January 2016 – The Breakfast Post

The first Bowie songs I remember hearing on the radio were Modern Love and Let’s Dance, both released in 1983 when I was eleven. I thought those two were fine, though they weren’t the sort of thing I liked to think I was into at the time. (I had a big Motörhead war-pig patch on my little denim jacket. Lemmy’s death was also the end of an era.)

A few years later, a cousin introduced me to some of the Spiders from Mars period songs like Rebel Rebel and Suffragette City. I was a bit puzzled because I thought I knew Bowie as a smooth, modern 80s-sounding chap. But I didn’t get the appeal either: too much like everything else from the early 70s. Rebel Rebel even sounded like the Stones, which was definitely my dad’s music.

Back in the real timeline of the 80s, Bowie was releasing Never Let Me Down, an album seen everywhere (one of several awful record covers) but seldom played, then launching the drearily adult Tin Machine.

His next album, Black Tie White Noise, didn’t come out until 1993, when I was briefly in Berlin as a student and mostly listening to industrial music and obscure things I read about in Usenet groups. If I had been aware that David Bowie had an album out, I would certainly have ignored it. By the time of 1997’s Earthling, a jungle-influenced album released a whole two years after peak jungle with a dreadful Cool Britannia cover, it felt socially impossible to admit to liking a Bowie song ever again. And that was pretty much the end of that.

There’s been a David Bowie album, collaboration, tour, or retrospective for almost every year of my life, and I’ve never taken more than a passing interest in any of them.

I was taken by surprise, then, by how emotional I felt about his death.

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What did eventually make me notice David Bowie as a figure was the connection with Iggy Pop. I think Iggy is brilliant, and I’d been a bit of a fan for a while before I eventually twigged what it was that his most interesting stuff had in common. That made me aware of the famously dramatic and productive spell for those two in Berlin the late 70s (the only albums of Bowie’s that I ever actually bought are from this period) and also an opening to a bit of a web of interesting collaborations and influences.

(Going back during the past week and filling in a lot of the songs of Bowie’s that I’ve missed during the last few decades, it’s been particularly fun to hear Iggy Pop numbers, er, pop up all over the place. China Girl — always an Iggy song to me — is well known, but there are at least three other albums that recycle songs previously recorded by him, including a straight cover of the flop lead single from Iggy’s most foolish album. A sustained friendship.)

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So something of the emotion for me has to do with all that Berlin stuff. There are two aspects to that. One is the grubbily romantic idea of “pressure-cooker” West Berlin, seen from a distance as a place of hideouts, drugs, spying, longing, separation, and any other melodrama that “we” could project onto it. I’m sure this version of the city was overstated for lyrical purposes, but it probably did exist to a degree. The Berlin that fascinated and frightened me in 1993 was already a very different city, and both versions are hardly visible in today’s shiny metropolis.

The other aspect is the notion that moving to a different town in a different country could give you a new life and make your past disappear, even for someone already so celebrated — that it could really be so simple. What makes that idea available here is that Bowie didn’t just go, but then produced such different work after going that it really could appear as if his past had not gone with him.

This impression of self-effacement alongside all the self-promotion, the ability to erase the past, is a very attractive one for a pop star, and it fits also with the amount of collaborative work Bowie did. From some of the videos you can imagine that he was never happier than when playing keyboards or doing tour production for Iggy, singing backing vocals in a one-off with Pink Floyd, or playing second fiddle to Freddie Mercury or Mick Jagger.