, like the masks and mirrors that litter his lyrics, videos and concerts, are all part of Bowie’s galvanizing restlessness. As he said in 1976, “The minute you know you’re on safe ground, you’re dead. You’re finished. It’s over. The last thing I want is to be established.” Twenty years later he commented that “not knowing where you’re going is what makes it exciting for me. It leaves a permanently open landscape.” As he proved so (un)spectacularly with Tin Machine, Bowie is at his least interesting when he abandons the quest and tries to ape the rootsy authenticity of the rock’n’roll band. In 1997 the NME’s Stephen Dalton summed up the situation succinctly if hyperbolically: “Hating Bowie in 1997 means hating everything overblown, theatrical, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual and jarringly progressive in the past 25 years of pop. In other words, everything great about pop. It also means hating yourself.” Bowie’s early manager Kenneth Pitt wrote in his memoir that those who judge Bowie and “take as their yardstick rock and roll, fail to understand that David never was a devotee or exponent of rock and roll. Whenever he rocked and rolled he did so in the context of theatre, as an actor. It has been his most successful role to date.” The accepted wisdom of the rock fan – and of many Bowie fans – is to cast the eyes skyward and groan with embarrassment at Labyrinth and the Bing Crosby duet and all those silly early songs about gnomes and bombardiers, because they don’t fit in with our narrow preconception of what a credible rock singer should be doing. Why do we punish ourselves like this? Station To Station is a great rock album, but that doesn’t stop Labyrinth being a great children’s movie. They are different things, and Bowie excels at doing different things. No other artist of his stature straddles and thereby defies the conflict between the opposing camps of “rock” and “pop”. Bowie enjoys the rare ability to appeal to fans of both Led Zeppelin and ABBA, of both Frank Zappa and Duran Duran. Those who take their “rock” too seriously have a problem with this, but it’s a problem of their own making; Bowie challenges the tribalism of such allegiances. “I never, ever wanted to be regarded as the leader or the forefront of any movement,” he said in 1983. “Never wanted it. I did want to be regarded as an individualist. But that’s about it.” Leading by example, his career actively encourages his followers to reject uniforms and movements, to shed their skins, to revel in the transience of musical and sartorial fashion. In so doing he has cannily avoided locking his own fan base into an ephemeral time frame, but more significantly it has enabled his music to defy categorization: was there ever a better example than Ziggy Stardust of an album that is simultaneously pure rock and pure pop? It is perhaps this sense of individualism, as much as Bowie’s native charisma, which has always made his music seem so personal both to him and to his audience. On stage he is blessed by the ability to make every individual in a stadium audience feel as if he is singing directly to him or her, and his songs have always struck an intensely intimate chord with devotees. “I felt that his records had been made with me in mind,” recalled The Cure’s Robert Smith in 2003. “He was blatantly different, and everyone of my age remembers the time he played ‘Starman’ on Top Of The Pops. The school was divided between those

Description:
The biggest edition yet – expanded and updated with 35,000 words of new materialCritically acclaimed in its previous editions, The Complete David Bowie is widely recognized as the foremost source of analysis and information on every facet of Bowie’s career. The A-Z of songs and the day-by-day da
See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.