Conscious disguises - the life and times of David Bowie

David Bowie. The gift to this blog that keeps on giving. The occasion is Moonage Daydream, the much-anticipated feature-length documentary by director Brett Morgen, which opens today. As this channel has regularly recorded, the posthumous Bowie industry has never ceased to turn in the six and a half years since the icon’s death, with a bounty of re-releases, box sets, books, pop-up shops and exhibitions all pumping the legacy of a rock star like no other. While cynics might see it as exploitation, fan - and we are many - will see it as justified deification of one of the singularly most influential artists of the 20th century, one who crafted, controlled and curated his image so consciously while alive, and even as he knowingly approached death.

Moonage Daydream is, though, the first ‘official’ documentary to be sanctioned by the Bowie estate since his passing in January 2016. Appropriately, five years in the making, Morgen’s 135-minute epic does for The Dame what Peter Jackson’s even longer Get Back film did for The Beatles. Whereas Jackson’s production distilled 21 days’ worth of consecutive footage of the Fabs trying to make what would become their Let It Be album, Moonage Daydream painstakingly pieces together “thousands” of hours of film and video - some from Bowie’s personal archive - along with 48 newly remastered live music. It is a labour of love by Morgen, a Bowie fan all his life, which attempts to penetrate the creative ambition that made the singer who he was, single-handedly defining glam rock and, magpie-like, grabbing at any genre that took his fancy - from folk to progressive rock, Philly soul to drum and bass, trite pop to, in his final outing, the prescient album Blackstar, complex jazz.

Within this broiling sea of reinvention, Morgen reflects the theatrical guises Bowie adopted throughout his musical journey, as he evolved from suburban folkie David Jones to David Bowie, the vessel for the various phases he would pass through - the alien Ziggy Stardust, the glam prince, the soul boy, even the 1980s pop star (“my Phil Collins period”). “Becoming a pop act was no different than being Aladdin Sane or being Ziggy,” says Morgen. ”It was by design. He was going to enter the mainstream. It was just another challenge.” This point blew the director’s mind. The conventional wisdom is that Bowie made the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums out of weariness (or laziness). It wasn’t, argues Morgen. It was simply another conscious disguise to be that commercial.

“I think he would like this film,” keyboard player and frequent Bowie collaborator Mike Garson said of his late friend in The Times recently. “Three quarters of it he would really enjoy,” the remaining quarter being Morgen’s visually erratic style that will bombard the viewers with a dazzling kaleidoscope of imagery, zig-zagging its way through the Bowie timeline. The film was conceived while Bowie was alive, with Morgen pitching the idea to the star unsuccessfully, and before his apparent evaporation into what felt like partial retirement in 2004. Morgen turned his attention to the Rolling Stones (Crossfire Hurricane) and Kurt Cobain (Montage Of Heck) to satisfy his storytelling, but Bowie wouldn’t go away. At the same time, he had the desire to create music films for the IMAX format.

On hearing that Bowie had died, on 10 January 2016, two days after his 69th birthday, Morgen contacted Bill Zysblat, who’d looked after the star’s business affairs. Zysblat revealed that his client had archived a treasure trove of content. Over the next five years Morgen worked his way through boxes of footage and still images - some five million assets in all, setting himself up with the near-impossible task of turning it all into something compelling. “Not because I wanted to,” he explained recently to the NME, explaining that he was, at that stage, completely unfunded. Working 18-hour days on his own, his dedication almost cost Morgen his life. “I had a massive heart attack on January 5, 2017,” he told the NME, revealing that he flatlined for three minutes, just five days shy of the first anniversary of his subject’s own death.

From today we will see for ourselves whether this near-death experience was worth the trouble. Moonage Daydream will reward us with, Morgen promises, “the missing unicorns”: never before-seen clips of Bowie performing live at Earls Court on the 1978 tour for the Heroes and Low albums. “Two nights. 35 millimetre. 24-track audio. Possibly the greatest performance on film of David’s career,” Morgen says. The film won’t just present the visual spectacle of Bowie performing live, but the aural brilliance of it too, with Morgen employing the Academy Award-winning team that worked on Bohemian Rhapsody to turn less than great quality tape recordings into something befitting the cinematic soundstage. 

