Lost and found: tomb raiding or celebration of a legacy?

© Simon Poulter 2021

My entry to the blogosphere happened by accident: a foul mood one Monday morning resulting from England’s latest humiliating exit from a football tournament led to a 1,000-word rant written on a train and in need of an outlet. Thus, this blog’s predecessor, What Would David Bowie Do? was born. It was never meant to be about The Dame (it’s title came from a throwaway remark by a former girlfriend) but over the course of its lifetime, my love of David Bowie’s music was progressively rekindled as I found myself dipping into the extraordinary body of work he had recorded. His death on 10 January, 2016, brought that blog to an abrupt halt. It just didn’t seem right to continue with that title, which was simply a nod to a throwaway, Jägermeister-fuelled quip in a Yosemite boozer. So I wrote my own obituary and WWDBD? ended there. 

Of course, I wouldn’t stop blogging, and there was only going to be one source for the new one’s name, hence the reference you see at the top of this page. Even now, people think I’m a Bowie blogger, but I haven’t actually written anything specifically about him for a couple of years. Today might change that, as I kick off what I’ve presumptively declared David Bowie Month, for no other reason than the 26th will see the release of the latest box set of Bowie reissues, Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001). The package will feature remasters of output in a period where Bowie may have struggled, remarkably, to fit into the Britpop wave that was going on at the time, but in Black Tie White Noise, The Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack, Outside, Earthling and Hours, still produced utterly compelling material. 

The period also covers a phase of live performances, where Bowie had a white-hot band and was seemingly comfortable in his skin performing all the old classics. Thus, a BBC Radio live recording from 2000 (originally released as part of the limited-edition three-disc Bowie At The Beeb) - a warm-up for his legendary Glastonbury headline performance - is included in the set, along with a collection of odds and sods called Re:Call 5. The true draw to the package, however, is Toy, the semi-mythical record featuring new versions of Bowie songs from the very beginning of his career, but which wasn’t deemed by the record company to be releasable in 2001. I can assure you there will be more on Brilliant Adventure nearer its release date.

© Simon Poulter 2021

Last week I indulged my fandom with a visit to the new ‘Bowie 75’ pop-up shop in London’s Heddon Street, opened (along with a sister branch in New York) to provide an outlet for devotees to gorge themselves on merchandise, music and other paraphernalia (such as a Stylophone with which to recreate the iconic middle-eight of Space Odyssey). I won’t deny that purchases were made (high-quality vinyl reissues of the ‘second’ David Bowie album and The Man Who Fell To Earth, plus the scintillating Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 recorded on the Station To Station tour - Bowie in his absolute ’70s pomp). 

In the shop’s basement you can listen to vintage songs spruced up with ‘360 Reality Audio’ (Sony’s new ‘spatial’ audio technology), as well as play around with magnetic lyrics stuck to a pillar, composing songs as Bowie once did with cut up newspaper headlines. There’s also a red telephone box in which you can have your picture taken, a hat-tip to the shop being located across the road from the building featured in the cover art for The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, setting the scene for the alien Ziggy’s arrival on Earth.

If people think all this is fan gouging, then that’s up to them. After all, people appear to be paying significantly north of £80 for Adele tickets next summer, so no one has the right to judge what people spend their money on when it comes to pop music. Most of the merchandise on sale in the shops is available on the official Bowie website, but there’s more to it than simply a couple of glorified souvenir kiosks. The London and New York stores (the latter located close to Bowie’s SoHo home of 20 years) have been opened for a strictly limited period, leading up to what would have been the artist’s 75th birthday, on 8 January next year. 

“I’m really emotional,” 35-year-old fan Nikky Smart told The Times the other day while visiting the Heddon Street store. “It’s kind of like they’ve brought him back again.” I can’t say that it was really like that for me, but it was all very tasteful. And seeing most of a back catalogue of 27 studio albums, live sets and compilations on sale, alongside the T-shirts (yep, I bought one), baseball hats, jigsaw puzzles and all the rest, was a poignant reminder of the sheer body of work Bowie left behind when he succumbed to cancer in 2016.

