Sorry, all, for tardy posting - been a bit consumed with things Scottish and musical, now establishing an equilibrium over all projects. Apropos of completely nothing - other than a search round the databases, and a wee bit of pridefulness - I post a 1997 review of a David Bowie biography that I did for the Times Literary Supplement, my only ever commission there. It's in full on extended post below, but here's an excerpt:
With the flotation of his name as a corporate entity on the New York Stock Exchange, Bowie has become even more of an abstracted "earthling" than ever before. In interviews, however, he remains as soaked in suburban affability as he ever was: the "good average" who can discuss postmodern art, and the latest laddish pleasures, with the same slightly stagey enthusiasm. It is this vaudevillian cast to David Bowie which both of these biographies, in their diligence, finally reveal. Like all great stars, Bowie has been a showman of his selves; and where the empty core behind the display has driven contemporaries to either madness or blandness, Bowie has used his fractured identity as a spin of the dice, an openness to the next cultural turn. The "coldness" remarked upon by so many of those interviewed in these books is probably the cost of this opportunistic fluidity; a matter of "loving the alien", indeed.
The TLS July 18, 1997
The Thin White Duke
Pat Kane
BOWIE. Loving the alien. By Christopher Sandford. 369pp. Little, Brown. £17.99. - 0 316 87978 9
DAVID BOWIE. Living on the brink. By George Tremlett. 350pp. Century. £15.99. - 0 7126 5531 X
David Bowie's fiftieth birthday earlier this year gave rise to various encomia - documentary specials on British television, countless magazine covers and radio profiles, not to mention these two exhaustive biographies. Might this not have been an appropriate moment for an elder statesman of rock to let his creative flame slowly and quietly die, to pick up the various gongs that popular music's new legitimacy can provide, rest in the glow of his supermodel wife, and retire to the Swiss chalet?
Not a bit of it. If you turn on MTV at the moment, you will eventually see David Bowie at his insectoid, avant-garde best. The video for his recent single "Little Wonder" renders London as a blur of sexes and organisms, a sprawling post-human orgy. Bowie sings nursery-rhyme melodies over the most fractured of dance grooves, and the whole thing is about as disturbing as hummable pop music gets. Even the more ageist parts of the British music press have conceded that Bowie's ability to colonize pop's future remains considerable. How is it that Bowie can remain a modernist, while his ancient peers - Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed - crumble into irrelevance or decrepitude?
The answer, buried deep in both of these books, is that Bowie's personality has always been essentially neophiliac. Nothing, and no one, has ever satisfied him for long - sexually, musically, narcotically, or financially. As both Christopher Sandford's Bowie: Loving the alien and George Tremlett's David Bowie: Living on the brink reveal, the source of this dissatisfaction has its origin in the grey turmoil of family life in post-war suburban London. Bowie grew up in Bromley, as David Jones, and both his mother and his brother were mentally ill. His early aspirations to stardom in the 1960s flourished in a netherland between showbiz and the avant-garde - where florid impresarios and voracious bohemians, struggled over the career (and affections) of talented neophytes such as Davy Jones. Bowie has always been able to reconcile the need to be a "good average" - an effective, technically competent performer, fit for stage, screen and studio - with his wilful, absorbed journeys into alternative worlds. Musician after musician recalls how disciplined and almost authoritarian Bowie was in rehearsal. Even when, during the Ziggy Stardust days, a live performance would involve simulated fellatio and an alien invasion from Mars, every move was choreographed to perfection.
Another useful aspect of the good rock biography is its window on the dull commercial realities of a thirty-year music career - the inevitable rip-offs, the tense relationship between record company and wayward artist, the rough negotiations between art and commerce that all musicians practise. Sandford in particular shows how, despite early mistakes, Bowie's grip on his career has always been extremely sure. It is mildly inspiring to see how Bowie manages to placate his corporate bosses with the promise of hits, while simultaneously using their resources to make tradition-shattering albums like his Berlin trilogy (Low, Station to Station, Heroes) in the 1970s, Scary Monsters in the 80s and the resolutely art-rock Outside and Earthling in the 90s. Bowie's career shows how auteurism is the necessary illusion of commercial pop: necessary for the artist as a defence against pressures to adhere to a formula, and necessary for record company executives to guard themselves against the commercial stagnation that can result from sticking too often to the same recipe for success. Bowie's adroit handling of this mind-set shows that nothing sustains a career in the music business like militant Romanticism.
Yet Romanticism can change into the most disturbing shapes. Neither of these biographies shies away from Bowie's most diseased period of "genius": his mid-70s flirtation with - and, at times, outright embrace of - Fascism.
Sandford meticulously reveals, through unearthed photo-graphs and intense archive work, just how disturbingly detailed Bowie's interest was. The immediate culprit appears to have been his ad-diction to cocaine; a veritable blizzard shrouded Bowie and his entourage as they spun through Europe and the United States. But Bowie's interest is also part of a rather twisted tradition in British pop music, a kind of neurotic nationalism - sometimes driven by a sense of inferiority in comparison with rock's American roots, sometimes swelling up with wider (and more dangerous) cultural anxieties. At its least harmful, it becomes the rosy nostalgia of the Kinks and the Beatles (a locus for our most recent bout of musical patriotism, Brit-Pop). At its strongest, it becomes a cry for cultural purity - Clapton praising Enoch Powell, Morrissey sneering at Asian subcultures, Bowie claiming Hitler as "the first rock-n-roll star". But the Thin White Duke can always be relied on to cut-and-paste his own past with impunity. Bowie stands on the cover of his latest album, Earthling, his back turned to the camera, displaying a Union Jack frock-coat, posing commandingly over the green fields of England. On closer inspection, however, the flag is seen to be covered in streaks of bird-shit.
With the flotation of his name as a corporate entity on the New York Stock Exchange, Bowie has become even more of an abstracted "earthling" than ever before. In interviews, however, he remains as soaked in suburban affability as he ever was: the "good average" who can discuss postmodern art, and the latest laddish pleasures, with the same slightly stagey enthusiasm. It is this vaudevillian cast to David Bowie which both of these biographies, in their diligence, finally reveal. Like all great stars, Bowie has been a showman of his selves; and where the empty core behind the display has driven contemporaries to either madness or blandness, Bowie has used his fractured identity as a spin of the dice, an openness to the next cultural turn. The "coldness" remarked upon by so many of those interviewed in these books is probably the cost of this opportunistic fluidity; a matter of "loving the alien", indeed.
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