Or so it says on an old badge I still have. Which I used to wear a lot. Being absent from the blog so much this year means no Bowie Talk about the new album, The Next Day. (Buy it from Amazon.) Yeah, I liked it; yeah, I’ve had my ups-and-downs with it. In the end I made peace with it fully—I actually love some of it intensely.
See, I thought he was gone for good. And I was more or less okay with that. It might seem odd but the whole thing was very emotional for me. I had to go through a wide spectrum of feelings. On the other side, I’m really happy the new album exists. The world is a better place with DB in it.
And hey, he’s still a fine-looking man at 66, ain’t he?
His most recent video, for “Valentine’s Day”, was fab. Here it is, if you missed it.
A few years ago, when I was working on a medical technologies trade journal, I ran a news feature on the national Healthcare Technology Awards. One of the winners was Aircraft Medical of Edinburgh, who make video laryngoscopes. Their national sales director was called David Bowie. So, inevitably, I gave the article the title ‘We Could Be Heroes’. He’s since started his own company, but we don’t do that magazine any more so the chance of interviewing him has passed me by.
Bizarrely, ‘Modern Love’ has featured in the soundtrack of two US films this year. Was it a big hit over there? Hate it.
Hah. Well, Modern Love made top 20 in US, I think, but not top five a la the UK. But the album itself (Let’s Dance) did very well there. And a lot of other places. It was his biggest success… and manufactured to be that, hence ditching Visconti in favour of Nile Rodgers. (I think it took TV and DB about 15yrs to patch things up, consequently.) I like the album, really, but it paved the way for a loooong spell of aimless mediocrity punctuated with the odd goodie (i.e. Loving The Alien) (incidentally, did you ever notice that part of that sounds exactly like the Red Dwarf theme?)…
The only Bowie albums I own (though not the only ones I’ve heard) are Station to Station, Low and Heroes, all of which I really like, but overall Bowie doesn’t speak to me as forcefully as some other artists (e.g. Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Scott Walker). Bowie seems too abstract somehow, too much an artist of ideas rather than passions. Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust are fine albums, certainly, and i’d probably like his other 70s albums if I heard them — after that I’m not so sure. ‘Let’s Dance’ and ‘China Girl’ are acceptable ‘sellout’ pop records but ‘Modern Love’ sums up everything I hate about the 1980s. I did like his recent single ‘Where are We Now’, so maybe the new album would be a good strategic purchase. Not that you can find CDs anywhere now.
Do you like Nico? I saw her twice in the mid-1980s and she was amazing. The Marble Index is one of my favourite albums, though her later work falls some way short of it.
You might like the new album. Bowie’s voice has failed a bit noticeably due to being away for ten years — one of the things that started to make me anxious for a while — but, hell, he IS 66. And being away for that long makes it stick out. On some tracks, not all. It’s not a great album but it’s a very good one.
Nico… well, heard the Velvet’s stuff. Never really heard solo work.
My favourite Nico anecdote is that there was only one joke she ever laughed at: “Have you heard they’ve discovered a new birth control pill? You take it and it’s like you were never born.” Nico was badly treated by the music industry but John Cale stood by her, which says a lot – he’s a man of real artistic integrity. Her last album, Camera Obscura, has a memorable line: “They want your face for a magazine / They want my voice for their fears”
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