Picture: The Rolling Stones/Bravado

The Bowie 75 shops are just the latest retail ventures opened by heritage acts to interact with fans. The Rolling Stones opened their own ‘Official UK Store’ in London’s Carnaby Street in September last year - a brave move given that it was that brief period of 2020 when normality resumed and people went shopping again, albeit tentatively. The Stones previously had a limited-period concession at Selfridges in Oxford Street to provide the template for the Carnaby Street shop, making it largely a platform to flog somewhat expensive T-shirts bearing the legendary ‘lips’ logo and various pieces of Stones album art. The Bowie shops also arrive a few weeks after Queen opened their own store, also in Carnaby Street, and dedicated to the band’s five-decade career, selling limited edition music releases, fashion collaborations with brands like Champion and Wrangler, Johnny Hoxton jewellery and other ‘lifestyle products’, whatever that means. 

All these band-based retail concepts appear to have two types of punter in mind: tourists that (in theory) throng to London’s West End, and in particular, social media-savvy youngsters looking to post their visits to Instagram and TikTok (that said, the Bowie shop seemed to be mostly customised by middle-aged blokes…er…like me). “We’re really looking at two things,” entertainment consultant Lawrence Peryer explained to The Times last week when talking about how the Bowie shops came about. “We wanted to create a place for the long-term Bowie fan to come in and find out something about Bowie that they didn’t know before, and have an experience they’d not had before, but also to connect with a young audience. David was always ahead of his time, always changing to connect with the younger crowd, and we’re hoping this will carry on the tradition.” 

Bowie certainly was ahead of his time: many will have seen on YouTube his highly prescient interview in 1999 with the BBC’s Newsnight in which he told a sceptical Jeremy Paxman that the Internet - then in relative infancy - would affect society beyond all recognition. “The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable,” he declared. The year before, Laurence Peryer had helped Bowie create his BowieNet website, widely considered one of the earliest pioneers of online music. It’s just one facet of Bowie that makes him still fascinating today, even before you start delving into the myriad characters and guises he quite consciously invented as avatars for his music. That was something he effectively did up to his dying day, with the morbid, out-of-body experience that was Blackstar, with its conscious references to impending death, which eventually occurred, uncannily, two days after his 69th birthday and the album’s release.

Bowie had a history of prescience. Invariably depicted as an inveterate Mod magpie throughout his life, appropriating music and fashion from wherever and whatever took his fancy, he also kept an unearthly beady eye on technology trends. In 1997 Bowie hatched a plan to monetise the master tapes of his recordings, foreseeing the rise of online streaming services that, as we now know, would only generate paltry revenues for artists compared to what they were used to with sales of physical formats. In the end, Bowie struck a deal with insurer Prudential to issue ‘Bowie bonds’ which used future royalties from his material as collateral, effectively enabling him to borrow against his back catalogue. The deal raised $55 million - shortly before Napster and the file-sharing boom came along, heralding the online music revolution that the industry has been coming to terms with ever since.

Today, as the online platforms Bowie predicted in his Paxman interview have eaten dramatically into sales of physical music formats, many artists have turned to striking deals with companies like the investment vehicle Hipgnosis. In the last year it has bought the rights to the catalogues of artists as diverse as Neil Young, Beyoncé and Blondie. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon have also sold their songwriting for eye-watering sums. Now, the Bowie estate is looking to get in on the act, with the Financial Times reporting last week that it is negotiating a deal for the artist’s albums that could raise anything up to $200 million, to be distributed between the artist’s widow Iman, son Duncan Jones and daughter Lexi, an agreement that would complement another signed recently with Warner Music for the recorded music catalogue.

Posthumously, Bowie continues to merchandise his work with a steady stream of reissues and deluxe packages, including the compilation box sets Five Years (1969-1973), Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982) and Loving The Alien (1983-1988), each containing respectfully tarted-up versions of original studio albums along with recordings that encapsulated Bowie’s stage magic. There has also been a series of live albums, released one by one to build up a box set of their own, Brilliant Live Adventures, and drawn from Bowie’s so-called ‘wilderness years’ in the 1990s when he was, incredibly, not in vogue (all these recordings had been officially available online previously, but lucratively making the available physically, with a limited edition slip case drew in the likes of me - and I haven’t been disappointed, either). Indeed, I’ve had no problem buying any of the these Bowie packages, even if they mean owning the same albums over and over again. Each - as will the forthcoming Brilliant Adventure - contain enough trinkets of genuine appeal to the fan and, if bizarrely, such people exist, provide an entry point to the work of one of popular music’s most richly artistic and charismatic figures. Yep, I know: I’m a record company marketing manager’s dream. Sue me.

Classic rock über alles

Picture: Led Zeppelin/Dick Barnatt

I feel vindicated. The other night, before she went to bed, my girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter was listening to Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times, the opening track of their self-titled 1969 debut album. The next morning I woke to read that the music I grew up with, from the 1970s and 1980s, is finding new audiences along with it original listenership thanks to streaming services.

