CHALKIE DAVIES (PHOTOGRAPHER): I was at Victoria Station when David returned to Britain and there was the incident with the supposed Nazi salute. But it wasn’t a Nazi salute at all. In May 1976 he arrived back in London on the Orient Express, he was met at Victoria by a chauffeur driving his newly acquired black open-top Mercedes. He stood up in the back of the car and waved to the crowd for about fifteen seconds. I got a picture of him doing this, but it was out of focus because his hand was moving. Back in those days, if they wanted a white background on an NME cover they literally painted the photograph white, and so somebody decided to put a hand where the withery hand was, but that made it look too much like a salute. The NME came out on a Wednesday and then the papers picked it up and decided it was a Nazi salute. It was taken completely out of context. Then I think someone found some quotes about fascism that he did in an interview in Amsterdam and it got blown beyond all proportion.
JULIEN TEMPLE: David kept up with everything, and he was especially intrigued by punk. In a way I think he felt as though he was somehow partly responsible. They were his children in a sense. He kept up, always kept up. When Iggy played the Rainbow in Finsbury Park in 1977, when David was playing keyboards for him, I went along with John [Lydon] and Sid [Vicious], and went backstage afterwards. There was already a tremendous rivalry between the old guard and the new, and there was a party going on somewhere afterwards, and I remember vividly that John and Sid really didn’t want Iggy and David to come to this party. So we arranged to go in convoy, and there was this farcical car chase across London, with John and Sid deliberately trying to lose Iggy and David. It was comical, but we lost them eventually.
SIOUXSIE SIOUX (PUNK ICON): I was fifteen when I first saw David Bowie. He was singing “Starman” on Top of the Pops, and I was in hospital recovering from a serious illness. I just couldn’t believe how striking he was. That ambiguous sexuality was so bold and futuristic that it made the traditional male/female role-play thing seem so outdated. Besides, I’d lost so much weight and had got so skinny that Bowie actually made me look cool! He was tearing down all the old clichés, but he was also having a lot of fun doing it. Bowie was well into clothes and dressing up, and that had a lot of resonance with me, although I was never a Bowie lookalike. A few years later, when he began to withdraw from it all, it really felt like there was something missing. Until then, his albums had been eagerly anticipated. But by the mid ’70s there was a vacuum. It was no coincidence that so many people involved in punk at the beginning had been inspired by him. Bowie was the catalyst who’d brought a lot of us, the so-called Bromley Contingent, together. And out of that really small group of people, a lot happened, including Siouxsie and the Banshees.
LEGS MCNEIL (JOURNALIST): “Never wear a new pair of shoes in front of him,” said Mick Jagger about Bowie. Jagger’s implication was either that Bowie was a notorious thief (of ideas, trends, or the latest fashions), or that he’d run right out and get it in order to claim ultra-hipper-than-thou trendsetting status.
I had a run-in with Bowie at Andy Warhol’s Factory back in 1976 or early 1977 that proved Jagger’s quip.
I forget who told me Bowie was going to be at the Factory, but when John Holmstrom, the editor-in-chief of Punk, heard the news, he packed me off with a cheap cassette recorder and told me not to come back to our cavelike offices at Tenth Avenue and Thirtieth Street without a Bowie interview. What I didn’t know was that this was Bowie’s second summit meeting with Warhol, after their disastrous first meeting in 1971. He’d played Warhol his new song “Andy Warhol,” and Andy said absolutely nothing. He just pulled out his Polaroid camera and said, “I really like your shoes!”
David was crushed. But that day at the Factory in the mid-’70s, Bowie was a genuine rock and roll star. He’d proved himself to be a viable commercial entity of comparable status with Warhol, an equal. There was a crowd of people surrounding Bowie when he walked through the Factory to the back room, where Andy was waiting for him, surrounded by his own coterie of supporters. It was more like a gang war than a private meeting. All the hangers-on were topping themselves with one-liners, vying to be noticed for the history books. I’m sure Andy was relieved to have so many people around because he seldom had much to say, ever.
I waited by the receptionist’s desk, for forty-five minutes to an hour, for Bowie to re-emerge so I could ask him for the interview and be on my way. It was excruciatingly boring, as all the gay guys who worked for Andy were too important to talk to me. Real fucking snobs. I tried hitting on the only girl in the place, Katherine Guinness, the heiress to the Guinness beer fortune, who was mildly amused by my efforts but wasn’t interested.
Anyway, Bowie finally came out of the backroom surrounded by his minions, who seemed to have doubled in size behind the closed door. As he was bidding Andy a fond farewell, I slipped over to him and said, “Mr. Bowie, I was wondering if you’d be willing to do an interview for Punk…”
Without speaking, Bowie grabbed the Suicide record out of my hands and his entourage swept him down the hall, into the elevator, and outside to a waiting limo, which presumably swept him off to the next fabulous event. I didn’t even have time to say, “Hey, you fucking pooftah, gimme back my fucking Suicide record!”
I did get back at Bowie though. A few weeks later he came to CBGB with Bianca Jagger, which wasn’t that strange. What was strange was that it was on some off night in the middle of the week when some shitty band was playing and the only people there were me, Joey Ramone, and some diehard drunks. Ha, you ain’t at Studio 54 now, asshole, I thought as I watched David and Bianca traverse the piles of dog shit on the floor that Hilly Krystal’s Salukis had deposited. Then I went outside and stole the hubcaps off his limousine. I fucked that up though, and read in the New York Post the next day that their limo got a flat tire on the way home.
TONY PARSONS: Bowie was the one person who was always there, even during punk. I saw him with my very first girlfriend, Kim, at Earls Court, in 1973 on the Aladdin Sane tour, and I remember being on the NME and going to see the Berlin tour he did when he didn’t have any money, and flying up to Newcastle to see that. I remember being that young, single parent, and not being able to get a babysitter for my kid, and taking my kid to see him when Bobby was about seven, in Birmingham. And he was just always there, he was really always there. So, for me, for someone who was a child in the ’60s, and grew up aware of all that great music in the ’60s, but not really a participant because I was too young, he was the person who unlocked the ’70s. The moribund, early-’70s rock music, the thing that punk rebelled against and revolted against, he really seemed an antidote to all that and he seemed authentic in a way that a lot of the glam stars weren’t. He just felt like our thing. In the ’60s the scene was just about a few people around Chelsea in London. In the ’70s it was everybody, all the suburban kids like me, with a cheap Aladdin Sane haircut from Basildon.
I used to go to funk clubs more than I went to rock concerts; I’d go and watch the Faces, and go and watch the Who, but I’d [go] down to the Goldmine in Canvey Island, listening to the Gap Band and Kool and the Gang. And Bowie seemed to get that, he seemed to have that ability, which really only the greatest have got, of breaking down barriers. Elvis did it. Rock music was really white, it had reached the end of all that promise, all that brightness, all that excitement that I felt as a kid, listening to the Beatles and the Stones; it had all come to the end. And he was the antidote to all that, it just kind of struck home. And it was a time when we thought that rock music would always reinvent itself, we thought there would always be another new thing coming down the road. Nobody ever thought it was going to become museum culture, a dead art form, which is what it became. And he clearly wanted it. I always thought he was an artist who wanted to be a star, and a star who wanted to be an artist. He was genuinely passionate about his craft and what he did, but also he wanted to be famous.
HANIF KUREISHI: I knew the Bromley contingent, just before punk, and my mates used to wear pins and nappies and bondage trousers and things like that. I just felt a bit embarrassed about it, I have to say. But I used to go to the Roebuck in King’s Road, the Water Rat and Chelsea Potter, the punk pubs. And there was a mixture of Chelsea playboys with their shirts open and their medallions and their cars outside. And I used to see all my lot in Bromley. They got quite nasty, and some of them were into prostitution, a lot of heroin. But I didn’t want to take heroin. I wanted to be a writer by then. I was much more interested in the Royal Court, which was at the other end of the King’s Road, than I was in becoming a junkie. Bromley was very middle class though. Johnny Rotten and Glen Matlock…they came from council flats and had much more violent backgrounds. Billy Idol, William Broad, he was very middle class, and wasn’t like Sid Vicious at all, and it was all about dressing up, so I was a bit puzzled by that. I liked punk, but I’d much rather go home and listen to Marvin Gaye or Patti Smith. But we all loved David Bowie. He was the bridge between the old and the new.
TONY PARSONS: I was a Bowie fan when I joined the NME, and it wasn’t like I had a relationship with him, it wasn’t like David was coming round to my flat to listen to soul music. When I joined the NME in 1977 he was the only person I was in awe of meeting because I had been a fan, it wasn’t like the bands that I hung out with and wrote about. The Clash, the Pistols, the Talking Heads, these were my contemporaries, but Bowie was my hero. I was going out interviewing bands, staying up for three days and nights straight, which was really the high point of rock and roll excess, and Bowie’s music just sounded fantastically moving, and fantastically human. Although it was numbed by experience, numbed by chemicals, even now I’m shocked when I listen to the love songs on Station to Station, I’m shocked how moving I find them. For me, he subtracted rock music with Low, when he was in Berlin. It was a really radical, artistic move, not a gesture. And for me, it mirrored what the drugs had done to him, what the drugs had done to everyone. It was music of exhaustion. By the time Low came out, I knew people who were very serious heroin addicts, I knew people who were dying, who were killing themselves, I knew people that would be lucky to come out of the drug experience undamaged, myself included. And that music reflected that. And it was always a part; he was always separate from the rest of it, he really did create his own agenda, and that was what was unique about him. We became genuine friends later, but at that time I was just a fan. I loved his music right throughout punk. I loved Station to Station, and the White Light [Isolar] Tour, one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever seen in my life. For me it was just such a fantastic performance, just so brilliant. Very plain setting, just chuck up a few sixty-watt lightbulbs and put on some baggy white trousers! That was the time of the famous RCA campaign: There’s old wave, there’s new wave, and there’s David Bowie.
