As if things haven’t been gloomy enough this week, if you want a proper wallow, track down Francis Whateley’s David Bowie: The Last Five Years, shown on Friday as part of BBC Four’s Bowie Night, in honour of what would have been the Starman's 74th birthday. It’s not about how the documentary ends - because five years ago this morning, the world found out - but for one particular period in the penultimate act of his career.
The time in question is, in the longer history, a relative blink of the eye, but it represents a glimpse of the real David Bowie, an individual who, for a large proportion of his musical career, was shrouded - mainly intentionally - in guises and crafted personas. In October 2003, Bowie commenced the Reality Tour, a 112-date campaign that would, over five legs, snake through Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand in support of Reality, generally thought to be his best album since 1980’s Scary Monsters And Super Creeps. It was a grueling tour with shows lasting two and a half hours each as the band merrily worked their way through almost 40 years of music. In fact, around 60 songs were rehearsed for the tour, drawn from almost every decade in the Bowie canon, from singalong hits to a lesser known cover of The Pixies’ Cactus and Sister Midnight, originally found on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot.
In Whateley’s film, band members, like bass player Gail Ann Dorsey, guitarists Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard, drummer Sterling Campbell, and longtime keyboard collaborator Mike Garson, speak with fondness of the David Bowie they were playing with. They enthusiastically embrace the exhaustive song catalogue, playfully finding new ways to perform it. But it’s clear that the Bowie they were touring with was comfortable in his own skin. The tour DVD shows him having fun, smiling and wisecracking his way through gigs that, night after night, appeared to be carefree celebrations. Moreover, it’s the off-stage footage that is the most revealing - hanging out with Slick in an amusement arcade, or larking about with a cutting impersonation of Paul Whitehouse’s ‘Brilliant!’ character from The Fast Show. It felt like you were watching David Jones of 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, as any ‘regular’ bloke in the pub.
While never an aloof figure, few probably knew the real David Bowie. Even himself, something apparent in Alan Yentob’s landmark Cracked Actor documentary in 1975, when an emaciated, cocaine-addicted Bowie - The Thin White Duke - swigging from a carton of milk in the back of a limo was, by his own admission, on the road to cliché rock star oblivion. What makes Whateley’s film so heartbreaking is that the David Bowie at the beginning of his final years on this planet was the very opposite of that casualty in the limo. Rather than reject his body of work - as so many performers of a certain vintage will do - he was celebratory of it. Things weren't always so.
While he’d disparagingly referred to his ‘80s commercial success (the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums, and even 1987’s Never Let Me Down and its subsequent Glass Spider Tour, with it’s overblown choreography and theatrical bombast) as his “Phil Collins years”, the 90s proved a different decade for Bowie. Musical fashion during the Britpop age turned its attention elsewhere, despite the likes of Blur and Oasis representing a reverence for the musical legacy of Bowie’s generation. Bowie, though, had also turned his attention elsewhere. His Sound + Vision tour in 1990 had been a conscious ‘retirement’ of the jukebox (“Knowing I won’t ever have those songs to rely on again spurs me to keep doing new things, which is good for an artist,” he said). His sojourn with the punky faux-grunge Tin Machine then seemed to draw a line more fully.
Like another Doctor Who-style regeneration, Bowie emerged with the spotlight somewhat off him with the largely electronic Black Tie White Noise album in 1993. Four years shy of turning 50, he embraced contemporary influences such as hip-hop, while also reuniting with Nile Rodgers. Some suggest this was a mild mid-life crisis, but in truth, it was simply the magpie tendency that had acquired genres throughout his career showing through once more. It also manifested itself in the understated soundtrack to BBC TV’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha Of Suburbia, which remains one of my favourite collections of Bowie music. Indeed, as the 90s progressed, Bowie explored further new avenues, with drum’n’bass and a more industrial sound, as can be found on 1. Outside, Earthling and the gentle Hours…, released in relatively quick succession between 1995 and 1999.
The first, Ouvrez Le Chien (Live Dallas ’95) was released in October, with the second, No Trendy Réchauffé (Live Birmingham ’95) appearing in December, both with an eclectic line up of notably hit-light content.
The third instalment, LiveAndWell.com appears next week, and will feature tracks recorded on the 1997 Earthling tour, and again skewing away from the traditional Bowie canon, with Hallo Spaceboy the only single and even the bleak V-2 Schneider instrumental from the Heroes album included. Brilliant Live Adventures’ six entries - the final three yet to be announced - may well prove to be collectibles for the most avid of fan.
Previously, these 90s shows had only been available to users of Bowie’s pioneering web platform BowieNet, and it could be argued that they might well have stayed there (Bowie’s choice of songs in this period was never always met with the satisfaction of audiences who’d turned up to hear pop hits - “This is bollocks! We want Let’s Dance!”, a punter was heard saying at one gig). He had, in this period, been defiant: it had been a deliberate effort to shift away from the material that had driven the first couple of decades of his career. Bowie was also somewhat belligerent over how it would land, regarding the exercise of choosing relative obscurities as educational.
However, it wasn’t just the fanbase that grew indifferent. Even sections of the press turned, with “edgy” younger hacks making disparaging remarks, seemingly for reactionary kicks. Bowie’s former press officer, Alan Edwards, relayed to The Sunday Times late last year the story of how, in personal notes he wrote during the 1999 tour, Bob Dylan had just been made a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, but in the UK, Bowie was no longer being treated with anywhere near the reverence he once had.
