On this day in 1947: David Bowie was born

Originally published in Hot Press in 1995.

It is perhaps fitting to meet David Bowie within the muted confines of the most Gothic building In West Hollywood. Sweeping off the madness of Sunset Boulevard at noon, the taxi noses up into a wooded cul-de-sac, stops at the archway leading to a carved stone cloister. To get to the actual hotel entrance, you pass a series of tall windows and columns that overlook a quiet garden. The Chateau Marmont's palm trees seem magically to provide sound-proofing as well as shade from the world outside, creating an effect where, once you cross the threshold, you could almost be in another dimension.

In the tasteful surroundings of Suite 35, I await – with as blank a mind as I can muster – for David Bowie. I sit on a pine green velvet couch directly under a mammoth print of The Garden Of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. What earthly manifestation will the man take? There have been so many. How does one greet a legendary 20th Century Rock God? One would almost be tempted to say “Hi, Elvis!” for the laugh. Suddenly, he breezes in, looking for cigarettes, addressing the publicist, criticising the orange juice, unplugging the phone. Nervous ebullience clouds invisibly out of him and fills up the room as he flops down at last into the sofa beside me to announce:

“I’ve just had a bath”

“You smell very nice, David.”

I am completely thrown. One doesn't expect Rock Gods to divulge the details of their personal ablutions at the offset. But then, David Bowie is not what you might expect, overall. You expect charm, sexiness, yes. But not bloody Dorian Gray. He is svelte, graceful, evincing a young man's demeanour, with an absence of facial wear and tear that renders him perhaps twelve years short of his 48, and a wicked grin that fixes on my forehead, which is black and blue.

“How's your head?”

The previous day, while turning onto Sunset Boulevard from Crescent, a warp speed pick-up truck smashed into the side of my car, hurtling me momentarily into oblivion. The last thing I saw was a glimmering rain of multi-hued diamonds (the side and front windscreens); the first thing that occurred to me when I came round was how unfortunate it would have been to miss this meeting. I tell him the wounds and bruises are all in the spirit of the new album. He laughs.

“It sort of sounds like that looks, actually!” He indicates the Bosch print, with its inmates squirming in pain and anguish, being burned, carved and generally tormented by devils.

“Damn,” he says, hitting his thigh in mock dismay. “So it’s been done before then … “

Thematically, Outside is without doubt as Gothic as Bosch, and in a more contemporary sense, hugely ambitious. It attempts to depict the chaos and fragmentation of so-called civilised life, now facing the end of its second millennium, within the context of a “non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle” – set in the realms of fringe Art. The story revolves around the diaries of private dick Nathan Adler, attached to “Art Crime, Inc.”, who has come across a grisly ritual-art murder. Hippies and squeamish folk beware: we glimpsed the computer-mutilated corpse on the cover of Lodger, but with Outside, the sleeve notes/short story begins:

“It was precisely 5:47am on the morning of Friday, 31 December 1999 that a dark-spirited pluralist began the dissection of 4-year-old “Baby Grace”. The arms of the victim were pin-cushioned with 16 hypodermic needles, pumping in four major preservatives … The stomach area was carefully flapped open and the intestines removed.” And that’s just for starters.

It’s as far away from the crowd-pleasing cabaret of The Glass Spider tour as it is from the jazzy romance of Black Tie, White Noise. But if what came between was a period that Bowie himself describes as one of his lowest in terms of self-esteem and creativity, the 1993 album was like a full-stop at the end of an era. Basically, a love tribute to Bowie’s bride Iman, it was at their wedding that Bowie met up again, after fourteen years, with Brian Eno, and entered into a new phase of creativity.

During the eighties, Eno had gone to Malaysia to re-group, emerging at the end of the decade as the magician for The Unforgettable Fire, later developing his work in conceptual art. He is now a professor of the subject at the Royal College Of Art in London. The two, re-united after fourteen years, discovered their mutual likes and dislikes in contemporary music trends, and decided to work on a collaborative album.

“What we’re trying to do is to lay the texture and the ambience and the sub-text which illustrates what 1995 feels like,” says Bowie. “The intent is to make a diary of the last five years of this millennium – that’s what we’re trying to do, in musical form. The interesting thing for Brian and I is that it is a continuous sage. The overall ambition is to keep working in this vein. Not only in this vein, because I think we will both make other albums as well, but the Adler Diaries per se as a collective – we’re going to keep them going, and as each year presents itself, we’re going to try and capture that year using the device of the fictional story, and building up more characters each time.”