NICK KENT: Iggy respected Bowie’s privacy. He saw Bowie as a patron and he wanted to protect that relationship, just in case he needed him again. He also owed him a hell of a lot as Bowie gave him his solo career, first of all by writing the songs on The Idiot and Lust for Life, then playing the instruments, paying for the sessions, and going out on tour with him. The thing with Iggy was that in the Stooges he always gave 100 percent, and when you do that you blow your voice out. There are certain professional things you need to do as a singer and one of those is to protect your voice, and Iggy never did that. He’d just lost control. Bowie was telling him that he needed to take care of his voice. So he sat him down and got him to develop the baritone voice that you hear on The Idiot and Lust for Life, and he wrote songs for that voice. “Sister Midnight” was written for Iggy’s new voice, and it worked perfectly. “Funtime.” All of them. So that Iggy could go onstage and not burn himself out after ten minutes, which was often the case with the Stooges. Their shows only lasted half an hour because they were just carnage. He showed Iggy how to become a professional performer, someone who could go onstage and perform for an hour and a half, someone who could keep the energy going and not blow his voice. So he was a mentor.
Iggy was also following him around on the Station to Station tour, as he had nothing better to do and no money. It must have been incredibly frustrating for him, as he had no money, no band of his own, and he was a pariah in the music industry because he had fucked up so many times. And David Bowie was looking after him. Bowie was also staying up for three or four nights at a time, behaving in a somewhat skittish way. If you were working for Bowie at the time you would have been somewhat stressed. He also had lots of other side projects. He was working with Ava Cherry, his girlfriend at the time, who he was recording with. He was making records with his friend Geoff MacCormack, also known as Warren Peace. So there was also no job security, as Bowie would spend a few days recording with Iggy and then go off and do something else for a while. It was Bowie’s largesse that kept everything going. Bowie liked having him around because Iggy is very good company. He’s very witty, well read, a quick thinker.
And Bowie needed quick thinkers, which is why Bowie got Brian Eno involved later on. He didn’t need Brian Eno. Eno brought considerable influence to Low and “Heroes,” but Bowie could have made those records himself. But he was using Eno. Brian used to live near me in Maida Vale, and I saw him one day when he came back from recording “Heroes.” I asked him how it had gone and he said it had been extremely difficult—“challenging” was how he put it. The problem was that Eno liked to work during the day, and Bowie liked to work at night. He would be in the studio at six in the morning, while Bowie would turn up at six in the evening. He was still on the night shift. So what Eno would do during the day was record all those instrumentals that you hear on the records. Then Bowie would come in and say, yeah I like that, and maybe add something to them. So that’s why a lot of those instrumentals are on the records, because Bowie was asleep. Brian Eno is someone else who uses opportunities to their maximum effect. There were problems because at the time Bowie wasn’t as straight as he would like us to believe. He later claimed that Low and “Heroes” were made in a cocaine-free environment, but I’m not sure that’s strictly true. He was using less cocaine than he had used during the Station to Station period, but he was still using, plus of course he was still on coffee and nicotine. Those were his most constant drugs, and perhaps some of his later health problems were brought about by his nicotine and coffee problems rather than anything else. The chain smoking and the coffee, one espresso after another.
GEOFF MACCORMACK: [In Berlin] I knew Iggy because he was so stoned, so I used to pinch his girlfriends. Once David, me, and Iggy, we went to the studio and I sat on the piano and started playing these chords, Iggy started singing and so I kind of left them to it and I went outside and there was this really attractive girl waiting to see Iggy and I convinced her that he was really busy and he was just creating art and shouldn’t really be disturbed again. The song was “Turn Blue.”
TONY PARSONS: Iggy Pop gave me a book once that Bowie had given him, and it was the letters of the Van Gogh brothers, Theo and Vincent. That’s how they saw themselves in Berlin, one genius artist and one perhaps not quite the genius.
IGGY POP (SINGER): He’d always marvel at what a dick I was—how awkward I was in social situations and in all the things that you can do to make your career go better. So finally he said, “Look, we’re going to call this album The Idiot.” I took it as a challenge: OK, I’ll show you. We had a good friction in our working relationship. He’s the kind of guy who had obviously read The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, which I hadn’t, and he probably saw all the resonance of the term and its possibilities. But I think his basic thrust, when he suggested it, was just to insult me—“You fucking idiot.”
The friendship was basically that this guy salvaged me from certain professional and maybe personal annihilation—simple as that. A lot of people were curious about me, but only he was the one who had enough truly in common with me, and who actually really liked what I did and could get on board with it, and who also had decent enough intentions to help me out. He did a good thing. He resurrected me. He was more of a benefactor than a friend in a way most people think of friendship. He went a bit out of his way to bestow some good karma on me.
DAVID BOWIE: I wanted to find some kind of satisfaction in life rather than this desperate kind of searching. I just did too much and I came close several times to overdose. It was really graphically clear; it was like being in a car where the steering had gone out of control and it was going towards the edge of the cliff. I was very worried for my life, so I ended up in Berlin, the smack capital of Europe. I didn’t have any idea until I got there until I found out that’s what it was, and who did I take with me? Iggy Pop, who was trying to get off smack. Surviving all that and realizing you don’t have to be a casualty was like being reborn. I think that throughout the ’60s and ’70s I was driven by lust. As much as anything it’s a great creative force that in turn is replaced by anger when you ask where the money is, then you get depression, and then you go to Berlin and write really moody instrumental stuff.
BRIAN ENO (MUSICIAN): I knew he liked [my] Another Green World a lot, and he must have realized that there were these two parallel streams of working going on in what I was doing, and when you find someone with the same problems you tend to become more friendly with them. He said that when he first heard [my] Discreet Music he could imagine in the future that you would go into the supermarket and there would be a rack of “ambience” records, all in very similar covers. They would have titles like Sparkling or Nostalgic or Melancholy or Sombre. They would be mood titles and so very cheap to buy you could chuck them away when you didn’t want them anymore.
TONY VISCONTI: Low wasn’t a difficult album to make, we were freewheeling, making our own rules. But David was going through a difficult period professionally and personally. To his credit, he didn’t put on a brave face. His music said that he was “low.” I find “Warszawa” very uplifting. Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click. I remember after a couple of weeks of recording I made a rough mix of the entire album so far and handed a cassette of it to David. He left the control room waving the cassette over his head and grinned ecstatically saying, “We’ve got an album, we’ve got an album.” I have to qualify that statement by saying that at the beginning, the three of us agreed to record with no promise that Low would ever be released. David had asked me if I didn’t mind wasting a month of my life on this experiment if it didn’t go well. Hey, we were in a French chateau for the month of August and the weather was great!
BRIAN ENO: We slipped into Peter Cook and Dudley Moore characters. Bowie was Pete and I was Dud, and for the whole time we stayed in character. “Ooh, I dunno about that synthesizer part, Dud.” The way he worked impressed me a lot. Because it reminds me of me. He’d go out into the studio to do something, and he’d just come back hopping up and down with joy. And whenever I see someone doing that I just trust that reaction. It means that they really are surprising themselves.
JON SAVAGE (JOURNALIST): I think Low is a perfect record. The lyrics were very jumpy and autistic, just images flashing without much logic, but side two was a complete revelation. A big turning point, it was the secret sound of 1977, the soundtrack to taking amphetamines and feeling alienated. “Weeping Wall” is very light and spacey, with shimmering marimbas: it’s tied into the exploration of space and synthetic textures that later fed into electronic disco. The second side of “Heroes” develops the ideas on Low. “Moss Garden” is just extraordinary: ambient music before the genre. It’s Bowie going beyond again. This really haunted my dreams in late 1977: that was around the time that I stopped listening to punk and began to think synthesizer music was the future. That’s what Bowie did. Like the Beatles in the ’60s, he signaled cultural shifts. He’s the ’70s Beatles, in that respect.
RICKY GARDINER (GUITARIST): Coco had called me and asked if I could go to the Château [d’Hérouville] to work on David’s new album. When I arrived I met Iggy, and that was good, although I didn’t know who he was of course. I had no idea, I thought he was a roadie or something. He said, “This my new album [The Idiot], do you like it?” and this awful mono cassette machine was pushed into my face and it sounded terrible and I said, “Oh yes, great.” David was going through a divorce and separating from his management and wasn’t all together. That’s why his album must have been called Low, I think. Low was basically a prog album, although I think David was slightly late in the prog department, as prog had been replaced by punk. He looked decidedly disheveled, poor thing. The wee boy Zowie was there; he was six. It was all a bit sad really. David seemed preoccupied, and he was just watching the speakers and looking into space. He was unshaven. However, I liked Angie, and she was a tidy specimen. And she worked hard, Angie did. David’s first gigs as David Bowie, when he had stopped doing his Johnny Ray impressions, and started using his Cockney accent, she made his costumes out of the curtains on the stage. She was a great support to David.
[He then invited me to] his flat in Paris to look at some of his paintings, and was much livelier. One painting was dappled, what you might imagine Impressionism to be. And there was a boat emerging from the water and I immediately thought of water as being emotion, and that he was emerging from some emotional conundrum or other. And he wanted my opinion. So I told him emergence, it’s about emergence, but I couldn’t care what he thought of what I said, really. I refused to be star-struck. We were contemporaries, and nice enough as he was, and correct as we say, he was fine. He was a Capricorn and he wanted to be successful. He needed to be, I think. We got on well. All stars are overrated. They’re people. I think some of them crave it when they’re young because along with that comes money but ultimately they want peace. It wears a bit thin. He wasn’t difficult to work with, not with me anyway. But then again, he wanted to crack Germany and we were fairly popular in Germany. He’d come from L.A. and he’d landed in Berlin and fair enough he wanted to do some stuff. He was a big star then.
Together David and Iggy were a pair of naughty boys really. They explored Berlin and the clubs and quite frankly they were dreadful. People talk about Berlin as if it were marvelous, but frankly it was just weird. They had a cabaret which was sexually deviant, and I just didn’t need this. But David wasn’t deviant, anything but. During the tour in America for example there were no boys outside these hotel rooms, just black girls he had a thing for. Both of them were pretty normal. I remember we were in some hotel in the US, and David and Iggy came knocking at our door, asking my wife, Virginia, to go and play! I don’t know where they thought I was. So I said, “Hello, David,” and they scampered off. Nothing was ever said after that.
David never spoke about his family, although I remember when he did the tour with Iggy, when he played keyboards. I think his mother came to a gig in London, and he wasn’t pleased. I think Stuey George looked after her. David was uncomfortable about the approach. Bless her, she thought, Oh look, David! Oh I must go up and see David. But Stuey was kind and said, No, you can’t go up there. David didn’t want her to come up.