In its latest yearbook, the BPI, the British record industry association, has revealed what the nation was listening to in 2019 via streaming services, and it is reassuring - from this old head's perspective, at least - to see how pop and rock's annals from the last six decades figure in that consumption. With the purchase of physical formats continuing their long-term decline (despite sales of vinyl records - pre-lockdown - remaining robust), music streaming in the UK grew by 7.5% in 2019, according to the BPI, which also noted that there were 114 billion plays on streaming services. Of particular note is that the '70s and '80s accounted for a greater share of so-called "catalogue plays" in 2019 than anything else, with two acts more prominent than anyone else - Elton John and Queen. No great surprise, given the success of the biopics Rocket Man and Bohemian Rhapsody: both films provided gateways to the music of two of the decades' most prolific artists, with John in particular bringing attention to both his colourful life in the 1970s as well as the extraordinary run of albums he recorded, with Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water, Honky Honky Château and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road amongst the 12 recorded between 1970 and 1979 alone.

David Hepworth's brilliant book 1971 - Never A Dull Moment pondered the rich output of that specific year (Led Zeppelin IV, Who’s Next, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, The Doors’ LA Woman, Carole King’s Tapestry, et al), but the BPI stats reveal that 1977 - the year of the Queen's silver jubilee - accounted for the most number of albums from the '70s streamed in 2019, with ELO’s Out Of The Blue (featuring the feelgood Mr Blue Sky), Fleetwood Mac’s perennial Rumours (The Chain was its most-streamed song), and The Bee Gees' Stayin’ Alive figuring heavily. As did Queen’s News Of The World, thanks to We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions.

Go back further, and the 1960s provided a steady appetite of pop, rock and soul music last year. Not surprisingly The Beatles figure prominently: the Fabs' catalogue was a relative latecomer to streaming, only first becoming available on the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music at Christmas 2015, seen at the time as an important effort to maintain the band's legacy. Four years on, their latter output dominated streams of '60s material, with the 50th anniversary edition of Abbey Road prominent, along with David Bowie's Space Oddity, various Rolling Stones tracks, and a healthy slew of Motown material, including Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's Ain't No Mountain High Enough (the second most-streamed '60s track), the Jacksons' I Want You Back, My Girl by The Temptations and Ben E King's Stand By Me.

Further forward, the 1980s also featured significantly in the BPI's numbers, some 9.2% of all streamed in 2019, with Queen once again demonstrating - whether you like them or not - just how much they dominated British music for the better part of two decades, and up until Freddie Mercury's death in 1991. Another One Bites The Dust was the most-streamed song from 1980. Given that many a lockdown family Zoom get together will inevitably descend into violent disagreement over which era - and generation of music - was the best, the 1980s often miss out on a fair hearing, largely due to the association people make with their own memories of shoulder pads and puffball skirts on Top Of The Pops, and the ubiquitous clatter of gated reverb (and the ubiquitous clatter of Phil Collins...). Thus, Britons helped themselves to the likes of  A-Ha's Take On Me, Bryan Adams' Summer Of '69, Kenny Loggins' Footloose, Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark and Tina Turner's The Best looming large in the 2019 streaming landscape.

So what, then, of more recent output? In any given week the most popular songs are always dominated by new material, and last year songs released in 2019 accounted for over a fifth of streamed plays, with those from 2018 slightly behind. In fact the top two streamed tracks for 2019 were released the previous year - Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved and Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road (no, me neither), along with 2019 releases from Billy Eilish, Stormzy and Ed Sheeran. Contemporary events also had an impact on streaming choices, too. Along with the Elton John and Queen biopics, songs featuring in TV and film productions drew people to streaming tracks like Bruce Springsteen's Blinded By The Light and, randomly, Limahl’s Never Ending Story appearing in the Netflix supernatural drama Stranger Things.

Picture: Twitter/Glastonbury Festival

There was also a boost caused by last year's Glastonbury Festival, with The Cure being a notable beneficiary thanks to their headline set. Given that there won't be a Glasto this year - or, for the time being, any marquee music events anywhere - it'll be interesting to see what the 2020 figures reveal. That said, with so many of us currently in lockdown and potentially exhausting physical record collections, streaming might possibly be coming into its own. "The reasons certain songs resonate with us are many and varied, says Rob Crutchley, author of the BPI's What The UK Streamed In 2019 report. "They can lift our mood, reflect how we’re feeling at a certain time, or evoke a particular happy memory. Older songs can enjoy a renaissance at any time, maybe by being used in a film or TV show, being shared online via social media or by being discovered in a playlist. A much-loved artist going on tour can spike interest and there is a wealth of catalogue classics that are always in great demand at Christmas time – we’re streaming the hits of today in huge numbers but we’re also enjoying delving into our rich musical heritage."