The album features several dramatic characters, ranging from a 14-year old girl to a sleazy, ancient shopkeeper, whom Bowie depicts on the sleeve art work as with his own computer-generated images. The creation of personae, one of Bowie’s former fortes, is used this time in a more composite fashion, to enhance the plot.

“I’ve virtually left them alone since 1975/76 with The Thin White Duke,” he says. “He was the last really conceived character. Anything else was just a public stance for stage afterwards. Up until that I’d been working with characters, but then during the course of Berlin I really tried to clean up my house in many ways, and on of them was to go through myself and what my needs were as a writer and do without the characters, because psychologically they brought me a lot of trouble, and I was in no position to mess around with all that. But NOW THAT I’M OKAY … “ (he leers, jokingly) …

There are other echoes from the past, too. On board for the album are Carlos Alomar, Mike Garson (the piano player from Aladdin Sane), Reeves Gabrels, Sterling Campbell and Erzal Kizilcay, all of whom Bowie has worked with before. Thus, between Bowie, the band and Eno, stark musical memories leap out at you from the speakers: here, that searing, lonely Turkish vibe that imbued Lodger; there, the ambient lushness of Heroes; a tinkling jazz piano pirouettes across the album like a ghostly dancer; there are what sounds like some very early guitar chords and even several monologues reminiscent of the intro to “Diamond Dogs”. It seems like Bowie is back in future time, via the past. Every style you remember from your brain’s Bowie Directory is flickering on and off on your internal screens, in a sort of Dervish-Windows gig that allows a myriad of different Bowie elements to be present simultaneously, but under a carefully managed whole.

“In terms of stylisation of the album, I think that I’m almost in a situation now where I’ve got, years-wise, such a body of work since the late sixties, that for me it’s become a question of where, if I’m going to ‘appropriate’ anybody these days, it’s going to be me!

Because when you re-contextualise something, the information changes. To use a Warhol reference, for instance: when you just see Marilyn Monroe, it’s Marilyn in the black and white scheme of things right there on film. But when Warhol painted her on a canvas it almost represented 1965 – it was so incredibly modern and prescient, it just felt like the times – using a symbol from the past and re-contextualising it.

“The painter Jasper John made a career, virtually, of a similar technique. He ended up where he was only painting with his own vocabulary of images. I’m sort of getting near that, because the years do it. You can’t do it unless you have enough work to draw from, and I’m nearly in that old, sage-like position (laughs) where I actually can.”

Bowie’s art repeated art references, to recur throughout the interview, stem from the increasing time he’s been devoting to his own visual art. Earlier this year, he held an exhibition of his work in the sacrosanct realm of the British art world, London’s Court Street. Despite having received mixed reviews, museums and important collectors (e.g. Saatchi) purchased work. Bowie himself is on the board of directors of the magazine, Modern Painters, for whom he interviewed the artist Baltheus last year. His own private collection is extensive.

“It’s always been an extraordinarily important part of my life. One of the first paintings I ever bought, as a matter of fact, in the late 70s, was a Yeats, who I’m a big fan of. I’ve been painting for the same length of time. When I was a kid it was a big decision whether to stay on as a visual artist or to become a musician. I certainly was drawn to both all the time. One has been a career, the other has been a sort of back-text, but whenever I’ve made an album I’ve always found that my painting output has increased dramatically, so it does seem that they work in tandem. It’s just that I’ve been a little bit more flamboyant about it over the last two or three years. I think that’s because I’ve changed a lot. I’m getting less self-judgemental about my work, and more or less putting everything out there that I do now, these days.”

One of Bowie’s recent projects has involved several collaborative paintings with the London artist Damien Hirst (whose material and unorthodox methods have made him highly controversial). Hirst has exhibited pieces including a large pickled shark in a tank and other preserved animals. One installation even features a pregnant cat, sawn in two, each half carefully preserved and displayed in two separate cases, so you can walk between the two parts, all of which relates strongly to themes explored in the textual and narrative part of Outside.