IGGY POP: He subsumed my personality, lyrically, on that first album. At times it was like having Professor Higgins say to you, “Young man, please, you are from the Detroit area. I think you should write a song about mass production.” He wrote a chord progression on a ukulele and said, “Call it ‘Lust for Life.’ Write something up.” He saw me sometimes, when he wanted to voice it that way, as a modern Beat or a modern Dostoyevsky character or a modern van Gogh. But he also knew I’m a hick from the sticks at heart.
David was worldly. I learned things that I still use today. I met the Beatles and the Stones, and this one and that one, and this actress and this actor and all these powerful people through him. And I watched. And every once in a while, now at least, I’m a little less rustic when I have to deal with those people. He came to my parents’ trailer in Detroit, and the neighbors were so frightened of the car and the bodyguard they called the police. My father’s a very wonderful man, and he said, “Thank you for what you’re doing for my son.” I thought, Shut up, Dad. You’re making me look uncool.
HANIF KUREISHI: Why the fuck would you do all that for Iggy Pop? I guess for David, Iggy Pop was just Terry, wasn’t he? He was his brother, his long-lost brother. I remember Bowie saying—if you love Iggy Pop there must be something wrong with you. Iggy Pop was really, really crazy, compared to Bowie who was much more centered. Maybe he was just Terry.
CARLOS ALOMAR: Making The Idiot was great, because I met Jimmy Osterberg, rather than Iggy Pop, this cat that came around to hang out with his friend David, and he was just a lovely sweet man. He is the kind of guy who reads the newspaper and looks over his glasses at you and says, “Good morning.” Then onstage his alter ego comes out and you think, Fuck me, who is that? When David asked me to do the album, it was like primal scream therapy. Iggy just came in and started singing about his mom, and how she stepped on his heart, and we’re thinking, This is serious stuff! David also told me this: If you see something, write; if you feel something, write. Write, write, write. David did a tour with Iggy as a keyboard player, and he tried to undermine his situation by saying I’m not David Bowie, I’m a keyboard player. Yeah, right! But that tour was the craziest, most awesome thing I ever did. We were on the front line, and the first two shows we did, there was this angry mob. What did I do wrong? They’re throwing beer at me! Welcome to punk music and Iggy Pop, you stupid fuck. I learned how to kick a fucker in the face in a minute. Once he spit at me, whether they were a guy or a girl, I’d kick them in the face. I just didn’t understand the world I had been thrown into.
JOHN GIDDINGS (PROMOTER): I first met David when he was Iggy Pop’s piano player, at Friars Aylesbury in 1977. Iggy said that David was the most expensive musician he’d ever worked with, and David said he never got paid! That was the first time I helped promote a “David Bowie” show, and I went on to promote him for the rest of his career. It came down to trust in the end, as all David wanted was to be able to walk out onstage, in London, Moscow, New York, wherever, and know that nothing was going to go wrong, that everything was going to be perfect. He didn’t want to know how you did it, but once he trusted you, that was it as far as he was concerned. He didn’t interfere. People are famous until you get to know them, and once you got to know David you realized that he was an incredibly smart, funny guy. Jim and David would sit around and talk about everything—art, music, politics, theatre—but never about their own work or careers. They weren’t obsessive about it in the way that many musicians are, didn’t need to show off about it.
I remember once being in a restaurant with them in Berlin, and the table was covered with all these glasses full of wine and water, with different amounts in each. And they both started hitting them with knives and forks, making up a song, a good song, on the spot. They were full of creativity but they didn’t brag about it. They thought it was silly when people talked about the problems of fame, as they knew they could both walk around unrecognized if they wanted to. It was all a matter of how you carried yourself. David was special. I’ve promoted everyone in the business, but David is the only person I’ve ever wanted to ask for an autograph, not that I ever did, obviously. There was no one to touch him. Freddie Mercury was in a band, Mick Jagger was in a band, Bono was in a band. David was all alone. The Stones were a blues band, U2 were a folk band, but David was David. And yet he was always a Bromley boy at heart.
NICK KENT: Bowie and Iggy went to see a screening of Taxi Driver in Berlin, and Iggy was so knocked out by the film that he immediately went and got a Mohawk, a Travis Bickle Mohawk. And Bowie went and saw a bunch of Fassbinder films and decided to grow a mustache. They were creating new identities for themselves, pretending they weren’t rock stars, but rather reluctant émigrés. The NME got wind that Bowie had grown a mustache, and we printed this in our gossip column. On the day this issue hit the streets, I was in the office waiting for a phone call while everyone else was out at lunch. So every time the phone rang I had to pick it up, and I got a series of calls from hysterical, obviously gay young men asking me if this was true, that he’d grown a mustache. They were all flabbergasted. Why had he done it? Was it really true? Did we have photographs? People were incensed. A lot of these people were from the north, and I always imagine they were Holly Johnson [from Frankie Goes to Hollywood] and Steven Morrissey. It gave me an insight into how extreme Bowie’s influence on his audience was.
DEBORAH HARRY (SINGER): The first time we met David Bowie was when we supported him on The Idiot tour for Iggy Pop, in 1977. We were all star-struck. How could you not be? He was David Bowie. We were obviously very pleased to be doing the tour, and it was a momentous occasion when they casually walked out onstage together when we were doing our sound check. We already knew that he was due to perform with Iggy, but it was still a thrill seeing him. On a couple of the other tours we had done, it was very competitive, and they tried to make the opening band look very insignificant, but David and Iggy took care of us. They wanted us to put on a good show. I don’t think we had full sound and lights, but they were, you know, encouraging. He was very generous, and gave me pointers about how to interact with the crowd. It was more like tech support rather than creative stuff, working the stage, working the lights. I guess I was pretty dull at that point.
He was intriguing, as you could see that he had a process in the way he metamorphosed. I couldn’t say what that process was, but it certainly involved exploration, which was one of the reasons he was so interested in us. I remember him talking about Japan and how infatuated and inspired he was by Japanese culture and costume, which was very clear by looking at a lot of the things he ended up doing. On this tour he was totally not in the front at all, and he was off to the side, focusing on playing. It was a tough bunch of guys, you know, really seasoned, strong musicians making this crunchy sound. It was really gutsy, and very good for Iggy. I think he did it out of love for Iggy, paying Iggy back in a way for being an inspiration to him.
I was complaining about being recognized, saying that it was getting difficult to walk around, and he said, “Oh, I always walk around.” And when I asked Bowie how he did it he said that he changed it up a little bit, wore a hat, put a pair of glasses on, and he would just vanish into anonymity. He could turn it on and off.
CHRIS STEIN (GUITARIST): They were waiting for us in the hallway when we arrived. This was in Massey Hall in Toronto. He was always the consummate professional. He obviously wanted to find out what was happening, and he was interested in what was happening in the whole new wave thing. He seemed obsessed with Television and Tom Verlaine’s hair, which I could never understand. I thought it would have been Richard Hell’s hair, as he had the quintessential cut, but he was always going on about Tom Verlaine’s hair. Maybe he was jealous. Maybe there was hair rivalry. But he was asking us all about what was going on in the New York scene. I’m sure he wanted to put the moves on Debbie. But the time wasn’t right, apparently! He wanted to know about the downtown scene. He wanted to maintain his relevance. I don’t know if he was too worried, but who knows. But he was aware of Iggy’s role as this seminal punk figure. He had a great time doing those shows too, as they were a really loud band, a massive sound, and he was really enjoying himself. There was a lot less pressure on him not being the front man too. Iggy went out with us more than he did. David was a little more reclusive. There was a moment when we were in Seattle and Iggy and me and Clem [Burke] and Gary [Valentine], I guess, went to the local punk house and did an impromptu show in a room in this house, and for years after that, every time we were back in Seattle someone would go, “I was at that legendary thing…!”
David could turn his charisma on and off. There’s this story about Marilyn Monroe walking down the street with the daughter of Lee Strasberg, Susan Strasberg, and Susan says that nobody was noticing her [Marilyn] at all. And then Marilyn says, “You wanna see something?” And she changes her demeanor a little bit, and all of a sudden everybody in the street was buzzing because it was her. Bowie could do that kind of thing too. That was his chameleon nature. He came over to our house on Fifty-Eighth Street a couple of times. We got stoned together. We had this fancy townhouse for a while when we had more money, and he fucking showed up in the middle of the night with Mick Jagger, just us and them and Ava Cherry and Jerry Hall. I got to sit on a coach with Mick Jagger and smoke a joint. That was cool.
CARLOS ALOMAR: When we were making Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger, David and I had the privilege of working with George Murray and Dennis Davies. We were the Damn Trio, and we had the ability to exemplify every thought David had. We could flip anything around, kick out arrangements, time signatures, three-quarter time here, four-quarter time, a half bar here, we could do anything.
TONY VISCONTI: When we were recording Low we would vacillate between being really chatty for about an hour, and then very studious. We both really loved Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and a lot of other British comedians, but then all of a sudden we would just snap into hard work without a cue. Because we were friends we would just chat about things. But he would never crack the whip, nor would I—we just had so many past experiences to base our work on.
ROY YOUNG (MUSICIAN): I came in around Low. I was a regular at the Speakeasy, in London’s West End, which is where all the musicians went after a gig, no matter where they were playing. It was just around the corner from the BBC, and was definitely the “in” club. Everyone that was in there was a name, you know. It was quite interesting. I used to play there, and would rub shoulders with Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Elton John, all the names that we know. We all mingled together because we’d all worked together. David used to come in, and he was like a Jekyll and Hyde, I think, and you never knew which one you were going to get. He had that quality to be able to be a different person every time you saw him. I thought it was quite neat actually. Whatever he carried, he carried it quite well. I remember one night he turned up as Ziggy Stardust, and the next minute everyone is rushing around trying to look like him. It was all the glamor and glitter, and the next day people were running out and buying gear down Oxford Street [to] buy the stuff to compete with David. The funny thing was, after a while it just looked so funny because everywhere you looked there was David Bowie. Then David started wearing a white shirt and a pair of blue flannel pants and the next thing was, all the people ran out and bought white shirts and blue flannel pants. I was playing at the Speakeasy when David called me to ask me to work with him on Low.
When we were recording Low at the Château, it transpired that we both liked to fish. Very odd, as you wouldn’t imagine he would like to fish. Art, he was very much on top of all that, I felt. He spoke about the horn players with Little Richard. He loved the saxophone. He was fanatical about Little Richard, Fats Domino. When we were recording he was very good at just letting you take the reins. That was interesting because it could’ve happened that we weren’t quite getting the effect that was needed for the album and so therefore, they let it go and go and it got more and more interesting as it went along.