Five and a half years after his death, with a plethora of posthumous biographies and retrospectives filling up shelves (especially mine...), the cold hard truth is that we still don’t know all that much about Bowie. We know the musical milestones, some of his family story, his Brixton childhood and adolescence in Beckenham. Even now, there’s precious little of Bowie actually talking if you search for it on YouTube. There are the few chat show appearances, the uncanny prediction of the Internet in his Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, but apart from Top Of The Pops clips, Live Aid and the films he made as an actor, nothing that truly reveals the artist himself. Even Alan Yentob’s legendary 1975 Omnibus film for the BBC, Cracked Actor, leaves the viewer vague as to who it was about, thanks to Bowie appearing gaunt and clearly on drugs (“I was so blocked, so stoned,” he once admitted while talking about the documentary. “It’s quite a casualty case, isn’t it. I’m amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely”).

Morgen’s challenge with Moonage Daydream is, clearly, how much new it will reveal. So much of Bowie’s career was a guise combining distinct image and music that even his hair styles formed part of a character. After spending the 1990s trying to bury his past, attempting the thankfully short-lived grunge band Tin Machine and even trying to put his creative peak in the 1970s behind him with the Sound + Vision Tour, Bowie finally embraced his popularity. His headline appearance at Glastonbury in 2000 was a joyous jukebox of hits. But if you watch the performance film, you also see a star shorn of his lofty artistic pretences. He is Dave, the blokey, jokey feller from south London. Indeed, in the four years following that set, we saw something of the Bowie you’d be happy to hang out with in the pub - a warm, self-effacing humour exuding from the stage in the brilliant A Reality Tour DVD, or being wickedly droll with Ricky Gervais in Extras. 

Perhaps, though, we don’t want Bowie to be anything more than the slightly ethereal figure he became in the late 1960s and in his ’70s pomp. Even in his final music video, for the Blackstar single Lazarus (“Look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can't be seen”, embracing his impending death, but managing to remain abstract, distancing himself from the rest of us mere mortals. And that, quite frankly, is alright with me. 

Getting back to when they really were Fab

At risk of appearing late to the party, I’ve finally found the time to consume all eight hours or so of Peter Jackson’s sumptuous Beatlesfest, Get Back. You’ve surely heard about it by now: the first part appeared on Disney+ last Thursday, with parts 2 and 3 released progressively over subsequent days, and given its collective length it’s been quite a challenge to find so much time to indulge it. 

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not trying to confect an image of a busy urban sophisticate with little room for frivolities like a mammoth documentary about a pop band, but you find anyone with so many spare hours with which to sit exhaustively through as much 52-year-old footage of musicians sitting around smoking and strumming. 

That last statement, however, fundamentally misses the point of Jackson’s incredible project. It also brushes aside the justifiable deification of the four musicians themselves, but I’ll get to that later. Because Get Back transcends any experience or expectation you may have of a music documentary. It is more than a biopic, more than a concert film, more than a retrospective. It is, perhaps inadvertently, a near-forensic examination of a band, but conducted through the narrowest of apertures - just 29 days in January 1969. 

To this end, it is no more than a blood sample drawn over the course of one month in the entire lifetime of The Beatles, so it shouldn’t be construed as an attempt to tell their story in its entirety. It's like carbon dating an oak tree by a tiny sample of one of its rings. But in capturing even a brief window of time in The Beatles' history, Get Back depicts the state of a band that would, officially, split up just 15 months after Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot the original footage, 56 hours of which have been distilled by Jackson down to the eight.

From one angle, it depicts the mundanity of life in a band (there are plenty of shots of Ringo Starr watching on while John Lennon and Paul McCartney finesse a new song, reflecting the famous Charlie Watts quote about life as the Rolling Stones’ drummer comprising of five years’ work and 20 years spent hanging around). From another angle, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras capture the dynamics between the quartet. There is the still-symbiotic relationship between Lennon and McCartney, with one scene depicting them discussing leadership of the group, the seemingly unspoken hierarchy that relegated the younger George Harrison to a lesser writing role, and the older Starr to, at times, merely making up the numbers (which isn't true, but there goes another well established Beatle trope).