During the recording at the BBC Radio Theatre in London, Bowie enthralled the audience with hilarious stories about the set list he was performing. And, yet, Edwards couldn’t persuade a single journalist to come along. “The press wax lyrical about David now, but I had wads of tickets I couldn’t give away in the 1990s, because he was not deemed cool,” Edwards told The Sunday Times.
Two days beforehand, Bowie had headlined the prestigious Sunday night slot at Glastonbury, delighting an enraptured 150,000-strong crowd with a 33-song romp through all the classics. Yes, the very songs Bowie had consciously rejected during his tours in the preceding decade. BBC2 aired the set in full last June, the first time it had been shown in its entirety, and almost 20 years to the day it had been staged. And it was mesmerising. The Glasto show has been rightly held up as the perfect Sunday night ‘legends’ performance, not just for the hands-aloft communal entertainment, but because we got the real David Bowie. From his baroque suit to his artfully tousled shoulder-length hair (a throwback to his late-60s folkie persona), this was a smiley, blokey Bowie. The man who fell down-to-earth, if you will. “Having a good time?” he threw out to the crowd at one point. This wasn’t the usual stage platitude. He was, genuinely, having a ball. “This is cool for us. I’ve not been here for 30 years, and it’s fucking great. I’m really hot and sweaty, I wore a stupid jacket, I’m too vain to take it off.”
Glastonbury has been branded Bowie’s comeback, but in reality it was only a comeback from a relative wilderness. And if it was a comeback, it didn’t last all that long. For the following couple of years he withdrew into family life following the birth of his daughter Lexi. Now New York-based, he performed Heroes at The Concert For New York, the 9/11 benefit at Madison Square Garden in October 2001. The following June came the Heathen album, another of my latter-career favourites, on which Bowie was joined by chums like Pete Townshend and Dave Grohl, as well as producer Tony Visconti, who had been a part of Bowie’s emergence at the end of the 1960s. It was a somewhat reflective record - not directly influenced by the events of the previous September, but certainly attuned to the anxious mood that emerged in America as a result. I was living in California at the time, and Heathen became a constant companion on the new contraption I was constantly plugged into. I believe it was called an iPod.
The following year Bowie released Reality which, when stood up next to Heathen, revealed a Bowie in his mid-50s and clearly contemplating the world around him. Moreover, it was an album of genuine warmth, full of ‘proper’ songs and a simpler, beginning-middle-end structure. The reception Reality met was as accepted as the comfort with which Bowie and his band went out on the road to tour it, which brings me back to the heartwarming - and heartbreaking - nature of the words at the start of this post.
The Reality Tour, originally scheduled for ten months, came to an abrupt halt on 25 June, 2004, when Bowie experienced chest pain while on stage at the Hurricane Festival in Germany. It was a blocked coronary artery requiring an emergency bypass. And it ended his touring career. The public appearances that followed while he recuperated were few and far between, with the occasional awards show, and the odd performance, such as joining David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006 to do Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb and Arnold Layne. It was David Bowie's final stage performance on British soil.
“He loved comedy,” Gervais has said since. “He was amazing in Extras. I sent him the lyrics and I said: 'Do something quite retro, like Life On Mars, and he went: 'Oh yeah, I'll just knock off a quick Life On Mars then…’!”. The resulting appearance, in which Bowie, sat at a nightclub piano riffs a song about Gervais’s jobbing actor character Andy Millman (“Chubby little loser!”) is a piece of comedy gold. It was also a Bowie continuing to show his true self, though, still in character.
Extras wasn’t, of course, some kind of ironic finale. But it certainly marked an absence that would only be ended on 8 January, 2013, Bowie's 66th birthday, when we read via son Duncan Jones’ Twitter account that his dad had something new to say. And, thus, the mournful Where Are We Now? - the song which gave this blog its name - appeared without warning, with its nostalgic lookback at Bowie’s Berlin residency, itself an intentional withdrawal from the madness of 1970s fame. The following March, an entire album appeared, The Next Day. The world fell in love again with David Bowie.
Suddenly, enigmatically, he was catapulted back into near-regal seniority, a member of rock's top team. A retrospective exhibition, David Bowie is..., went on tour after its run at London’s V&A (which I saw there and again, two years later in Paris). What we didn’t know, however, was that the show's subject was in the midst of a terrible, 18-month battle with liver cancer. This was to be the muse for two more surprises: the album Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday, and his death two days later. “Look up here, I’m in heaven” he sang on Lazarus, “I got scars that can't be seen," and in the second verse, “Look up here, man, I'm in danger. I've got nothing left to lose”. Only Bowie could have seemingly stage-managed his own demise in that way. It obviously wasn’t so contrived, but to release his most personal album ever, one clearly alluding to his failing mortality, and then dying two days later seemed, well, perfectly Bowie.
Visconti maintains that Bowie had more music in him when he went, and was as shocked as everyone else by the news. But David Robert Jones had always had a vision. He even predicted the Internet. Perhaps the Major Tom of Space Oddity and Ashes To Ashes was, in reality, his alter-ego, and the Starman was simply projecting a future echo. The upshot is that it is too easy to get maudlin today on the fifth anniversary of his death. And I won’t. His career will always be the gift that keeps on giving (and the continuous output of posthumous releases seems to underpin that point). It’s just that when I look at those scenes of the real David Bowie on tour in 2003, you can't help wishing you could sit with him, one last time, in a South London pub. Having a laugh. Bowie bantz.
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