I used to drink a lot of gin and tonics while I recorded, and one night David said, “Give me one of those gin and tonics.” So I gave him one, and he kept asking for more, and clinking his glass on the microphone. Every time he wanted another gin and tonic he’d clink his glass on the mike. He got so hammered that he fell asleep at the board. Tony Visconti kept recording, but David was fast asleep, snoring. Tony kept asking him what he thought and all you could hear was this snoring. So Tony started mimicking it, saying. “What do you think of that, David?” and then mimicking his snoring. We eventually had to take him to bed, carrying him up these winding stairs to his bedroom at the top, but then he fell all the way down the stairs. And I mean all of them. The next day at breakfast he lifted up his shirt and showed us all the marks on his back. Tony Visconti gave me such shit for the gin and tonics, I was nearly banned from the sessions. It was a very depressing album, anyway. He talked about fame a lot. He was very affected by the fact that he wanted to be famous, to be the guy running down the street and everyone chasing him and wanting to touch his body and girls screaming. But then when he got it he didn’t like it, said he couldn’t walk down the street anymore.
His son, Zowie, was traveling with us, and he was always impeccable, always impeccably dressed.
PAUL WELLER (MUSICIAN): I was in Dingwalls sometime in ’76, maybe ’77, with Joe Strummer when “Sound and Vision” came on, and we couldn’t fucking believe the drum sound. Neither of us had heard anything like it. I loved that, and I loved the barroom piano on “Be My Wife,” and all the crazy instrumentals. My recent records have been far more experimental, and while a lot of the influences come from psychedelia, a lot of them come from mid-period Bowie. I went through a spell of not really liking him, as I thought he’d gone off, but I have to admit I bought all of Bowie’s records from Hunky Dory onwards, right up until Lodger and Scary Monsters. All of his stuff back then was really groundbreaking. I never liked all the music, but it was always different, always pushing forward. Everyone in some way has been influenced by him. I’ve recently become much more of a fan, due to my missus, although Low is probably actually my favorite record of all time.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: My problem with Low was that I’d basically just crawled out of a deep hole, a mini breakdown caused by several years of acute amphetamine addiction, and Low reminded me of everything I’d just crawled out of. And when I interviewed Bowie the following year, I told him that Low appeared to be an actual sonic incarnation of post-speed addiction breakdown, and he said that’s exactly what it was. He said he made that record because he’d just been through something similar, and wanted to get it out of his system. He wasn’t glorifying psychotic withdrawal, as I initially thought he was, he was actually exorcising it. And then we were all chums again. We’d both been through the wars in our different ways, to different degrees in the intervening years. Him being a rich rock star who got drastically fucked on coke, me as an impoverished journo who got drastically fucked on speed. He may have been wearing a carefully chosen outfit from the normal-bloke section of his wardrobe, but he seemed like he was back on the straight and narrow, and had discarded a lot of baggage during that time. “Heroes” was an album about triumphing over a state of mind that Low seemed to be wallowing in.
Stuey George was David’s bodyguard, and his jokes—benign though they were—tended to be at his boss’s expense. “A Starman that won’t fly,” he used to say, whenever mention was made of Bowie’s reluctance to board a plane. In Berlin there were no birds in the sky, just taxis and lots of walking, irregular working hours and lots of beer and coffee. When Bowie had been living in L.A. the year before, he had hardly left his house, but here he was in Berlin, trying to replicate the dark, solitary psychosis of drug-addled Los Angeles. Lyrically Low was fueled by his L.A. diary, while musically it was basically upside down R&B—blue, blue, electric blue. Bowie designed to unnerve and disconcert. Low was a comedown album.
JAYNE COUNTY: Around the time of Low, and having moved to Berlin, he had a torrid affair with Romy Haag, and they were quite an item for a while, much to Angie’s disdain. Romy flew into a rage one night and threw David out in the street because she said he was stealing her ideas from her show at her club. He took all the images, gestures, and staging from her act and Romy was furious. I know he was also influenced by a few of the demos I was sending him. He went crazy and called everyone saying that he loved my songs and that I was a fantastic songwriter. He was supposed to produce an album for me but nothing ever came of that except some of my ideas began popping up on his songs. I don’t think it was intentional, I mean he wasn’t being evil or anything. I think he listened to my songs then went about his business, then when he started writing new songs some of my ideas unintentionally, subconsciously, made their way into some of his material. It was mostly the subject matter, not the actual sound of the songs. I’m not resentful now. I got over it. I’m now very flattered indeed. David was always a nice lad but he was easily influenced by others. For instance his sound changed immediately when he went to see the Human League one night at CBGBs. He was like that.
TONY VISCONTI: Working with Bowie was much more than going to a studio. It was a social event too. We would eat together, go to shows together, go to clubs together, and really soak in the local culture. That was always his way of working, and Berlin was perfect for him in terms of what he wanted at that time. It was a stark, scary place, yet it had a very exciting nightlife, with exotic locales such as the Turkish Quarter, and it was swarming with artists like Tangerine Dream, who were friends of ours. David was writing with Brian Eno back then, and the three of us got on really great. I think David just liked living in Berlin. There was so much of it, in those days, that was fantastic, fantasy-like, that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world. The impending danger of the divided military zones, the bizarre nightlife, the extremely traditional restaurants with aproned servers, reminders of Hitler’s not-too-distant presence, a recording studio five hundred yards from the Wall—you could’ve been on the set of The Prisoner. I got a real wonderful memory of that city. I know the wall had to come down, but in many ways, it was a much more romantic city with the wall around you. You felt like you were in a black-and-white film from the ’40s. You were expecting Humphrey Bogart to walk down the street any minute.
It was a very bizarre situation. Every day we’d see military tanks in the street—really huge tanks that were almost fifteen to twenty feet high, with big gun turrets at the front—and black jeeps that weren’t the standard military green. It was almost like being in a futuristic Arnold Schwarzenegger film, but this was happening in the ’70s. The city was surrounded by a moat that was mined. So if you fancied swimming across from East to West Berlin, you’d probably be either caught in barbed wire or exploded. If you had a British or American passport you could go into East Berlin…and when you went into East Berlin you were going about thirty years into the past. Because it was a Communist territory there were no brand names but they had billboards with a picture of a fish saying, “Eat fish” [or a] picture of a milk bottle [that said] “Drink milk” in German. There were no products in a Communist country then. The women were dressed as if it were the ’50s: they had narrow skirts, beehive hairdos, and stiletto heels. It was a most bizarre situation. David was parked one night on the west side and he was having a cigarette with a girl in his car and a Red Army guard knocked on his window and asked him for a light. Now, this guy shouldn’t have been in the west. Wacky stuff used to happen like this. He came under the river in a passage to ask him for a light. David was so freaked out. “You guys should be over there, on the other side.” That’s a lyric from “Heroes,” actually.
ANGIE BOWIE: Berlin called to him in other ways. He chose to live in a section of the city as bleak, anonymous, and culturally lost as possible: Schöneberg, populated largely by Turkish immigrants. He took an apartment above an auto parts store and ate at the local workingmen’s café. Talk about alienation.
IGGY POP: There’s seven days in a week: two for bingeing, two for recovery, and three more for any other activity.
COCO SCHWAB: I loved how Jim [Iggy] would pick new neighborhoods in Berlin and then just go out and walk them. Then he’d come back and say, “Wanna go for a walk?” He’d show us from time to time what he found. It was always fun. I remember one elevated subway ride where you ride into East Berlin with no checkpoints and then back out with absinthe into the west. Trust Jim to find that one.
TONY VISCONTI: They use “Heroes” for every heroic event, although it’s a song about alcoholics. We did it on twenty-four tracks in Hansa Studios in Berlin. With all of the backing vocals and instruments on it, we only had one track left for the vocal. So Bowie would do a take and listen to it and he’d say: “I think I’ve got one better.” And I’d say, “Well, you know we can’t keep that take.” This was before digital recording. So he’d pull his socks up, take a deep breath, and go and do a better take than the one he did before. And that was it, it was gone, the previous vocal was gone. We kept doing that. Having experience in the studio, you have to know when to say, “I think we’ve got the take.” There’s no way of going back to take five or take two; they were gone, evaporated. I did a lot of records that way. That’s when you work as a team, as a producer, coach, singer, artist. Everybody’s on the same page and everyone is just hyped up with adrenaline.
BRIAN ENO: That time was really confused. It was much harder working on “Heroes” than Low. The whole thing, except “Sons of the Silent Age,” which was written beforehand, was evolved on the spot in the studio. Not only that, everything on the album is a first take! I mean, we did the second takes but they weren’t nearly as good. It was all done in a very casual kind [of way]. [However] Bowie was pretty much living at the edge of his nervous system…he was very, very upset. I felt desperately sorry for him going through that and trying to make a record. But as often happens, that translated into a sense of complete abandon in the work.
ALAN YENTOB: He was significantly different when I interviewed him in Berlin, as he had entered a different phase of his life. His interests were different, Berlin was a fascinating space to be in, electronic music was to the fore, he was learning new things. You could say that Brian Eno rescued him during this time, and he was very influential. Because the Berlin period was so different than what had come before it, it seems very calculated, in the sense that it was really about who he had come across. But then he was always like that. He was always picking up things and collecting thoughts and ideas from others. He assimilated them and then represented them.
HANIF KUREISHI: David could be funny with Brian Eno. He was very competitive with Bryan Ferry. He used to do a very funny imitation of Bryan Ferry in front of Bryan, who used to look rather embarrassed. He used to do his voice, his high voice. He was a great mimic, and used to do a very good Keith Richards. He used to play Trivial Pursuit with Keith.
PAUL MCGUINNESS (FILM PRODUCER, FORMER MANAGER OF U2): I remember Eno telling me that one time he was sharing an apartment with Bowie and Iggy Pop in Kreuzberg, and he says there were a lot of rows about what was in the fridge. “Who’s taken my eggs?” He says they were like students—“Who took my socks, you bastard!” It was like The Young Ones.
