Daily Mail 12.1.16
Cometh the moment, cometh the man, and David Bowie encapsulated the Seventies like no-one else in rock music. Who, other than someone so outside the norm, do different, could have hit upon the idea of turning the first space voyages into the most unconventional of hit songs? That Bowie did with Space Oddity.
After the first man landed on the moon in July 1969 the world was in awe of astronauts and their bravery and of the silent emptiness of space into which they voyaged. But it was the unknown former mime artist and saxophonist from the London suburb of Bromley who, with a song written a few weeks before the moon landing, personalised their journey.
‘This is Major Tom to Ground Control,’ he sang in a voice inspired by the very, until then, ungroovy Anthony Newley. It worked.
In the months that followed Space Oddity would become twenty two year old Bowie’s first hit and it would remain his biggest for the rest of his life – a song heard on radios around the world yesterday and out in space by Tim Peake and the other astronauts on board the international space station. Indeed three years ago, Chris Hadfield, another astronaut, Chris Hadfield, had a You Tube hit as he sang the song in a broadcast from space.
With that song, the thin, straggly Bowie, with his badly beached hair, vulpine teeth and one eye blue and the other brown, charted in music the birth of space exploration. And building on it and his androgynous looks, he began to define an outrageous era as far as rock music was concerned.
Because the Seventies, more than anything in rock, was about look and sex. With the introduction of the Pill in the previous decade, the Seventies was an age of free love, and Bowie enjoyed its unshackling even more than most rock stars. Mainly he went for girls, but he liked boys, too.
Before Bowie, sexual ambiguity was a no-no for rock stars, with rock and roll bands expected to be, or to at least promote themselves as being, lustily heterosexual. But from the very start of his career Bowie, with his make-up, eye-liner, dyed red hair and androgynous outfits flouted all the rules. ‘I’m bisexual,’ he told me early in his career. ‘I first realised it when I was about thirteen or fourteen.’
So had he been afraid of public scorn, I enquired. ‘No. I was more afraid of football,’ he replied.
In today’s climate of same sex marriages, a star admitting to bisexuality or even a television personality wearing a dress, is hardly newsworthy. But forty five years ago it could have spelled career death. That it didn’t is testimony to not only Bowie’s bravery but also to his prescience in sensing the massive change in public attitudes that was taking place around him as Gay Pride protestors took increasingly to the streets.
‘I think being bisexual is a facet of my life, but not necessarily the most important,’ he told me in 1973. ‘In the States it gets to horrendous proportions and it’s ‘fag this’ and ‘fag that’ and all the papers call me a ‘fag’. But I don’t see why see why it should stop me being an all-round entertainer.’
He was being deliberately provocative, but that was Bowie, catching the zeitgeist as his emergence coincided fortunately with the introduction of colour television into most people’s homes. By wearing the most dazzling outfits his first shows were eye-poppingly unforgettable, a style very quickly followed by other groups of the time.
When we see film of the young Beatles from a decade earlier, it’s almost always in black and white. But conjure up the young Bowie, and we remember him in dazzling colour as he began his series of reinventions, going from Major Tom to Ziggy Stardust (And The Spiders From Mars) to sing Starman – a song which has recently become current again after being played in Matt Damon’s new film The Martian.
By the time Starman was a hit in 1972, Bowie was already married to American Angie Barnett, a young lady of equal bisexuality. As a marriage, apart from producing their son, Zowie (now known as film director Duncan Jones), it was notable mostly, and most famously, for its threesomes and openness.
Whether or not you believe the first Mrs Bowie’s veiled suggestion in her autobiography that her husband and Mick Jagger had a relationship, and many of us don’t, Mr Bowie quickly became celebrated in the rock world for enjoying the sexual fruits of fame on a banqueting scale, involving, it is said, hundreds of girls.
Interestingly not many of them, were famous – although Bette Midler, at least one of the Three Degrees and Ronnie Spector were said to be among his conquests – or perhaps he among theirs. Beautiful models, it seems, were more to his taste, as was cocaine. And, throughout the Seventies drugs would become a serious problem for him as it would for so many of his friends and colleagues who wanted to live the life.
Nothing, however, could get in the way of his ever expanding talent, as, seeing pop music as an extension of theatre, he invented, then jettisoned, one self-creation after another, forever moving on to new artistic fields to explore. In the Sixties a rock and roll show had been usually four or five young men on stage singing their hits. The artist in Bowie, and art was the only O-level he passed, insisted that he give the fans a visual show as well, be it shades of psychedelia, him in a clown’s suit or with his new band, the post modern heavy metal outfit, Tin Machine.
His was a chameleon’s gift, using the tricks he had learned in mime, to stay current as fashions changed. But, of course, as hit followed hit – Jean Jeanie, Life On Mars, Rebel Rebel (on which he played the famous guitar riff himself) Fame, which he wrote with John Lennon, and Ashes To Ashes – it was he who was often dictating the fashion. Never possessed of a great singing voice, he was a clever songwriter and an innovative producer.
Nor was it only in music that he excelled. On Broadway he played the lead part in The Elephant Man to good reviews, while his role in the film The Man Who Fell To Earth captured on celluloid the sad fate of the stranded alien whose mission to earth ends in alcoholism. Then there was Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, in which he played a rebellious British soldier in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II.
Perhaps as much as in his music, his well-chosen dramatic roles illustrated his own personality. As he said in 2002, ‘In my entire career I’ve only really worked with the same subject matter…isolation, abandonment, fear and anxiety – all of the high points of one’s life.’
Overlooking the vampire film The Hunger, in which he co-starred Catherine Deneuve, but during which he was only on screen for around thirty minutes, he chose his movie parts better than any other rock star you can name.
But music was his main love. In the mid-Seventies he had begun mixing with the Andy Warhol set and produced some of Lou Reed’s Transformer album, which carried the hits Walk On The Wild Side and Perfect Day. While in 1982 he had an unlikely hit when he duetted with Bing Crosby on Little Drummer Boy.
Meanwhile his own hits still came with Let’s Dance and China Girl and the hilarious MTV video showing him and Mick Jagger singing Dancing In The Street for the Band Aid charity.
Then in 1993 he composed the music for the TV dramatization of Hanif Kureishi’s novel, Buddha of Suburbia. By this time he was one of the elder statesmen of rock, able to look back on some of the changes he had pioneered – not only in the chances his early sexual ambiguity had given to later performers, but to the ever widening scope of music he experimented with and produced. All his albums may not have been hits, but they were never anything but adventurous.
By this time he was married to the Somalian supermodel Iman, and living mainly in New York, and his name was not cropping up so much in the gossip columns as middle age gave him the quiet life of the contented recluse, busy with his drawing and painting with the only occasional venture into the spotlight. His daughter with Iman, Alexandria Zahra Jones, was born in 2000.
The last time I saw him on stage was at Glastonbury in 2003. A good generation and a half older than the great body of fans there, he was still something to behold. Quite what, probably no-one really knew. Perhaps that was his secret. He really was a complete one-off.