In this mix we see Yoko Ono, rarely not at Lennon’s side, and studio visits from Linda (Eastman, as was) and a delightful cameo from her daughter Heather. Maureen Starkey and Pattie Boyd, then wives of Ringo and George, also make appearances. They provide, somewhat, glimpses of normality, of domestic maturity in stark contrast to the screaming adulation that met the formerly fresh-faced Mop Tops with their cherubic smiles, bum freezer suits and polite bowing after each number. Now, they’d become shaggy-haired men in the second half of their 20s (Lennon was 29 at the time), with kids and a collective business interest, Just seven years separate these two images.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In case you’ve missed the memo, or have been self-isolating to hermit-level media avoidance, the premise of Get Back is that it depicts the band supposedly writing, rehearsing and recording what was meant to be their eleventh studio album, while - perhaps not explicitly - opening themselves up to the possibility of live performance again. It opens on 2 January 1969 with the band assembling at Twickenham Film Studios where, on a chilly, cavernous 7,500 square-foot sound stage (the same space where they had earlier made Help! and A Hard Day’s Night) they sit in a semi-circle and attempt composition in a ‘live‘ setting. But the atmosphere appears febrile, not helped by the cold of the studio, with Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras and microphones picking up every comment, every sideways glance, with unrestricted access.

To some extent, the exercise was envisaged as a tentative return to the live performances they’d given up at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966. That had left them jaded, but the net result was that concentrating on work as a studio band alone focused The Beatles on what is now considered their most creative, free-wheeling phase, which led to the critical high of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the childishly enjoyable Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, their retreat to India, the supposed ‘grown-up’ step of forming Apple Corps, and then the eclectic brilliance of The Beatles, better known as ‘the White Album’.

As Get Back captures, Twickenham proved to be unfulfilling, even if there is oodles of output (and embryonic snippets of songs that would eventually find their way into solo repertoires, such such as Lennon’s Jealous Guy and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass). However, Twickenham established the principle of returning to a more stripped-back rock sound, with a simpler set-up in the film studio - Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sat in a semi-circle, Starr completing the arrangement, with guitars plugged into amps. No embellishments. But, as transpires, there’s an uneasy vibe, which culminates in Harrison standing up and declaring “I’m leaving the band,” and walking out muttering “I’ll see you in the clubs.”. The remaining Beatles respond by going for lunch. “We may as well get in Clapton,” jokes Lennon uneasily as they return to work, unwittingly and ironically referencing the-then hottest British guitarist who would eventually fall in love with, and marry, Harrison’s wife Boyd. 

Productivity shifts up a gear when they leave south-west London and reconvene in Mayfair, in the basement studio of 3 Savile Row, their ‘corporate’ headquarters. Harrison returns (Savile Row was his condition for doing so, along with the inspired addition of augmenting their sound with keyboard player Billy Preston, who not only relieves any residual internecine tension, but adds soul to the music, giving it a looser feel).

That, then, is ultimately what Get Back is about: the music. Before our very eyes, we get a unique insight into the gestation of what would much later become the Let It Be album. We see and hear McCartney inadvertently strum the opening chords to the song Get Back on his iconic Hofner Violin bass, and he and Paul spar gently over various attempts to arrive at the line “Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner…”. But what’s even more remarkable is that we are ultimately watching something of a failure. Even after the work at Savile Row had ended, the album ended up on the back burner, and here might lie the source of the popular belief that it was a process beset by acrimony.

Much myth and falsehood has been generated about The Beatles’ demise. Even now, Fabologists debate the sequence of events and who said what to whom during the denouement. There is, though, little-to-no traces of true discord in Get Back. If anything, it depicts the dull normality of life in a band making records. No wild and crazy drug and booze-fuelled sessions - just endless cigarettes, and copious trays of tea and toast. Band members turn up for work in the morning, break for lunch, go home in the evening. They chat, they joke, they play endless arrangements of their songs, adopting Goon-like funny voices (Peter Sellers makes an awkward appearance in the Twickenham scenes) and lark about with much the same banter you find in any office. There are tedious repeat attempts at playing songs, with arrangements being tweaked and phrasing adjusted, interspersed with impromptu jams of rock’n’roll standards like Twenty Flight Rock and the ribald Liverpudlian folk song Maggie Mae. Even when looks are cast at each other, the body language suggests nothing more sinister than the mild irritation of disagreeing with a colleague over how a PowerPoint presentation might be structured.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In fact, amid the clouds of cigarette smoke, the Fabs looked like they were having fun. Towards the end we see the infamous rooftop concert, staged at 3 Savile Row in lieu of an earlier plan to perform the new songs at an open -air show on Primrose Hill. The performance is, notoriously, interrupted by fun-free PCs Ray Dagg and Ray Shayler (other christian names were available in the 1960s to Met officers…) from West End Central nick to shut down what a couple of local numptys had branded a breach of the peace. It marks the end of The Beatles as a performing entity, but you can see in that footage of them, carefree and taking them back to Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller and Liverpool’s Cavern almost a decade before.