ROBERT FRIPP (GUITARIST): In February 1977 I went to live in New York and in July, the telephone went at my apartment on the Lower East Side and the voice came on and it said, “It’s Brian, hello! I’m here with David, we’re in Berlin, hang on I’ll pass you over.” So Eno passed the phone over to David and David said, “Hello, we’re here in blah, blah, blah, do you think you can play some rock and roll guitar?” and I said, “Well, I don’t know because I haven’t really played for three years, but if you’re prepared to take a risk, so am I.” At that point at I had no intention ever of returning to the music industry, this festering pit of dishonesty, deception, theft, violation, greed and all the rest of it, but hey this was Brian calling, I’d done two albums with Brian, this was Bowie, a magnificent live act who’d written some of my favorite pop/rock songs, so yeah! Why not? By and large when I get calls from people, it’s when they don’t know what they want, but they know they want something.
A first-class plane ticket on Lufthansa to Frankfurt with connection to Berlin arrived shortly afterwards. Flying first class [for] the first time in my life, the Lufthansa stewardess leaned over and said while pouring Champagne and pretending to be pleased to see me, “First class is the only way to fly,” and I believed her. On the in-flight sound system was “Sound and Vision” from Low.
So I landed in Frankfurt and had to make the connecting flight, carrying my Cornish pedal board, with fuzz, wah-wah, and volume pedals. At the time, 1977 in Germany, the Baader Meinhof Group were in active go mode and I remember the German security guard looking at my pedal board, wondering what on Earth I was trying to smuggle on board. So anyway I made the connection to Berlin, caught a taxi to my hotel, which I believe was the former SS headquarters, dumped my stuff, got myself together, and then went to Hansa Studios by the Wall for about quarter to six in the evening, jet-lagged, pretty sleepless, and said to David and Brian, “Well, would you like to play me some of the things you’ve been doing?” Eno said, “Why don’t you plug in?” So I plugged into Eno’s magic suitcase, his VCS3 synthy. They hit the Roll, Play button [makes drumming noises] and then on bar three [makes guitar noises] and skysaw guitars and that straight into “Beauty and the Beast.” What you hear on the record, the first track of “Heroes,” is the first note I played on the session.
This was a time of change. David was clearly in transition personally and musically and Brian, well, Brian can no doubt speak for himself. So, here you have three men in their early thirties, in a changing time musically, a changing time in the world, in a city which was on the edge and Berlin at the time was on the front line. I toured in Germany with King Crimson in ’73 and ’74 and you were in no doubt that this was [the] front line in the Cold War. You would perhaps be sitting in your motel having breakfast and overhead there’s the American Air Force patrolling the border. The liminal zone, the in-between place, is where creative artists go to work because it’s on the edge, it’s unsettled, it’s not fixed. This is the place to be and the Hansa Studios by the Wall still was missing a roof. You looked at it and there was the Berlin Wall with the machine-gun turret, which from time to time would look into the control room in the studio. It was a time and place and at least two of the three characters there were on the edge and in a moving zone. It was a place that a creative artist would move to be.
In terms of “Heroes,” enough work had been done for me to work on top, but not enough to stop me playing on top. I didn’t have very much in the way of guide vocals to work to. I had a few phrases but not much. It was very quick, very spontaneous, and the key to working both with David and with Brian was always “play.” Very good professionals often forget to play. Both Bowie and Eno play. Working with them it’s as if the only reason we’re there is to have fun and let rip, see where it goes. So, my best hunch would be there was a framework, a map of the terrain, but it didn’t tell you how you get from A to B. Working with Bowie and Eno, above anyone else I’ve ever worked with, they set up the situation for me to fly. Encouragement and support, without any reservation, constriction, editing—it was stunning. I was in Berlin for the total period of one week. The actual recording was two, three days.
Both Eno and Bowie were actually shrewd about not being governed by the rules of the marketplace. Professionals would take close care of what was possible in the marketplace and act accordingly. The other approach, the approach of the artist not the professional, is to produce the work and then see what you have to do to deliver it, knowing that the world will act against you.
BRIAN ENO: He got into a very peculiar state when he was working. It used to strike me as very paradoxical that two comparatively well-known people would be staggering home at six in the morning, and he’d break a raw egg into his mouth and that was his food for the day, virtually. It was really slummy. We’d sit around the kitchen table at dawn feeling a bit tired and a bit fed up—me with a bowl of crummy German cereal and him with albumen from the egg running down his shirt.
I was only involved in “Heroes” to do the backing track. He wrote the lyrics and the melody after I’d left—as he did for all the other tracks. And when I left, I already had a feeling about that track—it sounded grand and heroic. In fact, I had that very word in mind. And then David brought the finished album round to my place and that track came up and it said, “We can be heroes” and I was absolutely…it was such a strange feeling, you know. I just shivered. When you shiver, it’s a fear reaction, isn’t it? Well, we had all these backing tracks very suddenly—it seemed in about two days. And remember: this came after laboring for months and months on my record. And I thought, Shit, it can’t be this easy. But gradually it began to hang together. Fripp did everything he did in about six hours—and that was straight off the plane from New York too! He arrived at the studio at about eleven p.m. and walked in and we said, “Do you fancy doing anything?” and he said, “Might as well hear what you’ve been doing.” And while we were setting up the tapes, he got out his guitar and said, “Might as well try a few things.” So I plugged him into the synthesizer for treatments and we just played virtually everything we’d done at him—and he’d just start up without even knowing the chord sequences. It was a very extraordinary performance. By the next day, he’d finished, packed up, and gone home.
David told me about this place in Kyoto called the Moss Garden and then we just started to work. And again, there was this very sloppy sort of technique—like, I was just playing around with this chord sequence on the Yamaha synthesizer and I said, “Give us a shout when you think it’s long enough,” you know, and sort of carried on. And then David looked at the clock and said, “Yeah, that’ll probably do,” and we stopped. And on the record, that’s exactly where the piece ends.
The “Heroes” cover was deliberately meant to ape punk. It may have looked as though it suddenly appeared in a vacuum, but the styling on the cover, the leather jacket and the monochromatic feel, were all meant to echo the iconography of punk. What seemed at the time indiscriminate and off-kilter was actually a parody. The cover photo by Masayoshi Sukita was inspired by the painting Roquairol by German artist Erich Heckel, in which the subject strikes a similar pose. The cover is also obviously a version of the cover of The Idiot. Bowie had initially been quite dismissive of punk, a form and an attitude that he felt was actually rather old-fashioned, and by dint of that, fundamentally retrogressive. He had been propelled in a pell-mell fashion toward his semi-exile in Berlin by a combination of curiosity, fear, and whim. This for him was new, unlike punk, which seemed reductive and possibly rotten. It was only when punk suddenly went mainstream that he thought he should reference it, and only then in a playful manner, on the cover of “Heroes.”
BILL PRINCE (JOURNALIST): Masayoshi Sukita was a commercial photographer working for an ad agency in Tokyo when he first visited New York in 1971, largely at the behest of a boyhood fascination with postwar American cinema and the cult of the “rebel” as expounded by Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. The following year he went to London. “At the time there was very little information about David Bowie in Japan,” he said. “When I arrived in London, I had never even heard his name before.” A chance sighting of Brian Ward’s high-kicking cover image for The Man Who Sold the World, advertising the singer’s imminent shows at north London’s Rainbow Theatre, changed all that. “I thought it was a sensational photo and an unusual image for a pop musician. And the concert itself was amazing. I quickly realized David Bowie wasn’t a regular performer. I felt there was much more going on, so much more depth and imagination than from a regular musician.” What he’d seen inspired Sukita to approach Bowie’s management with the idea for a shoot, and their first session took place in August 1972. It was the beginning of what turned into a lifelong association—the photographer was there to meet Bowie as he arrived in Yokohama in April 1973, for his first Japanese tour, and was still taking pictures of him in 2009. “The ‘Heroes’ photos were meant to have a ‘punk’ feel. The whole session was over in an hour. Afterwards, I selected about twenty photos to give to David-san, including the shot on the ‘Heroes’ sleeve.”
NICK KENT: The German records are among his very best. Bowie was obsessed with calling down the muse. With really creative people, and Bowie was one of them, there is a sense of calling down the muse. And in Berlin he isn’t just living with Iggy Pop, he’s living with the muse. It’s like Bob Dylan between 1963 and 1966; the muse moves in. The Rolling Stones between 1968 and 1971, the muse moves in. And then it leaves just as quickly and never comes back. And in the ’70s, the muse was with Bowie all the time. Right there on his shoulder, whispering in his ear. Imagine having that talent, that amazing song craft. When Lou Reed wrote a song it was all on one level, and Bowie could do that with things like “Rebel Rebel,” and he could do what Iggy Pop could do, but none of those guys could do what Bowie could do. He was like a musical chemist, a sonic chemist, like Miles Davis. Completely audacious.
On September 11, 1977, David recorded a song for Bing Crosby’s Christmas special, Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, at Elstree Studios, with two of Crosby’s children present. He did it as a favor to his mother. The crooner, who would die five weeks later, and the man with the burnt-apricot wedge swapped cheesy dialogue before singing an adaptation of “Little Drummer Boy,” complete with a new musical counterpoint, “Peace on Earth,” written by Larry Grossman.
LARRY GROSSMAN: [We’d suggested they duet on “Little Drummer Boy”] but Bowie said, “I won’t sing that song. I hate that song….And if I have to do that song, I can’t do the show. I’m doing this show because my mother loves Bing Crosby.” [So we crafted a counter-melody that Bowie could sing.] It all happened rather rapidly. I would say within an hour, we had it written and were able to present it [to] him again.
MARY CROSBY: We were pretty young, but we knew that this was happening. That first moment when he walked in, it’s etched in my memory. The doors opened and David walked in with his wife. They were both wearing full-length mink coats, they have matching full makeup, and their hair was bright red. We were thinking, Oh my God. But then they sat at the piano, and David was a little nervous, and he said, “Well, I only sing in this key.”
NATHANIEL CROSBY: It almost didn’t happen. You should have seen the way he was dressed in rehearsal. I think the producers told him to take the lipstick off and take the earring out. It was just incredible to see the contrast. But it happened.