Flesh, blood, guts and pain may be banned from MTV (as in Trent Reznor’s video escapades), but live performance (art) has taken to it in a big way. Especially in the US, where Andreas Serrano’s once-shocking “Piss Christ” pales in comparison with the antics of HIV positive artist Ron Athey (referred to in the text). His self-afflicted “crown of blood” routine, and his live, onstage carve-up of a colleague’s back in order to create blood images on paper towels for suspension above the audience, caused outrage in the more conservative American art circles.

A similar scalpel-wielding stage show is referred to on the album in one of Nathan Adler’s monologues, when he describes a performance by suspected Baby-Grace murderer Leon and renegade high-priestess of S&M, Ramona Stone.

The album and notes also refer to artists like Chris Burden (had himself shot onstage) Mark Rothko (an abstract expressionist who committed suicide), and one young Korean underground conceptualist who would have himself anaesthetised in order that body parts would be removed in front of a live audience (that was the show). While the trend can be denounced as an ever more crass and pretentious attempt to shock and gain attention by a marginal group of artists, the movement gains increasing momentum. One theory for this intensely physical expressionism is that today, when humans can become de-humanised extensions of machines, barrenly wallowing in cyberspace, this compensates by presenting the blood and guts of humanity right into your face. Bowie relates it to a more atavistic urge.

“The more focused attention I give to ritual artists ties in with a set of subjects that I’ve always been passionately interested in, that are coming into my work more obviously these days, which involve the spiritual starvation that we have, and what do we replace it with? We don’t believe in the Church, or we’ve lost faith in the Church – but how do we deal with creating a bond between ourselves and whatever is beyond?

“There are areas of sexuality and violence a that are not embraced or contained by Judeo-Christian ethics, and we feel that we don’t know how to deal with these things, or publicly see them displayed so that we can make up our own minds and manifest our fears or our exuberances about those particular areas of our lives, and I think that’s what popular culture is for. I think it’s there to take up the slack the Church won’t deal with, and that if we didn’t have a public arena for that almost gladiatorial, fight-out, that NCO-pagan blood-letting – that the world would be in an even worse condition than it is now.”

When challenged that the tone of the album seems to espouse a particularly negative spiritual flavour overall, Bowie vehemently disagrees.

“I don't believe that it’s a negative outlook, you see. I think it’s a common wisdom that at the end of every hundred years you have a psychic panic that comes into place just before you turn the century – it happens in the arts and society. I think that it has an awful lot to do with the momentum that gathers. It’s like a desperation that you’ll never get through to the next century, and I think coming up to the millennium it gets far more exaggerated, more highly focused.

“This story is indicative of the feeling that there has to be some kind of ritual sacrifice made, otherwise we won’t get into the year 2000. It’s the same with these artists – there’s some kind of mutation of some barely remembered pagan ritual going on that’s carried out in these new post-modernist ways. Its within that area. It is a dark irony and it’s supposed to be.”

Another theme on the album, which is inextricable from the kaleidoscope of musical styles involved, is that of chaos. One song is entitled, ‘I’m Deranged’, another, “No Control”. Methods for the music’s composition were often equally diverse. The process included flashcards issued at the beginning of a recording session, which might instruct the musicians: “You are the last survivor of a catastrophic event and you will endeavour to play in such as way as to prvent feelings of loneliness developing within yourself” or “You are the town crier in a society where all media networks have tumbled down”. Eno would sample snippets of radio broadcasts s they happened. Bowie would come into the studio with his cut-ups and the whole gang would jam.

Bowie’s “cut-ups” method (not the only Burroughs influence on the album my any means) has undergone a cybernetic upgrade: now he does them by punching his writing into a “verbaliser” computer programme, which cuts up what he’s just fed in for him in seconds.

“There’s so much emphasis now on the speed by which we receive information, and the voluminous quantity of the information in the States. There’s 78 Channels worth of stuff to look at on the television alone. Which means that because they are all vying for ratings, they can’t possibly pretend to cover anything in any more depth than a buzz phrase, a sound byte or a quick image. And people are receiving their information like that. And because the speed and the diversity of the output, people have lost the need to analyse anymore. They’re not looking past the surface image.

