The Complete David Bowie

1459 Pages·2011·6.07 MB·English

by  Nicholas Pegg

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.
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accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
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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