TREVOR BOLDER: I don’t think anyone has ever mentioned this, principally because I don’t think anyone actually knows it, but Bowie tried to re-form the Spiders when he’d finished with the Berlin period. He rang me once, in 1978, at home, and he asked me would I go back and re-form with the Spiders. He said that he’d been away too long, doing whatever he was doing in Berlin with Brian Eno and Robert Fripp and all those people, and he wanted to know if I fancied going back out again. And I said, “Well, if you can get Mick to do it, we’ll consider it.” Bowie was having problems with America, I think; he’d done Diamond Dogs and all that but I don’t think his career had gone how he thought it was going to. Young Americans had been a big hit for him there, but Station to Station, Low, and “Heroes” had been very European records, and he desperately wanted success in America. America was where he was focusing on at the time, and he thought he might stand a better chance at commercial success if he started doing some more orthodox rock music, and obviously by re-forming the band that had made him famous in the first place. If I’m honest I actually think he missed the band, in fact. He’d used other musicians but he missed the camaraderie of the band. He missed going out on the road and being one of the lads, even though he was never really one of the lads with us, not towards the end, anyway. But Mick wouldn’t do it, as they weren’t really speaking at the time, so it never happened. Mick was really annoyed that Bowie had shut down all communication, and didn’t want to have anything to do with him. It could have been great, in fact it could have been amazing, but Mick just wasn’t interested.
NICK RHODES: When I was asked to DJ at the Rum Rummer in Birmingham, I basically just played all my David Bowie records. This was in 1978, and we were just about to form Duran Duran, and all of us loved Bowie. Most of the other members of the band were working at the club in some capacity—cooking, cleaning, or washing up—but I actually got to play Bowie’s records. Duran Duran had a single vision of what we wanted to do. We wanted to mix glam rock and punk rock with a little bit of disco, although the prime motivation for forming in the first place was David Bowie. It always was. An entire generation of groups who formed in the late ’70s or early ’80s only happened because of David. He is basically responsible for British music in the first half of the ’80s. There was decadence about him that was appealing, something dark, something German, but something very exciting.
In Bowie’s world, everything at this time was about Germany. In 1978 Bowie starred in a West German film called Just a Gigolo, directed by David Hemmings, and also featuring Kim Novak, Sydne Rome, and Marlene Dietrich. It was his first movie role since The Man Who Fell to Earth, and was an unmitigated disaster. So bad was it that Bowie said it was his “thirty-two Elvis movies rolled into one.”
RORY MACLEAN (TRAVEL WRITER): I was a wannabe film director, and was assisting David Hemmings. I was his dogsbody, his gofer, and I was the one who read all the scripts that came into the office. In the summer of 1977 this appalling script came in called Just a Gigolo, which was a knock-off German attempt at Cabaret, financed by German dentists’ tax write-offs. The producer also made his money from soft-core porn films. David called his agent to let him know that he didn’t want to do it, only to be told that both David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich had agreed to appear in it. So who cares if the script is awful?! So David Hemmings was persuaded. Apparently it took the producer six months to convince [Dietrich] to accept the role. Every time he telephoned her apartment, a woman would breathe into the receiver. “This is the maid. Madame is lunching in Versailles.” The “maid” was obviously Dietrich.
I first met Bowie in Berlin in December that year. Hemmings and I had flown in to start the film, by which time Bowie had almost finished his Berlin phase, and was flitting between there, Lausanne, and Paris. At the time he was having all these custody battles over Zowie with Angie. I was a wet-behind-the-ears, naïve Canadian, but almost instantly Hemmings and Bowie became quite matey, in that quintessential English way. Bowie wanted to initiate us in the ways of the city, so invited me and Hemmings to his favorite transvestite club, the Lützower Lampe. The club’s star, a sixty-year-old drag queen named Viola, sat on my knee and crooned German love songs in my ear: “Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo, denke nicht mehr an die Zeiten…” There were also more traditional females there that night, and Bowie didn’t go home with one of the transvestites.
He was very relaxed in Berlin. He was really in himself, and while the normal man he appeared to be was maybe a persona too, it sure didn’t feel like it. He was an ordinary exile. He was living a life away from the spotlight. Tartan shirt, baggy trousers, hanging out at the Exile restaurant. He seemed to be at peace with himself, and had spent a lot of time painting, having discovered German Expressionism. He had also just released “Heroes,” so he knew that he had created something very special. We spent a great Christmas together, along with David Hemmings, and various partners and children. It was in a secluded restaurant in the Grunewald, the deep and dark urban forest that hugged the city’s western fringe. We ate and drank too much and Bowie gave me a copy of Fritz Lang’s biography. At the end of the happy evening I followed him downstairs to the huge, ceramic lavatory, where—as we stood before the urinals—we sang Buddy Holly songs together, and “Good Golly Miss Molly.”
Coco was there all the time, and I had a lot of time for her. I remember Angie went into the apartment in Schöneberg and had gone into Coco’s room and thrown all her clothes out into the street. Coco was extremely protective of him, and also such a facilitator. I don’t know if there had been a sexual relationship, but she obviously loved him, really loved him, and would do anything to support him. Getting the canvases, getting the paints, finding apartments, getting him the books he wanted. Iggy was there too, and I first met him at David’s birthday party in January 1978. We were in the first nouvelle cuisine restaurant in the city, and we all ate these immaculately produced minute dishes. Eno was there, Zowie with his nanny, Coco, Hemmings, me, and a bunch of other people. I remember Iggy getting outrageously drunk, and we all went off to Lützower Lampe. The birthday was a big affair, they even had matchbooks printed. Bowie hadn’t completely reformed his north American habits, shall we say, and one night, Iggy sat in the passenger seat as Bowie rammed their car into their dealer’s car again and again, for five long minutes. He then drove around their hotel’s underground car park, pushing seventy miles per hour, screaming that he wanted to end it all by driving into a concrete wall…until the car ran out of fuel.
Berlin represented so much, that clash of twentieth-century opposites, being the clash of communism and fascism, and through David I fell in love with the place. There’s a German word, begeistert—enthusiastic—and that’s what I felt about Berlin. I had an academic interest in the place, an island of capitalism surrounded by communism, and three-quarters of a million Red Army soldiers. Bowie brought it to life, and his passion for it certainly inflamed mine. He was unduly influenced by his surroundings, and whereas all previous material had been bound up with persona, his new music was a direct result of his environment. If you look at “Warszawa” or “Neukoln” they all spun out of Berlin. The scars were all still there. There were so many playgrounds, but that’s because they were destroyed buildings. In every street you could still find pockmarked walls, or houses full of bullet holes. The city was dying, and continually being squeezed by Khrushchev. He had this wonderful line: “If I ever want to make the West squeak, I squeeze its balls in West Berlin.” That’s what was happening. And there was something really attractive in that. The city was full of Wilmersdorf Widows, the war widows, and young anarchists. It was full of ghosts, full of darkness. We felt like exiles, cut off from the rest of the world. Everyone had a suitcase under the bed, just in case something happened. I think Bowie had a love/hate relationship with the place, because it was intoxicating, yet you were trapped.
On a film set, when you’re shooting you become so involved, and so emotionally overwhelmed that you lose sight of the bigger picture. However when we finished we knew for sure that this was a flawed project. The great paradox is that both Bowie and Dietrich only agreed to appear in the film on the understanding that they would get to work together—these two twentieth-century legends having this unique opportunity to work together—which of course they never did. We filmed Bowie in Berlin, and then he went off to Texas to prepare for his 1978 tour, and then we filmed Dietrich in Paris for the same scene. Hemmings played the other character in both scenes, and when we were filming Dietrich, she said to him, “Do they pay you extra for this shit?” She was wonderfully pissed off.
DAVID BOWIE: I think we have to look back on Just a Gigolo with a certain amount of irony. I had a wonderful time making that movie because by the second week we looked around at each other and said, “This is a pile of shit, so let’s have a good time!” So we had a good time. But it was an atrocious movie. I mean, it wasn’t the end of the world or anything like that. When one starts out one’s career with “The Laughing Gnome,” it’s very easy to put things down to experience.
RORY MACLEAN: After the end of Just a Gigolo, David Hemmings was asked if he wanted to direct the film of the Isolar Tour, but his heart was not really in it. He didn’t really value the music. It was all paid for by Bowie, and I think the production budget was $100,000. We were going to film five or six concerts, including Earls Court and Bingley Hall in Stafford. But Hemmings was far too literal with the film, and when there were cutaways they were dreadful. When you hear trains on “Warszawa,” he would cut to a stock shot of steam train going through a tunnel, and when David sang about the dolphins in “Heroes,” there would literally be a cutaway to a dolphin. His concerts were more than adulation, they were about the thrill of the richness of celebration. But none of that was in Hemmings’s film. It was a disaster. When Bowie saw it, he immediately took all the material, all the negs, all the material, the soundtrack, and sent everything to the vault in Elstree, where I think it still remains.
Every night in the audience there would be the Ziggy, there would be the Thin White Duke clones, and the Berliner clones, because there had already been some publicity stills released from Just a Gigolo. Bowie and I joked that there would soon be the Seven Ages of Bowie as opposed to the Seven Ages of Man. The thing that I found fascinating was the interval during the show, which happened after about seventy minutes. So how does a performer retain that energy during a twenty-to-thirty-minute break without resorting to drugs? What Bowie would do is go to the green room and sit down with a VHS and watch Coronation Street. Every night. I thought, This is glorious! He was sitting there in full costume as this occupied the front part of his brain. Seven-eighths of his brain were still in a tense state, ready to go back onstage, but the front part was watching Coronation Street.
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH (DEVO): Bowie showed up [to our show at Max’s Kansas City] and he introduced us: “This is the band of the future! I am producing them in Tokyo this winter!” And we’re like, That sounds good to us. Then afterwards he said, “I really want to produce you guys, the only thing is I’m up for this movie called Just a Gigolo, and if I get it I have to go to Berlin for a couple of months.” The next week, we played again, and Robert Fripp and Brian Eno came. And they both said, “We would want to produce you guys if you were up for it.” And we said, “Well, Brian, David Bowie last week said he was producing us in Tokyo.” And Brian Eno starts going, “He’s full of shit.” At the time I didn’t know that Eno was kinda pissed at Bowie because he felt he didn’t get credited properly on “Heroes” and Low.