The full What The UK Streamed In 2019 report can be read here.

A Bowie biopic? Start cringing now

No sooner have I stopped reflecting on the beatific glow created by Francis Whately's wonderful David Bowie documentary, Finding Fame, on Saturday evening that I discover - belatedly, it seems - that there are ghouls abound planning a biopic about The Dame.

I have form on such things: rock star biopics, in particular, make me cringe. Even the supposedly good ones, like What’s Love Got To Do With It, La Bamba, The Doors or Control. The trouble with them, usually, is that they attempt to animate characters who are or were, by nature, animated already. Even Bowie himself once said "They never seem to get them right." So, did we really need a biopic about Queen, a band whose lead singer took flamboyance and excess to new extremes and which were pretty much widely known already? Frankly, I could have just watched a compilation of clips of Queen playing live, as that is what counted. However salacious an existence Freddy Mercury led, the biopic that got made turned it into something of a cartoon, albeit with a strong central performance by Rami Malik. We didn’t, however, need to see Mercury's life re-enacted when a documentary of the depth and quality of Whately's Bowie trilogy would have served the purpose far better.

Later this year we will get Rocketman, described as "an epic musical fantasy about the uncensored human story of Sir Elton John’s breakthrough years." Made by the same team responsible for the entertaining Eddie The Eagle, and starring Taron Egerton (who played Eddie Edwards) as Elton John, it too smacks of the superfluous. Any serious biographer or documentary maker could do a better job of recording John's life than any live cartoon about him. Which is what fills me with absolute dread about Stardust, the film announced last month that would focus on Bowie's first trip to America in 1971. It certainly won’t be about Bowie's music: Salon Pictures, who are making the film, said in a somewhat terse statement that: "The film was written as an ‘origins story’ about the beginning of David’s journey as he invented his Ziggy Stardust character, and focuses on the character study of the artist, as opposed to a hits driven ‘music’ biopic.” The statement added: "We would like to clarify that this film is not a biopic, it is a moment-in-time film at a turning point in David’s life, and is not reliant on Bowie’s music”. Salon also make the clarification that Stardust will use "...period music and songs that Bowie covered, but not his original tracks." In other words, 'we don’t have the rights to use Bowie's music'.

Duncan Jones, Bowie's film director son, poured ice cold water on the project last month, tweeting: "Pretty certain nobody has been granted music rights for ANY biopic... I would know." followed by "I'm not saying this movie is not happening. I honestly wouldn't know. I'm saying that as it stands, this movie won't have any of dads music in it, & I can't imagine that changing." "If you want to see a biopic without his music," he added in another tweet, "or the families [sic] blessing, that's up to the audience." Bowie's lifelong friend George Underwood (who, as a schoolboy, was the cause of the singer's permanently dilated pupil, leading to the myth that he had different coloured eyes) has also waded in, telling the NME that he was dreading the film: "They never seem to get those right. Although I did like the Freddie Mercury one [Bohemian Rhapsody], but they’re never accurate. All of the books about David are copies of things that just aren’t quite right then it gets worse and worse.” Francis Whately himself has called it correctly, telling the NME that biopics like Stardust will only emphasise the "wrong aspects" of Bowie's life and career. “What I’m glad to have been able to do is make three 90-minute films on David Bowie as a musician, the artist, not anything else. That’s what’s important."

Johnny Flynn, best known for TV's Vanity Fair and Les Miserables is slated to play Bowie in Stardust. As Malek demonstrated in Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, with the right voice coaching and prosthetics, Hollywood can turn you into anyone. But Bowie - just like Mercury - was distinctive throughout his career. It’s what made his career. He went from character to character, constantly reinventing himself, adopting new masks and costumes in the process. Ziggy Stardust was, after all, one of those characters, a vessel for Bowie to play out his imagination through, musically and theatrically, and one of the most powerful memes ever devised in popular art. Frankly, we don’t need an actor impersonating that, even if with the editorial intent of informing the audience. Safe to say I, for one, will be avoiding Stardust like the plague.