If there were cracks, Get Back doesn’t really depict them. But something was up. Glyn Johns was given the task of assembling the album from the combined Twickenham/Savile Row sessions, but things started unravelling. The album was abandoned (although the single Get Back was released in April 1969). Four weeks after the rooftop concert the band reconvened at Abbey Road, to make the record that would take that studio’s name. In the orthodox chronology, Abbey Road became the final album to be recorded by The Beatles, but the product of their work in January 1969 would eventually be released in May 1970, nominally one month after McCartney had declared himself out of the band. To boot, the tapes Johns had worked on had been handed over to Phil Spector to ‘re-produce’, adding elements that McCartney would eventually strip out with the Let It Be…Naked album released in 2003. Some - me especially - will maintain that it’s the better album as a result.

There is, though, probably more to The Beatles’ end story than Jackson’s epic captures. John Lennon, for example, had brought in the New York businessmen Allen Klein to manage the band’s affairs, against McCartney’s knowledge. Klein gets no attention in Get Back, which leads to some suspicion of Apple Corps’ creative control over the project. Then again, Get Back is not about the break-up of The Beatles. either. Ultimately, it’s a snapshot (albeit a gargantuan one) of 29 days in January 1966 when the Fabs got together and produced music of a richness and longevity that can be enjoyed almost as new today. We get to appreciate, through raw, unedited scenes, unencumbered by voiceovers or cutaway interviews, just what John, Paul, George and Ringo brought individually to the band, arguably dispelling some of the convenient, cartoon-like tropes that we’ve conditioned into accepting down the years. That Lennon was the caustic rocker, that McCartney was the benign, anointed one, that Harrison was the ‘Quiet One’ with the uncanny gift for song, and that Starr was that drummer’s cliche, the class clown who sat at the back and didn’t get involved. 

Get Back shows them all in a much more engaging light: Lennon was cool and surprisingly warmer than we’d expected (his interaction with the young Heather McCartney is delightful, as is Ringo’s). McCartney was and is blessed with a unique ear for melody that comes out with The Long And Winding Road and his improvised Get Back riff. You see how Harrison contributed far more than the few songs that made it onto the albums, but you also see a somewhat diffident soul. Starr was (and could still be) a remarkably exquisite drummer, capable of fills and improvisation equally as good as the more lauded tub thumpers of the rock era.

“We only think we know The Beatles,” director Peter Jackson recently told Uncut magazine while discussing the project. “We’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night and Help! We’ve seen them perform on stage in The Cavern [Club] and Shea Stadium. We’ve seen interviews or press conferences. When you think about it, those are all performance situations.” Get Back, he says, presents things differently. “When they don’t know they’re being filmed you are getting a 100 percent pure look at the real guys, which doesn’t really exist on film, particularly, anywhere else.”

Pictures: Twitter/@TheBeatles

Ultimately, Get Back is a masterclass in music making. The Beatles are or were musical deities, and over the 29 days Jackson has condensed into his film, even the most seasoned fan will come to appreciate their music even more. I won’t, though, leave it just there. Because the other thing about Get Back is that it shines a light on the accelerated timeline that The Beatles’ career ran on. When they walked into Twickenham Film Studios on the second day of January in 1969 it was less than seven years since Love Me Do. Seven years. Don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all that different in 2014 to how I am now. But in October 1962, The Beatles’ music, their haircuts, their suits, everything was in stark contrast to the beards, long hair and maturity of the men seen approaching their 30s in 1969. 

Paul McCartney and his daughter Mary at the London premiere of Get Back
Picture: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Disney 

Stretch their timeline to its full extent, and just ten years, more or less, separates their formation in August 1960 and McCartney’s announcement in April 1970. Ten years in which they evolved from chirpy beat poppers into prototypical rock stars, a transition that, arguably, enveloped the most remarkable library of popular music that the genre has ever experienced.

51 years on, we’re getting to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, what a band of brothers The Beatles were. You could argue “So what?”. Five times more years have elapsed since they split up as they were together. But the influence The Beatles have still today is almost immeasurable. Some misanthropes will still dismiss them as purveyors of children’s songs, but in the grand scheme of things, their body of work remains beyond comparison with anything past, present and, probably, future. Get Back is not the key to understanding that bold statement, but over eight utterly engrossing, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck hours, it goes a long way to reinforcing it.

The Beatles: Get Back is streaming now on Disney+