PAUL GORMAN (JOURNALIST): One morning in the early spring of 1979, Derek Boshier received a telephone call at his studio in Ladbroke Grove. On the line was the photographer Brian Duffy. “He was a bit mysterious that day. He told me that he wanted me to meet someone, a friend of his, and because he said, ‘I think you two will really get on together,’ I assumed he was fixing me up on a date.” The blind date was arranged as a late-morning cup of tea at Duffy’s studio in Swiss Cottage. In the meantime, Boshier paid a visit to one of his regular haunts, an art bookshop in Covent Garden. Here, he was informed in time-honored fashion (“You’ll never guess who was in here asking about you”) that no less than David Bowie had been browsing the shelves the previous day, hunting down catalogues and books featuring Boshier’s work. Had Boshier paused to connect Bowie to Duffy (who had photographed the Aladdin Sane sleeve), he would have received less of a surprise when the star turned up at his studio a few days later. “So there was David,” says Boshier. “He had just finished recording an LP and wanted to collaborate with me and Duffy on the cover design. From that moment we got on like a house on fire.” Bowie explained that the album was to be called Lodger. Then, over tea and cigarettes, he and Boshier unraveled the various areas where their life and work intersected. Boshier is cut from similarly modest cloth to Brixton-born David Jones; brought up in Portsmouth, he was destined for a career as a butcher’s boy when an art teacher intervened, recognized his talents, and propelled him onto the path to the Royal College of Art. Here, alongside classmates Peter Blake, David Hockney, Peter Phillips, and Pauline Boty, Boshier effectively minted British pop art with such paintings as 1962’s England’s Glory (the first artwork to incorporate an ironic representation of the Union Jack). As a result, Boshier appeared with all of the above in Ken Russell’s BBC Brit-art documentary, Pop Goes the Easel, in which there is a section dedicated to him (and, with the gyrating Boty, he proves himself an exception among artists by pulling off a convincing turn of the twist in footage shot at a drunken RCA student party). Often—and significantly for Bowie—Boshier’s paintings contained the recurring image of a plummeting naked “everyman” figure, either solo or as a collective cascade, as in the 1962 space-race peroration Rethink/Re-Entry. In the ’60s, Boshier’s pop-art canvases had formed the backdrop for fashion shoots by the British photographer Robert Freeman. He also undertook a riotous road trip across the States in a classic car with [David] Hockney and Ossie Clark, but split from them in New Orleans to explore the funky South, while they hightailed it to Los Angeles to hook up with Brian Epstein and the Fab Four. In fact the title of Rethink/Re-Entry was used a decade later by Bryan Ferry as the springboard for “Re-Make/Re-Model,” the first song on the debut album by Roxy Music, which set out the group’s art-directed futurism.
More than anyone who had tumbled through the heady pop-cultural wash of London in the ’60s, Bowie homed in on the potency, the pathos, and humor inherent in Boshier’s work, and in particular the falling-man motif. The artist had appropriated this figure from William Blake to express humanity’s vulnerability, a move that resonated with the thoughtful rock star then attempting to come to terms with the mind-spinning trajectory of his career in the ’70s. After all, hadn’t he starred in The Man Who Fell to Earth just a couple of years before meeting Boshier? Meanwhile, a mutual respect had been manifested by Boshier’s inclusion of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust in an untitled collage and also in the cut-up film installation Change, which pondered life’s mutability in parallel fashion to Hunky Dory’s “Changes.” And there was another link: mime. Though much derided, Bowie’s use of physical adaptation in performance had been honed under the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp; and in his first year at the Royal College, Boshier was offered a free place for a term at mime master Marcel Marceau’s school in Paris. At the time of Duffy’s call, Boshier’s practice could not have been more different from the pop-art moment; he’d forsworn the limitations of paint and dedicated himself to radical politics and all manner of alternative disciplines: 3-D sci-fi works in Perspex, film and photographic installations, collage, assemblages, and protest posters. But it was his use of photographic augmentation which spurred Bowie and Duffy’s interest in working with Boshier. That day in Swiss Cottage, the artist, the musician, and the photographer contemplated the themes of body posture, transformation, and descent, and arrived at—even by Bowie’s standards—one of the most challenging record-sleeve packages of all time.
ADRIAN BELEW (GUITARIST): The first time I met David Bowie was when I was onstage in Berlin in 1978 when I was playing with Frank Zappa. There was a break in Frank’s show where I would leave the stage for a few minutes, and as I walked over to the monitor mixer there was David Bowie standing with Iggy Pop. I walked over and shook his hand and thanked him for all the work he’d done, and told him I loved his music, and he said, “Great. How would you like to be in my band?” I motioned back towards Frank and said, “Well, I’m kind of playing with that guy, the one out onstage.” David laughed and said, “Yes, I know, but when Frank’s tour ends my tour starts two weeks later. Shall we talk about it over dinner?” So we agreed to meet after the show back at the hotel. When I went to the hotel, David was in the lobby with his assistant, Coco Schwab. As I walked past them they were being very spylike, very conspiratorial. He whispered to me, “Get into the elevator, go up to your room, then come back down in five minutes, and meet us outside, and we’ll have a car waiting for you.” It was very hush-hush. When I came back down and went outside there was a black limousine waiting. The driver opened the door and I got in the back with David and Coco. David immediately launched into all his ideas and thoughts about the next tour, where we would be playing, what material we might play, etc. He said he was going to take me to one of his favorite restaurants in Berlin, and as we walked in the first thing we saw was Frank Zappa and the rest of the band all sitting round this huge table. So what could we do? We sat down with them, and David tried to strike up a conversation with Frank, saying, “This is quite a guitar player you have here…” And Frank said, “Fuck you, Captain Tom.” David persisted, and said, “Oh come on now, Frank, surely we can be gentlemen about this?” And Frank said, “Fuck you, Captain Tom.” By this point it was getting a little embarrassing, so David said, “So you really have nothing to say?” To which Frank said, “Fuck you, Captain Tom.” It was extremely awkward and yet David seemed to be fine. We agreed that we should probably go somewhere else to eat, and as we left the restaurant David said in his wonderfully British way, “I thought that went rather well, don’t you?”
So Frank was going off to edit his movie Baby Snakes, and David’s tour didn’t look as though it was going to take that long, so I started in his band. But as soon as I started playing with David, Frank started a new band; which is just as well because David’s tour eventually lasted a year. We obviously played things from “Heroes,” which had been the most recent album, but we were dipping back into things from Low, Station to Station, right back to early songs. I knew David was talking about doing a new record with Tony Visconti and Eno but at this point again it was very hush-hush. When I eventually arrived in Montreux to make the record, David told me it was probably going to be called Planned Accidents. It was a very curious idea.
The studio was a concrete bunker under a casino, because the previous building had burned down, oddly enough while Frank Zappa was playing there. This was where the song “Smoke on the Water” came from, as it was recorded there by Deep Purple. So when they rebuilt the studio they made it out of concrete so it couldn’t happen again. The control room for the studio was on the first floor and you had to walk up some stairs to reach it. The actual studio was on the second floor, which is where the band would set up and record. There was a television camera in the studio so the control room could see us but we couldn’t see them. The original idea with Planned Accidents was that they said there was about twenty tracks they’d already worked on, and they wanted me to go upstairs in the studio, put the headphones on, and start playing. And I said, “Playing what?” And they said, “No, you just start playing. You play what you like.” I asked if I could hear the songs first and they said no. I was just given a tempo and time signature. They said they wanted to get my accidental responses. And I said, “What key?” And they said, “No…just go upstairs, put the headphones, and play along to the song.” And they allowed me to do that twice for each song, no more. And then they’d take their favorite parts of the guitar tracks and cut them up, and string them into a composite guitar track. So all those guitar parts you hear on Lodger are things I made up on the spot to a song I’d never heard before. “Boys Keep Swinging,” “DJ,” “Red Sails”—all made up on the spot. The guitar parts were meant to sound accidental and I think they kinda do. The whole thing took two days.
When I eventually heard the finished album, I recognized some of the songs but my parts were a complete surprise to me. It’s a great record though, as it goes far afield, and there are so many different types of material on it. David gave me great encouragement and let me do what I wanted to do, within a framework of course! He used to say to me, “Just go wild, be as wild as you like. That’s why you’re here, and that’s what I want you to add to the band.” And when we played “Stay” or “Station to Station” onstage, as I was embarking on these huge guitar solos, he would never do anything but stand there, still, grinning from ear to ear.
PAUL GORMAN: While recording Lodger, Eno suggested they call it Planned Accidents as a reference to their experimental working methods. The decision to change the album title has been interpreted by some Bowiephiles as a reference to Roman Polanski’s supremely creepy 1976 film The Tenant, in which the paranoid lead character, played by Polanski, hurls himself out of his apartment window. The similarity between Bowie’s pose on the cover of Lodger and the figure outline in the poster for The Tenant has been seen to lend credence to this theory. But Boshier’s work has never been concerned with providing pat solutions, relying instead on the creative definition that design provides answers while art poses questions. “To this day, I receive mail asking for the meaning of the cover,” says Boshier. “While The Tenant may have been in David’s mind, he never mentioned it. We wanted to create a scenario that would intrigue and at the same time draw on the areas of crossover between us.”
And so the trio used the outer Lodger gatefold to actualize a planned accident. Bowie, with bandaged hand, disheveled suit, and the illusion of a broken nose created by stage makeup, was photographed by Duffy on a specially built trestle that lent discreet support in the depiction of him falling, or having fallen, calamitously backward against a tiled bathroom wall. Bowie’s face was contorted by fishing lines stuck to his brow, chin, lips, and nose. These were tugged gently out of shot by his companion and manager, Coco, and makeup artist Antony Clavet. To enhance the immediacy of the image, Duffy used a Polaroid camera (the classic SX-70 favored by Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol). “I was blown away by David’s commitment to the project and his ability to transform himself,” says Boshier. “It was incredible to see the artwork take life.” The photo shoot completed, Boshier set to preparing the design and realized a series of ink sketches as guides. The placement of Bowie’s apparently broken body across the gatefold afforded another set of Boshier self-references; the title and credits were conveyed in a spiky hand-lettered font by a postcard-like panel, harkening back to the artist’s use of Post Office symbols in such ’60s works as Postcard and SOS (Sunset On Stability). “Just before I started the final artwork, I mentioned that we hadn’t talked about the design for the inner gatefold,” said Boshier. “David replied, ‘Do what you like,’ so I chose the eternal themes: time, life, and death.” Here, Boshier interpolated such images as Freddy Alborta’s 1967 macabre photograph of Che Guevara’s corpse, a framed card of fifteenth-century painter Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, and an image of Bowie being made up for the cover shot lying on the specially designed trestle table.