“For instance, the younger people are very adept at scanning the surface of things. And we (my generation) tend to think that shows some kind of indifference or a Philistine attitude, but I think it’s probably a transitory period. I think they’re leaning to adapt to a world which will only get more fragmented and more chaotic at this point. Everything is changing. History is breaking down, there’s revisionist history – just look how Ireland is changing radically. Overnight it’s being re-written. Every tissue of our society is being evaluated and re-written, because revisionism is really the word of the day – it means that what we end up with is really a network of histories, rather than one straight trunk which takes you back down one absolute path. “

Speaking of expansion, does Bowie fear its antithesis – the growing spread of extremism seen generally in world affairs and on a more mundane level, how it affects personal and sexual freedoms? Even in the area of Gay politics, the extreme activists have become as intolerant of non-conformists as the heterosexual conservatives they once fought against.

“There’s a lot of fear on both sides. And I think that kind of polarisation is apparent everywhere. The polemic at the moment is very tribal. And it’s a tribalism that extends through politics, through Church, fanaticism of various kinds. And it’s about finding an absolute. Absolutism and absolutes generally, again, it’s one of the fifties’ philosophic strains that ran through society and it’s been shouldered and dragged through this end of the century. It’s quite obvious that there is no absolute political system.

“What it does breed more than anything else is malicious fundamentalism. The trouble is that the ones who are getting it more than anybody else these days are the Drag Queens, because they are despised, abhorred and ostracised by everybody. By straight gays and by straights. And I can almost regard the Drag Queen as the only radical left – it’s peculiar, but it’s come back to that again.”

For somebody who was, at the height of his career, the harbinger of an all-compassing sexuality (or as he puts it himself, with a grin, “indiscriminately promiscuous”), this kind of dogma is ludicrous. I tell Bowie the story of an “outing” campaign run by one of the more extreme Queer activist groups. Names ad photos of celebrities were plastered all over walls in urban areas around US cities, in the form of imitation “Absolut Vodka” ads. The caption under Jodie Foster would be “Absolutely Queer”, the one under Paula Abdul would read, “Absolutely Straight”. Bowie suddenly erupts into hilarious snorts of laughter. “Ooooh,” he quips. “Was I on both, then?”

“No, it’s funny, because I recently saw a headline on the cover of Harpers & Bazaar, which read: BISEXUAL CHIC (laughs) – and it felt, oh God (mock shame and horror), – has it come to this? And it has!! It’s something you wear now! But it’s very funny. I guess that’s how experimentation is showing itself, because again, I think the depth aspect of it is not really there, it’s almost a surface thing. I think that to pick on something as a ‘fashionable’ thing to do is a way of assimilating information these days, like reading surfaces. Surfing the chaos sort of thing.”

Bowie does surf the Internet, and although initially intrigued by its potential has found it “a bit of a let-down”.

“I don’t have Utopian thoughts on computers of the Internet of anything else. I think it’s got up-sides and down-sides. It passes information, and voluminous information, and very quickly. But unfortunately most of the information is crap! And you think, wait a minute, why am I wading through this rubbish. They say it makes information more accessible – but it has an awful lot to do with the quality of the information you’re searching for.

“And the other thing is that I’ve always seen it, since its instigation, as a thing whose very dark side manifests itself when it becomes a force of the financial middle and upper classes. It’s divisive in the sense that a certain group of people will benefit from it and have that computer ability, but the rest of the world will suffer dramatically. Because they’ll have even less information than before, without access to computers. You won’t find some guy running around the Andes saying, “wow, you wanna see what I got on the Internet tonight …’ It isn’t going to be like that It supports the haves, and doesn’t support the have-nots.”

In that regard, Bowie is, undoubtedly very much in the former category himself at this stage in life. Nevertheless, the current album could be perceived as a risk for him. Although almost anything that Eno touches turns to artistic (and sometimes commercial) gold, Outside is, overall, decidedly dodgy. The audience that bought Never Let Me Down or Black Tie, White Noise isn’t going to touch it with a barge-pole. Can a duo of lads in their late forties swing a successful album without stopping to he greed tactics we’ve seen from some of Bowie’s contemporaries of late? Just take The Eagles tickets last summer across the US, at $125.00 a pop. Or your “Special Edition” Rolling Stones Gold Visa card, available with the Steel Wheels tour tickets purchases.