But the deadline was tight and Bowie invited Boshier to deliver the finished artwork over lunch at his hideaway in Kreuzberg, Berlin’s Turkish quarter. “David picked me up at the airport and drove me back to his amazing place,” says Boshier. With Schwab, the pair of Brits reviewed the paste-ups in a small kitchen-dining area with a distinctly surreal atmosphere. “It had an inside/outside feel, like being in the open air but in an enclosed environment,” says Boshier. “The walls were decorated with giant photo-murals of Alpine scenes, as if we were high up in a ski lodge.” The rest of the residence consisted of high ceilinged rooms with Art Deco–framed windows. Bowie’s eight-year-old son, Zowie, was living with him and occupied a typical child’s bedroom, with toys, a bicycle, and walls decorated with crayon. In another room, Bowie had set up a painting studio with easels, canvases, and drying paintbrushes, along with books representing his abiding interest in such German Expressionists as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, whose tortured faces likely influenced the performer’s appearance on the sleeve of Lodger. As you’d expect from a rock star, one room served as a fully equipped recording studio. Like the others, it was decorated plainly, in white with simple blinds, but the last room Bowie showed Boshier offered a deep contrast: here were luxurious draped curtains, giant rugs on a wooden floor, leather couches, Tiffany lamps, and a roaring log fire, above which hung two small, traditional oil portraits, of a Teutonic matriarch and her pipe-smoking husband. “David told me that when his German friends visited, they felt immediately comfortable in that room,” said Boshier. Later that day, Boshier asked Schwab if it had been preserved from the time of the previous occupants: “No, no,” she laughed. “That’s David’s room. He invented that from scratch.”
CARLOS ALOMAR: The trilogy—Low, “Heroes,” Lodger—changed my life forever. In adjusting myself to the methodologies that were used, and the new form of freethinking and linear thinking that I was exposed to, it changed me. They taught me that every time I came back to David, I needed to change. He wanted R&B, rock and roll, electronic music, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, romantic music. Stir the pot and out comes the Thin White Duke. He was such a restless person. He didn’t like being comfortable. Comfortable is genre-driven, and be careful, because it will outlive you and it will surpass you. David had a lovely saying, “Let go, or be dragged.” He was David 2.0, 3.0. If I wanted five amplifiers, he’d get them for me, if I wanted to mike something differently, we’d do it. It was change, change, change. Bryan Ferry would introduce something and stay there. David would introduce something and leave it.
PAUL SMITH: I reconnected with David in 1979 in my shop in London. This is around the time of Lodger. I think he’d just moved back from Berlin. My studio used to be above the store in Covent Garden, and I’d often receive calls from staffers who’d whisper things like, “Jack Nicholson is in the shop! Harrison Ford is here!” My reply was usually, “Oh, that’s lovely.” But one day when they whispered, “David Bowie is downstairs,” well, I went downstairs. I was acting all cool, pretending to be nonchalant, of course, and we began chatting. He was obviously quite an inquisitive person, and started talking about anything and everything, but interestingly not music. Technology, astrology, architecture, photography. And he started coming back all the time. As you know, he was someone who reinvented himself—so his stage wear and his music were very much part of a public persona. What was interesting to me, though, was his approach to his own personal style. As a designer, I’ve never really given things to people; I like people to wear my clothes because they enjoy them and not because they’ve been gifted them. And David would literally just come to the shop himself. No bodyguard, no stylist. He had a suit in Donegal tweed, and another in a houndstooth check, with a short jacket and a pleat trouser. We did a GQ shoot once with all Paul Smith clothes and he bought the whole lot. He once came into the Fifth Avenue shop and bought every shirt in his size.
When he came to my shop in Floral Street, he would say, “That book there, tell me about that book there.” He was always interested in what was going on, interested in ordinary things. He used to love the fact that in the shop there’d be a ceramic next to a book next to a photograph. He was always searching for inspiration, picking up words in sentences. He would always say hello to whoever I was with, so I suppose he was a proper actor in that respect. Onstage he was a chameleon, but he never got it wrong, he always got it right. What I liked about it was how radical he was in terms of appearance, but it was never rude or bad mannered or incorrect, it was just a theatrical act. Sometimes people do things that are very extreme but you don’t feel close to them for whatever reason, but he never felt that [way] to me. If he came in to see me now he’d say, “All right, Paul, can I have a cup of tea?” One time, a friend of mine’s eighteen-year-old son needed a suit, so he brought him into the Floral Street store. The boy tried the suit on, came out of the changing room, and looked into the big mirror we had. At the same time, the door to one of the other changing rooms opened and out walked David. “Wow, you look great!” he said to the kid. “You look really great, man!” And this boy nearly passed out, he went pale white! Nearly fainted! That was just David. He seemed to pop up everywhere.
TIFFANY MURRAY (WRITER AND NOVELIST, AUTHOR OF DIAMOND STAR HALO): I was brought up at Rockfield Studios, just outside a village called Rockfield, near Monmouth in Wales. It was a farm owned by two brothers, Charles and Kingsley Ward, who were in skiffle bands in the ’50s, who wanted to get into recording music. My stepdad, Fritz Fryer, was a musician in the ’60s, in a Northern band called the Four Pennies. He then became a producer, and moved to Rockfield. My mother also opened a rehearsal space nearby, and bands like Queen, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath came to play there before recording at Rockfield. So that was where I was brought up, and my earliest memories are of all these male musicians smelling of leather, dope, and alcohol looking after me when I wandered into the studio. Still to this day if I go to a heavy rock concert I fall asleep, because I find the music so comforting.
Iggy came to record Soldier in 1979, and Bowie came to visit him for a day, to lay down a couple of tracks for the album [singing backing vocals on “Play It Safe”]. He’d just finished Lodger, I think, and I was about ten. It was the only time in the studio’s history that it was poshed-up, and all for Bowie’s arrival. My mother said, “Well, it was David Bowie, darling.” So she did an entire side of poached salmon with pickled cucumbers. David sat in the kitchen and worked his way through it, although Iggy wasn’t really eating at the time. Iggy was probably having his head rubbed by one of the horses, whose heads stuck out of the stables in the quadrangle. He was the height of politeness, incredibly well behaved, meticulous. Salmon and a fag, salmon and a fag, sitting upright on this horrible leather sofa playing with [my brother] Jason. When Scary Monsters came out I remember thinking, I’ve met him, I’ve met him! I literally fed him salmon! But of course the reality is I didn’t, but I thrived on that re-memory, which is what we all do with Bowie, as he is like this palimpsest that layers over bits of our lives.
JULIEN TEMPLE: When I’d finished editing The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle with the Sex Pistols, I did a formal screening, which was a censor’s formality. In those days you had to put on a free screening so people could come and officially complain about it if they found it offensive. So obviously no one ever came to these things, although David managed to come to this one. It was in the Fox Theatre in Soho Square, and as soon as the lights went down I noticed a solitary figure slip in and sit at the back. And it was David, coming to see what all the fuss was about. And predictably, as soon as the film finished—whoosh!—he was gone, as though he’d never been there.
ALLAN JONES (JOURNALIST): This was 1979, and I’d gone to see Lou Reed at the Hammersmith Odeon, which even by Lou’s standards was a pretty confrontational concert. By the end of the show most of the audience had left. People had been calling out for “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Sweet Jane,” and “Heroin,” and he was intent on playing his new album, The Bells, in its entirety. He also left the house lights on, which made the gig quite uncomfortable. The crowd continued calling out for his old songs, and so Lou eventually told us all to fuck off, so lo and behold a lot of people did. As soon as the audience had gone, and there were only a few of us left by then, he started playing “Heroin,” “Waiting for the Man,” and all the songs they’d been screaming for. The concert ended with his bass player, Ellard “Moose” Boles, singing a half-hour version of “You Keep Me Hanging On” by the Supremes, although he appeared to only know the chorus. The bass was so loud that it actually made my girlfriend physically sick. It was horrible. As we were leaving, a press officer from Arista Records asked if we wanted to go backstage and meet Lou, so we did. But by the time we got to the backstage bar, we were told that Lou and had left with Bowie, and would we like to join them for dinner.
So we went off to the Chelsea Rendezvous just off the Cromwell Road, along with a journalist from Sounds, Giovanni Dadomo and his wife. Lou and Bowie were sitting at the head of a long table in the basement, and we were shown to a smaller, adjacent table, along with some other people, including I think Jim Kerr from Simple Minds. Lou and Bowie appeared to be getting on really well, even though they’d had a falling-out a couple of years ago when Lou was recording Sally Can’t Dance, and David had complained that his diction wasn’t clear enough. So they were chatting away, dinner was served, and suddenly there was this kind of explosion, smashing glasses, and Lou was dragging Bowie across the table and bitch-slapping him across the face. He was screaming, “Don’t you ever say that to me, don’t you ever say that to me!” The minders didn’t know what to do and just froze. Eventually they were separated and then just burst out laughing and hugged each other.
Five minutes later David was being dragged across the table again, with far more ferocity this time, with Lou screaming, “I told you not to say that!” This time he really went for it, and was raining blows on Bowie’s head. At this point in his life Lou had been working out quite a lot and was actually quite a powerful man. He was eventually hustled out of the restaurant, while Bowie just sat at the table, head in his hands, elbows on the table, sobbing. I went over to ask him what happened and he started screaming at me, went berserk, and grabbed me. “You’re a fucking journalist!” he shouted. So we ended up in a scuffle and it got really unpleasant. On each of the stairs out of the restaurant was a potted plant, and as he walked up them he kicked each one, and they all came flying back into the restaurant. He later went looking for Lou at his hotel, raging up and down the corridor calling Lou out. Apparently at dinner he had offered to produce another album for Lou as long as he got himself clean and straightened himself out. Which Lou obviously didn’t like.
ANGIE BOWIE: The last time I saw him was in a coffee shop in Lausanne, outside the lawyers. We had coffee, we kissed, and we said goodbye…and I never saw him again. That was in 1979. We were divorced. It wasn’t very happy. It was just final.
WENDY LEIGH: I wanted to interview Angie for something I was doing and although we’d had become sort of friends she wanted to charge me $500 for speaking to her. She was living in Atlanta at the time, and I FedExed her the check, and didn’t hear anything. So I waited a week, called her up, and she said she didn’t get it. I said, “You’re joking, right?” And she said, “No, I’m not,” and promptly put the phone down on me. I had said that I’d had proof of delivery from the post office, and she said, “I never go to a post office,” in this terribly imperious way. And that was that.