“I think I’ve ever only had one physical obsession in my life, and that was with art, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever really bothered with. Commercial success? It’s not my raison d’etre – it really isn’t. I’ve always wanted, more than anything else, just to be a successful artist, and what I mean by successful is to produce things that continue to interest me. I just want to keep surprising myself with things. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s all good.”

Once upon a time in the Eighties …

“Yes! In fact, some of the surprises were quite horrendous. But the parameters for me to stretch are those of expression. Sometimes I wonder if wanting to go out and make a lot of money – I can’t talk for anybody else – but I think I know why that happens. When a need for the love of the audience, or something – and wanting to keep up your financial status – causes you to … It also produces a nagging feeling of I’m really letting myself down. And when you let yourself down – you go shopping. I think that money will take the edge off not being creative any more, not bothering. As if by earning a lot of money, that will give me the happiness that being creative used to. So really, it doesn’t buy you happiness so much as buy you a cocoon. I don’t want that cocoon particularly. I think that what I need in my life now is just to remain creative. Because I’ve had money.

But if the album is unlikely to cause Michael Jackson to lose sleep, it certainly has potentially a brand new, young audience willing to give it a shot. In the way that Bowie retained his cool pretty much all through punk by being more out-there, skinnier, paler and generally weirder than any rock-star-sniping punk, his early music has withstood the challenges to time and served to influence a newer generation – from Kurt Cobain to Trent Reznor, with whom he is currently touring in North America.

“The interesting thing for me, is that I kind of always knew what my weight was in Europe, it was kind of self-evident. But in America, I had no comprehension that I mattered a toss over here. Then, after the Nirvana thing, I started to read things that were sent to me by my PR people in LA, on bands like NIN and Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots, which indicated that my work was really an integral part of their influences. That’s more than flattering, it almost validates one’s work to see it infiltrate a culture in that way.

“That it re-emerges in different guises, in different areas of that particular art form, is almost tantamount to thinking that in one’s own lifetime, one’s work has come to some kind of fruition. I can’t be anything but delighted when I see that happen.”

Generally, Bowie comes across as a Renaissance man mostly at ease with himself in the ‘90s, chaos or not. He is even optimistic.

“I think the Arts Reflect society all the time, and there is an emergence of such good music since the beginning of the ‘90s that it indicates a new kind of positivism among young people. Which has more or less destroyed that whole bland thing of the ‘80s.

“If you’d asked young people in the ’80s what music they’d take with them over the next ten years, they’d say, what? You’re crazy! Paula Abdul? Kylie Minogue? Now you ask them the same question and they’ll come up with half a dozen bands or acts from Nirvana to Pearl Jam onwards of who they'll say, that the music will take them through a lot of our lives. They will grow with this music.”

Music seems to be the main focus for Bowie right now, with the release of the new album and the US tour with NIN. But it’s certainly not the only one. He plays Warhol in a new film by American artist Julian Schnabel entitled Build A Fort, Set It On Fire on the life of the street artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. He hopes to further develop The Adler Diaries with Brian Eno, ultimately stage them as a “piece of epic, monumental theatre, directed, ideally, by stage master Robert Wilson. His first visual arts exhibition in the US will take place later this year, and he expresses his wish to “pummel Britain with my art until they give in.”

He confirms that he will be creating a Minotaur with Damien Hirst just as soon as the human who has donated his body for this project after his death obliges, and that they even plan to build a labyrinth for it on a small island near the Hebrides.

I remind Bowie that precisely 22 years ago to the month, he caused widespread panic staging a “Retirement Gig” at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, in order to guillotine the monster, Ziggy. Yet here we are another decade, another monster and an end-of-millennium album that Ziggy probably would have approved of (remember 5 Years?). Bowie laughs, and begins to speak before I fully formulate my question.

“The last five or six years, really, since the end of the ‘80s, have been just wonderful. I’ve been very fortunate in my personal life. But also, what I do as an artist has been so fulfilling. As I get older, for me the priorities fast become quality of life, and each day I don’t want to fuck about.

“I don’t really want to waste my time, because there’s so much more that I want to do and say and paint and make music on and all that, and I love it. I really love it. I love being an artist. It’s my chosen profession, and I just think I’m getting better at it, and this is definitely the wrong time to quit.”